Many things are discussed in this article, but dating isn’t happening, marriages aren’t happening, children aren’t happening because of legislation. No one’s talking about that. Why not talk about it?
At the same time women scream about “equal rights” they can take men to the cleaners with but a few words. Marital rape carries the same penalties as any other kind and in my state at least, just the woman’s say-so is all that’s required for conviction. Without evidence and with zero proof. The PFA is the most common first-strike in any divorce action here, the protection from abuse order, also requires no evidence or corroborating testimony and is automatically granted. A man with zero warning finds his firearms confiscated and himself homeless with no communication or access to his children, until such time as the court gets around to a hearing. By that time he is labeled an abuser, is ready to negotiate for his right to exist. Dating to marriage is no longer a sane option. Only those unaware or unwilling to accept the real probability of these things actually happening to him, will try it. It is an agreement to becoming of lower staus than the average road-squashed toad. The drop in the birth rate is a direct result.
I have no problem talking about the decline in dating and marriage, in fact I think it is important that we should. However, we should do so reasonably and not in a way that plays upon the emotions why being logically inconsistent. You don't solve problems by incoherent griping about them. That is the problem with the leftist DEI/Woke politicos: they want to profit by the problems, and so do their damnedest to make sure they persist. Persistence reqires never finding out the true root causes.
I note that you manage to compress in your final paragraph about all the content of the 33,500+ word essay. Well done!
With regards to birth rates dropping, it is interesting that there are step changes in the rate of decrease, but it has been pretty steadily decreasing since the 90's, after a brief rally from the cliff it fell off in the 70's. I am curious as to what happened in the 90's, too. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/crude-birth-rate?tab=chart&country=~USA
Didn’t mean to “diss” any of the content. I read it all. Your reply to me, however does seem to disregard what I’ve pointed out. There is no need to discuss pornography, digitalization, habits of new generations if there is an entirely unrelated root cause, and I’ve given it to you. Step changes are shown in steps because that’s the way data is presented. Following myriad changes in civil law, the use of it to womens’ advantage has gradually increased, as it was found to work and more women resorted to its use.
But you are right. I’m only “griping” because I have no solutions. Anyone with the testicular fortitude tp propose reversal of it would be demonized and stripped of his career accomplishments. If population decline will end humanity, then we are absolutely doomed.
Sorry Ken, I didn’t mean you were griping, but that BP was. I didn’t mean you in particular; I probably should have used ‘one’ for clarity.
I was being a little cute with the bit about your last paragraph, but I think you have a good point there. I don’t know that many young men are thinking about that when they decide to get married and start a family or not, but it probably varies state to state depending on the laws as you say.
The birth rate thing though is tough. It would be useful to have birth rates per state, though, so you could see if a certain law being passed changes the rate of change. Looking at the nationwide data you can kind of see the effects of the sexual revolution/birth control thing in the 70’s, then.... something in the 90’s... but it isn’t clear if those smaller changes in direction are localized changes or just random blips or what.
I strongly suspect the inglourious basterd generic 'you' was invented presactly to populate many a convo minefield, to make our otherwise uneventful communication so much more fun 🤪
Trust me, young men are thinking about it. It would be foolish to commit their lives to a family under the current state of legalities. I knew one man who couldn’t face the consequences of false accusation and paid with his life. I know another who spent a year in prison.
We are gifted with one life. It shouldn’t be wasted.
Population decline ending humanity is worth it if we preserve these legal advantages for women. Even if we go extinct, we'll all go to heaven and God will confirm that we did the right thing. It's not the continuation of the species that He cares about but preservation of divorce laws favoring women. Sometimes you have to destroy this life to do God's will.
"ready to negotiate for his right to exist.." I liked that one. I am subscriber to Ken, as it turns out, but I rarely go there! I must have liked it at some point but it did not stick? I asked a girl who obviously liked me for a date and she turned me down flat. She said it was not "romance" that she was after. Yeah I know babe but I was trying to find a path. What the hell did she want I do not know. Some fantasy thing?
Excellent critique of the bafflegab. Especially appreciated: "When we want to agree with people, whether because they are like us, are expressing frustrations we share, or otherwise saying that which we want to be true, we have a very strong motivation to take everything that they say in the most beneficial light. We paper over holes in arguments, we assume we know what they mean when they say something nonsensical, we give them a pass on factual errors as "nonessential to the argument" when they say things we know are wrong. At the extreme end, we assume that what they are saying must be really profound and deep, and we just can't quite grasp it all yet."
(I fall into this error more often than I'd like to admit.)
Thanks man. I think that everyone is deeply prone to that error, which is exactly what makes it so dangerous. It worries me a great deal that those that oppose the leftists in America seem unaware that the tactics and techniques work as well in them as those on the left.
Bafflegab is a great word too! I need to remember that!
Hey I liked your essay. I ended up going and reading the entire essay your referenced by Billionaire Psycho. I think that like many new Right figures the author has become a puritan. We have to take our alliances where we can get them. Demanding our version of perfection from everyone we listen to isn't constructive. Good Essay - keep up the writing.
