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No one expects young men to do anything and they are responding by doing nothing

robkhenderson.substack.com

521–530 of 1001 posts

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they are responding by doing nothing

#521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that really an issue? If you are a stable personality finding a mate isn't that much of an issue. Especially today with high mobility and dating apps if you put your back to it you can find a partner.

>> If you are a stable personality finding a mate isn't that much of an issue. So those without mates are possibly not stable? Good luck finding a date if you work in an predominantly male area such as a northern mining town or military base. Good luck funding a mate if you are stuck in a bad job/career. Good luck funding a mate if you are stuck taking care of disabled/elderly family members. A stable personality gua…

> So those without mates are possibly not stable?

Of course not. You can be stable and not be interested for a mate. Or as you pointed out, there can be huge friction between a person and their mate because of a job or circumstances.

But aren't those cases a minority, a exception to the rule? Even people in the military or working in extreme areas don't do that most of their lives. And this isn't something new really, frontiersmen and sailors faced same issues in the 20th and 19th centuries (and since forever really).

I was thinking about a people who are stable and also have a chance and will to find a mate.

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they are responding by doing nothing

#522
Male culture in the West is certainly undergoing dissolution, but the moral of the story is not to go backwards; there were plenty of evils in that culture to want to aspire back to the patriarchical order. Instead, we need to find a new path forward to instill seriousness of purpose and will back into male culture who's drives for competition and sex are 90% satisfied by video games and porhub.

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they are responding by doing nothing

#523
post #463
post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This! Most of the flaming identity cultural wars are basically a distraction. The problem as always is class, and elites vieing for control. Yes progressive values are a thing, but its media representation is nuts, on purpose. The it's us vs them narrative leads to subjucating all values to pure "survival". This promotes long term irrationality. The powers at be know this and capitalize it. On both "sides". In my bia…

Why do you think it's more common with conservatives? You said it yourself, cultural wars are just distraction to keep the elite in power and talk about everything except classes. People in power don't care about conservatives or liberals, they just pick a team and play the game.

Because their base consists of people who:

- are severely uneducated. Consider distribution of political alignments in Academia. Consider the fact that antivaxxers and conspiracy theorists are in their overwhelming majority politically conservative and authoritarian. Belief in conspiracy theories is highly correlated with an impoverished interpersonal functioning, such as interpersonal paranoia, narcissism, disagreeableness, insecure attachment and Machiavellianism [1]. Impoverished interpersonal skills signify lack of empathy, which fuels dehumanization, and enables exploitation of others.

- grew up hammered by propaganda and the red scare, where anything that resembles social welfare is considered communism even if they themselves are dependent on such systems. Accepting that one needs help is exceptionally difficult for a person high on narcissism and paranoia.

Furthermore, when threatened, the brain takes "conservative" stances, i.e. stances that preserve the status quo. When faced with an ever changing world that does not resemble anything that they were accustomed to, they cling on to the closest sense of status quo even if the person or structure that supports it only does so for optics.

The lack of education makes it difficult for them to see that they are played like pawns by the bourgeoisie, that they receive preferential treatment through systemic issues [2], and finally they misattribute the reasons for their successes due to their obliviousness [3].

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6282974/

[2] https://libcom.org/library/advance-class-struggle-abolish-wh...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attribution_(psychology)

Kind reminder that I stated facts, so please argue, as adults :) .

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they are responding by doing nothing

#524
post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you define the difference (Serious question)?

My sense of the distinction: luck is rare. Not everyone can be lucky, by definition. Fortune doesn't have the property. For example, one could say that everyone who grows up in a liberal democracy is fortunate. Something which requires luck to achieve is by definition unachievable by most. Something which requires good fortune could, in a better world, be had by all.

>Not everyone can be lucky, by definition.

That's true only for people who play the same game, the same time. But life is a series of countless games, so both the law of probabilities and observation of people around make me think that nobody can be unlucky forever.

Having luck and taking advantage of that luck are different things.

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they are responding by doing nothing

#525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

> Simple, don't have 4 children. Okay, but some people do, so what then? Fuck them and their 4 kids who did nothing wrong but be born?

We need to seriously stop treating having kids as some kind of accident that just happens. It's extremely simple to not have children. American society is free, which means you are free to fail and fuck things up. If someone has 4 children the only person to blame is the parents. If you can't control yourself, get yourself sterilized. We don't need more of your insane lineage that can't prevent themselves from having 4 children on this planet.

