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Pornography and the Butterfly Effect

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171–180 of 222 posts

Re: Pornography and the Butterfly Effect

#171
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Enforced monogamy, i.e., marriage

That would just be monogamy. The thing people are calling stupid is the idea that low status men should be assigned wives forcefully to prevent them from being sad, which is what some people have actually proposed.

That’s not the only way that monogamy can be enforced. For example, in many countries, sex outside of marriage is illegal with severe penalties, and divorce and adultery are either illegal or lead to social ostracism. These countries don’t assign anyone a spouse but they have very high rates of early marriage and low rates of divorce (even in abusive marriages) because of you want to have sex, which most people do, you need to get married.

Re: Pornography and the Butterfly Effect

#172

"Did you know that erectile dysfunction rates have risen tenfold among young men since the rise of free porn? Correlation does not prove causality but it’s hard to imagine that those two things aren’t somehow related." I'm extremely skeptical that it's caused by porn. More men are on Propecia than in the past. Probably more anti-depressants, too. And it seems to me that people have really ratcheted up the anxiety in…

Why are you more skeptical of porn as a cause than anxiety? One is directly related to sex and one isn’t.

Re: Pornography and the Butterfly Effect

#173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Peterson seems to have a knack for not explaining himself well and expecting people to just understand where he's coming from. He's also really bad at phrasing. He constantly seems to get into hot water for what he says, and then if you try to figure out what he says he actually said it's never for what we're told he says. I think he'd do much better if he wrote more books and had a really good editor .

This is the hallmark of cult (or any organized religion's) literature. Also how therapists operate. Be vague, and let your customers project the meanings onto your words that they most want to hear. If you actually gave people answers, their quest for meaning would be complete and they wont come back next week. You lose engagement.

How do you manage to put the blame on the person cited out of context instead of on the journalists, whose job it actually was to verify such things?

I don’t know the exact context for the original statement, but the linked explanation video[1], which is only three minutes long, is very straightforward and exhaustive, and not at all vague as you claim.

Mostly it just irks me, as I have seen many people I respect given this treatment, but it has always been by the intellectually dishonest, including in fact in cult literature, with which I unfortunately have some personal experience.

The fact that this is now the new norm in mainstream press is very concerning.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yn60-8Ql_44

Re: Pornography and the Butterfly Effect

#174
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps it’s not the best example. Replace it with something more specific if you wish, like “placing live fragmentation grenades in one’s mouth in moderation”.

Eh, live grenades are dangerous because their dosage is discrete. There's a qualitative difference. And if you argue that any amount of porn is harmful, well, that's a really strong claim and requires better arguments than silly analogues.

That’s not my argument at all, and never has been. I’ve been abundantly clear on this.

Re: Pornography and the Butterfly Effect

#175
post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree that the message sounds a bit like that, I think he is right about that point. For me an eye opener was Tinder. Where I live it seems like half of the women have something like "Don't even try if you are less than 1.80cm" or something like that in their profile. I am actually relatively tall and happy with my sex life, so I don't take the offense personally, yet I can't help but wonder what would happen…

> yet I can't help but wonder what would happen if a guy wrote something like that about weight or boob size, for example? Have you browsed men's profiles on Tinder? You're comparing 50% of the actual data to your imagination here.

Read the next sentence, you get your answer.

Re: Pornography and the Butterfly Effect

#176
post #8

I listened to this series. At the end I was surprised that the author was not blaming 9/11 on porn, because he was blaming pretty much everything on porn.

It’s interesting that you mention 9/11 because one theory I’ve heard is that polygynous societies where there is a surplus of unmarried men breed violent young men (both married and unmarried).

Re: Pornography and the Butterfly Effect

#177
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Peterson seems to have a knack for not explaining himself well and expecting people to just understand where he's coming from. He's also really bad at phrasing. He constantly seems to get into hot water for what he says, and then if you try to figure out what he says he actually said it's never for what we're told he says. I think he'd do much better if he wrote more books and had a really good editor .

He is purposefully obtuse, so that wouldn't help. This way, hard core incels can believe he means the more extreme options, and he has plausible deniability for journalists.

