There are good reasons why early internet culture insisted on pseudonymity and never showing your face or personal space. There are reasons why CIA/etc sponsored outfits like Facebook pioneered real name policies and mass facial recognition.
We tried to teach people how to use this thing safely and sanely. Meanwhile the people who want total surveillance and control over your life told you "internet hygiene" was dangerous, cowardly, and masked evil intentions.
The same people who want to disarm you also want you to give up your own privacy.
The same people who won't turn over a single record without redacting half of it think you should share your name, location, and intentions with them 24/7.
The same people who want to profit on making you hopelessly dependent on drugs are mad that you hide your face and identity.
The same people who want to sell cosmetics, fashion and plastic surgery encourage you to share selfies on Instagram.
The pimps and human traffickers of cam and escort sites want you to know that online prostitution is legitimate work.
You don't need to have a beautiful mind to draw a straight line connecting A to B.
Exactly. What I'm suggesting here is really just a return to pre-2010 internet culture. Pseudonymous, private, and focused on intellectual rather than social intercourse.
It's sad how much of that stuff has vanished, not even to censorship but to software rot, rampant tech mergers and acquisitions and resultant "restructuring" that blacked out entire chunks of the web, people simply giving up on paying for their domain names and hosts.
There have been and are ongoing efforts to come up with more resilient, durable ways to approach a decentralized, independent web. But so much of what made it great in the first place is now unrecoverable.
Outside the urban centers of the big platforms the web is an endless sprawling wasteland of dead links, broken sites, and peeling digital billboards, and as with our real life rural areas, most are too caught up in the cities to have noticed anything changed.
Tangential to what you say, I wonder how much the "dead internet" theory has caused the degeneration. Creating content for bots to pander to other bots in order to feed engagement algorithms for ad revenue can't have a positive effect for what is available...
Over the past few years I've watched LLM bot generated content grow from occasional find to dominating search results. But before that there were the plagiarism mills, which is really just the same thing but with humans in sweatshops. Combine that with search engines moving toward only showing you a tiny fraction of the supposed whole of the content they find (6 billion results but we'll show you the first 400 or so and you'll have to take our word for it on the rest!).
The content mills, whether sweatshop or LLM driven, just copy other content, slightly rephrase it, pump it full of ads and spyware, and then game the search engines to rank higher than the original. And the DEI-rotten "engineers" behind the search engines have long since given up the arms race and spend most of their dwindling productive capacity on ensuring the things they do show you are politically correct rather than relevant, which the LLMs have no trouble complying with.
So only the walled gardens of Q/A sites, reddit and other social media are safe shelter from the storm, and some of them are crumbling too (quora for example is filling up with bot content in many topics).
The internet really is dead. I have a huge bookmark collection, over 20 years old, and half the sites in there are dead or broken at this point; the other half aren't discoverable in search unless you look for them with very specific search terms and sometimes not even then. This was not the case even 5 years ago.
We're in the Dead Age of the Internet. Broken links, bot content, search results prioritizing political advantage over practical utility. Google image search has gotten rotten by the way - almost any term is 90% AI 'art' now.
Urbit has a lot going for it. Unfortunately I think it's crippled somewhat by the fact that Yarvin was at the time a young, ambitious programmer approaching the greenest of greenfield projects and decided to reinvent every possible wheel, right down to creating an esoteric programming language to build it with. Things even he admits were probably mistakes in hindsight.
But yeah, urbit, ipfs, .onion sites on tor, beaker, gemini, i2p, federation, mesh networks; these all contain pieces of what a new free web would look like. Possibly one of them is already "good enough" and will become the de facto solution when people are ready to start over.
I think there's an important distinction to be made here: Those who brought the search engine into being (Sergey Brin, Larry Page et al) made a marvellous invention. Those who created social media (Zuckerberg et al) created a monster.
Without Facebook we would be Year Eight into Queen Hillary becoming a Trillionaire. Without Social Media none of us would have been able to fight big Vax. As we would have had no way of reaching out. SM is NOT just Only Fan butthole pics. (Does that actually happen?).
Won't work at all, John. Moslem women are just as affected by the things you describe, if not more so. Under the garbage bags they wear, they will pretty themselves up as much as they can, to show off for other women at their women-only beauty parlours, hair salons, baths and so on.
All the coverings achieves is a false sense of modesty, plus that they mark men as impulsive-driven potential rapists at the sight of a naked ankle - ponder this: did full-body coverings make Victorian era upper class women any less likely to play these games?
The difference today is threefold, re: the media:
1) It's new. The psyche will adapt. This is already happening but it is not making headlines. Some women fall into the traps you describe, some don't - but "Young girls learning to repair engines/doing well in sports/starting real careers at 18" doesn't make for good headlines. "Social media is destroying women" does, both for the alt-right* and the e-wokes.
Why adjustment is happening? Good parenting, good teachers and a solid social network in the real world.
2) Feminism has poisoned men and women, culturally speaking, for 50-60 years. Not the strife for equality before the law, just feminism - the supremacist mix of on-the-surface marxist economical analysis and USUK bourgeoise liberal capitalist lifestyle and privilege-ideology. Interest in feminism, identifying as feminist and listening to feminists is (suddenly) in a sharp decline among the under-thirty years old women here in Sweden, especially the actual swedish women; feminism has been labeled dorky and uncool by the young girls.
Being an able stand-up woman is in; being a bitter childless 50-something harridan is out. And it is the latter kind that the young girls identify with feminism: bitter, spiteful, hateful women trying to dominate and dictate to young girls how to live.
It looks like it's starting to eat itself.**
3) It open the door even more for acceptance of islam. It proves to the moslems and the free civilised peoples alike, that islam is the answer. And that is something the young is already being brainwashed into believing online: there's no lack of islamic Youtube-channels showing off new converts, or said converts looking at whoreish narcissistic videos and commenting on how liberated they feel in their islamic faith. And that is hardly what we need - the slavery of islam.***
Consider this truth:
Men like what they like, independent of what other men like. Adam likes Star Wars. Bill likes Star Trek. And Cecil likes Stargate SG1. And they can argue for hours about what they like and dislike and so on, and be friends - yes, arguing about it even strengthens their friendships.
Women like what other women like, if it is popular enough. Anna likes what Bea likes who likes it because Ciara likes it.
And that's how you turn this around: make it uncool. Offer something more popular - and the beauty of it is, it doesn't have to /be/ more popular objectively or numbers-wise, not initially. It just have to look like it is. Instead of bringing up the Amber Herds, shine a light on Gina Carano, so to speak.
---
*Which is just as woke as the actual woke - they use the same ontological and epistemological foundation of USUK liberalism. It's like the difference between socialism and communism.
**Which means your suggestion would hand back control of the narrative to the feminists, by acknowledging as objectively true all their claims.
***Women acting the way you describe is the price and the prize of freedom: without the freedom to take the consequences of your actions, you are not free.
The analogy here is digital avatar to niqab, street clothes to what's under the niqab. It's fully expected that women will continue to dress however they please in public. The intent isn't to enforce standards of sexual prudishness. It's simply to prevent that sexual competition from getting out of hand via social media amplification.
Yes, I get it - it's a digital burkha and women who don't use it will be presumed to be whores.
It's nothing new. All european cultures used to have cultural codes for how girls, women and crones wore their hair, and how it was to be covered.
For the same reason. Often, whores (i.e. women convicted of non-marital sex or adultery) had to wear a special whore-cap and sit in whore's bench at church.
We're well rid of it, and all the better for it. It is totalitarian, sexual fascism and nothing but.
Look instead deeper into european cultures and women's power before and during the early stages of enforced christianity.
The Romans weren't exactly libertines on these matters, either. Prostitution was perfectly legal but actors and whores were barred from certain social functions, for example.
But again, none of this has anything to do with prudishness. It's really just about establishing boundaries of custom and norms of behavior that prevent women from driving themselves mad with social media.
In the 1980s over here, there was a brief epidemic of "bipolar" young women.
This came about after the term was popularised in the press, specifically the rags targetting young women and teens.
I'm sure you remember such magazines? Fashion, gossip, celebrities, sex-advice columns, and so on.
Suddenly in just a few years, the subset of girls that were more out-acting, more out there and "dangerous" (fishnet stockings, laced and heeled boots, mini skirts, leopard patterned blouses, toupéed hair - the glamrock, heavy metal, synth jambalaya of popculture) all developed this habit of causally dropping in conversations that they were feeling "bipolar".
It made them edgy and cool, compared to other girls, and gave them an excuse for lewd and licentous behaviour: wasn't their fault they slept around, they were bipolar you see.
(Not that I saw or see sleeping around as a fault, long as you a) ain't in a relationship and b) use protection and c) own up to what you're doing.)
Then, around 1990ish, they were no longer bipolar. For a very simple reason:
They were now in their thirties. Too old for them regular Saturday night meat-market nightclubs. The fresh batch of barely twenty years old out-competed them, with their combination of "bi-chic/heroin chic".
The cycle repeats. It is more wide-spread now and more visible. It will sort itself out, and we will have casualties along the way. And corporations will figure out how to profit from it, and states will figure out how to leverage yet more agency away from people.
But at least they were out there, in person, doing things. What we have now is qualitatively different - it isn't a matter of this or that mass hysteria, women have indeed always done this. This isn't weird fashion choices or unfortunate substance abuse habits. It's an entire generation of kids that have stopped even talking to one another, let alone screwing, and it's driven by a novel technological change, which demands a cultural shift to compensate for its deleterious effects.
You say it will resolve itself under its own power, well yes, these things do resolve. Because humans resolve them. But how? This isn't magic. We resolve them by changing our behavior.
> It proves to the moslems and the free civilised peoples alike, that islam is the answer.
What if this is the truth? What if Islam is objectivelly SUPERIOR to Liberalism, especially it's developed form, the Agnostic Liberalism most readily observable in the Woke? For a proper right-winger this is not supposed to be a controversial notion. After all, the entire POINT of "the right" is that there is an Order or Hierarchy of the World, which is external to us and not changeable by us mere mortals. And further the point of "the right" is to find this Order and live according to it. The notion of relative superiorities of religions or world-views is inherent in right-wingness and shouldn't surprise us. BTW, I'm completely ommiting the Condorcet paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_paradox which might be able to kill right-wingism (if you do not allow gradations of superiority it kills it's idea of Hierarchies outright, but if you do allow gradations it's not so simple). Over on Science Is Not The Answer https://wmbriggs.substack.com/ Uncle Sergeant Briggs regularly posts on the evils of Enlightment, Liberalism and the entire complex of the modern West. He draws a fairly straight line from moral relativists of the French Revolution to modern laws promoting sex-change operations. There's more on his blog, https://www.wmbriggs.com/
To a naive observer, it would seem that West's ideas on the World failed. You (I'm on the fringe of the West) have men claiming to be women and LAWS which compel others to join in on this delusion. I could stop right there. I don't need to go anywhere else. But I'll also point out that you have racist practices where California is literally wanting to pay black people purely for the fact they are black. BTW, it's Black if you're referring to the ethnic group and black if you're referring to skin color. USA has both, even some white Blacks which is amazing. Eminem? Scott Adams (formerly)?
A naive observer would look at this and conclude the West is bonkers. A naive observer will further think about it some more and conclude it's the West's way of living, their ideology and ultimately their religion (Atheism counts) that is to blame. Brown people in hidqabs (or however you spell it, I'm to lazy to look it up, fix your spelling people) are offputting but what if there's a community of white people nearby (brown people get white quickly if you remove the subtropical sunshine) that affirm the existence of an external Order and Hierarchy to the World that exists outside of us and can't be changed by us mere mortals? And what if they discover this order and live according to it? Don't they look better, superior, to a naive observer? And by "naive" I mean observers who didn't get Agnostic Liberalism hammered into their heads by 15 years of liberal school curricula. All curricula in the West are liberal.
And for the record, I'm Catholic who actually had ash literally sprinkled on his head yesterday. I'm part of the only group which, in the West, and in the East, it's allowed to hate more than Jews. Seriously. Jews Jews Jews, but when somebody mentions the Vatican or Catholic priests.... oh boy! At any rate, the option is still here. There's no shortage of videos on YouTube of Catholics talking about their joyful lives as disciples of the Anointed One. As long as the Umma isn't established in Europe and North America, the opion will stay here. After that, I don't know. See my comment below on two points to keep in mind about Islam. But I do know that Agnostic Liberalism is done. It failed, it's perfectly 100% obvious by now and people are leaving it. Some like our own John Carter are trying to invent some kind of an alternative, but without a thousand years of culture to back them up how likely are they to make it? Iliad didn't drop out of the sky. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aofPdMbXzUQ Others are going for already established options. And since Christianity in general (not that it would fix anything as Protestantism is the anticipation of Liberalism and the modern "anything goes" realitivism, if not why are there so many Protestant sects?) and Catholicism in particular has been stigmatized in the West, what other option there is but Islam? Don't tell me nobody tried Buddhism in the West. ;)
The West is absolutely bonkers. I am a college professor in NY and it is a clown show. My students know nothing--I mentioned the Oedipal complex the other day and they don't even know what it that is, much less how it connects to Shakespeare or Freud (and absolutely NO knowledge of Ancient Greece). This year only 2/31 students could identify the Virgin Mary and Christ child as a visual icon.
Sorry about the sarcasm but this all stems from the heart-roots: liberalism (all kinds) and progressivism.
(If liberalism is taken as an ideology, progressivism is a flavour you can add to any ideology.)
You either focus on real things - how to hammer a nail in f.e. - or you focus on theory. The less able and willing you are to learn the real thing, the more likely you are to focus on the theoretical (and that isn't new, just /much/ more prevalent and visible thanks to media and industrialised society - in older times, fewer could be slackers since the Grottekvarn* runs on human lives).
And the more theory-oriented someone is, and the less able they are - the more dependent, obedient and rechtsgedenken they are.
Ideally, you will believe the news as told to you; you will go to your daily activity; you will get your allotted consumer-cheque of the day (electronically) and you will return to your cell after consuming goods.
The basic model is after all Plato's ideal society - eugenicist fascism, but without the panoply and spectacle.
And in that model, the plebs only need to know to obey.
(Sorry for the preachy tone - workrelated injury so to speak. Re-read it after posting saw how it came off.)