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they are responding by doing nothing

#526

A counter is that other countries (Japan, Korea, Italy, ...) that enforce traditional values have had a collapse in the birth rate. Having children out of wedlock is a safety valve for broken institutions that keeps the birth rate higher in the US than comparable countries; that plus relatively open integration helps us maintain our economy, welfare state, pensions, etc. If we turned the screws on women and men to di…

Somewhat ironically, the US birth rate is propped up by Hispanic immigrants that do have traditional Family Values

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db318.htm

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they are responding by doing nothing

#527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the left thinks of privilege solely as racial or gender privilege. Here's an article on "everydayfeminism.com" about the broad view progressives take on it: https://everydayfeminism.com/2014/05/income-vs-wealth/

> I don't think the left thinks of privilege solely as racial or gender privilege. The left doesn't thing of privilege as even primarily racial or gender privilege. (The people that do are centrists; the actual left centers class privilege, though there are leftists who see race/gender issues as important secondary/connected issues to class issues.)

Just an FYI, you and the person that's responding to you are talking about the same people but use two different words for them. A real leftist ideological group doesn't exist in the US; progressives are not that for certain. To the right, however, a leftist is a US progressive.

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they are responding by doing nothing

#528
post #3

This is an important read, especially this part. > This highly educated and affluent person prioritized stability for her own children. But refused to publicly endorse this value so that less fortunate children could also benefit from family stability. I’m from a rigidly socially conservative immigrant family that professes fashionably liberal values in public—imposing a double standard between “us” and “Americans.”…

I think the post fails to make the case that male behavior (or the culture that induces male behavior) is the root cause of divorce rates. - The rise in imprisonment is basically entirely a result of the War on Drugs, aka carceral slavery. - The problems with employment are that unions have disappeared, jobs are hyperexploitative (a better measure than the unemployment rate here is the Social Security Disability rate…

>Many of us have lost a sense of community and place we once had. I don't know what about our culture has done this, but it's bad.

Every community is a social organism fighting uphill on an energetic gradient. Therefore in order to survive a community always has to have a boundary. If you cannot delineate "These people are Us and those people are Not Us" then you cannot store energy in social bonds. People watch their cultural and societal investments get cracked open and poured out for the benefit of outsiders. Then they stop investing and turn to rationalized materialist systems that are more reliable. And then you do not have a community.

Here's an effective strategy if you're part of a materialist system: at every turn, make a moral argument for why the investments inside a target community are actually evil and must be cracked open. Mount a massive and continuous campaign to redefine the core concept of community (loyal in-group preferentialism) as an exploitive world-historic injustice. Then coordinate this as a basis for reward and punishment at scale. Now you can watch people trip over themselves to leave their community and seek material protection inside your system.

Rinse and repeat et voila, you've perfected technological metabolism of human culture. Bye bye, sense of community!

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they are responding by doing nothing

#529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still better to instill expectations even if opportunity currently does not exist. If it arises one day that person will do better.

Until then they'll be crushed and/or feel lied to.

I'm talking from experience, my drive to succeed helped me to take an opportunity when it came. Otherwise I'd probably be selling weed on the corner.

Or you think its better to evade temporary failure by embracing permanent failure?

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they are responding by doing nothing

#530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a tight-knit family is the foundation of all other social structures. But you're missing an important part there: the "tight-knit" part doesn't just mean "stays together no matter what". It means "genuinely care about each other and work well together." Yes, a close, loving, supportive family is hugely important, for everyone in it. But a) the nuclear family you're almost certainly thinking about (a married couple…

> Yes, a close, loving, supportive family is hugely important, for everyone in it. Telling people that it doesn't matter if they divorce and that they should put their own short-term happiness first and foremost is tantamount to denying this. And when it's the liberal upper class doing this, they're pretty much pulling up the ladder to effective social cohesion behind themselves, even as they hypocritically enjoy its…

This seems to be rooted in the notion that the liberal upper class benefits by having cohesive families while at the same time saying that divorce doesn’t matter and, in fact, celebrating it. I can’t help but ask you to support that, because it seems like a bizarre claim to me. The only type of person that comes to mind for me when thinking of people that celebrate divorce are people that have been divorced.
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