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.
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...