A majority did sit up and take notice when I told them about Rene Girard's ideas about the scapegoat and Christ being the last of them, and how that changed the world forever. I used a Mean Girls example and throwing someone under the bus. They were very curious about this. I actually have no plan. I just know that I am 57 and know that everything is wrong with the way they are educated (my own kids went to Catholic high schools so at least got some of this), and so I try and keep up with you all who are "writing sense" and interweave your points into my lectures. John, you get it right every time. These girls feel trapped and they don't know how to get it out. I remember one time during COVID telling them that their generation couldn't get any more naked if they tried and that to be really radical they all should be chaste and wear monk's robes. A new sexual straight edge to create real desire. They liked this idea a lot. But none of them are courageous enough to start. I am going to share that manifesto by Bridgette linked above when I ask them to write manifestos this year (the assignment asks them to write in the spirit of the Futurists, but most end up writing HR influenced didactic memos.) Thank you for inspiring me, I do pro-life work in my free time and your assessments often help me make links to consistent life ethic theories.
Not a new thing. Fischer talked about this with respect to the Quakers girls in his book Albino's Seed. The girls were so chaste and simple that even the ranks were writing to their diaries about how much they desired them. It's a cycle. People do get tired of the New Thing so they take out the Old Thing as the New New Thing.
Well, to nitpick, there is no such thing as year 0 AD. xD Not in history, anyway. Year 1 AD is preceded by year 1 BC. :) That was the first lesson in history class for me back in elementary school.
And as a second nitpick, the ancient historians messed something up really bad and miscalculated the year of the birth of the Anointed One. He was definitively crucified in 33 CE, but he was probably born a few years before 1 CE. That's because the constelation of circumstances (who was king/emperor where, who was legate where, how old he was before crucifiction...) was last correct about 5 BCE or something such. There's also a theory he was born few years after 1 CE but I personally don't view it as credible. In addition, there's a problem with the Gospels in that not all of the data in them align. You simply have to write something off as erroneous and depending on your choice the resulting date (or even location of birth) will move. Ultimately, they are all derived from human memory and people often conflate things and move the dates 5 or more years. I certainly caught myself shifting parts of Britni Spear's biography by full 4 years. If not for written records, I would be certain she released that song right after her meltdown, not quite a few years later.
Lol. My point was not what is CORRECT, and yes, you are. I am trying to get these 18, 19, and 20 yo kids to visually make a timeline and understand how art-making is situated along it and what we mean when we say 2024. The point is that they don't even know what event marks that moment before BC and AD--I don't even think this is because they have been only taught to use BCE and CE. And the sad thing is that if you asked them if their family history is Christian, they will say yes, but they aren't and they don't even understand that the long history of that faith is what shaped their world.
I have had educated adults tell me Palestine was a country for 1000s of years. Seemingly not realizing countries as we know them emerged over about 100 years around the 1700s.
Islam is objectively worse than Western Liberalism. Show me where it has worked. You won’t be able to. Keep in mind what we are seeing now in the West is disease. It isn’t Liberal free thinking people changing and growing and improving in leaps and bounds. It is a malevolent destructive force intent on hurting what has helped humans more than anything else ever has. A Christian based Liberal society. Center right politically. Moral, but openminded. That is what has worked. It works wherever it is implemented. Not Buddhism, not Islam, not Hinduism. We aren’t seeing that now anywhere.
Well, Islam is 1400 years old. "Western Liberalism" has barely 300 years to it's name. So, on that metric, Islam definitively "works". But that's probably not what you meant by "works".
> A Christian based Liberal society. Center right politically. Moral, but openminded.
To the best of my knowledge, this has never been tried on a large scale for longer than one or two centuries. It might work, for a given value of "work".
This is quite a starry-eyed statement. What it has FAILED to accomplish is ensure it's own long-term survival: the birth rates in Western Liberalism are below replacement, and have been that way for 50 years, and show no signs of correcting. What if, if Western Liberalism has something "special" that produced the Industrial Revolution, that very same "special" something also creates below-replacement birth rates? Then Western Liberalism would be a self-limiting aberation.
My point here isn't to actually convice anyone Islam is *the answer*, it's to show how it's extremely difficult to argue it's not. And if the contest is between Western Liberalism and Islam, they may both be equally wrong.
Oh it did that way earlier the 17th century. It did it multiple times, even - every time real science started to regrow out of the remains of greco-roman-egyptian culture the ruins of which islam is founded upon, the priest-caste was there to smack it down.
Islam and the islamic races are pretty much what Europe had been without christianity being put in its place multiple times by various kings and by the incompatibility of the real european cultures the roman-semitic hodge-podge mythology was plastered on top of.
No Martin Luther or Jean Calvin in islam, so to speak.
ALL DAY LONG!!! This too shall pass. Both girls and boys will figure this shit out. Without some well meaning oldie telling them what they can and can’t do. Both this commenter and the author are onto something: shit becomes uncool and the young find some other way to express themselves. You’re never going to legislate away the fact that heterosexual girls want to be attractive nor that they compare themselves to other females and compete for male attention. We have a new tool. The novelty will fade and people, even young girls, will get a grip. Some girls are perfectly capable of seeing the road to onlyfans and decide not to go there. Let the females hav agency FFS! Unless you really do want Islam lite, in which case boys, be prepared to work your asses off to support the females in your lives.
Not sure if you guys have been following the dignifai page on x that started from the bowels of /pol/ on 4chan, but the gist is during the wake of the Taylor Swift AI porn debacle, some guys had an idea to use AI to do the opposite: take these thirst trap women, put modest clothes on them and remove their tattoos and crazy piercings, then they publicly tag their accounts in the photos. I think its pretty genius because you can't really get banned for doing it, and watching some of these women have public meltdowns over someone putting clothes ON them is freaking hilarious and displays their backwards thinking to the masses. Its wild how "feminism" went from demanding that women not be seen as sex objects, to now being a sex object is "freeing"
"How many such persons of your acquaintance suddenly acknowledged their damaging behaviors and cured themselves?"
About 1/10 to 1/20 . but we're talking actual heroin-addiction here. Injecting it.
Here's something to consider: pathologising/psychologisng behaviours is very dangerous to do as it removes all agency and all rights from the person or group observed. It makes then into a thing to be fixed according to the measuring rod of the observer.
Exactly what the woke are doing, only with different measurements.
Freedom has a cost. That cost is that some of us won't make it. The alternative is someone telling /your/ daughter or son what to wear, what to think and how to feel.
For me, that someone should be you and your wife/husband (don't which sex you are). Not an AI-filter. Not a priest/psychologist.
One's choice of what to wear - or, to stay on topic here, of what to share publicly online - is a social decision. Anyone can do as they please; free will is absolute. But people will also react as they will.
In many countries it's perfectly legal to walk down the street nude, yet people do not do so. Why? Social mores. Fashion choices are a form of communication, which is a two-way street.
Hehe, I just got to nitpick this about public nudity in the street.
Where would that be legal?
It isn't here, not even in a Pride-parade.
You'd get picked up by police for public indecency, or behaviour intended to cause affront.
There's an old (really old) proverb: "Som du är klädd blir du hädd" - "The way dress decides how people see you", roughly, though the deeper meaning is lost: it is that while you have the right to choose for yourself, with that right comes the right to suffer the reactions of others.
Because one cannot exist without the other: remove the free choice and you remove the responsibility, both legally, socially and psychologically.
Legal nudity is rare outside certain beaches, but here in Canada there was a court case several years ago in which women won the right to go topless in public, on the grounds that this is perfectly legal for men.
To the disappointment of men everywhere, none of our women have made use of this new freedom.
Eh, social media sites and other digital skinner boxes are just as addictive and deranging as heroin. Same psychological mechanisms, same hedonic treadmill, same feedback loops. True, the withdrawal symptoms probably won't kill you (other than via your own hand), but this is not what keeps people on the needle either. It's the habit, the fixation, chasing the high, and the relief of external psychological stress that keeps them coming back even after they've got through the withdrawals many times.
Skinner box software has been designed very carefully, through a combination of natural selection and over a decade of informal, large scale psychological experiments, to be this way. And unlike other destructive, addictive habits like gambling, it's trivially accessible. You can shoot digital heroin in bed, for free; you can do it on the toilet; you can do it while you're on the train; you can do it in a room full of friends and family; and rarely with so much as a glimpse of opprobrium.
Pathologizing the abuse of skinner boxes and its consequences is exactly appropriate.
I doubt anybody anywhere hasn't heard that heroin is dangerous, addictive, and bad for you. I understand the point of view that people who choose to use it anyway are responsible for their actions.
The difference between the skinner boxes and almost any other abusive habit is that you don't have a constant barrage of media and peer pressure to pick up a heroin needle or crack pipe. But with skinner boxes they tell you if you don't pick up the digital needle you'll lose out on friendships and networking, stunt your career and social life, and miss out on important opportunities.
While many people admonish children to use digital heroin "responsibly" and "in moderation" before giving them their junkie starter kit, few tell them "you don't need it and it'll make your life miserable". And most who do, do so from a position of hypocrisy.
Shame, scorn, and lines in the sand might not solve the problem, but at this stage it certainly couldn't hurt.
It's a collective action problem imo. Essentially all social life has migrated into the Skinner boxes. Everyone's peer groups are all wirehead junkies. A kid who avoids it ends up isolated. Only answer is a mass migration offline.
Yah. Learned that principle the hard way as a kid when I wandered out into a peat bog, thinking it a short-cut.
Go back, find a new path, get home, clean up before grandma sees what you've done to your boots.
Problem is, to move this to the major topic: who are the grandparents of the current 30-and-younger crowd? Where are they? Which generation are they?
Because in older societies, grandparents (the women especially) are the gatekeepers and forward-passers of culture. So where are the grandparents of the young'uns?
There's one "youth subculture" that never got co-opted, never got commercialised, never became mainstream.
Skinheads.
They romper-stompered their way hither and yon in youth, and then became adults.
It is highly probable the answer to the thing you talk about (as did I, succinctly summed up by John Lydon once as "Bob Dylan's got a parking ticket stuck to his asshole" - only for Lydon to park his arse firmly in the lamestream himself) is buried in the "Why?" skinheads never went the way of hippies or punks or any of the other styles.
Skinheads became adults. Here in Sweden, so does the raggare. Don't know if there's a US counterpart to raggare today. Possibly, the original 1950s greasers come closest.
I work with young ski instructors, seems our demographic is a mix of retired or partially retired folk, gap year uni kids/high school weekenders or young folk who just want to work on the hill. All these guys and girls, well, most of them, are competent, smart, talented, educated to a point and definately not the kinds of gals who take excessive selfies despite their youthful beauty. Alot of the girls I work with travel worldwide or have plans. Self sufficient, funny and fun. I am so proud of them, they give me hope for the future. The OnlyFans crew = I see them as having their beauty only to rely on. Once it's gone, then they'll REALLY be depressed.
"Make it uncool." This. Women will relentlessly steer their daughters into whatever seems high-status among women. Foot binding? Yep. STEM degree? Yep. Sleeping around in college? Yep. Stating their pronouns? Yep. The art/media culture needs to be hijacked (riding the wave of nauseated backlash that is forming) to make femininity, beauty & virtue the high-status play among women, as it has often been. Women will put their teen daughters in convents rather than be uncool, and the girls will finally catch a break.
I have a great deal of respect for my grandmothers' generation, and the ones preceding them.
My maternal grandmother started working her first job directly after school. While doing so, she married my grandfather and they raised four children together.
The key word for me is [Together]. Family.
Not perpetual teenhood as an itemised and atomised super-individual, as the generation that were young in the 1960s sold to the West at first and later to the entire planet.
Familj, fränder, folk, fosterland.
In english, it doesn't alliterate as well but the meaning is:
Family, kin, people, father-/motherland.
Feminism purported to teach girls ability, but instead only taught them spiteful resentiment, revan(s)chism, and self-loathing. Take my wife as an example of womanhood that I admier and respect:
She can change the tyres of the truck herself. Change the oil. Do all sorts of minor things that most people nowadays just have a shop do for them. Not her and it's not a question of money: she /can/ do it, so she /does/. She can shoot, throw knives, dress skin joint de-bone an animal and cure the hide, make soap from basics, sew and knit and too many things to list.
Ability. Will. Determination. Respect (not deferrence) for tradition and elders.
I think more than lewd licentiousness it is being robbed of doing things that has hurt women - they were told they can be anything they want, "just like the privileged patriarchy": no-one told them that being a man means that you struggle to be good enough in your own eyes first and foremost, but also compared to father and brothers and mates.
So the girls, the women were promised everything for free if they just femme it up enough, it feels like to me.
And that's why I'm so bileful towards feminists: for a century now they have led womanhood itself into becoming some kind of "androgynous sex-doll with attitude" Pit of Despair.
Your wife sounds awesome! My daughter is very much in this vein, thank God, with no interest in social media at all. We have destroyed girls, and the bill is coming due.
I really think it is because we both tend to look at how our grandparents did things, and both hers and mine married young and remained married throughout life. "Problems are for solving" as dad says.
A thousand years ago, in social media Time, when the great migration of hindbrains moved from the laptop to the smart phone, and young women were just beginning to step into traffic while thumbing into bliss, this was all being adjudicated as the "manosphere" emerged from its burrow of butthurt to be bludgeoned by the progressive orthodoxy for its manifesto of wrongthink.
Feminists and bootstrap boomers and churchian elders and media pundits all went their rounds tag-teaming the harbingers. But before the misandry bubble was clubbed and skinned and worn as a pink hat marching on the mall, it saw its long shadow. Sorry, six more eons of dark sexual winter.
Not long after, the Science of Modern Mating was settled. Teams "lean-in" and "man up" were right and the bad news bears of misogynists and incels were wrong. Get over it.
Why are there "teams" you might ask? Don't we all benefit from understanding the truth? LOL.
The truth about female sexual nature and selection - and the myriad overt and covert prongs of the long war on reality, skewering, among many other things, what was left of masculinity, courtship, and family formation, were sent back underground where they would be fertilized with metric tons of bullshit and new shoots of female empowerment would hatch every spring proving progress to be right time and again.
A return to anything resembling Patriarchy is antithetical to progress.
