One common mistake people run into is to assume that because things are bad today that returning to how things used to be would be a solution. As an example, there’s the ongoing backlash against women’s emancipation. It affects women themselves as well, who are also recognizing the downsides. If you look at what really happened when women joined the workforce, you’ll find that our standard of living hasn’t really improved much as a consequence. You now just find yourself stuck both getting four year college degrees and working full time, to buy a house your parents generation would buy on one full time job after high school.
And yet that doesn’t mean returning to how things used to be is any better. Until we discovered birth control and marital rape became illegal, most married women lived out their lives as a kind of de facto entertainment system for men, that grew in numbers because using the entertainment system with your penis produces more of them. Young girls play with dolls, not so much because they have to raise them when they’re adults, but because throughout much of history, young girls would have to raise the other babies that came falling out of the entertainment system.
Margaret Sanger was one such girl, who was enraged at her father, because she felt he was so merciless in using his entertainment system that it grew cold and stopped working after a while. In the 22 years after he married his system, he knocked it up 18 times, which led to 18 births, of which 11 were functional and the other 7 were dead on arrival. You would think that having a dead child fall out of your entertainment system would lead you to reconsider what you are upto, but apparently he didn’t. And so little Margaret embarrassed her father by publicly accusing him at the funeral of murdering her mother.
The situation was sadly made worse, by societal taboos. The entertainment system for men comes designed with hands and two extra holes originally designed for producing noise and manure, but any such use of the system was explicitly prohibited by the user manual. In fact, men had to attend ceremonies every Sunday where they were reminded how to properly use the entertainment system, which had the added advantage of producing a steady supply of more men who had to attend such ceremonies.
I feel like reminding you of Catholic doctrine, which states that all sexual activity must be “open to life”. In other words, using any other hole that doesn’t lead to the system pushing out another child nine months later was prohibited in the user manual. And so you might say that surely the church expected the entertainment system to consent to any such use that risks having another corpse in your hands, or worse, another mouth to feed.
To that I would say, sure, in theory that was the case. But tell me: How many women do you think really consented to having to push out 18 children over 22 years? And yet, this was the norm. Autistic Catholic women on the Internet aspiring to become an entertainment machine themselves may imagine this would be fantastic, but once they genuinely marry they rapidly tend to reconsider as soon as they’re breastfeeding their first child and their dear husband is eager to get active again.
My grandfather never really spoke to his own father. Once his father’s entertainment system broke down and grew cold, he sent all the young kids to an orphanage. I don’t get the impression my grandfather lived a very happy carefree life, this may have very well played a role in it.
What you have to consider is that most of the smart women in the past figured out at some point that signing up to be one mediocre dude or another’s living breathing entertainment system was a bad deal for them, when they could just go to the doctor whenever they suffered another episode of “female hysteria”. Why does women’s porn always consist of stories about falling in love with a doctor? Nobody seems to connect the dots.
And so, the old situation was not very sustainable as soon as we developed industrial agriculture. Whereas previously we had the advantage of most entertainment systems growing hungry, underweight, infertile and perhaps cold once they were used too much, the massive rise in agricultural production meant the human population started to grow enormously.
However, combined with the fact that women smart enough to recognize what a lousy deal they were expected to sign up for refused to marry, we were left with a population that was rapidly growing dumber. You and me, are generally the descendants of those women who did not make the smart choice of refusing to sign up for such a lousy deal. That’s why we’re so stupid.
Take a good look, at the fertility rate in France:
How could it be just around 3 in the late 19th century? In the Netherlands it looked as following:
Demographers have tried to explain this mystery, why fertility rate in France was lover than the rest of Western Europe during the 19th century for a long time, with no clear consensus. My own pet theory is that French doctors had gotten surprisingly good at treating female hysteria. Dutch doctors? Not so much.