You’re talking about a “dog whistle.”[1] That’s quite an accusation to make without providing any evidence.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog-whistle_politics

Re: Pornography and the Butterfly Effect

#178
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s also been a shift due to online and apps that give women an unlimited choice of men while giving the majority of men nearly no choice — the dating world for most men has become a lot more difficult over the last couple of years. I see my male friends really struggle and I see my female friends have unlimited options.

Women have always had the upper hand in terms of choosing a mate. What's changed now is that their selection pool has gotten a lot larger than just the people they encounter and interact with in person.

It's just perceived selection pool, mostly consisting of guys they despise and use for feeling better about themselves and desirable (they will tell you openly once they are comfortable with you they would prefer those guys not to exist at all), or momentarily top guys that are difficult to reach even for the prettiest/smartest of them, and where there is a literally brutal competition between them.

If you are one of those top guys, you have to invent elaborate schemes how to reject a female so that she thinks it was her decision and leaves you alone ("how much nice/beta do I have to go until I start repulsing her?"), or just state/enforce expectations you have with them, maybe being shocked by mind-blowing admission that they would be willing to share you with other women only if you kept them as well.

The problem of this is that it leaves females that are used to one-time attention from a top guy thinking that's their attractiveness level for the rest of their life and anyone marrying them walks straight into hell of "being never enough". So overall for society enforced monogamy might be way better than what we have now, i.e. most females flocking to top guys and using the rest for money, validation or easy life until their attractiveness fades away and they become broken shelves of persons.

But hey, they front-loaded their life, trading exciting time in their prime for desolation of middle-to-older age. Just please don't force men to support them with taxes once they fall through the bottom. Those men didn't study/work hard to trade their prime years for supporting women that didn't give them time of day when they still were interested in them. That's not fair either; no wonder many of those men go for pathetic sex dolls and VR porn, or just leave society completely.

Re: Pornography and the Butterfly Effect

#179
post #133
post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He is purposefully obtuse. This way, hard core incels can believe he means the more extreme options, medium believers believe he means wherever positions they fall on the spectrum, and he has plausible deniability for journalists.

I don't think so. The problem is you have to be aware of other things he's saying to get at the correct, more charitable, interpretation. Namely, he's calling on people not to blame others or society at large for their problems, but to improve their own life and become a desirable potential mate. That's opposite of what he's accused of.

> Namely, he's calling on people not to blame others or society at large for their problems, but to improve their own life and become a desirable potential mate.

When Peterson calls on males to improve themselves, a substantial portion of his audience hears this as an exhortation to stop bitching and moaning, get off their asses... and then learn seduction techniques, push for political changes that would guarantee them a mate, or other steps that might be considered coercive or antisocial. Regardless of Peterson’s own position, never underestimate the ability of his statements to be interpreted in various fashions due to the seething anger of some of his listeners.

Re: Pornography and the Butterfly Effect

#180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, and it's by far the worst part of the GDPR. It's based on the implicit premise that you don't own your company and can be compelled to provide services to random people by the government at the point of a gun.

It's crazy where the Overton window is that no one gives a shit about privacy issues unless they tie into politics somehow, and government trying to protect citizens' privacy by means of laws with actual teeth (read: fines) is equated to physical violence. Ad tech has taken full carte blanche for long enough. If you actually dig into GDPR you find that it's quite reasonable, far better than the cookie law and other e…

Oh, I care a lot about privacy. Because of that I made many choices to never even start using services like Facebook or carry a cell phone with me. I also run white-list only javascript in browser and host all my own services (web/mail/voice chat/etc). These things have made it harder to stay involved with friends, harder to use the web, but it was my choice and the right one.

The idea that people have to be protected from themselves and their choices is at the heart of GDPR. It prevents people from making the correct choice of not using services you disagree with and keeps those services profiting and ever more centralized.

But digging even deeper, there's this delusion that your usage patterns of someone elses' property are yours and to me it seems crazy. You wouldn't say that physical grocery stores cannot keep track of who enters their premises and what they bought (or how long their phone SSID was in range of $x aisle). Or that they should be fined, and have those fined backed up with government violence, if someone demanded the grocer delete the data.

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