Ten thousand years of controlling for female sexual selection and providing for pro-social incentives to steward boys into productive men were all wrong because hate has no home here.
Long before SSREyes, when noticing was in full swing, there was the "thousand c*ck stare".
There were all matters alarms going off indicating that the kids were most certainly not okay. Just some growing pains. Nothing to see here. Its natural to suffer some setbacks when central planning the entire social order of the human race.
Meanwhile, whatever holdouts remained aged out or got off on various gatekeeper offramps or chained themselves to grifter trees like so many desperate and lonely environmentalists pooping off their elevated platforms to the sound of chainsaws.
Soon enough the younger generation had the false dilemma injected into every aspect of their lives: enter the zero-sum, adversarial, pareto meatgrinder or opt out entirely. "Get dark triad or go home".
Fast forward and it is still illegal to tell young women "no" - or to cultivate masculinity that has not been sanitized, re-programmed, and officially sanctioned by the ivory gynocracy tower of the State.
And still the biggest problem we face, aside from all these women mysteriously failing to stick the landing in the ice cream sundae of traditional life, with the cherry-picked benefits of patriarchy atop, is that the rudder-swimmers and "MMA" fighters are stealing all the strong girls trophies.
And because no internet comment is worth a salt if it does not mention notsees or boomers, one of my biggest personal beefs - aside from having lived through this sexual dystopia, is that my latchkey GenX friends who are high on their horse about "the boomers" being so materialistic and narcissistic, have ushered in an era in which their own children are the most commodified, dehumanized, disenfranchised, financialized and damaged - aside from perhaps the generation of those running over the trenches into machine gun fire while the girls back home handed out white feathers of shame.
They regularly sit across the table from their own kids, all on their phones. Saying nothing. Always on their phones. They think they are winning because their kids love hanging out [with them] at home and that they are in "good schools" and on the status trajectory.
They don't want their kids to settle down too early. They need to go to "college". Get a career first. Get a house first. See the world. etc.
The genx parents have internalized all of the lies of the sexual dystopia that I saw manifest through revealed preference, and own-goals of the diametric stated objectives impaled on actual personal choices of all those women who supposedly wanted to get married [some day] and have children [not any time soon].
If marriage and family is the priority, it is reflected in all that we do. Which is what the old social order was constructed to do: propagate a people and her way of life.
But marriage and family is not a priority. It may be a want. Or an ideal. But it is not a priority and in this truth the parents are complicit. The marketplace of diffusing responsibility is flush. There is a collective shrug. What can we do? A grand mystery afoot.
Congrats on 10K, John Banger. The Billie Eilish sanpaku eyes are haunting because they are reminders that subversive SSRIs, birth control, weed, alcohol and constant selfies/scrolling all kill the soul through chemical warfare. A digital purdah combined with substance detox and healthy IRL relationships with men that lead to marriage/babies would go a long way towards healing the culture. Everything else is downstream.
Happy Valentine's Day, my fellow Barsoom consoomers ;)
Honestly I think a lot of these girls would be a lot happier if they put down the Insta and SSRIs and just took up alcoholism. IRL partying is better for the young than staring at the black mirror.
Yes - this whole mess is of course also tied up with the rise of safety culture and loss of freedom for young people. Enforcement of higher drinking ages, smoking bans in bars, and loss of autonomy.
Umm. that is a tall order. everything blocking healthy internal developement, is a long, long list.....from education as it now exists to religion to entertainment.....to fashion, to medicine......?
Many people are blaming smartphones for the hysterical behaviour we're seeing in Zoomer girls these days (and I'm using the term "hysterically" very intentionally). I think smartphones and the whole digital dystopia are aggravating the situation we're in, but I see a deeper root that goes back at least a couple of generations.
I'm a GenXer, but unlike most of my generational peers, I was brought up by very traditional parents. (They weren't politically conservative, but they were "socially" conservative.) I saw this as a huge burden growing up because my parents were much more strict than other parents. But now, I am incredibly grateful for how I was raised.
Here are three key differences I noticed between how things worked in my family and those of my friends:
1. Corporal punishment. No one wants to hear this, but spanking kids worked for millenia; now, all of a sudden, we're all too good for that. The reality is that an occasional swat on the butt (a naturally flabby, well protected part of the anatomy) stings for a few moments, but it gets the message across. Too many modern-day parents would rather put their kids on prescription drugs for "ADHD" than discipline their kids with a spanking. Amazing when you compare the potential long-term brain damage of a drug (on a young, developing brain, no less) to the temporary burn of a spanking.
2. Chores. I was expected to help out around the house - and I wasn't given an "allowance" as a reward. I resented this alot as a kid, but I am so grateful now. And I have been amazed to learn how many MORE chores my parents and grandparents did - my dad was shingling roofs at age 9. My grandfather was helping to support the family at the same age when his father was sent to fight in WWI.
3. Get a job! While I was never given an allowance, my mom helped me to get my first jobs: delivering papers from age 8-12, and babysitting from age 12 on. By the time I was 16 I was able to look for work on my own. My parents always told me there was no shame in manual work or "starting out at the bottom." All work was honourable work.
Parenting is always going to be an art, and there is no formula for it. But when I look around at the young people who seem to be struggling the most today, I see people who never got spanked, had no responsibilities growing up, and think they are too good to flip a burger.
I have come to truly know what the term "spoiled" means.
I'll finish by saying that there is absolutely nothing wrong with girls wanting to dress up, wear makeup, and look pretty. It's completely normal, and it keeps the race going! I did all those things, and I enjoyed it too. But then I did something called "growing up," and other things became more important to me. The phenomenon JC is describing in this article is a severe form of arrested development...brought on, IMO, by indulgent parenting.
It ain't easy being a parent in 2024. But you know something? It never was. You're asking the right questions, so I think your daughter is in good hands.
The reason people are pointing to smart phones and social media is that there is a mountain of empirical evidence demonstrating that the collapse in mental health among young women especially correlates quite precisely with the introduction of phones; responds in a dose dependent fashion to social media usage; and resolves with cessation of social media usage. Jonathan Haidt has published quite a bit on the subject, which was why I linked him at the beginning.
I get all that, and I'm not disputing it. But I'm not talking about correlations established through studies - I'm talking about Real Life. And I'm not just talking about hysterical zoomer girls - what I am saying applies to boys and girls who are struggling with all kinds of modern-day plagues, from trans bullshit to drug addiction.
The analogy I would draw is that of growing a garden: plants cannot thrive in lousy soil. Improve the soil (i.e. the parenting) and the plants will do the rest on their own.
Yes. I picture a graph with big inflection point on the sloping line. The trend was already in place, but much more insidious. Then it got a shot of rocket fuel, and now everybody feels it.
(See also frog in a warming pot and someone turned up the heat to high.)
Thank you Anna! I agree with you on every particular. Done correctly, corporal punishment engages the survival mechanism in behavior modification, without causing harm. There’s a reason why my mum always had my dad handle that; he had complete control of his temper. Never strike out of anger, and always for an explicit reason that the child understands.
John, I’m thinking that another way of putting it is that smartphones are a catalyst, that massively enhances feedback on personality traits that are already in place.
read with her. read what she is interested in. discuss, the characters motives. ask what she would do instead. internal strength of personal agency is the only thing that can save her from this. It also prevents them from being vulnerable to cults.....let her question everything. even you. if you love her enough to do this, it gives her a fighting chance.
that is excellent, you still have a few years to prepare her, before the hormone step in. after that.....well. keep the lines of communication open always. even if you don't understand her, she doesn't understand her either...the " i love you too much to argue" method, if you must.
Right. There's no guarantee that the genes which are weeded out by this artificial culture are bad ones. The genes it preserves may be the fittest ones for surviving and reproducing in a digital dystopia, but are they the fittest ones for having families and rebuilding and maintaining civilization? That's not a given.
It won't always be a dystopia. The age we're entering will be sweet, no more illusion. But we're still in its labour phase. Early adopters of www knew in advance vaccines were junk. They go through to the next round for asking the right questions and discerning the right information.
As for girls fitness. Girls must know their worth, it's a moral imperative. In an equalised democracy how to grasp their value? Hierarchy has been demolished. Their ego/mirror says one thing, social media account another, parents/friends another and irl guys yet another. No wonder they're going mad.
I want people to have meaning and be truly happy though, even if they don’t understand how to get there themselves. Just because someone chooses to destroy themselves doesn’t release my obligation to try to lead them to the truth.
Young women never see themselves as young men see them. The tragedies are manifest; scarring and mutilating themselves to appeal to their inner envies of female others all the while they murder what sets the heart of a man to conquer any and all that stands between them.
Lost is the simple siren-like beauty of an imperfect smile, that delicate breeze of freckles, or that funny little mole just above her lip; the things that flip something inside a man who wanted to see the genuine her.
I tend to wear little or no make-up - not because I'm against it in any way, so much as that I've reached an age where wearing make-up can actually make me look worse (!), and while it's fun to put on, it's a pain to take off.
Perhaps because of my mostly naked face, quite a few men have confided to me how much they prefer women with little or minimal make-up. It's quite surprising - and I think it has to do with what you said: "Young women never see themselves as young men see them."
When you think about it, most make-up techniques have to do with making yourself look younger and/or healthier. (After all, it's largely about mating when you get right down to it, so youth and health are what appeals.) Once I realized this, I decided to skip the hair colour and face paint and just focus on being healthy. I guess I'm lucky - my husband approves.
I married a lovely young lady 38 years ago whose heart and mind I fell in love with - things that no makeup can touch. Loyalty, a sense of purpose and just wanting to be together have marked our journey all along. She never thought of herself as beautiful, which is at least partially indicative of my view on all of this - she doesn't see who I see, and I don't see the person she sees. We each think we got the better deal, ha!
True. This is just like the crazy. If a man isn't crazy in some obvious way, if his sanity is perfect, then it has to be that he's just great at hiding his crazyness. Best not to deal with him because for all you know he likes to serve people sausages he previously shoved up his ass. Much better to deal with people who are obviously crazy (in some mostly mild way) because they at least let it hang out where you can see it. Same thing with female beauty. If she's not obviously imperfect in some way, then there must be something hideous about her that she's just great at hiding. Maybe her heart is High Octane Nightmare Fuel?
Fascinating idea. I think the toughest opposition would come from the people it would probably end up benefitting the most. Just as the drunks panicked the most when prohibition was enacted.
My sister is on Instagram. She knows it's bad. We joke about how it makes her more depressed and anxious. She's read the articles I've sent her. It doesn't seem to make a lot of difference, she's still there.
Almost all of them know it's psychologically toxic. That's why online slut shaming is the only real solution. If the only thing they get for a selfie is abuse, they'll stop with the selfies. Then they'll just use the Internet to gossip, trade recipes, fashion tips, music recommendations, whatever.
We have to be honest about that part first. There is a growing cottage industry around the elephant that is addiction (see: digital detox), but there is a concerted effort to avoid calling attention to the fact that it is an addiction - and that is by design. Like most products of the techno-progressive hivemind, we want to keep the tingles but not the tears.
And so most people are pursuing the strategy of asking their captors to provide them with features to help them feel less captured. In the same way we abdicate our personal responsibilities to the "government" and then demand the "government" do better.
Anyone who has ever witnessed a smart phone being handed to an infant recognizes the power goes beyond whatever some influencer is shilling.
Thats not even getting into the slumbering correlation of the iPhone launch and babies going spectrum. What happens when a new mom loves her phone more than her crying baby? Ask again in 20 years.
We are a highly addicted people. The convergence of our entire social existence into the incredibly sticky and elastic products and services offered via our pocket moloch is like the alcoholic gambler living on the 24/7/365 vegas strip. In his pocket.
They even design the carpet there so that your eyes won't drift downward from the tables.
Hey buddy, you gotta stop hanging out in bars. But thats where all the people are!
The second order problem is the pluralistic ignorance that has also been inculcated that EVERYONE IS DOING IT.
Everyone lives in Vegas too. If you move, you will have no friends, life etc. If you are not on the socials/apps girls will think you are a loser, weird. etc.
The problem is we tore down Chesterton's fences. We have lost generational knowledge of how to be an actual person - and thus community of people, in real life.
So we now have some very tough personal choices to make that exist between the manufactured isolation, anxiety, depression, and alienation of online life and the sudden frontier that is real life gone fallow.
Friends of mine who are parents: "We gave our 10 y/o daughter a smart phone because we didn't want her to be the only one at school without a phone...to be weird."
Ok. Have you seen these girls lately?
I work with a lot of home-schooled kids. Rural. So my experience is skewed. But it is also juxtaposed against my experience in Babylon. There is no comparison.
Like a lot of things these days the great divide is widening. The sides are being drawn. There will be a lot of people that won't make it out of alt-reality. But we can also reclaim a lot of what has been lost if we are honest about how we got here.
So like any other addiction, sadly, we have to be prepared for that too. There is a point where you can't let it burn the whole village down.
I pray they will find their way out. In the meantime, perhaps starting with some conversations around a detox. It is a health issue. Start with that.
and that is why i do not have a cell phone, it's a trap. I have a landline. worse than tv for your brain. no one addicted is ever really free. each addiction is a master.
Imagine how much happier parents would be if they knew there was zero possibility of their daughters posting tit pics because they knew their daughters' peers would ruthlessly slut shame them for posting a selfie.
Or maybe just offer a compelling alternative? Conservatives are horrible at this. Want to convince young women that hook-up culture is damaging? Show them the satisfaction and intimacy available within monogamous marriages. But no, conservatives always lead with some sex negative lay-in-the-dark-missionary-style-in-fear vision that slut shames every women caught up in the random-sex-as-empowerment and the terrified girls stay in their rut.
There was some random girl on the internet talking about how she was in her early 30's and regretted not finding a good man and she was attracted to conservative men and was having difficulty uunderstanding her new perspective, and maybe she had been lied to and she could change and it wasn't too late, and.... And Cat Turd made a viral comment along the lines of "LOL, make me a sandwhich." I'm sure she sees the light now!! Part of why she didn't consider the conservative message before was because she was lied to and told that all conservatives were jerks who just want women to make them sandwhiches and now she's sure that was the truth.