And so in today’s society, we have an endless barrage of angry people. People are angry about the porn industry, people are angry about feminism, people are angry about “hookup culture”, about “rape culture”, about “hypergamy” and all sorts of other problems. But I would remind them, that things used to be much worse and importantly: The old situation was unsustainable, as it was causing an exponential expansion in the number of idiots.
The first Neo-Malthusians, like Margaret Sanger, took great effort to explain that it was a terrible situation to be in, where wealthy couples used birth control, smart women settled on not marrying, yet the prole idiots from which Margaret also had the misfortune of being descended kept using their entertainment system until it broke and grew cold.
In an era where the whole world is breaking down through climate change and we are running out of our natural scarce resources, I find it’s worth emphasizing once again how lucky we are that women like Margaret didn’t put up with the miserable situation they were born into. This whole mess we are born into has zero chance of avoiding the iceberg it’s now crashing into, but it would have gone wrong much earlier if we had filled this world to the brim with even more idiots.
And if people had genuinely listened to Aunt Maggie instead of sending her to jail, we might have even avoided the situation we are in today. Margaret was warning about overpopulation and its consequences throughout the 1920’s. Take a look with me at this nightmarish curve:
It really didn’t have to be like this, we could have easily been below two billion people by now, if we had not maintained all sorts of qualms about reducing our fertility. If we had just two billion people alive today, the energy transition would have been much easier: We would have been able to run our industry off hydropower and biofuels. Today with so many people, all the rivers are already dammed and biofuels compete with the need to feed human beings.
It’s sad to me that Catholicism became such a regressive natalist force in the 19th century, as this ultimately clashes with its roots in the early Christian church. Mary had a single child, Jesus had zilch. I’ve seen no evidence suggesting any of the apostles had large families. The monasteries and religious life were also an effective way for people in the Roman empire to escape the misery of the obligations of marriage. Jesus, as an agitator against Judaism’s patriarchal norms ended up having more in common with Aunt Maggie than with the institute he gave birth to.
It’s amazing Clara Schumann found time to practice.
Great essay and I much appreciate all your posts these last few years.
Small point. Do the gospels refer to Jesus’ ‘mother and brothers set out to take charge of him’ and Acts of the Apostles to James the brother of Jesus? I take Xty very seriously, and am one who considers that the evidence indicates that Jesus had brothers. So, the way of the world being what it is, Mary may well have adopted children and/or she may have carried more than one.
“Mary had a single child, Jesus had zilch. I’ve seen no evidence suggesting any of the apostles had large families. ”
Protestants recognize that Mary gave Jesus various brothers and sisters. Although John was the only way trustworthy enough(whom Jesus especially loved) to be given charge of his Mother.
As for the Apostles. Being killed wasn’t very conducive to family formation. Whilst John the lone survivor was locked away at Patmos.
you hold very odd beliefs about about the roles men and women lived in per-industrial societies, as well as the societies of even 40 years ago. Your take on male/female psychology is equally odd, and seems to rely more on class struggle as interpreted by the second wave feminists than current conclusions from modern research. This prior vision of the world has proven to cause a lot of misery as ideologues try to force humans into not being human, “because it is more efficient” and because “utility” Which is inhuman by definition.
The current understanding is that women marry “across and upwards” in status, and men marry for youth and fertility as demonstrated by indicators culturally seen as “beauty”. This reflects the relative effort needed from men and women needed to bring healthy children and ultimately descendants into the world. It is not supposed to be fair. Fair is game of tee-ball for five year olds without keeping score. Fair is not having the best offspring possible.
I do adore your party-line stance on almost everything, though.
I suspect I was trained like you were, but for some reason it never stuck. I think I always wanted to know why and had a nasty suspicions about contradictions, I was always the odd one that way. I was also trained very early to always look at original sources for facts, not third or fourth degree interpretations since the further away from the original sources it is hard to identify errors and intentional misinterpretations
David, now that women can earn their own money they for the very most part go for height and handsomeness. The Kindle stats are pretty clear. The men who earn a lot but are short or homely will end up with women who wear a lot of makeup and have implants. If you are a female who will be going to go to all the effort of reproducing, you do not want a homely kid; physical beauty in both sexes is now the coin of the realm; actual money matters much less.