I don’t know about that... I have been kicking around an essay on that notion of allies where you can get them. I often think the biggest mistake the left people (that is those individuals on the left, not the movement) made was adopting the “no enemies to the left” stance. I think it turned out that those to their left turned out to be bigger enemies in the end, as the socialists in the Spanish civil war found out.
In a nutshell an ally that wants to fight your enemy so that he can be the one to enslave you instead is no real ally. So where then is the line? Does it include people who mouth things you want to hear only? I don’t know yet, but I will always hate sloppy thinking :)
True. But purity spirals are a real thing. Not considering someone conservative enough because they don't lift weights, or they are giving marriage advice that hasn't worked out for everyone, seems like a way to end up on a team all by yourself. Using ones perception of oneself as the measuring stick to measure other people by is a bad idea.
I agree that grifters need to go and possibly some wingnuts on the fringe - but Josh Hawley has been a fairly consistent supporter of conservative values. I think America needs people like him.
Oh I am with you there. My purity spiral seeks to avoid irrational people and authoritarians. I don’t have a particular problem with Harley beyond him being a politician (I have seen some clips of him grilling people in the senate that seem pretty good, at least). I do feel disgust towards those who seem to think that a statement is made invalid by arm size. :) The lack of clear thinking capacity is a bad sign, especially when mixed with emotional pressure.
I read some of BP's piece after I read yours. His struck me as flashes of brilliance surrounded by eons of stupidity. Just too meandering and unfocused. Was there a point in there?
He has potential, but could benefit from a few writing classes. I was taught that every unnecessary word loses a reader. I think he lost a boatload.
Yes indeed. I also think that volume of unconnected thoughts tends to be a defense mechanism for bad reasoning. If people can’t recognize all your mistakes they see tons of stuff and a handful of obvious errors and think “well, the rest is probably all right; it feels right at least.” Plus eventually they tune out and start just skimming instead of considering closely.
Maybe you're being sarcastic, don't know. But I meant it for good. I really did see some good things, one or two great things. Please take my criticism in the vein it was meant and keep writing. You'll find your voice. Wishing you all the best.
That's good. No hard feelings then. That's a mark of a good man.
I rotate subscriptions or I'd spend a grand month on Substack. I'll check out more of your stuff and maybe sub for a few months. Take care, and I'll see you at Billionaire Psycho.
My work is free and always will be. You are welcome to subscribe, mostly I write about niche literature technique which only interests about a third of my FrogTwitter audience, sometimes I write about politics.
Everything's cool. Much love bro. I'm always happy to have new readers, every performer wants an audience.
Hey, don't know if you've ever read this, but an excellent book for all aspiring writers is Elements of Style, by William Strunk Jr. He would have a field day with BP's piece and a red pen. 😁
The essay is long and windy. And lacks substance. However it hits the right emotional beats and elicits imagination. And this is what matters in this kind of writing. We are not robots so emotions work on us. And this is substack - place where people write whatever they can to get attention in a best way they can.
It's just an essay(poem/ small book). Not an algorithm to solve issues . You yourself are not objective at judging the piece for what it is. And demanding it to be bigger than what it is. And btw this post of your own is just a critique coattailing of a trendy article. So well...
Much as I enjoy your descriptions of smithing, this is my personal favourite DHA article. You have perfectly articulated my internal critique of certain right-wing misery themes.
I'm old enough to remember when we could differentiate between left and right, broadly, by seeing who attributed their fortune or misfortune to internal or external forces.
What's funny, at this point, is that parts of the new right come across as Woke-with-guns.
This whining about women not forming queues to fuck them is especially undignified.
Thanks for saving me the bother of reading that piece.
Much appreciated! The question of the locus of agency is definitely one that used to be the driver, but I think increasingly Bryan Caplan’s formulation is correct: the left is anti market, and the right is anti-left. The importance of self development and virtue, solving problems yourself instead of expecting people to solve them for you, that seems to be increasingly lacking but considered fine if you just oppose stuff the left pushes.
I think this is one of the most interesting currents that seemed to surface with the pandemic. And it's not just the right adopting a left vibe. Rebel Wisdom pointed out that the conservative moral intuition of 'sanctity', in Haidt's moral foundations theory, was adopted by the left, with masks and health. On the general principle of locus of control, I noticed that my own rightward shift came from facing down adversity during a bad spell, 3 years ago, instead of sinking into self-pity. Seems to me there has never been a better time to reject both the poles I grew up with.
Thanks Mike I always admire someone cultured and sophisticated like yourself, who confidently critiques essays he doesn't bother to read. Truly the mark of a superior intellect. After all, why bother to familiarize yourself with the topic? Research is so passé
I can only stand to read 33000+words if it's a novel - not non-fiction - so I have to base my comment on your precis. The BP essay does sound like an incontinent rant. But it does seem (however inelegantly) to touch on something real that gets almost zero recognition in journalism about sexual mating in the 21st c. West. Evolutionary psychology (David Buss et al) does seem to have shown pretty clearly that, when they have the choice, young women will tend to hanker after the same small pool of successful 'alpha' males. Men will tend to be less picky but still major in (if they can) on the prettiest women.