Show, don't tell. Show women how a life of monogomy and embracing the feminine and motherhood is deeply fulfilling. Attack videos and slut shaming won't do it. You don't look happy and fulfilled by attacking all day. (Not saying YOU are doing this John Carter) but conservatives in general are horrible at sharing their message.
Yeah there's a long and counterproductive habit of conservatives driving women away, partly by failing to offer an inspiring vision. That's another question though. What I'm talking about here is rather more metapolitical: social media is driving women in general insane; this has severe downstream consequences for all of us; how do we stop this?
But here’s the thing, a lot of us don’t talk about our marriages because our intimate lives are none of the wider world’s business.
I could tell you about my-very-much-not lights-off-missionary-style sex life, but I don’t write porn. And even if I did, I’d just get a bunch of incels and femcels calling me a liar or worse.
We’d very much like it if the libs would stop sharing the details of their relationships, because it’s awful to see. Variety may be the spice of life, but pathetically masturbating into a different stranger every other night does not count as variety. Like congratulations, you’ve sampled every item on the menu at every McDonalds in the country, you’re a real gorumand. Give me a break. Protip: if you want to be really, incredibly good at something, you have to specialize. And specialization in sex means specializing in a partner, not perfecting your “moves”. This is one of those areas where the wisdom of crowds does not apply.
Ok, so beyond the realm of sex and sexuality, the other 99% of a stable, happy, fulfilling relationship, what evidence do you need? I’ve been married for over 20 years. In an environment where either of us could have walked away at any time with basically no consequences, and we’ve both had plenty of invitations to do that (her more than I of course, because that’s how these things work). Who’s more likely to have the goods on how to find and keep someone special, me, or the person with 150 heart-wrenching breakup stories to share?
At some point you just have to shrug and say “do what you like”. This is also what we tell our children when they’re being stubborn and we know they’re not going to like the outcome, but clearly they’re only going to learn that through experience.
I'm not asking people to write details of their sex life, just to do what you just did. Talk about how a happy marriage is fulfilling. I hear a lot of negative from conservatives (slut, blue hair, feminazi) and not a lot of talk about how happy a traditional life can make a person. Very little aspirational. That's all I'm talking about. To be honest when I hear someone like Michael Knowles constantly talk about sluts and slutty women (constantly!) it doesn't lead me to believe he has a happy sex life. Not making a statement of fact here, just talking about perception. If Knowles had a bunch of inspirational messages about how awesome his life is and and how a great sex life is definitely possible in a marriage (wink, wink - no details) it would be a much more compelling message and could actually convert people instead of just virtue signalling to his base.
So yes, stay happy and mind your own business but when it comes to pundits and conservatives a message of how wonderful life is to be on the "other side:" coupled with compassion of how one could fall for the ubiqitous and damaging messaging going out to people would really grow the base. Not "LOL slut, make me a sandwhich" or being suspiciously obsessed with women with promiscuois sex lives.
I definitely hear you on that. I get tired of hearing the "look at what this random ho on the internet is doing!" stuff too. It's very idiocracy tier, like Jackass but with thots instead of ... well, jackasses.
Have you considered that conservatives have been telling it, just that the controlled media and algo’s don’t show it? We live in a divide and conquer empire, ruling us slaves to be malleable to their will. Of -course- they’re not going to show a healthy, family based alternative.
Doing otherwise would lead to stable families, that pursue happiness, which they can’t offer, and either seek it elsewhere or become ungovernable.
I'm not talking about the mainstream., although I agree that it's not being depicted there. I'm talking about the conservative world the alt press. I see a lot of peices dunking on the current state of affairs but not a lot of pieces offering an aspirational and compelling alternative.
Ah, I see. Especially after reading your response to John.
And, I would agree. I think a large part of that is three fold.
1. It's harder to get views and go up in algo's saying something non-controversial.
2. The society wears many men out that they don't know how to do it. They don't know how to make a stable marriage, find a wife, find work that pays, get out of usurious debt, etc. Pointing out problems is easy. Solutions, that are workable, realistic, and point towards the common good and virtue - those are hard. That leads to a lot of ideas being thrown out there to see what would work, unless someone happens to have a lot of wisdom and experience.
3. Happily married men have less time to write. I have 5 children, 6 on the way, and write pieces specifically tailored in a certain style. They're short, to the point, with a mix of dialectic and rhetoric. I can do it in 30-60 minutes when everyone's asleep, but as a business owner it wears on you or can happen sporadically. I know my stack isn't for everyone, nor is it meant to be. It's meant for people that are searching and want something to ponder during their work day, or a quick share with a friend to start a conversation. Married men, writing essays about married life, is much more difficult.
And, because it would come from a male perspective, likely wouldn't hit on the emotional and spiritual highs/lows that women would want to hear on a regular basis. I, as a man, can offer one woman a dream and a life. I can describe that life to others. But it's our dream, it's hard, full of suffering, joys, tears, and wonder.... And would not appeal to everyone
"Most women want attention, but they also want the plausible deniability of being able to pretend they aren’t trying to get attention."
Reminds me of those gym-trap videos. The virtue-signaling cam whore works out in her skivvies, then "confronts" the guy who takes the bait and checks out the goods. One of the more exotic sociogenic diseases on the market.
Women have been doing this since forever. "Excuse me, my eyes are up here!" Hmm yes I know but you're wearing a tube top with a pushup bra and your bust is surrounded by rhinestone arrows pointing at your cleavage.
how about there be a place for them to get some public attention is a positive way? on a couple of holidays a year? so life is not just a long series of drudgeries? It has been done before and worked well. Personally, i did not want to be a princess, But, that Is what the wedding day phenomena is. your one day to be a princess. I am just saying...every 6 months or so....they NEED a princess long weekend. I became a singer (rock/jazz) because i needed , i admit it, i needed to prove to the world how devastatingly awesome i was. Was i insecure? yes. women are cut throat measuring themselves against each other. as powerful a drive as the nesting instinct, and you , nor anyone else will be turning it off.
I think I agree, as long as it's offline. I think maybe that’s John's ultimate point as well. The cutthroat competition for attention among women isn't the problem. It's the online virtual arena that poisons it, because it poisons basically everything by artificially removing boundaries.
That's really exactly what I'm getting at, yes. That girls compete for the attention of boys is not a bad thing: it's natural, healthy, and right, so far as it goes.
It's the Internet that makes it pathological. That is not our natural environment; our evolved instincts go off the rails there; therefore we must adapt new customs to use it properly.
And for God's sake, we need to get back into our bodies.
To really be effective, it is far better in person. and it tempers the competition. this online place.....does not involve enough of the senses to be really intoxicating as real life. i think of it as performance art. sight smell, sound, texture, and the magic of heart....
> 2) I've heard this too but have not actually seen it in practice.
I'm a still-reasonably-young man that has been a churchgoer for almost 20 years now and I never saw this work. The Mass is actually pretty streamlined and the only way you can actually talk to people is to stay and mingle with people after the Mass. Most parishes don't have that practice. Otherwise, you're left with finding an extracurricular church activity which actually circles back into ordinary practice of "get hobbies to meet girls" which I've also never seen work. It's also terribly expensive, to "get a hobby" you need to spend at least a year and it'll net you a selection of 5-10 girls of which all or almost all are going to be already taken. ASSUMING they're girls and not old women - which they will be in a church.
Exactly. Every time I've attended a church for something other than a funeral or a wedding, it's been largely old women. And no one talks to one another after the service.
"Just go to church" is a meme. I can't think of a single couple I know that met at church.
Actually correction: my mother and father met at a "hobby". They were both sport pilots. My mom was flying gliders and my dad was flying tug airplanes.
You all are probably aware of "The Distributist" here as Dave Greene, basket weaving get togethers for dissident right peeps? If not you should be, they have a Discord t organize them in all states and Cananda. I joined up but alas I am in a wilderness area and hundreds of miles from the nearest meetups, but if you are in a more densely populated area it's probably an excellent way to meet some dissident folks IRL.
Every woman in the country should read this. I have seen no finer explanation about what is happening, and the destruction it has wrought, than this. Kudos to the author.
Very insightful. I’d go even further and say that phone cameras and the unlimited capacity to take and store and post digital photos has maybe not been a good thing for society overall. So much time and energy wasted posting pictures of your food for example.
Long before the meme war there was a meme (staged photo) of a young man and young woman having a picnic together in a pretty setting. She was holding her phone up taking a selfie and he had a camera and was taking a picture of nature.
It was meant to be an illustration of the innate difference between how men and woman literally see the world, see themselves in the world. The kind of beautiful truths about the complimentary nature of men and women that have been totally banished.
In some of my international travel around the time of the smartphone explosion, I could already see this dynamic happening IRL.
Couples on honeymoons or backpacking adventures or weekend getaways spending an inordinate amount of their time staging, shooting, reshooting, checking, reshooting etc the various selfies that would be evidence of a well lived life - or whatever social media currency was in play in the moment.
A spectacular sunset was not some awe-inspiring moment to be shared with the one person in the world you love most but rather to be anxiously captured, filtered, curated, and collected such that it could be "posted".
Women were fussing with their phones and leading their males around to get the best angle or light or backdrop while the males dutifully played along. Meanwhile life was right there in front of them. Life was not being lived but documented. For some, like the couple in Kauai who stepped off the edge of a cliff for a better angle - ended.
Ask any wedding photographer if they "enjoyed the wedding".
The body language of the people in their manic states of optimizing and converting real life into digital feelz was the for me witnessing the birth of the NPC.
It was sad and unnerving. I could already see the light going out in their eyes and some server farm in flyover smiling as the global reserve currency of self-expression became self-unaware.
And this was before the secondary trading markets of the hashtag really got going. Or the selfie-stick. Which was likely a man trying to solve part of this problem. Somewhere I have a photo I took of hundreds of people at some vista of significance holding all their sticks in the air like toasting iphones over the big campfire in the sky. Surreal.
Had this realization when I was trying to get a good shot of a band with my cameraphone, around 2008 or so. For several minutes I'd been filtering reality through the low-rez screen of the device, in order to - what? What was I really doing there? When I could be experiencing reality in high-rez, with all of my senses?
Ever since then I've been careful about not getting trapped like that.
Any public event or gathering or random event in the street these days hatches Narcissus' fireflies.
These behaviors are now "normal" but to a time traveler like me they are unnerving. Foreboding. And indicative of something much deeper and darker in play.
A whole world of beauty and fellowship to enjoy, but instead everyone is busily trying to capture their own light in a jar.
Phone cameras can be used for other things, I use them for artsy black and white nature photos, but of course they mainly aren't. I would be perfectly willing to give up my phone camera and go back to an old school DSLR, if it ended Only Fans slut "culture." The front camera is certainly only useful for mastabatory narcisistic bullshit.
There are good reasons why early internet culture insisted on pseudonymity and never showing your face or personal space. There are reasons why CIA/etc sponsored outfits like Facebook pioneered real name policies and mass facial recognition.
We tried to teach people how to use this thing safely and sanely. Meanwhile the people who want total surveillance and control over your life told you "internet hygiene" was dangerous, cowardly, and masked evil intentions.
The same people who want to disarm you also want you to give up your own privacy.
The same people who won't turn over a single record without redacting half of it think you should share your name, location, and intentions with them 24/7.
The same people who want to profit on making you hopelessly dependent on drugs are mad that you hide your face and identity.
The same people who want to sell cosmetics, fashion and plastic surgery encourage you to share selfies on Instagram.
The pimps and human traffickers of cam and escort sites want you to know that online prostitution is legitimate work.
You don't need to have a beautiful mind to draw a straight line connecting A to B.
Exactly. What I'm suggesting here is really just a return to pre-2010 internet culture. Pseudonymous, private, and focused on intellectual rather than social intercourse.
We were all much happier then.
Chris Poole was right back in 2010!
Ahh... those were the days! Not sure we can turn the clock back though.
Fortunately while the arrow of time points in one direction the arrow of civilization is more like a spiral.
An optimist I see!
I'm incredibly optimistic about everything but the next couple decades!
Really, this must be a new thing fuck it all. :-) I thought you and I were neck and neck in the cynical black pill race. :-)
That should just about cover it!
I wish it were possible. When the first smart phone was released, the genie was out of the bottle…
It's sad how much of that stuff has vanished, not even to censorship but to software rot, rampant tech mergers and acquisitions and resultant "restructuring" that blacked out entire chunks of the web, people simply giving up on paying for their domain names and hosts.
There have been and are ongoing efforts to come up with more resilient, durable ways to approach a decentralized, independent web. But so much of what made it great in the first place is now unrecoverable.
Outside the urban centers of the big platforms the web is an endless sprawling wasteland of dead links, broken sites, and peeling digital billboards, and as with our real life rural areas, most are too caught up in the cities to have noticed anything changed.
Tangential to what you say, I wonder how much the "dead internet" theory has caused the degeneration. Creating content for bots to pander to other bots in order to feed engagement algorithms for ad revenue can't have a positive effect for what is available...
Over the past few years I've watched LLM bot generated content grow from occasional find to dominating search results. But before that there were the plagiarism mills, which is really just the same thing but with humans in sweatshops. Combine that with search engines moving toward only showing you a tiny fraction of the supposed whole of the content they find (6 billion results but we'll show you the first 400 or so and you'll have to take our word for it on the rest!).
The content mills, whether sweatshop or LLM driven, just copy other content, slightly rephrase it, pump it full of ads and spyware, and then game the search engines to rank higher than the original. And the DEI-rotten "engineers" behind the search engines have long since given up the arms race and spend most of their dwindling productive capacity on ensuring the things they do show you are politically correct rather than relevant, which the LLMs have no trouble complying with.
So only the walled gardens of Q/A sites, reddit and other social media are safe shelter from the storm, and some of them are crumbling too (quora for example is filling up with bot content in many topics).
The internet really is dead. I have a huge bookmark collection, over 20 years old, and half the sites in there are dead or broken at this point; the other half aren't discoverable in search unless you look for them with very specific search terms and sometimes not even then. This was not the case even 5 years ago.
We're in the Dead Age of the Internet. Broken links, bot content, search results prioritizing political advantage over practical utility. Google image search has gotten rotten by the way - almost any term is 90% AI 'art' now.
We're living in a cognitive wasteland.
We've done progress. Lots and lots of progress.
Shouldn't that be written as "progress?" So, much "progress" is regression.
We haven't yet investigated URBIT.