Intelligence is inherited from the mother, so there is no point in marrying a guy for his brains.
I have an acquaintance who was in her twenties and very beautiful (she is now hugely obese and has shaved her head). She felt an obligation to go out with homely nerds, since she is herself intellectually gifted. I pointed out to her that she could actually date a handsome guy; that there was no law against it. So she did date a terrifically handsome guy, and she was instantly besotten, and got pregnant (by lying to him about contraception), and married him, and divorced him, and she has a physically gorgeous kid. This is the world today.
Oh, Tinder, not Kindle. haha
Generally men look for beauty and youth, women look for status.
This is why men tend to go for the receptionist, or leave a wife (especially if they have not had children) for a younger mistress.
And it really sucks for women with advanced degrees: not only have they spent their greatest fertility years working their asses off to get those degrees and positions, they also have trouble finding a man with greater status, because there is also greater competition from younger women.
And they are told by the feminists in society that they are betraying their abilities of they stop in the middle to have kids while swotting and sweating away for the degrees.
I would also question if intelligence comes strictly from the mom, intelligence is far more complicated than curly hair.
Wow, you didn’t read what I wrote, did you. Times have changed, dude. Men may want the receptionist, but that isn’t what they’re getting unless they are tall and handsome. The bottom line is that in the past, women went for status because their choices were limited because they couldn’t work. Now that they can earn their own money, they can get what they want, and what they want is tall and handsome.
Isn’t there some guy named Peterson who writes the sort of thing you’re saying? It is as if you have copied a script rather than looking around at what is happening. What you are describing is male wishful thinking; there are loads of guys who make some money and they think it makes them desirable. It is a fantasy.
I know women who have advanced degrees and they are marrying guys who are tall and handsome; way better looking than the women themselves in fact. The guys don’t have especially good careers, and in some case no career at all. But the woman’s career carries them economically. Sure, the woman would rather have a tall and handsome guy who also has a good career, but they seem pretty happy overall with what they are getting, and they do have kids. Better than some homely old guy with a wad of money that he’s hoarded.
So,you are out of date. I’m not saying things couldn’t go back to the old way that you are describing, if women suddenly lose all economic power. But you have missed there reality boat here.
Money doesn’t make one sexually attractive necessarily. Its like expecting women to have an unconscious money sensor that calibrates said attraction.
Isn’t proven to exist. As for Men being symmetrical and masculine(And vice versa for women femininity and symmetrical is also correlated at least physically). There is definitely more instinctual attraction there.
Who trained you? You are lucky to have had good training. I went thru the crummy education system like a rule following knucklehead. It didn’t occur to me to think for myself and find out stuff for myself for ages.
An acquaintance once told me that men are genetically selected to be sadists since only a sadist would subject another person to the dangers of childbirth, and that women are genetically selected to be masochists since only a masochist would willingly risk childbirth. The ironic thing is that that person is himself a sadist – I heard credible accounts from others – so perhaps he had a special insight. The dangers of childbirth are now much reduced, so maybe that evolutionary pressure will be reduced.
In the old days women could become pregnant due to actually wanting kids, or themselves having a high sex drive, or having a husband (or whatever) who had a high sex drive. With contraception we mostly get women in the first category having kids. So the women that I know who have had big families in recent years (meaning the last 60 years) have been very happy with them; it really is what they wanted. The selection is for either for stupidity or for irrational optimism or for the capacity to enjoy life enormously and to be able to cope with loss (perhaps due to religious beliefs).