'That's life' you might say 'no one said life has to be fair'. And that's the way any grown up non-whinger will see things....me included. But what I personally do find irritating is that the vast majority of journalism on 'the mating game' completely ignores this huge INTRA-sexual asymmetry and the pain and disappointment it leaves in its wake. The feminist journos tend to just talk in terms of their stereotypical 'Men' .... 'Men' always cheat on 'Women' etc etc. (Ironically I suspect that feminist journos' stereotype is the successful 'alpha' males who populate their mental universe because they are the only ones they've ever noticed.) The male journo meanwhile doesn't like to talk about the above asymmetries either - presumably because he doesn't want to come across as a loser - wants you to know that he personally of course is a bit of a babe magnet.
In all of this, what I call 'The Less Desired' of both sexes get a pretty poor deal out of sex discourse.
Indeed, I think the dating market (pardon my economist framing) has gotten worse, and as you correctly point out it is not well understood, from the perspective of either men or women. At the same time, applying the methods of discussion and analysis used by the CRT types is only going to make the situation worse, which I think is what BP is doing, albeit probably unintentionally.
Hello Graham. His estimate is off by 16,000 words. Pygmalion and the Anime Girl is 17,000 words long. Which is extremely long, but not the 33,000 word novella he claims.
Very exciting, I look forward to reading it, will restack if I like it. Issac Simpson's Carousel had an excellent guest column about feminism, sex, etc..
could not agree more with you...even though everything said in this absurdingly long essay is true, it reads like a long verbal logorrhea and made me almost feel like I was stuck in an sick mind...We need some clarity and we need all men of our side to focus on those practices that elevate them....
I won't try to defend the genius of the essay, that is too difficult for it is truly magnificent in a way that is difficult to describe. I'll just cover some of what you missed here. First, you mistake his initial discussion of porn as endorsement. It is clearly not. He is simply pointing out that it is more symptom than cause. Not a big deal for you to miss this, but then you go on to complain that he is inconsistent in decrying how porn is problematic, which you interpret as inconsistent. Not inconsistent, you're just operating under an assumption stemming from a conclusion that you jumped to independently.
Is lifting important outside of fitness discussion? Of course it is. It is one of many proxy indicators that we can use to infer character. I mean, DYEL?
The end of cheap energy is open to interpretation, but there are many reasons why this might be the case (I'd say because globohomo demands it) but that is beside the point. Either this is a prior you have or it isn't. If it is, it is a salient point that plays into the mosaic being painted here. The thing about cost of living is most apparent if you think about housing prices anywhere you might want to settle down. If you own a home you won't see this. If housing prices keep going up it will be very hard to find a place to settle down. The whole agenda 2030 thing is in full swing and the trend is worsening. You might be comfortable, but if you don't focus on the numbers for a second and think about your level of education and how marketable your skills are in comparison to, I don't know, >90% of other Americans you should be able to appreciate the point being made there for what it is.
These things tie into my last criticism of your take. You demand for data to support arguments that might sway you to believe stuff that the intended audience takes for granted. There are many other things that leave me with a high degree of confidence about a lot of this stuff. I wouldn't depend on this essay for that, and I wouldn't expect anyone else to. In other words, this essay isn't for you, and you thinking such is the only thing that makes your comparison of it with leftist stuff coherent. A leftist version of this would be expected to be believed without question, because all leftist dogma is to be taken as a priori Truth, and those who disagree are definitionally Evil.
The nuclear family is in terminal decline. Exactly why is obviously multifactorial, but it is plausible if not likely that many of the things BP touches on have contributed to the phenomenon. This essay helps to convey to people who already largely share BPs priors on an emotional level what young men are having to contend with these days. Josh Hawley's advice is F&G, and if you can't understand that, anything you have to say on this matter will be interpreted by the folks dealing with this shit and doing their best in earnest as F&G as well. I lift weights so as not to be F&G, but it isn't enough. I have to also not act like Josh Hawley, which I know understand at a visceral level thanks to BP.
Your comment about politics, culture, and economics mutually reacting is spot on, and I've always kind of thought the Breitbart politics downstream from culture thing is F&G, especially since McConkey pointed out how it is obviously a bidirectional relationship, if not the inverse in some cases.
TL;DR: This article isn't for you. If you're interested in data driven arguments about the state of marriage, community, and cost of living in the U.S. you can make those arguments yourself, because you're an expert at that kind of thing. This article is for people who share priors with BP, not because of some top-down ideological enforcement mechanism as is the case with our opposition, but for our own reasons. Not every article has to be a stand alone hermetically sealed argument, although those are definitely helpful and necessary.