Urbit has a lot going for it. Unfortunately I think it's crippled somewhat by the fact that Yarvin was at the time a young, ambitious programmer approaching the greenest of greenfield projects and decided to reinvent every possible wheel, right down to creating an esoteric programming language to build it with. Things even he admits were probably mistakes in hindsight.
But yeah, urbit, ipfs, .onion sites on tor, beaker, gemini, i2p, federation, mesh networks; these all contain pieces of what a new free web would look like. Possibly one of them is already "good enough" and will become the de facto solution when people are ready to start over.
I think there's an important distinction to be made here: Those who brought the search engine into being (Sergey Brin, Larry Page et al) made a marvellous invention. Those who created social media (Zuckerberg et al) created a monster.
Without Facebook we would be Year Eight into Queen Hillary becoming a Trillionaire. Without Social Media none of us would have been able to fight big Vax. As we would have had no way of reaching out. SM is NOT just Only Fan butthole pics. (Does that actually happen?).
Social Media is what has demolished the lying depraved MSM.
I still remember those days decade ago
That my friends is rock and roll in mini-essay form.
Well said
Won't work at all, John. Moslem women are just as affected by the things you describe, if not more so. Under the garbage bags they wear, they will pretty themselves up as much as they can, to show off for other women at their women-only beauty parlours, hair salons, baths and so on.
All the coverings achieves is a false sense of modesty, plus that they mark men as impulsive-driven potential rapists at the sight of a naked ankle - ponder this: did full-body coverings make Victorian era upper class women any less likely to play these games?
The difference today is threefold, re: the media:
1) It's new. The psyche will adapt. This is already happening but it is not making headlines. Some women fall into the traps you describe, some don't - but "Young girls learning to repair engines/doing well in sports/starting real careers at 18" doesn't make for good headlines. "Social media is destroying women" does, both for the alt-right* and the e-wokes.
Why adjustment is happening? Good parenting, good teachers and a solid social network in the real world.
2) Feminism has poisoned men and women, culturally speaking, for 50-60 years. Not the strife for equality before the law, just feminism - the supremacist mix of on-the-surface marxist economical analysis and USUK bourgeoise liberal capitalist lifestyle and privilege-ideology. Interest in feminism, identifying as feminist and listening to feminists is (suddenly) in a sharp decline among the under-thirty years old women here in Sweden, especially the actual swedish women; feminism has been labeled dorky and uncool by the young girls.
Being an able stand-up woman is in; being a bitter childless 50-something harridan is out. And it is the latter kind that the young girls identify with feminism: bitter, spiteful, hateful women trying to dominate and dictate to young girls how to live.
It looks like it's starting to eat itself.**
3) It open the door even more for acceptance of islam. It proves to the moslems and the free civilised peoples alike, that islam is the answer. And that is something the young is already being brainwashed into believing online: there's no lack of islamic Youtube-channels showing off new converts, or said converts looking at whoreish narcissistic videos and commenting on how liberated they feel in their islamic faith. And that is hardly what we need - the slavery of islam.***
Consider this truth:
Men like what they like, independent of what other men like. Adam likes Star Wars. Bill likes Star Trek. And Cecil likes Stargate SG1. And they can argue for hours about what they like and dislike and so on, and be friends - yes, arguing about it even strengthens their friendships.
Women like what other women like, if it is popular enough. Anna likes what Bea likes who likes it because Ciara likes it.
And that's how you turn this around: make it uncool. Offer something more popular - and the beauty of it is, it doesn't have to /be/ more popular objectively or numbers-wise, not initially. It just have to look like it is. Instead of bringing up the Amber Herds, shine a light on Gina Carano, so to speak.
---
*Which is just as woke as the actual woke - they use the same ontological and epistemological foundation of USUK liberalism. It's like the difference between socialism and communism.
**Which means your suggestion would hand back control of the narrative to the feminists, by acknowledging as objectively true all their claims.
***Women acting the way you describe is the price and the prize of freedom: without the freedom to take the consequences of your actions, you are not free.
The analogy here is digital avatar to niqab, street clothes to what's under the niqab. It's fully expected that women will continue to dress however they please in public. The intent isn't to enforce standards of sexual prudishness. It's simply to prevent that sexual competition from getting out of hand via social media amplification.
Yes, I get it - it's a digital burkha and women who don't use it will be presumed to be whores.
It's nothing new. All european cultures used to have cultural codes for how girls, women and crones wore their hair, and how it was to be covered.
For the same reason. Often, whores (i.e. women convicted of non-marital sex or adultery) had to wear a special whore-cap and sit in whore's bench at church.
We're well rid of it, and all the better for it. It is totalitarian, sexual fascism and nothing but.
Look instead deeper into european cultures and women's power before and during the early stages of enforced christianity.
The Romans weren't exactly libertines on these matters, either. Prostitution was perfectly legal but actors and whores were barred from certain social functions, for example.
But again, none of this has anything to do with prudishness. It's really just about establishing boundaries of custom and norms of behavior that prevent women from driving themselves mad with social media.
In the 1980s over here, there was a brief epidemic of "bipolar" young women.
This came about after the term was popularised in the press, specifically the rags targetting young women and teens.
I'm sure you remember such magazines? Fashion, gossip, celebrities, sex-advice columns, and so on.
Suddenly in just a few years, the subset of girls that were more out-acting, more out there and "dangerous" (fishnet stockings, laced and heeled boots, mini skirts, leopard patterned blouses, toupéed hair - the glamrock, heavy metal, synth jambalaya of popculture) all developed this habit of causally dropping in conversations that they were feeling "bipolar".
It made them edgy and cool, compared to other girls, and gave them an excuse for lewd and licentous behaviour: wasn't their fault they slept around, they were bipolar you see.
(Not that I saw or see sleeping around as a fault, long as you a) ain't in a relationship and b) use protection and c) own up to what you're doing.)
Then, around 1990ish, they were no longer bipolar. For a very simple reason:
They were now in their thirties. Too old for them regular Saturday night meat-market nightclubs. The fresh batch of barely twenty years old out-competed them, with their combination of "bi-chic/heroin chic".
The cycle repeats. It is more wide-spread now and more visible. It will sort itself out, and we will have casualties along the way. And corporations will figure out how to profit from it, and states will figure out how to leverage yet more agency away from people.
But it will resolve itself under its own power.
Raise your kids right, is the best solution.
But at least they were out there, in person, doing things. What we have now is qualitatively different - it isn't a matter of this or that mass hysteria, women have indeed always done this. This isn't weird fashion choices or unfortunate substance abuse habits. It's an entire generation of kids that have stopped even talking to one another, let alone screwing, and it's driven by a novel technological change, which demands a cultural shift to compensate for its deleterious effects.
You say it will resolve itself under its own power, well yes, these things do resolve. Because humans resolve them. But how? This isn't magic. We resolve them by changing our behavior.
I kind of feel compelled to comment.
> It proves to the moslems and the free civilised peoples alike, that islam is the answer.
What if this is the truth? What if Islam is objectivelly SUPERIOR to Liberalism, especially it's developed form, the Agnostic Liberalism most readily observable in the Woke? For a proper right-winger this is not supposed to be a controversial notion. After all, the entire POINT of "the right" is that there is an Order or Hierarchy of the World, which is external to us and not changeable by us mere mortals. And further the point of "the right" is to find this Order and live according to it. The notion of relative superiorities of religions or world-views is inherent in right-wingness and shouldn't surprise us. BTW, I'm completely ommiting the Condorcet paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_paradox which might be able to kill right-wingism (if you do not allow gradations of superiority it kills it's idea of Hierarchies outright, but if you do allow gradations it's not so simple). Over on Science Is Not The Answer https://wmbriggs.substack.com/ Uncle Sergeant Briggs regularly posts on the evils of Enlightment, Liberalism and the entire complex of the modern West. He draws a fairly straight line from moral relativists of the French Revolution to modern laws promoting sex-change operations. There's more on his blog, https://www.wmbriggs.com/
To a naive observer, it would seem that West's ideas on the World failed. You (I'm on the fringe of the West) have men claiming to be women and LAWS which compel others to join in on this delusion. I could stop right there. I don't need to go anywhere else. But I'll also point out that you have racist practices where California is literally wanting to pay black people purely for the fact they are black. BTW, it's Black if you're referring to the ethnic group and black if you're referring to skin color. USA has both, even some white Blacks which is amazing. Eminem? Scott Adams (formerly)?
A naive observer would look at this and conclude the West is bonkers. A naive observer will further think about it some more and conclude it's the West's way of living, their ideology and ultimately their religion (Atheism counts) that is to blame. Brown people in hidqabs (or however you spell it, I'm to lazy to look it up, fix your spelling people) are offputting but what if there's a community of white people nearby (brown people get white quickly if you remove the subtropical sunshine) that affirm the existence of an external Order and Hierarchy to the World that exists outside of us and can't be changed by us mere mortals? And what if they discover this order and live according to it? Don't they look better, superior, to a naive observer? And by "naive" I mean observers who didn't get Agnostic Liberalism hammered into their heads by 15 years of liberal school curricula. All curricula in the West are liberal.
And for the record, I'm Catholic who actually had ash literally sprinkled on his head yesterday. I'm part of the only group which, in the West, and in the East, it's allowed to hate more than Jews. Seriously. Jews Jews Jews, but when somebody mentions the Vatican or Catholic priests.... oh boy! At any rate, the option is still here. There's no shortage of videos on YouTube of Catholics talking about their joyful lives as disciples of the Anointed One. As long as the Umma isn't established in Europe and North America, the opion will stay here. After that, I don't know. See my comment below on two points to keep in mind about Islam. But I do know that Agnostic Liberalism is done. It failed, it's perfectly 100% obvious by now and people are leaving it. Some like our own John Carter are trying to invent some kind of an alternative, but without a thousand years of culture to back them up how likely are they to make it? Iliad didn't drop out of the sky. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aofPdMbXzUQ Others are going for already established options. And since Christianity in general (not that it would fix anything as Protestantism is the anticipation of Liberalism and the modern "anything goes" realitivism, if not why are there so many Protestant sects?) and Catholicism in particular has been stigmatized in the West, what other option there is but Islam? Don't tell me nobody tried Buddhism in the West. ;)
The West is absolutely bonkers. I am a college professor in NY and it is a clown show. My students know nothing--I mentioned the Oedipal complex the other day and they don't even know what it that is, much less how it connects to Shakespeare or Freud (and absolutely NO knowledge of Ancient Greece). This year only 2/31 students could identify the Virgin Mary and Christ child as a visual icon.
I've had similar conversations with graduate students.
Yes, I can imagine. We had a new hire in Communication Theory and she had never read Plato's Allegory of the Cave.
So "Project: Homo Novus" is going well it seems?
Sorry about the sarcasm but this all stems from the heart-roots: liberalism (all kinds) and progressivism.
(If liberalism is taken as an ideology, progressivism is a flavour you can add to any ideology.)
You either focus on real things - how to hammer a nail in f.e. - or you focus on theory. The less able and willing you are to learn the real thing, the more likely you are to focus on the theoretical (and that isn't new, just /much/ more prevalent and visible thanks to media and industrialised society - in older times, fewer could be slackers since the Grottekvarn* runs on human lives).
And the more theory-oriented someone is, and the less able they are - the more dependent, obedient and rechtsgedenken they are.
Ideally, you will believe the news as told to you; you will go to your daily activity; you will get your allotted consumer-cheque of the day (electronically) and you will return to your cell after consuming goods.
The basic model is after all Plato's ideal society - eugenicist fascism, but without the panoply and spectacle.
And in that model, the plebs only need to know to obey.
(Sorry for the preachy tone - workrelated injury so to speak. Re-read it after posting saw how it came off.)
Today, I asked them what the year 0 marked, and no one knew.
Yikes.
A majority did sit up and take notice when I told them about Rene Girard's ideas about the scapegoat and Christ being the last of them, and how that changed the world forever. I used a Mean Girls example and throwing someone under the bus. They were very curious about this. I actually have no plan. I just know that I am 57 and know that everything is wrong with the way they are educated (my own kids went to Catholic high schools so at least got some of this), and so I try and keep up with you all who are "writing sense" and interweave your points into my lectures. John, you get it right every time. These girls feel trapped and they don't know how to get it out. I remember one time during COVID telling them that their generation couldn't get any more naked if they tried and that to be really radical they all should be chaste and wear monk's robes. A new sexual straight edge to create real desire. They liked this idea a lot. But none of them are courageous enough to start. I am going to share that manifesto by Bridgette linked above when I ask them to write manifestos this year (the assignment asks them to write in the spirit of the Futurists, but most end up writing HR influenced didactic memos.) Thank you for inspiring me, I do pro-life work in my free time and your assessments often help me make links to consistent life ethic theories.
Incredible to think that things written here are finding their way to the classroom. I'll pass that on to Bridgette.
Not a new thing. Fischer talked about this with respect to the Quakers girls in his book Albino's Seed. The girls were so chaste and simple that even the ranks were writing to their diaries about how much they desired them. It's a cycle. People do get tired of the New Thing so they take out the Old Thing as the New New Thing.
Well, to nitpick, there is no such thing as year 0 AD. xD Not in history, anyway. Year 1 AD is preceded by year 1 BC. :) That was the first lesson in history class for me back in elementary school.
And as a second nitpick, the ancient historians messed something up really bad and miscalculated the year of the birth of the Anointed One. He was definitively crucified in 33 CE, but he was probably born a few years before 1 CE. That's because the constelation of circumstances (who was king/emperor where, who was legate where, how old he was before crucifiction...) was last correct about 5 BCE or something such. There's also a theory he was born few years after 1 CE but I personally don't view it as credible. In addition, there's a problem with the Gospels in that not all of the data in them align. You simply have to write something off as erroneous and depending on your choice the resulting date (or even location of birth) will move. Ultimately, they are all derived from human memory and people often conflate things and move the dates 5 or more years. I certainly caught myself shifting parts of Britni Spear's biography by full 4 years. If not for written records, I would be certain she released that song right after her meltdown, not quite a few years later.