You grossly overstate the number of children women had. By your own charts, the average is 5.3 or thereabouts. Certainly there were nightmarish cases, as in the Sanger family, but I reject that as the rule. You certainly don’t take into account that most women have pretty strong maternal instincts, and actually want at least a couple children, particularly when not browbeaten into subscribing to the current mantras.
Also even with many children many miscarriages(because of genetic issues) and child mortality. Surviving children is barely above replacement.
European Plagues seem more frequent than Asian plagues in terms of capacity to kill:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=od66vzA1L24
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ByvUZVp3epY
Europe kept having waves of plagues every few years. That helped keep their population density far below that of Asia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_plague_pandemic
I’ve got no particular desire to go back to the population doubling every 25 years.
But do not agree with your diagnosis of the problem. Women love being subject to powerful external forces. All that has changed is that corporations became more powerful than men so now women subject themselves to corporations rather than men. Which use them even more ruthlessly, and have much less fun, and the women have much less fun, and at the end of it there is no sassy daughter to sit at the death bed and scream things at the funeral.
Feminism is the ultimate source of nihilism in our society, because the consequence it has in our context is to produce empty, pointless, dead-end lives.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-25/world-monkeypox-cases-fall-despite-americas-spike-supply-crunch
FALSE ALARM!
Guess you were wrong again.
What a surprise.
It’s a little early to say, isn’t it? The question is whether and how much it will mutate to become easier to transmit. That won’t happen instantly. It is now spreading through kid populations in the U.S., and infections in Latin America are going up fast. Now that lots of people in the U.S. have it, it can jump species and develop new attributes. It seems to especially afflict people who are immunocompromised, plus little kids and probably ultimately pregnant women (since pregnant women have altered immune systems). And we have a lot of immunocompromised people now.
I am going to guess that cases will drop in the U.S. for a while but that it will continue to spread and then it will mutate and then we will get a whole lot of it.
Loads of these people with newly weakened immune systems are also going to get fungal infections that they formerly could have fought off. It is already happening:
“Pan-resistant cases of C. auris are unfortunately not unheard of, even in the U.S. But past cases here seemed to be isolated incidents where earlier treatment with an antifungal had goaded the fungus into becoming more resistant. In both outbreaks, though, the CDC investigators found that all of the people who contracted a highly resistant strain had no exposure to these drugs, indicating that it had spread beyond the original (and unknown) source to others. As far as the authors can tell, these are the first known cases of transmission involving these pan-resistant strains, which may have occurred through direct person to person contact or through contact with surfaces contaminated by someone else, such as medical equipment.”
https://gizmodo.com/fully-resistant-superbug-fungus-spreads-between-people-1847349220
Well, it was clear what was happening with Coronavirus in 2020 within little more than a month, so if you’re still undecided after three months of Monkeypox, then you’ll be waiting a long time for doomsday.
I’m almost certain that this issue is going to fizzle out into nothing.
It’s almost as if different viruses behave in different ways.
Monkeypox is not noted to “drift” much, unlike corona viruses. That is why the closely related smallpox and rindepest were relatively easy to eradicate, it did not evade vaccination via mutations.
Unless of course the current monkeypox vaccine is leaky like the covid vaccine, or if it is a novel virus that has been modified in some lab, in which case all bets are off, we might get a new strain every quarter.
It honestly wouldn’t surprise me if monkeypox has been tweaked. All it takes is some Eric Harris type psycho working in a lab. Maybe COVID has set a precedent in the same way Columbine did for school shootings. “You assholes think COVID is bad, I’m going to unleash airborn ebola on you fucking retards!”
You don’t even read, you just skim. I already wrote weeks ago:
>And yet, although you may not recognize superexponential growth, you are seeing its symptoms: In the coming weeks, the “gay STD” suddenly starts infecting children, women and elderly in growing numbers relative to its incubating demographic. It may be that total daily numbers go down globally, I’m pretty convinced they will go down in Europe and the US. Yet that merely means depletion of the incubating demographic, it doesn’t mean retreat of the existential threat.