Rather than start a new comment thread, I'll append my response to Grant's, because he said a lot of what I was going to say (but said it better than I would have). To do like all those coworkers you hate who say in work meetings, "Just to piggyback off what [last speaker] said..." 😉
I don't think Billionaire Psycho's (BP) criticism of Hawley for not lifting is meant as an ad hominem attack to invalidate his argument, but rather as an indication of Hawley's hypocrisy. Hawley harangues young men for not doing more to get real women, yet physical fitness being one metric by which young women judge a man's attractiveness, Hawley is not really doing these things either. of course, Hawley has other things going for him (he comes from money, he has political connections, he has parlayed these things into a successful career in politics) which I certainly do not fault him for; however, he betrays a lack of understanding that for young men today, they follow the conventional wisdom yet still strike out in the romance department. Obviously porn escapism is not the answer -- neither are opiates the answer to the lack of career options for rust belt workers whose jobs have been shipped overseas or automated out of existence -- and any kind of escapism fuels a negative downwards cycle, but it's not fair to point to the palliatives that are taken as a consequence of defeat and demoralization as the primary cause of that defeat and demoralization. I know with this, we can get into the weeds, where, yes, no matter where you are, you can always improve your situation, and pursuing an active, rather than passive and escapist, response to one's problems is always a better option; however, issuing blanket condemnations of, and clichéd moralizing to, people in tough situations is also counterproductive. I take BP to be criticizing Hawley for doing that.
From your essay: "Women reject the vast majority of men, and chase fruitlessly after a small handful of conceited, womanizer jerks (such as myself)." [BP quote]
"There are only extremes, all one or the other, nothing in between." [Your response]
No doubt there are opportunities in the middle, especially as people get older, they realize that holding out for the perfect guy (or gal) is not a good strategy, and they adjust their standards towards something more realistic. That said, in modern life the competition is much more difficult than it used to be, in that young men are competing with many more people for a piece of a shrinking pie. This is true economically/career wise for sure, but this also seems to be true in terms of being considered “attractive” as a potential mate. Speaking as a man, if I was alive in 1850, I would have far fewer women available for me to consider as a point of comparison when assessing female attractiveness; now, I’m comparing the woman next door to outliers from around the world – and even from different eras, as I can watch a movie with someone like Claudia Cardinale – she’s old now, but in her day (she was in the first Pink Panther movie in 1965) she was an absolute fox. So if I’m looking at the woman next door, I might consider her “mid” when in an earlier age, she would be one of the prettiest women in the village. And the same would go for guys, when it comes to attracting women. And if you get into a relationship with someone thinks of you as a “mid,” rather than very attractive, that’s going to have an impact on the dynamics of your relationship. I don't know what the answer to this is, but it does add to the problems young people (men and women) would face in forming healthy relationships.
You make a fair point about there being other potential explanations for why more women than men file for divorce and give examples like infidelity, substance abuse, and physical abuse. But 40% (or whatever the rate is) of marriages end in divorce. That's a lot of failed marriages. Are all, or even most, of those failures due to infidelity, drug and alcohol abuse, physical abuse, etc.? I don’t know, but I suspect that the vast majority of marriages fail because both parties are so ill-prepared for it, as we live in a culture where people are encouraged to remain childlike well into adulthood, where people are encouraged to lay claim to rights without bothering with any attendant responsibilities, where people are encouraged to look to others to provide their happiness for them and to blame others for their unhappiness, where the social norms and institutions that used to facilitate successful marriages have all been hallowed out and undermined, etc. As their marriages (and lives in general) fail, people turn to harmful palliatives, like having an affair, getting blackout drunk, lashing out at those around them, etc. In some cases, those tendencies are probably an originating cause for the marriage going bad, but I would bet that in a large number of cases things start going bad first, and then the people involved respond by engaging in these harmful palliatives (which of course would just worsen the underlying problem). I take BP to be pointing out that saying most marriages fail because people engage in these harmful palliatives is a very incomplete explanation, and he is proposing alternatives to that, without denying that in some cases, those explanations are accurate.
What you said about the responses to this essay matching some of the responses to DEI workshops is an important note of caution that did make me stop and reflect. This essay agrees with many of my priors, so I am not as concerned with how well it argues its case. BP’s preaching to the choir, in which I am one of the lead vocalists. And yes, this is similar to what’s going on with DEI-type audiences, but -- and I know this is going to be cliché – but my answer to that is: I am right, and they are wrong. As in, I do not believe that there is much evidence or many good faith arguments that support a belief that, in America in 2023, black or female are disfavored classes, but there is plenty of evidence and many good-faith arguments that support a belief that being white or male is an actively disfavored identity (absent some participation in the Rainbow Pride cult, in which case your identity becomes good again). As for BP's essay, I think there are good faith arguments and solid evidence that support the overarching contention he is making, even if he does not provide those in this essay, and even stipulating that he may be incorrect on a few particulars.
I enjoyed reading your critique and you raise some important points and notes of caution. I also enjoyed BP’s essay and think that he gives voice to a perspective that is almost never presented sympathetically or even fairly in our culture. His overarching point is good: that young men face challenges that – at least in many ways – are simply so different than what their grandfathers faced, that the conventional wisdom of their grandfathers is little help at all, and that young men today are the targets of much lecturing and condemnation that is unfair and even malicious.
1: It is absolutely ad hominem. It would point out hypocrisy if Hawley had said "you need to go to the gym" , or if Hawley had been ripped like Jesus when he got married. I see no evidence of either. BP merely stipulates that masculinity requires apparently a certain arm diameter, says Hawley doesn't have it, and so is not masculine, and therefore... ?
Look at it a different way: I tell BP "No, the first step to the solution is to stop looking at porn and go ask women out." Is the argument now unassailable because my arms are roughly the size of Hawley's thighs and I quench my blades in my own testosterone excretions? If no, was the shortcoming really the hypocrisy?