Lol. My point was not what is CORRECT, and yes, you are. I am trying to get these 18, 19, and 20 yo kids to visually make a timeline and understand how art-making is situated along it and what we mean when we say 2024. The point is that they don't even know what event marks that moment before BC and AD--I don't even think this is because they have been only taught to use BCE and CE. And the sad thing is that if you asked them if their family history is Christian, they will say yes, but they aren't and they don't even understand that the long history of that faith is what shaped their world.
I have had educated adults tell me Palestine was a country for 1000s of years. Seemingly not realizing countries as we know them emerged over about 100 years around the 1700s.
Wow. Utter disaster. D:
interesting!
Islam is objectively worse than Western Liberalism. Show me where it has worked. You won’t be able to. Keep in mind what we are seeing now in the West is disease. It isn’t Liberal free thinking people changing and growing and improving in leaps and bounds. It is a malevolent destructive force intent on hurting what has helped humans more than anything else ever has. A Christian based Liberal society. Center right politically. Moral, but openminded. That is what has worked. It works wherever it is implemented. Not Buddhism, not Islam, not Hinduism. We aren’t seeing that now anywhere.
Well, Islam is 1400 years old. "Western Liberalism" has barely 300 years to it's name. So, on that metric, Islam definitively "works". But that's probably not what you meant by "works".
> A Christian based Liberal society. Center right politically. Moral, but openminded.
To the best of my knowledge, this has never been tried on a large scale for longer than one or two centuries. It might work, for a given value of "work".
Look what it has accomplished in 200 years though.
This is quite a starry-eyed statement. What it has FAILED to accomplish is ensure it's own long-term survival: the birth rates in Western Liberalism are below replacement, and have been that way for 50 years, and show no signs of correcting. What if, if Western Liberalism has something "special" that produced the Industrial Revolution, that very same "special" something also creates below-replacement birth rates? Then Western Liberalism would be a self-limiting aberation.
My point here isn't to actually convice anyone Islam is *the answer*, it's to show how it's extremely difficult to argue it's not. And if the contest is between Western Liberalism and Islam, they may both be equally wrong.
7th century, surely?
Oh it did that way earlier the 17th century. It did it multiple times, even - every time real science started to regrow out of the remains of greco-roman-egyptian culture the ruins of which islam is founded upon, the priest-caste was there to smack it down.
Islam and the islamic races are pretty much what Europe had been without christianity being put in its place multiple times by various kings and by the incompatibility of the real european cultures the roman-semitic hodge-podge mythology was plastered on top of.
No Martin Luther or Jean Calvin in islam, so to speak.
Hahaha. Are you guys serious? Wow?!
Publicly. Putting it out there. That your main concern is strange semi- women domination conversations.
That’s ok.
I’ve seen this go on for years now.
You’ll find your way. Back to respectable.
And somebody will clean up this mess.
I’m almost embarrassed to comment on something outrageous Ly obvious. Like a total set up. Hahha
I love you guys and feel your pain.
John Carter.
Smarten the Fuck up.
You look like a fool.
And I say this with love.
As I do all I can to try and support my American brothers that are falling by the wayside.
Talking about dominating is not the same as dominating.
And spare yourselves the effort.
This is my first and last comment and first and last read of this strange wanna be.
ALL DAY LONG!!! This too shall pass. Both girls and boys will figure this shit out. Without some well meaning oldie telling them what they can and can’t do. Both this commenter and the author are onto something: shit becomes uncool and the young find some other way to express themselves. You’re never going to legislate away the fact that heterosexual girls want to be attractive nor that they compare themselves to other females and compete for male attention. We have a new tool. The novelty will fade and people, even young girls, will get a grip. Some girls are perfectly capable of seeing the road to onlyfans and decide not to go there. Let the females hav agency FFS! Unless you really do want Islam lite, in which case boys, be prepared to work your asses off to support the females in your lives.
These things don't fade on their own. It requires cultural adaptation. What I'm describing is one possible adaptive pathway.
Not sure if you guys have been following the dignifai page on x that started from the bowels of /pol/ on 4chan, but the gist is during the wake of the Taylor Swift AI porn debacle, some guys had an idea to use AI to do the opposite: take these thirst trap women, put modest clothes on them and remove their tattoos and crazy piercings, then they publicly tag their accounts in the photos. I think its pretty genius because you can't really get banned for doing it, and watching some of these women have public meltdowns over someone putting clothes ON them is freaking hilarious and displays their backwards thinking to the masses. Its wild how "feminism" went from demanding that women not be seen as sex objects, to now being a sex object is "freeing"
Yes, DignifAI is hilarious.
Reminds me of that old movie, 40 days and 40 nights. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KImrAtbJnTw You should watch it. xD Totally a seasonal film.
I think delaying exposure to the internet , until a solid foundation can be built is safety, might really help.....(provided the home is decent.
It might, but enforcing that is another matter entirely.
agreed.
"How many such persons of your acquaintance suddenly acknowledged their damaging behaviors and cured themselves?"
About 1/10 to 1/20 . but we're talking actual heroin-addiction here. Injecting it.
Here's something to consider: pathologising/psychologisng behaviours is very dangerous to do as it removes all agency and all rights from the person or group observed. It makes then into a thing to be fixed according to the measuring rod of the observer.
Exactly what the woke are doing, only with different measurements.
Freedom has a cost. That cost is that some of us won't make it. The alternative is someone telling /your/ daughter or son what to wear, what to think and how to feel.
For me, that someone should be you and your wife/husband (don't which sex you are). Not an AI-filter. Not a priest/psychologist.
One's choice of what to wear - or, to stay on topic here, of what to share publicly online - is a social decision. Anyone can do as they please; free will is absolute. But people will also react as they will.
In many countries it's perfectly legal to walk down the street nude, yet people do not do so. Why? Social mores. Fashion choices are a form of communication, which is a two-way street.
Hehe, I just got to nitpick this about public nudity in the street.
Where would that be legal?
It isn't here, not even in a Pride-parade.
You'd get picked up by police for public indecency, or behaviour intended to cause affront.
There's an old (really old) proverb: "Som du är klädd blir du hädd" - "The way dress decides how people see you", roughly, though the deeper meaning is lost: it is that while you have the right to choose for yourself, with that right comes the right to suffer the reactions of others.
Because one cannot exist without the other: remove the free choice and you remove the responsibility, both legally, socially and psychologically.
Legal nudity is rare outside certain beaches, but here in Canada there was a court case several years ago in which women won the right to go topless in public, on the grounds that this is perfectly legal for men.
To the disappointment of men everywhere, none of our women have made use of this new freedom.
Eh, social media sites and other digital skinner boxes are just as addictive and deranging as heroin. Same psychological mechanisms, same hedonic treadmill, same feedback loops. True, the withdrawal symptoms probably won't kill you (other than via your own hand), but this is not what keeps people on the needle either. It's the habit, the fixation, chasing the high, and the relief of external psychological stress that keeps them coming back even after they've got through the withdrawals many times.
Skinner box software has been designed very carefully, through a combination of natural selection and over a decade of informal, large scale psychological experiments, to be this way. And unlike other destructive, addictive habits like gambling, it's trivially accessible. You can shoot digital heroin in bed, for free; you can do it on the toilet; you can do it while you're on the train; you can do it in a room full of friends and family; and rarely with so much as a glimpse of opprobrium.
Pathologizing the abuse of skinner boxes and its consequences is exactly appropriate.
I doubt anybody anywhere hasn't heard that heroin is dangerous, addictive, and bad for you. I understand the point of view that people who choose to use it anyway are responsible for their actions.
The difference between the skinner boxes and almost any other abusive habit is that you don't have a constant barrage of media and peer pressure to pick up a heroin needle or crack pipe. But with skinner boxes they tell you if you don't pick up the digital needle you'll lose out on friendships and networking, stunt your career and social life, and miss out on important opportunities.
While many people admonish children to use digital heroin "responsibly" and "in moderation" before giving them their junkie starter kit, few tell them "you don't need it and it'll make your life miserable". And most who do, do so from a position of hypocrisy.
Shame, scorn, and lines in the sand might not solve the problem, but at this stage it certainly couldn't hurt.
It's a collective action problem imo. Essentially all social life has migrated into the Skinner boxes. Everyone's peer groups are all wirehead junkies. A kid who avoids it ends up isolated. Only answer is a mass migration offline.
Modern psychology is not marginally better. It is markedly worse.
**It looks like it's starting to eat itself.**
You can say that again!
I can't wait to see it all implode... ideological collapse... but what rises up in its place?
We can't go back Bob.
Agreed that we can't go back.
But we can go forward in such a direction we return to the good place to be.
Some new way of life that gives us them good old days vibes... I'll settle for that.
Yah. Learned that principle the hard way as a kid when I wandered out into a peat bog, thinking it a short-cut.
Go back, find a new path, get home, clean up before grandma sees what you've done to your boots.
Problem is, to move this to the major topic: who are the grandparents of the current 30-and-younger crowd? Where are they? Which generation are they?
Because in older societies, grandparents (the women especially) are the gatekeepers and forward-passers of culture. So where are the grandparents of the young'uns?
The young'uns today were reared by Nintendo, Sony, Apple, Facebook and Instagramma... and we will reap the results of that soon enough.
Nailed so hard the hammer broke.
Edit: It" "Nailed it so hard the hammer broke".
There's one "youth subculture" that never got co-opted, never got commercialised, never became mainstream.
Skinheads.
They romper-stompered their way hither and yon in youth, and then became adults.
It is highly probable the answer to the thing you talk about (as did I, succinctly summed up by John Lydon once as "Bob Dylan's got a parking ticket stuck to his asshole" - only for Lydon to park his arse firmly in the lamestream himself) is buried in the "Why?" skinheads never went the way of hippies or punks or any of the other styles.
Skinheads became adults. Here in Sweden, so does the raggare. Don't know if there's a US counterpart to raggare today. Possibly, the original 1950s greasers come closest.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raggare
The article is a joke, but it at least gets some parts correct.
Now what does raggare and skinheads have in common? (I ask rethorically, thinking I know the answer).
You overestimate the female ability to self correct. Women hate women, especially a more successful women.
Good point. Once you kick the demon out, it has to be replaced by something wholesome or it will be back, with friends.
so true, and so often forgotten.
I work with young ski instructors, seems our demographic is a mix of retired or partially retired folk, gap year uni kids/high school weekenders or young folk who just want to work on the hill. All these guys and girls, well, most of them, are competent, smart, talented, educated to a point and definately not the kinds of gals who take excessive selfies despite their youthful beauty. Alot of the girls I work with travel worldwide or have plans. Self sufficient, funny and fun. I am so proud of them, they give me hope for the future. The OnlyFans crew = I see them as having their beauty only to rely on. Once it's gone, then they'll REALLY be depressed.
"Make it uncool." This. Women will relentlessly steer their daughters into whatever seems high-status among women. Foot binding? Yep. STEM degree? Yep. Sleeping around in college? Yep. Stating their pronouns? Yep. The art/media culture needs to be hijacked (riding the wave of nauseated backlash that is forming) to make femininity, beauty & virtue the high-status play among women, as it has often been. Women will put their teen daughters in convents rather than be uncool, and the girls will finally catch a break.
I have a great deal of respect for my grandmothers' generation, and the ones preceding them.
My maternal grandmother started working her first job directly after school. While doing so, she married my grandfather and they raised four children together.
The key word for me is [Together]. Family.
Not perpetual teenhood as an itemised and atomised super-individual, as the generation that were young in the 1960s sold to the West at first and later to the entire planet.
Familj, fränder, folk, fosterland.
In english, it doesn't alliterate as well but the meaning is:
Family, kin, people, father-/motherland.
Feminism purported to teach girls ability, but instead only taught them spiteful resentiment, revan(s)chism, and self-loathing. Take my wife as an example of womanhood that I admier and respect:
She can change the tyres of the truck herself. Change the oil. Do all sorts of minor things that most people nowadays just have a shop do for them. Not her and it's not a question of money: she /can/ do it, so she /does/. She can shoot, throw knives, dress skin joint de-bone an animal and cure the hide, make soap from basics, sew and knit and too many things to list.
Ability. Will. Determination. Respect (not deferrence) for tradition and elders.
I think more than lewd licentiousness it is being robbed of doing things that has hurt women - they were told they can be anything they want, "just like the privileged patriarchy": no-one told them that being a man means that you struggle to be good enough in your own eyes first and foremost, but also compared to father and brothers and mates.
So the girls, the women were promised everything for free if they just femme it up enough, it feels like to me.
And that's why I'm so bileful towards feminists: for a century now they have led womanhood itself into becoming some kind of "androgynous sex-doll with attitude" Pit of Despair.
Sorry if I come across as angrily ranting.
Your wife sounds awesome! My daughter is very much in this vein, thank God, with no interest in social media at all. We have destroyed girls, and the bill is coming due.
She is, very much so.
Married thirty years this year.
I really think it is because we both tend to look at how our grandparents did things, and both hers and mine married young and remained married throughout life. "Problems are for solving" as dad says.
A thousand years ago, in social media Time, when the great migration of hindbrains moved from the laptop to the smart phone, and young women were just beginning to step into traffic while thumbing into bliss, this was all being adjudicated as the "manosphere" emerged from its burrow of butthurt to be bludgeoned by the progressive orthodoxy for its manifesto of wrongthink.
Feminists and bootstrap boomers and churchian elders and media pundits all went their rounds tag-teaming the harbingers. But before the misandry bubble was clubbed and skinned and worn as a pink hat marching on the mall, it saw its long shadow. Sorry, six more eons of dark sexual winter.
Not long after, the Science of Modern Mating was settled. Teams "lean-in" and "man up" were right and the bad news bears of misogynists and incels were wrong. Get over it.
Why are there "teams" you might ask? Don't we all benefit from understanding the truth? LOL.
The truth about female sexual nature and selection - and the myriad overt and covert prongs of the long war on reality, skewering, among many other things, what was left of masculinity, courtship, and family formation, were sent back underground where they would be fertilized with metric tons of bullshit and new shoots of female empowerment would hatch every spring proving progress to be right time and again.
A return to anything resembling Patriarchy is antithetical to progress.
Ten thousand years of controlling for female sexual selection and providing for pro-social incentives to steward boys into productive men were all wrong because hate has no home here.
Long before SSREyes, when noticing was in full swing, there was the "thousand c*ck stare".