>Instead, if you want to see what’s really happening, you’ll need to watch the number of cases diagnosed in women. For the past few weeks, the relative increase in the number of women diagnosed has been greater than the relative increase in overall cases. That’s the warning sign that tells you whether Western civilization has sodomized a new pandemic into existence or not.
I literally wrote two weeks ago that I expect numbers to go down in the US and Europe, perhaps even globally, yet you claim I’m wrong?
The point is that it doesn’t matter if cases go down, if evolution continues and recombinations happen. That just means you’re left with increasingly fitter strains, so that eventually under the right conditions cases will start to grow again.
It really is pointless to argue with someone like you. You’re not actually engaging in rational discourse at this point.
When cases go down, that’s proof of your hypothesis, and when casss go up, that’s also proof in your favor!
It’s amazing. You are beyond all error.
But, I have infinite patience, so perhaps you could explain how it makes any kind of logical sense to assert that “the depletion of the incubating demographic”, which in the history of virology has meant the termination of a viral epidemic, now, for the first time ever, signals the ACCELERATION of the plagues and not its end phase.
>But, I have infinite patience, so perhaps you could explain how it makes any kind of logical sense to assert that “the depletion of the incubating demographic”, which in the history of virology has meant the termination of a viral epidemic, now, for the first time ever, signals the ACCELERATION of the plagues and not its end phase.
It means that total daily cases go down in the coming weeks, as most cases are in gay men, but its capacity to spread through other means, into other demographics, steadily grows in the background. This then means that cases eventually begin to grow again, absent a globally coordinated effort to stamp out this disease, as r0 for transmission pathways other than gay sex eventually in certain strains will nudge above 1.
Ok, so, as I said, you’re waiting and hoping (coping?) for Doomsday, evidence be damned. And, to be sure, there is no evidence that the kind of mutation for which you’re praying to Tezcatlipoca to see is coming ever.
98% of Monkeypox cases are in gay men, and that number has not changed meaningfully in weeks. How much longer can you hold out out hope for the mutation from Hell?
This is a reply to Apollonius:
Monkeypox is not presenting as doctors have expected (https://hotair.com/headlines/2022/08/27/this-is-not-the-monkeypox-that-doctors-thought-they-knew-n492657)(I'll let you get past the NYT paywall to get to the actual NYT article). It already has mutated far more than was expected (https://www.newsweek.com/monkeypox-study-virus-mutated-more-expected-transmission-1718522)
You wrote “that number has not changed meaningfully in weeks.” These sorts of things don’t happen in a matter of weeks. Try to picture a particular mutation forming in one person, and then spreading worldwide. How long would that take? Months, even years.
Maybe the number of “cases” is not the best measure. That is because a person can have monkeypox without symptoms and mutate and spread it. Right now we are seeing a lot of cases because the population most affected has a lot of people in it who are immune compromised; they are probably more likely to have visible symptoms. After they have gotten past it, it will spread more among people who are less immunologically compromised and there will be more invisible cases.
You might say, who cares if a lot of immunologically okay people have asymptomatic cases? Well, that means there is more risk of spread to the extra-vulnerable (kids, unborn).
Probably sewage data is a better measure than cases. Or maybe random testing, if there is a blood or saliva test for infection.
This confirms what I just wrote. People are getting mild cases and not bothering to report them:
New monkeypox cases begin to slow in L.A. County, echoing trends elsewhere LA Times. Paragraph 16: “‘Many people have quit reporting their illness because it’s mild,’ [Troy Masters — publisher of the Los Angeles Blade, an LGBTQ newspaper] said. ‘I’m aware of this from numerous friends. They keep an eye on it. If it gets out of control, they then contact their doctor.’”
So, it can spread apace.
Regrettably, having hawked the doctors-hysteria-vibrators thing around the conversational circuit myself for years, it turns out it might just not be true: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/09/victorian-vibrators-orgasms-doctors/569446/