(On a related note, hypocrisy isn't itself an argument for the falsehood of a statement, anyway. It might be evidence that the speaker doesn't actually believe it himself, like climate change preachers buying ocean front property. On the other hand, if an alcoholic tells me "Look man, you really want to stay away from alcoholism" he might be totally correct, even if he can't pull it off himself.)
2: Only extremes: be fair, I am not inferring that BP thinks there are only extremes from that sentence alone. The quote also contained this one, for starters: "Feast, or famine. There’s no middle ground."
BP's argument is that you are either the alpha male who gets all the women like him, or you get zero. That is not only empirically false, not only incredibly destructive to believe, but also shows a Manichean view of the world as simple enough to cast as extremes outside of human agency, instead of varying levels where people's actions can make a difference in their lives.
That is an excellent point about the comparisons between "prettiest girl in town" and "statistical outlier of all humanity", by the way. I used to refer to that as "Hollywood Ugly" where an actress is sort of meh but would easily be the hottest woman anyone knew personally. I don't care for Angelina Jolie, but she would definitely have all the boys in the yard back home. More on point, I think that effect does impact modern dating, as men expect women to be far lovelier than is reasonable based on the ratio of crazy hot to standard on TickTock or whatever vs the real world, and women do the same. However, some of that is mitigated with age as you say, and more is mitigated by spending time with actual humans who become attractive as much because of personality and attainability as the far characteristics of presentation online. Likewise, porn makes that worse because again, the apparent universe of women is filtered to the unusually sexy (and over sexualized) women who engage in it.
There's a fair number of reasonably attractive young women out there who aren't nuts. You won't meet them on PornHub or whatever, though. Maybe join a church, or a club or something... I am going to expand on these ideas a bit more in the following weeks I hope.
3: Divorce is a tricky one. I don't have the number in front of me (although now that I look Forbes has a handy little reference sheet https://www.forbes.com/advisor/legal/divorce/divorce-statistics/ ) but many marriages end before kids are had. Another big chunk is second and third marriages, which makes sense because, well, sometimes the only constant in your failed relationships is you. :D According to the Forbes sheet, with references I didn't check because they match what I remembered reading before, about 60% of people cite infidelity as what pushes them over the edge to divorce. Now, I expect a LOT of things go wrong before it culminates in infidelity; some people are just dogs like that, but I imagine quite a few are suffering for a while before they go looking to shuck some side corn. (I refuse to give up that phrase, even if I am the last man on Earth using it :D )
Only 24% cite abuse, while 35% cite substance abuse. I am actually surprised the abuse claims aren't higher, as what Ken points out in another comment (that women claim abuse as a tactic) would seem pretty likely. I suppose if it is obviously not the case it gets retracted from the record or something, but whatever, it doesn't come up much; maybe people without kids just don't bother and dissolve the marriage without all the crazy.
It does look like your guess of "both parties unprepared" is a pretty common one too, so well done! :D
More on point though, it is pretty clear BP want to blame women for men not having good relationships. Everything, from rejection in dating to ending what relationships did form a marriage, is pointed out as women's fault. It's a bit much, isn't it? I mean, data on divorces isn't hard to find, so you say "Huh, I wonder if women initiating 70% of divorces really means it is women's fault" and then find out more information to understand it better. Unless, of course, one is trying to tell men who are struggling with relationship problems "Hey, it isn't your fault, it is everyone else's fault. Never change. You are healthy at any weight!"
Oh... hold on, that last bit is from a different type of demagogue.
4: I am right, they are wrong. That's probably true, given what I know about you :) However, it is not enough to be right, but one must endeavor to be right for the right reasons. I know that sounds obnoxiously puritanical, but let me by way of example discuss why that is important:
Say I discover one morning that my hip is really bothering me. Walking around hurts a bit, and it is stiff. I go to the doctor and he asks about my workout routine, and points out I probably just pulled a few tendons; happens to a lot of guys my age. Yea, totally over did it on the leg presses, so I start dialing those back at the gym. Hooray, hip gets better. Over time, however, it never quite gets all the way better, and in fact is getting slightly worse. I cut out the leg presses all together, chicken legs be damned. Eventually, however, the pain is worse. I go get an x-ray and it turns out, whoops, it wasn't strained muscles, but bone on bone arthritis because I don't cartilage anymore. I need total hip replacement surgery, and then boom, all better. (It might be a slightly extended "boom")
So what's the point? The wrong diagnosis of the problem led not only to not solving the problem early, but it actually made it worse (loss of muscle mass). The first doctor was right that the joint had problems, but was wrong about why, and while he was right that rest was needed he was wrong about whether or not it would solve the issue.
Likewise, I think it is quite right to say that young men of all races are struggling these days in a real way that, say, specific races are not struggling; the cases are not 1:1. However, understanding why they are struggling takes more than listening to their complaints and repeating them back to them while saying "never change, it isn't your fault." One must actually understand the problems and recognize what can be changed by fixing society and what must be changed by the individual. Of course the individuals always want to hear "everyone needs to change but you," so there are always those willing to say that.