There were all matters alarms going off indicating that the kids were most certainly not okay. Just some growing pains. Nothing to see here. Its natural to suffer some setbacks when central planning the entire social order of the human race.
Meanwhile, whatever holdouts remained aged out or got off on various gatekeeper offramps or chained themselves to grifter trees like so many desperate and lonely environmentalists pooping off their elevated platforms to the sound of chainsaws.
Soon enough the younger generation had the false dilemma injected into every aspect of their lives: enter the zero-sum, adversarial, pareto meatgrinder or opt out entirely. "Get dark triad or go home".
Fast forward and it is still illegal to tell young women "no" - or to cultivate masculinity that has not been sanitized, re-programmed, and officially sanctioned by the ivory gynocracy tower of the State.
And still the biggest problem we face, aside from all these women mysteriously failing to stick the landing in the ice cream sundae of traditional life, with the cherry-picked benefits of patriarchy atop, is that the rudder-swimmers and "MMA" fighters are stealing all the strong girls trophies.
And because no internet comment is worth a salt if it does not mention notsees or boomers, one of my biggest personal beefs - aside from having lived through this sexual dystopia, is that my latchkey GenX friends who are high on their horse about "the boomers" being so materialistic and narcissistic, have ushered in an era in which their own children are the most commodified, dehumanized, disenfranchised, financialized and damaged - aside from perhaps the generation of those running over the trenches into machine gun fire while the girls back home handed out white feathers of shame.
They regularly sit across the table from their own kids, all on their phones. Saying nothing. Always on their phones. They think they are winning because their kids love hanging out [with them] at home and that they are in "good schools" and on the status trajectory.
They don't want their kids to settle down too early. They need to go to "college". Get a career first. Get a house first. See the world. etc.
The genx parents have internalized all of the lies of the sexual dystopia that I saw manifest through revealed preference, and own-goals of the diametric stated objectives impaled on actual personal choices of all those women who supposedly wanted to get married [some day] and have children [not any time soon].
If marriage and family is the priority, it is reflected in all that we do. Which is what the old social order was constructed to do: propagate a people and her way of life.
But marriage and family is not a priority. It may be a want. Or an ideal. But it is not a priority and in this truth the parents are complicit. The marketplace of diffusing responsibility is flush. There is a collective shrug. What can we do? A grand mystery afoot.
Excellent comment.
There's a lot of pissed off wrapped up here, and rightly so. One or two, or twenty things to rethink if we have a hope of recovering sanity.
The solution will start at birth, or marriage; though it's never too late.
If this comment isn't "AI"-generated, it's on to something.
Ain't no mystery to it.
Raise your kids right, or someone else will do it for you and they might not care about what you thinkfeel is right.
Ask "society" to do it for you and this is what the free capitalistic market delivers.
Congrats on 10K, John Banger. The Billie Eilish sanpaku eyes are haunting because they are reminders that subversive SSRIs, birth control, weed, alcohol and constant selfies/scrolling all kill the soul through chemical warfare. A digital purdah combined with substance detox and healthy IRL relationships with men that lead to marriage/babies would go a long way towards healing the culture. Everything else is downstream.
Happy Valentine's Day, my fellow Barsoom consoomers ;)
Honestly I think a lot of these girls would be a lot happier if they put down the Insta and SSRIs and just took up alcoholism. IRL partying is better for the young than staring at the black mirror.
Objection! Women alcoholics mostly drink alone, men alcoholics mostly drink in company.
Male loner alcoholic checking in...
<3
Yes - this whole mess is of course also tied up with the rise of safety culture and loss of freedom for young people. Enforcement of higher drinking ages, smoking bans in bars, and loss of autonomy.
Jell-O shots FTW
Great comment, Yuri
The entire internet should just become 4Chan where nobody shows their faces
4Chan is unironically the sanest place on the internet.
Become? You mean it was already. Those were the times I loved. Since normies arrived internet is ruined.
This would hit a lot harder if you didn't show your face on you avatar. xD kekeke
Lol I realised that as soon as I said it
I guess I'm one of those "alt-right" females "hiding" behind a flower. And I will use my anonymity to say what I don't see anyone else saying:
This is all just voluntary eugenics. Get over it.
Well, sure. Only 45% of women failing to have kids is a hell of a genetic bottleneck.
Umm. that is a tall order. everything blocking healthy internal developement, is a long, long list.....from education as it now exists to religion to entertainment.....to fashion, to medicine......?
Can you expand on that please Anna? My daughter is 8, so this whole subject is important to me.
Many people are blaming smartphones for the hysterical behaviour we're seeing in Zoomer girls these days (and I'm using the term "hysterically" very intentionally). I think smartphones and the whole digital dystopia are aggravating the situation we're in, but I see a deeper root that goes back at least a couple of generations.
I'm a GenXer, but unlike most of my generational peers, I was brought up by very traditional parents. (They weren't politically conservative, but they were "socially" conservative.) I saw this as a huge burden growing up because my parents were much more strict than other parents. But now, I am incredibly grateful for how I was raised.
Here are three key differences I noticed between how things worked in my family and those of my friends:
1. Corporal punishment. No one wants to hear this, but spanking kids worked for millenia; now, all of a sudden, we're all too good for that. The reality is that an occasional swat on the butt (a naturally flabby, well protected part of the anatomy) stings for a few moments, but it gets the message across. Too many modern-day parents would rather put their kids on prescription drugs for "ADHD" than discipline their kids with a spanking. Amazing when you compare the potential long-term brain damage of a drug (on a young, developing brain, no less) to the temporary burn of a spanking.
2. Chores. I was expected to help out around the house - and I wasn't given an "allowance" as a reward. I resented this alot as a kid, but I am so grateful now. And I have been amazed to learn how many MORE chores my parents and grandparents did - my dad was shingling roofs at age 9. My grandfather was helping to support the family at the same age when his father was sent to fight in WWI.
3. Get a job! While I was never given an allowance, my mom helped me to get my first jobs: delivering papers from age 8-12, and babysitting from age 12 on. By the time I was 16 I was able to look for work on my own. My parents always told me there was no shame in manual work or "starting out at the bottom." All work was honourable work.
Parenting is always going to be an art, and there is no formula for it. But when I look around at the young people who seem to be struggling the most today, I see people who never got spanked, had no responsibilities growing up, and think they are too good to flip a burger.
I have come to truly know what the term "spoiled" means.
I'll finish by saying that there is absolutely nothing wrong with girls wanting to dress up, wear makeup, and look pretty. It's completely normal, and it keeps the race going! I did all those things, and I enjoyed it too. But then I did something called "growing up," and other things became more important to me. The phenomenon JC is describing in this article is a severe form of arrested development...brought on, IMO, by indulgent parenting.
It ain't easy being a parent in 2024. But you know something? It never was. You're asking the right questions, so I think your daughter is in good hands.
The reason people are pointing to smart phones and social media is that there is a mountain of empirical evidence demonstrating that the collapse in mental health among young women especially correlates quite precisely with the introduction of phones; responds in a dose dependent fashion to social media usage; and resolves with cessation of social media usage. Jonathan Haidt has published quite a bit on the subject, which was why I linked him at the beginning.
I get all that, and I'm not disputing it. But I'm not talking about correlations established through studies - I'm talking about Real Life. And I'm not just talking about hysterical zoomer girls - what I am saying applies to boys and girls who are struggling with all kinds of modern-day plagues, from trans bullshit to drug addiction.
The analogy I would draw is that of growing a garden: plants cannot thrive in lousy soil. Improve the soil (i.e. the parenting) and the plants will do the rest on their own.
Yes. I picture a graph with big inflection point on the sloping line. The trend was already in place, but much more insidious. Then it got a shot of rocket fuel, and now everybody feels it.
(See also frog in a warming pot and someone turned up the heat to high.)
Thank you Anna! I agree with you on every particular. Done correctly, corporal punishment engages the survival mechanism in behavior modification, without causing harm. There’s a reason why my mum always had my dad handle that; he had complete control of his temper. Never strike out of anger, and always for an explicit reason that the child understands.
John, I’m thinking that another way of putting it is that smartphones are a catalyst, that massively enhances feedback on personality traits that are already in place.
Not only smartphones. The Internet in general has that effect.
And yes, that is a good way of putting it.
Matthew, I envy your ability to coin things so concisely. You have a well-disciplined mind.
I try, but I was building from what you and John had shared.
It’s a lot easier to be concise when someone else has done all the prep work!
Yeah, I was just thinking about how JC "prepared the soil" for this conversation with his whole approach to this substack's commenting section.
read with her. read what she is interested in. discuss, the characters motives. ask what she would do instead. internal strength of personal agency is the only thing that can save her from this. It also prevents them from being vulnerable to cults.....let her question everything. even you. if you love her enough to do this, it gives her a fighting chance.
We’ve just finished reading “The Silver Chair” by C.S Lewis. And she loves chapter books enough that she reads them on her own as well. 😌
that is excellent, you still have a few years to prepare her, before the hormone step in. after that.....well. keep the lines of communication open always. even if you don't understand her, she doesn't understand her either...the " i love you too much to argue" method, if you must.
Sometimes I think of that, but then I wonder, what we would be turn into? What else could be lost in the process?
Right. There's no guarantee that the genes which are weeded out by this artificial culture are bad ones. The genes it preserves may be the fittest ones for surviving and reproducing in a digital dystopia, but are they the fittest ones for having families and rebuilding and maintaining civilization? That's not a given.
Exactly.
It won't always be a dystopia. The age we're entering will be sweet, no more illusion. But we're still in its labour phase. Early adopters of www knew in advance vaccines were junk. They go through to the next round for asking the right questions and discerning the right information.
As for girls fitness. Girls must know their worth, it's a moral imperative. In an equalised democracy how to grasp their value? Hierarchy has been demolished. Their ego/mirror says one thing, social media account another, parents/friends another and irl guys yet another. No wonder they're going mad.
Yeah it is.
I want people to have meaning and be truly happy though, even if they don’t understand how to get there themselves. Just because someone chooses to destroy themselves doesn’t release my obligation to try to lead them to the truth.
Are we eliminating the breeding population we meant to eliminate?
Great connection, Anna.
Incredibased
Young women never see themselves as young men see them. The tragedies are manifest; scarring and mutilating themselves to appeal to their inner envies of female others all the while they murder what sets the heart of a man to conquer any and all that stands between them.
Lost is the simple siren-like beauty of an imperfect smile, that delicate breeze of freckles, or that funny little mole just above her lip; the things that flip something inside a man who wanted to see the genuine her.
I tend to wear little or no make-up - not because I'm against it in any way, so much as that I've reached an age where wearing make-up can actually make me look worse (!), and while it's fun to put on, it's a pain to take off.
Perhaps because of my mostly naked face, quite a few men have confided to me how much they prefer women with little or minimal make-up. It's quite surprising - and I think it has to do with what you said: "Young women never see themselves as young men see them."
When you think about it, most make-up techniques have to do with making yourself look younger and/or healthier. (After all, it's largely about mating when you get right down to it, so youth and health are what appeals.) Once I realized this, I decided to skip the hair colour and face paint and just focus on being healthy. I guess I'm lucky - my husband approves.
I married a lovely young lady 38 years ago whose heart and mind I fell in love with - things that no makeup can touch. Loyalty, a sense of purpose and just wanting to be together have marked our journey all along. She never thought of herself as beautiful, which is at least partially indicative of my view on all of this - she doesn't see who I see, and I don't see the person she sees. We each think we got the better deal, ha!
That put a big smile on my face, Michael. Romance lives!
True. This is just like the crazy. If a man isn't crazy in some obvious way, if his sanity is perfect, then it has to be that he's just great at hiding his crazyness. Best not to deal with him because for all you know he likes to serve people sausages he previously shoved up his ass. Much better to deal with people who are obviously crazy (in some mostly mild way) because they at least let it hang out where you can see it. Same thing with female beauty. If she's not obviously imperfect in some way, then there must be something hideous about her that she's just great at hiding. Maybe her heart is High Octane Nightmare Fuel?
Fascinating idea. I think the toughest opposition would come from the people it would probably end up benefitting the most. Just as the drunks panicked the most when prohibition was enacted.
My sister is on Instagram. She knows it's bad. We joke about how it makes her more depressed and anxious. She's read the articles I've sent her. It doesn't seem to make a lot of difference, she's still there.
Almost all of them know it's psychologically toxic. That's why online slut shaming is the only real solution. If the only thing they get for a selfie is abuse, they'll stop with the selfies. Then they'll just use the Internet to gossip, trade recipes, fashion tips, music recommendations, whatever.
And they'll be so much happier.
Many such cases
She is an addict. They all are addicts.
We have to be honest about that part first. There is a growing cottage industry around the elephant that is addiction (see: digital detox), but there is a concerted effort to avoid calling attention to the fact that it is an addiction - and that is by design. Like most products of the techno-progressive hivemind, we want to keep the tingles but not the tears.
And so most people are pursuing the strategy of asking their captors to provide them with features to help them feel less captured. In the same way we abdicate our personal responsibilities to the "government" and then demand the "government" do better.
Anyone who has ever witnessed a smart phone being handed to an infant recognizes the power goes beyond whatever some influencer is shilling.
Thats not even getting into the slumbering correlation of the iPhone launch and babies going spectrum. What happens when a new mom loves her phone more than her crying baby? Ask again in 20 years.
We are a highly addicted people. The convergence of our entire social existence into the incredibly sticky and elastic products and services offered via our pocket moloch is like the alcoholic gambler living on the 24/7/365 vegas strip. In his pocket.
They even design the carpet there so that your eyes won't drift downward from the tables.
Hey buddy, you gotta stop hanging out in bars. But thats where all the people are!
The second order problem is the pluralistic ignorance that has also been inculcated that EVERYONE IS DOING IT.
Everyone lives in Vegas too. If you move, you will have no friends, life etc. If you are not on the socials/apps girls will think you are a loser, weird. etc.
The problem is we tore down Chesterton's fences. We have lost generational knowledge of how to be an actual person - and thus community of people, in real life.
So we now have some very tough personal choices to make that exist between the manufactured isolation, anxiety, depression, and alienation of online life and the sudden frontier that is real life gone fallow.
Friends of mine who are parents: "We gave our 10 y/o daughter a smart phone because we didn't want her to be the only one at school without a phone...to be weird."
