sam0345

Well, duh. Having high status people fall in love with you is an obvious sort of wish fulfillment plot.

Yet in films targeted largely at males, for example James Bond, the sex interest girls are generally low status. High status girls is not a major male wish fulfillment fantasy, whereas in romance, high status guys are as uniform as moaning in porn.. Even when the sex interest girl is a badass action girl with batman like athletic abilities, for example Yuffie the thief, she gets in trouble for stealing stuff, making her low status.

Further I doubt tha... (read more)

Yet strangely, I have never heard of a romance novel in which the heroine has an egalitarian relationship with a nice guy who picks up her socks.

a) I've never seen one that had a similar plot arch to what you describe,

Did it have an immortal vampire instead of a prince, a vampire who kills people by drinking them, instead of by chopping them up with a sword?

If so, I would say that would probably be seen by me, though not necessarily by you, as having a plot arch that was not merely similar, but for all practical purposes identical.

Much as all porns... (read more)

I'm having trouble evaluating your arguments because, as a woman with a fierce need for independence, who is really enjoying life in this day and age, I deeply disagree with your premise that less patriarchy is a Bad Thing.

Yet strangely, I have never heard of a romance novel in which the heroine has an egalitarian relationship with a nice guy who picks up her socks.

Roissy would of course dismiss your self report as a shit test and the rationalization hamster running, but then you would say that your observations are more reliable than my and Roissy's ob... (read more)

as someone had already told you once when people got angry at your defense of Roissy's writing, sometimes the tone does tell us more than the denotation! ... Im absolutely not going to tolerate this.

How then could the same facts be stated in a way that has acceptable "tone"?

How could one state in a tone that meets your approval that the socially conservative family structure that was the ideal endorsed by authority from the New Testament to the Georgian era worked and was good for everyone, and the new progressive emancipated family structure started not working in the Victorian era, and has been working less and less for everyone as it has become more and more progressive?

And that does happen in practice, I think: most everyone who lived in the USSR would agree that its brainwashing of children was benign in that particular area - teaching cooperation and suppressing zero-sum games.

I don't think so.

Compare East Germans with West Germans. Started off the same race and same culture, yet socialism made them subhuman. Germany has all the problems in assimilating East Germans that a conservative would plausibly attribute to an inferior race with inherently inferior genetics, except that in this case the problems are obviousl... (read more)

Just give me a plain answer of some sort: what do you want power structures within a family and in the workplace to look like?

Every long established functional family that I am aware of, where the couple remained married, the grown up children love and respect their parents, and so on and so forth, is quietly and furtively eighteenth century. Dad is the boss. When the kids were kids, Dad was the head of the family. The family was one person, and that person was Dad. Mum picked up the socks.

So, eighteenth century did it right, and it has all been so... (read more)

Do I even need to bring up comparably bad situations created by modern institutions? I mean we even have ones that are perfectly analogous. coughcrushingstudentdebtcough

Quite so. I am fond of pointing out that an eighteen year old girl cannot commit herself to always be sexually available to one man and never to any other, in return for a promise of undying love and guaranteed life long support for her and her children, but can commit herself a gigantic debt that can never be expunged by bankruptcy in return for a credential of uncertain, and frequently... (read more)

The problem is not nine months servitude, but twenty years servitude.

You cannot, or at least should not, ask people to contract to that which they cannot perform. Thus, moment to moment consent to sex, requires in practice moment to moment consent to marriage, which abolishes marriage. Abolishing marriage violates freedom of contract.

Which is not moral progress.

If you are hiring for an important job, family matters, because the apple does not fall far from the tree, and because you can always get more information through family connections that through formal sources.

Hiring people that have family connections is apt to be positive sum, because they cannot get away with bullshit, and because their incentives are more oriented to long term benefits.

I meant, our behaviour being closer to our CEV than Homer's behaviour was to his CEV, if that makes sense.

I don't think that makes sense. Also, I am pretty sure that Xenophon's behavior (massacre and pillage the bad guys and abduct their women) was a lot closer to his moral ideal than our behavior is to Xenophon's moral ideal.

Further, the behavior Xenophon describes others of the ten thousand performing is astonishingly close to his moral ideal, in that astonishing acts of heroism were routine, while the behavior I observe around me exhibits major disc... (read more)

For example, some dudes say that it's self-evident that all men are created equal. Then somebody notices that this doesn't really jive with the whole slavery thing. So at least some of what gets called moral progress is just people learning to live up to their own stated principles.

By this reasoning, abolishing slavery was moral progress, but declaring that all men are equal was moral regress.

If the fallacy is slavery, then moral progress. What if the fallacy is that all men are created equal?

By your measure, hypocritical values dissonance, we morally ... (read more)

I don't think violence has declined. State violence has increased. Further, since we are imprisoning a lot more people, looks like private violence has increased, supposing, as seems likely, most of them are being reasonably imprisoned.

Genghis Khan and the African slave trade cannot remotely match the crimes of communism.

And if it has declined, Xenophon would interpret this as us becoming pussies and cowards. Was Xenophon more violent and cruel than any similarly respectable modern man? Obviously. But he was nonetheless deservedly respectable. We r... (read more)

After 1830 or so there is a PC reluctance to mention certain facts about the Tasmanian aboriginals that people previous to that time found glaringly obvious.

We are fucked. Probably since 1914.

We have been about to be fucked ever since they declared that all men are created equal with inalienable rights, which foreshadowed the collapse of all the institutional barriers that the founding fathers created to protect against democracy.