5: Gell-Mann Amnesia: (I always remember this as a special attack effect from a gel-man, where if it hits you you forget things.) Ignoring whether his arguments are in good faith, is BP's evidence "solid"? You have spotted or noted some particulars where he is incorrect (and I have seen many where it is contradictory). Presumably you noticed the errors in the topics where you are knowledgeable personally, but are you sure the errors he makes are ONLY confined to the topics you are personally knowledgeable about? Are you missing other errors because you simply don't know whether they are right or wrong, but just assuming they are correct?
That's the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect: We watch some bloviating head on the news, and catch him making some egregious error on a topic we know about, despite how confidently he speaks as an expert. Then he talks about another topic, and we assume what he is saying is true, because look how confident he seems, and we don't know any differently. But if he spoke confidently when he was totally wrong, why believe his confidence signals accuracy other times? It is as though we completely forgot he was talking BS earlier.
That's the (dark) power of throwing tons of shit at the audience without bothering to tie them together: no one knows enough to counter every point, and hey, some might even be true, so the over all effect is "Wow, he has tons of evidence for his point! Even if some are not really good, the rest is overwhelming."
Well... no, chances are really good the rest is also crap.
I think the upshot of what you say is good, i.e., that even if the situation in which today's young men find themselves is more difficult (at least in some ways) than prior generations, their most beneficial course of action is to stop looking at porn and just try to talk to women in real life and, yes they will get rejected and that will feel bad, but they can keep going and get better at it and eventually find someone with whom they can have a good relationship. Certainly that is better than continuing to look at porn and avoiding real life because it's difficult and then just getting ever more bitter about everything, which is a recipe for a terrible life. If trying involves some risk of failure, not trying increases the risk of failure to 100%. So on a practical level, I do agree completely with that.
Also, you brought up an important point, that this new reality sucks for everyone, male and female, and women are not solely to blame for it. BP is strongly biased towards the male perspective and dismissive of female concerns (even where the female perspective captures some very legitimate points), but given how society has gone to a pro-feminine extreme ("The Future Is Female!"), I think that his bias is understandable in the context of this essay. But yes, it is important to counter the "Future Is Female" wackos, not with an equally unbalanced "The Future Is Male" movement, but with a movement that says, "The Future Is *Human*, Male AND Female."
And what you said about Gell-Mann Amnesia is important. I know I fell for a lot of shit because even though I could spot areas where the regime/mainstream media/so-called experts were wrong about things I knew something about, I still trusted them (very naively) in areas where I knew I was ignorant. So that's a good reminder to be alert to that.
This is a pretty lazy response on your part Doctor Hammer which shows you didn't read the essay closely.
//
I'll cover the core of my disagreement and repost it elsewhere.
//
I politely engaged with you in the comments section of my Substack on July 26th, we had a friendly back and forth during which I explained the aesthetic design principles of my essay, and how my style was sculpted in imitation of “The Last Psychiatrist”. So I’m surprised to randomly stumble across this Substack viciously castigating myself. At a minimum, you could’ve tagged me to let me respond in a timely fashion.
//
You make some basic, amateurish factual claims which are wrong. That's not a problem by itself, we're all human, we all make mistakes, but the mistakes impair your analysis and corrupt the data you're working with.
//
1.) You claim in two places the essay Pygmalion and the Anime Girl is "33,000+ avalanche of words" and "Down around word 1,444 of a 33,500+ word essay (if you don't count the image inserts)".
//
Sorry, no, the true length is 17,097 words. You're off by 16,000 words. Maybe you're using hyperbole, if I give you the benefit of the doubt. But you can just copy-paste the Substack into a Word document and run an analysis to get the correct number, should take less than a minute.
//
2.) You claim that I'm making up a quote, which is extremely lazy, almost to an unbelievable extent:
//
"(And who the hell claimed "women are catering to the whims of men"? That isn't referenced in the essay anywhere else, attributed to Hawley or anyone... who are you arguing with, BP?)
--
However, women rejecting "the vast majority of men" isn't relevant here, anyway. The graph presented as evidence refers to a particular online dating app, not asking someone out face to face. He seems to intend to show that most people meet online now, and not asking out flesh and blood people. Yet, all the "pass" data comes from Tinder whereas the source of meeting partners is "Met Online," of which Tindr is but a segment1. If he hoped he was providing evidence for his claim that women now reject men at far higher rates, far higher than they ever used to one presumes, he has failed to."
//
In point of fact, the quote I'm referencing is mentioned at the beginning of the Substack, during the 3rd paragraph, when Josh Hawley comments, "Don’t make her cater to your whims."
//
In the future, I recommend searching a document with the "the Ctrl+F keyboard shortcut" to search for a specific word or phrase, so you can easily find whether phrases are included in a large document.
3.)
You also seem to defend Josh Hawley's ignorance of the dating market, asserting "It seems he considers it Hawley's responsibility to know about this data."
//
To which I can only respond, yes. If an adult presumes to give young kids advice about dating, or major life events, it's his responsibility to spend time thinking about actionable, practical solutions which address their existing problems. The alternative is gesture rhetorically, pat yourself on the back, and sabotage the youth by leading them in the wrong direction — which is what he's doing.
//
4.)