Ok. Have you seen these girls lately?
I work with a lot of home-schooled kids. Rural. So my experience is skewed. But it is also juxtaposed against my experience in Babylon. There is no comparison.
Like a lot of things these days the great divide is widening. The sides are being drawn. There will be a lot of people that won't make it out of alt-reality. But we can also reclaim a lot of what has been lost if we are honest about how we got here.
So like any other addiction, sadly, we have to be prepared for that too. There is a point where you can't let it burn the whole village down.
I pray they will find their way out. In the meantime, perhaps starting with some conversations around a detox. It is a health issue. Start with that.
and that is why i do not have a cell phone, it's a trap. I have a landline. worse than tv for your brain. no one addicted is ever really free. each addiction is a master.
Is dignifiAI and the subsequent screeching of the shamed the birthpangs of digital purdah?
yeschad dot jpeg
On behalf of those with young daughters the world over, I thank you for this galaxy brain social prescription!
Imagine how much happier parents would be if they knew there was zero possibility of their daughters posting tit pics because they knew their daughters' peers would ruthlessly slut shame them for posting a selfie.
Or maybe just offer a compelling alternative? Conservatives are horrible at this. Want to convince young women that hook-up culture is damaging? Show them the satisfaction and intimacy available within monogamous marriages. But no, conservatives always lead with some sex negative lay-in-the-dark-missionary-style-in-fear vision that slut shames every women caught up in the random-sex-as-empowerment and the terrified girls stay in their rut.
There was some random girl on the internet talking about how she was in her early 30's and regretted not finding a good man and she was attracted to conservative men and was having difficulty uunderstanding her new perspective, and maybe she had been lied to and she could change and it wasn't too late, and.... And Cat Turd made a viral comment along the lines of "LOL, make me a sandwhich." I'm sure she sees the light now!! Part of why she didn't consider the conservative message before was because she was lied to and told that all conservatives were jerks who just want women to make them sandwhiches and now she's sure that was the truth.
Show, don't tell. Show women how a life of monogomy and embracing the feminine and motherhood is deeply fulfilling. Attack videos and slut shaming won't do it. You don't look happy and fulfilled by attacking all day. (Not saying YOU are doing this John Carter) but conservatives in general are horrible at sharing their message.
Yeah there's a long and counterproductive habit of conservatives driving women away, partly by failing to offer an inspiring vision. That's another question though. What I'm talking about here is rather more metapolitical: social media is driving women in general insane; this has severe downstream consequences for all of us; how do we stop this?
If you want a compelling alternative you couldn’t do better than https://motherucker.substack.com/p/techno-shieldmaiden by @Bridgette. Really, I got chills. What a wonderful article.
But here’s the thing, a lot of us don’t talk about our marriages because our intimate lives are none of the wider world’s business.
I could tell you about my-very-much-not lights-off-missionary-style sex life, but I don’t write porn. And even if I did, I’d just get a bunch of incels and femcels calling me a liar or worse.
We’d very much like it if the libs would stop sharing the details of their relationships, because it’s awful to see. Variety may be the spice of life, but pathetically masturbating into a different stranger every other night does not count as variety. Like congratulations, you’ve sampled every item on the menu at every McDonalds in the country, you’re a real gorumand. Give me a break. Protip: if you want to be really, incredibly good at something, you have to specialize. And specialization in sex means specializing in a partner, not perfecting your “moves”. This is one of those areas where the wisdom of crowds does not apply.
Ok, so beyond the realm of sex and sexuality, the other 99% of a stable, happy, fulfilling relationship, what evidence do you need? I’ve been married for over 20 years. In an environment where either of us could have walked away at any time with basically no consequences, and we’ve both had plenty of invitations to do that (her more than I of course, because that’s how these things work). Who’s more likely to have the goods on how to find and keep someone special, me, or the person with 150 heart-wrenching breakup stories to share?
At some point you just have to shrug and say “do what you like”. This is also what we tell our children when they’re being stubborn and we know they’re not going to like the outcome, but clearly they’re only going to learn that through experience.
Bridgette's manifesto was absolutely fantastic.
I'm not asking people to write details of their sex life, just to do what you just did. Talk about how a happy marriage is fulfilling. I hear a lot of negative from conservatives (slut, blue hair, feminazi) and not a lot of talk about how happy a traditional life can make a person. Very little aspirational. That's all I'm talking about. To be honest when I hear someone like Michael Knowles constantly talk about sluts and slutty women (constantly!) it doesn't lead me to believe he has a happy sex life. Not making a statement of fact here, just talking about perception. If Knowles had a bunch of inspirational messages about how awesome his life is and and how a great sex life is definitely possible in a marriage (wink, wink - no details) it would be a much more compelling message and could actually convert people instead of just virtue signalling to his base.
So yes, stay happy and mind your own business but when it comes to pundits and conservatives a message of how wonderful life is to be on the "other side:" coupled with compassion of how one could fall for the ubiqitous and damaging messaging going out to people would really grow the base. Not "LOL slut, make me a sandwhich" or being suspiciously obsessed with women with promiscuois sex lives.
That's all. :) Oh, and thanks for the link.
I definitely hear you on that. I get tired of hearing the "look at what this random ho on the internet is doing!" stuff too. It's very idiocracy tier, like Jackass but with thots instead of ... well, jackasses.
You asked, and it has been done in the style you'll get from this Uncouth Barbarian. Peace be to you, and victory over your enemies.
https://uncouthbarbarian.substack.com/p/the-making-of-barbarian-queens.
Have you considered that conservatives have been telling it, just that the controlled media and algo’s don’t show it? We live in a divide and conquer empire, ruling us slaves to be malleable to their will. Of -course- they’re not going to show a healthy, family based alternative.
Doing otherwise would lead to stable families, that pursue happiness, which they can’t offer, and either seek it elsewhere or become ungovernable.
I'm not talking about the mainstream., although I agree that it's not being depicted there. I'm talking about the conservative world the alt press. I see a lot of peices dunking on the current state of affairs but not a lot of pieces offering an aspirational and compelling alternative.
Ah, I see. Especially after reading your response to John.
And, I would agree. I think a large part of that is three fold.
1. It's harder to get views and go up in algo's saying something non-controversial.
2. The society wears many men out that they don't know how to do it. They don't know how to make a stable marriage, find a wife, find work that pays, get out of usurious debt, etc. Pointing out problems is easy. Solutions, that are workable, realistic, and point towards the common good and virtue - those are hard. That leads to a lot of ideas being thrown out there to see what would work, unless someone happens to have a lot of wisdom and experience.
3. Happily married men have less time to write. I have 5 children, 6 on the way, and write pieces specifically tailored in a certain style. They're short, to the point, with a mix of dialectic and rhetoric. I can do it in 30-60 minutes when everyone's asleep, but as a business owner it wears on you or can happen sporadically. I know my stack isn't for everyone, nor is it meant to be. It's meant for people that are searching and want something to ponder during their work day, or a quick share with a friend to start a conversation. Married men, writing essays about married life, is much more difficult.
And, because it would come from a male perspective, likely wouldn't hit on the emotional and spiritual highs/lows that women would want to hear on a regular basis. I, as a man, can offer one woman a dream and a life. I can describe that life to others. But it's our dream, it's hard, full of suffering, joys, tears, and wonder.... And would not appeal to everyone
"Most women want attention, but they also want the plausible deniability of being able to pretend they aren’t trying to get attention."
Reminds me of those gym-trap videos. The virtue-signaling cam whore works out in her skivvies, then "confronts" the guy who takes the bait and checks out the goods. One of the more exotic sociogenic diseases on the market.
Women have been doing this since forever. "Excuse me, my eyes are up here!" Hmm yes I know but you're wearing a tube top with a pushup bra and your bust is surrounded by rhinestone arrows pointing at your cleavage.
Yes, but now they can broadcast it to the multiverse!
how about there be a place for them to get some public attention is a positive way? on a couple of holidays a year? so life is not just a long series of drudgeries? It has been done before and worked well. Personally, i did not want to be a princess, But, that Is what the wedding day phenomena is. your one day to be a princess. I am just saying...every 6 months or so....they NEED a princess long weekend. I became a singer (rock/jazz) because i needed , i admit it, i needed to prove to the world how devastatingly awesome i was. Was i insecure? yes. women are cut throat measuring themselves against each other. as powerful a drive as the nesting instinct, and you , nor anyone else will be turning it off.
I think I agree, as long as it's offline. I think maybe that’s John's ultimate point as well. The cutthroat competition for attention among women isn't the problem. It's the online virtual arena that poisons it, because it poisons basically everything by artificially removing boundaries.
That's really exactly what I'm getting at, yes. That girls compete for the attention of boys is not a bad thing: it's natural, healthy, and right, so far as it goes.
It's the Internet that makes it pathological. That is not our natural environment; our evolved instincts go off the rails there; therefore we must adapt new customs to use it properly.
And for God's sake, we need to get back into our bodies.
dance. best way to do it. get back to the body. an act of joy in motion.
Absolutely.
To really be effective, it is far better in person. and it tempers the competition. this online place.....does not involve enough of the senses to be really intoxicating as real life. i think of it as performance art. sight smell, sound, texture, and the magic of heart....
100%
I wonder if it might be as simple as doing three things:
1) Get out and meet real people in real places
2) I've heard that church is a great place to meet the opposite sex
3) Go on dates and mingle with people.
Shutting down apps such as tiktok, snapchat, etc. Might be a start.
Sure, but.
1) Collective action problem. People need to be out there (and not staring at their phones).
2) I've heard this too but have not actually seen it in practice.
3) Sure but see 1)
> 2) I've heard this too but have not actually seen it in practice.
I'm a still-reasonably-young man that has been a churchgoer for almost 20 years now and I never saw this work. The Mass is actually pretty streamlined and the only way you can actually talk to people is to stay and mingle with people after the Mass. Most parishes don't have that practice. Otherwise, you're left with finding an extracurricular church activity which actually circles back into ordinary practice of "get hobbies to meet girls" which I've also never seen work. It's also terribly expensive, to "get a hobby" you need to spend at least a year and it'll net you a selection of 5-10 girls of which all or almost all are going to be already taken. ASSUMING they're girls and not old women - which they will be in a church.
Exactly. Every time I've attended a church for something other than a funeral or a wedding, it's been largely old women. And no one talks to one another after the service.
"Just go to church" is a meme. I can't think of a single couple I know that met at church.
Actually correction: my mother and father met at a "hobby". They were both sport pilots. My mom was flying gliders and my dad was flying tug airplanes.
Rad.
This is the way.
You all are probably aware of "The Distributist" here as Dave Greene, basket weaving get togethers for dissident right peeps? If not you should be, they have a Discord t organize them in all states and Cananda. I joined up but alas I am in a wilderness area and hundreds of miles from the nearest meetups, but if you are in a more densely populated area it's probably an excellent way to meet some dissident folks IRL.
https://twitter.com/GreeneMan6/status/1753244094908801106
Every woman in the country should read this. I have seen no finer explanation about what is happening, and the destruction it has wrought, than this. Kudos to the author.
Perhaps we should start with something easier - like forbidding women from gossiping.
Sounds like a job for King Cnut.
Why Canute?
Because keeping the tide from coming in would be easier.
Uh, good luck. :-)
Joke. It was a joke
Very insightful. I’d go even further and say that phone cameras and the unlimited capacity to take and store and post digital photos has maybe not been a good thing for society overall. So much time and energy wasted posting pictures of your food for example.
It's pretty absurd isn't it.
Long before the meme war there was a meme (staged photo) of a young man and young woman having a picnic together in a pretty setting. She was holding her phone up taking a selfie and he had a camera and was taking a picture of nature.
It was meant to be an illustration of the innate difference between how men and woman literally see the world, see themselves in the world. The kind of beautiful truths about the complimentary nature of men and women that have been totally banished.
In some of my international travel around the time of the smartphone explosion, I could already see this dynamic happening IRL.
Couples on honeymoons or backpacking adventures or weekend getaways spending an inordinate amount of their time staging, shooting, reshooting, checking, reshooting etc the various selfies that would be evidence of a well lived life - or whatever social media currency was in play in the moment.
A spectacular sunset was not some awe-inspiring moment to be shared with the one person in the world you love most but rather to be anxiously captured, filtered, curated, and collected such that it could be "posted".
Women were fussing with their phones and leading their males around to get the best angle or light or backdrop while the males dutifully played along. Meanwhile life was right there in front of them. Life was not being lived but documented. For some, like the couple in Kauai who stepped off the edge of a cliff for a better angle - ended.
Ask any wedding photographer if they "enjoyed the wedding".
The body language of the people in their manic states of optimizing and converting real life into digital feelz was the for me witnessing the birth of the NPC.
It was sad and unnerving. I could already see the light going out in their eyes and some server farm in flyover smiling as the global reserve currency of self-expression became self-unaware.
And this was before the secondary trading markets of the hashtag really got going. Or the selfie-stick. Which was likely a man trying to solve part of this problem. Somewhere I have a photo I took of hundreds of people at some vista of significance holding all their sticks in the air like toasting iphones over the big campfire in the sky. Surreal.
"Life was not being lived but documented."
Had this realization when I was trying to get a good shot of a band with my cameraphone, around 2008 or so. For several minutes I'd been filtering reality through the low-rez screen of the device, in order to - what? What was I really doing there? When I could be experiencing reality in high-rez, with all of my senses?
Ever since then I've been careful about not getting trapped like that.
Yes. I've done the same. It is absolutely a trap.
Any public event or gathering or random event in the street these days hatches Narcissus' fireflies.
These behaviors are now "normal" but to a time traveler like me they are unnerving. Foreboding. And indicative of something much deeper and darker in play.
A whole world of beauty and fellowship to enjoy, but instead everyone is busily trying to capture their own light in a jar.
Beautifully said.
Phone cameras can be used for other things, I use them for artsy black and white nature photos, but of course they mainly aren't. I would be perfectly willing to give up my phone camera and go back to an old school DSLR, if it ended Only Fans slut "culture." The front camera is certainly only useful for mastabatory narcisistic bullshit.
Oh is that what that hole on the front is for? I thought it just marked out where you put the electrical tape.
Oh is that what a front hole is for? I always wondered...
LOL.