You claim in your comments section that I'm engaging in ad hominem attacks, and say, "1: It is absolutely ad hominem. It would point out hypocrisy if Hawley had said "you need to go to the gym" , or if Hawley had been ripped like Jesus when he got married. I see no evidence of either. BP merely stipulates that masculinity requires apparently a certain arm diameter, says Hawley doesn't have it, and so is not masculine, and therefore... ?"
--
and elsewhere, in your comments section:
--
"You know what ad hominem is, or at least I believed you did. I am left either thinking you didn't understand that or were incapable of thinking through it, or you are so eager to defend BP that you bent over backwards trying to justify his bad behavior and compromise yourself in the process.
--
I had expected you to be able to read what was actually written and say "Yea, that was a stupid cheap shot that lessened the work," or something to that effect. That is why I am disappointed."
//
And yes, I'm every bit as vicious and nasty as you claim. I never pretended to be anything other than that. But there's a beautiful irony in you taking the moral high ground, and criticizing ad hominem attacks, asserting that personal insults are dirty cheap shots, while simultaneously you engage in plenty of ad hominem attacks against me — and keep in mind I can do plenty of research into Senator Josh Hawley, he's a public figure, he has years of promotional media available. But you don't know anything about me — my name, age, career, hometown, or marital status. And yet you assert that I'm:
a.) "mentally unhealthy", as mentioned in "A partial examination of a mentally unhealthy essay by "BILLIONAIRE PSYCHO"
b.)"That last line, in particular, along with the opening topic of this excessively long essay, is a strong clue as to the motivating event driving the author: he is angry that Hawley said single men should stop spending time on porn and instead go ask women out. How dare he blame men for being single because they spend their time on porn instead of asking women out (and not on Tindr, I would note.)
--
Apparently Hawley touched a nerve."
c.) "A serious person might say those emotions of the downtrodden were perhaps real, but their diagnosis of problem was apparently way off, and this twit bloviating nonsense wasn't doing them any good... Sure, this particular twit might not know what he is talking about, but the phenomenon is true.
d.) "One can see why he makes this error: better to blame impersonal forces outside one's control for one's ability to find a spouse and thus over-indulge in porn than to consider one's own actions might be contributing. Actions such as "not asking women out but rather spending too much time on porn." It isn't that you don't ask flesh and blood women out on dates, but rather the economy that keeps you from dating."
e.) "BP's argument is that you are either the alpha male who gets all the women like him, or you get zero."
//
Doctor Hammer, you can claim that ad hominem attacks are disrespectful and unacceptable — a failure in logical analysis, the product of weak rhetoric which latches on to personal flaws rather than dealing with substance. Or you can smear me with ad hominem attacks as much as you choose (which I note, you are doing so from a place of total ignorance in regards to my personal situation, as opposed to my focused research into a public figure).
--
Either way, I don't take any criticism personally. We're all strangers pontificating on the Internet, and exploring ideas, which hopefully leads towards some aspirational outcomes.
--
But it's bizarre, and incoherent for you to reject ad hominem insults as an unfair rhetorical tactic, and then to use them yourself. I do take great pleasure in this sort of social comedy.
–
It's also funny self-parody that you claim I'm a porn-addicted loser who can't get a date, and is too much of a coward to approach a beautiful woman in public, but also simultaneously a ruthless "alpha male who gets all the women."
--
You seem to be missing the point... the brutal game-theory of a defect-defect equilibrium causes a bifurcation in the aggregate results, because it's a WINNER-TAKE-ALL SYSTEM. You seem unable to process the concept that even someone who wins in a dysfunctional ecosystem could be deeply troubled by social problems while personally benefiting from social decay.
--
In fairness, you seemed to miss every point I made in this essay, starting with the opening paragraphs, to the dating graphs, to the mythology and media dissection, to the origins of the past century’s power structures. If you find it objectionable that there's a connection between muscles and masculinity, I despair of any prospect of explaining to you how complex macroeconomics interact together over the course of centuries on an industrial scale.
--
Honestly, you indicate a deep cluelessness about athleticism and social behavior among groups when you ask the question, "BP merely stipulates that masculinity requires apparently a certain arm diameter, says Hawley doesn't have it, and so is not masculine, and therefore... ?"
--
Likewise, when you question, "Social media is industrial?"
--
I simply ask myself — How am I supposed to explain how fiber-optic cables and vast, transcontinental electrical networks created social media as an accidental byproduct? How am I supposed to explain semiconductor factories and global supply chains which provide every teenager with a smartphone, a pocket camera broadcasting subtle variants of mental illness? This is a very abstract and technologically complex subject. If you are making basic mistakes in reading an essay, I'm not sure how to verbally condense the mechanized interworkings of industrial technology, and how social media functions in physical terms.
5.) Lazy analysis — it's surprising to me that you write here that you don't understand a Bible verse, and yet you don't bother to do a basic Google search to find the passage. You say, "Then BP claims modern religion tries to glorify women at the expense of men which... what the hell has that to do with the previous points? Oh, the single line about "women being created in the image of God" which isn't apparently perfectly accurate (or is it? the quoted passage from the Bible is unclear). Where the hell is this going?"
--
But I clearly cited the relevant Bible verses, 1st Corinthians 11:7-9
I don't understand why you didn't just read 1st Corinthians 11 to figure out what the passage means.
--
And yes, Senator Josh Hawley is at a large Christian event, making a Biblical argument, referencing a key passage of Scripture. He's referencing Genesis 1:26-28, when God created Adam and Eve "in the image of God". Literally this is the first Chapter of the Bible, it's a foundational text of Western Civilization, everyone who speaks English should be familiar with this passage, and I find it perplexing you are confused by this reference.
--
Later religious teachers criticized and clarified this passage, which speaks to the origins of humanity, and the biological purpose of LIFE itself, which is to be fruitful and multiply. In other words, to have sex and procreate.
--
Quotation:
"Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals,[a] and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”
--
27 So God created mankind in his own image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.
—Genesis 1:26-28
--
I just find it weird that you would stumble across this, not bother to dig into the source materials, then accuse me of ignorance and incoherence.
--
6.) Repeatedly, you contradict yourself. Simultaneously you argue that my Substack is too long, and not long enough. You claim that "Pygmalion and the Anime Girl" is an excessive length, nobody can sit thru a massive essay of this size (I will note here that more than 20,000 readers have viewed it). And at the same time you argue that I lack evidence for my position, that I don't bother presenting sufficient evidence to justify the extensive propositions and assertions presented here.
--
Here you argue my essay is too long:
a.) "I find this sort of work repugnant, even if I agree with many of the general themes. Indeed, perhaps because I agree. If you have time for a two hour podcast and a 33,000+ avalanche of words"
b.) "what the hell has that to do with the previous points? Oh, the single line about "women being created in the image of God" which isn't apparently perfectly accurate (or is it? the quoted passage from the Bible is unclear). Where the hell is this going?
--
Oh... eventually he gets to the point that women tend to reject a lot of men, and apparently there is data detailing how much."
c.) "That last line, in particular, along with the opening topic of this excessively long essay, is a strong clue as to the motivating event driving the author: he is angry that Hawley said single men should stop spending time on porn and instead go ask women out."
--
Here you argue that I didn't bother to show evidence:
--
a.) "The graph presented as evidence refers to a particular online dating app, not asking someone out face to face. He seems to intend to show that most people meet online now, and not asking out flesh and blood people. Yet, all the "pass" data comes from Tinder whereas the source of meeting partners is "Met Online," of which Tindr is but a segment1. If he hoped he was providing evidence for his claim that women now reject men at far higher rates, far higher than they ever used to one presumes, he has failed to."
b.) "The evidence for women being the reason for this disintegration of the family is a statistic that 70% of divorces are initiated by women. Why might that be other than women being at fault?"
c.)"Then of course we get another assertion that is simply wrong. (One suspects that a more focused essay with more thought put into the claims and their truth value might help avoid these problems.)"
d.)"The images of Tweets he chooses to highlight this point are another good example of the loose thinking, the "well emotionally it feels right, so it is probably true" approach."
e.) "I note he doesn’t bother to note what the incomes of those 1990’s middle class people are, either."
f.)"Moreover, we are left with no way to check whether what he is claiming is true. Focus on the emotion, not the reason."
g.) "What is "our culture's sexual dysfunction?" Is that related directly to its economic problems? If so, how? Is it related to women being more picky and nasty now than in some previous era you had in mind?"
h.)"Our poisoned ecosystem is destroying happy relationships? Where the hell did that come from? I thought people couldn't form happy relationships from the get go, but now they existed and are being destroyed by the ecosystem?
--
And what the hell is the rest of that? Do you intend to explain or demonstrate what you mean, perhaps with examples, BP?
--
No. No he does not.
--
Thus dies the hope of a coherent argument emerging from this rant as the author shifts into full on "state everything I perceive as wrong with the world," mode."
i.)"I am going to stop here for a moment, as my brain starts to scream "What the actual fuck am I reading about?" This essay so far (my description is now up to a bit over 18,000 words into the essay after the swarm of fever dream stream of consciousness) is a great example of how semi-coherent mindless bullshit can trick the sympathetic audience member."
//
I note again, you're failing at counting basic arithmetic Doctor Hammer, the Substack doesn't have 18,000 words.
//
j.)"The expected emotional beats are there, and words that are shaped into something resemble dialogue, spoken in an order that appears to be related to the progression of the story as shown by the scenes that seem to follow logically from one to another. But then you step back and think about it for a moment and realize hey, this part doesn't quite make sense, and this doesn't really follow... What those sympathetic hearts do not notice, however, is that they are making it all up; in their desire to give the author the benefit of the doubt, they are doing the author's job for them, and writing a coherent narrative that is not present in the actual work itself. Those dots don’t connect, those reasons are not reasonable, and the meaning isn’t there."
--
Billionaire Psycho's essay, brings out the same behavior."
k.)"So what does BP mean when he says "the end of cheap energy" and blames much of the current economic problems on it? Doesn't matter, just insert whatever you think it means such that it makes his story coherent.
--
Do his claims and statistics hold up in how he combines them? Well... we can assume he really means to say something slightly different.
--
Is this coherent at all? Well, no, not really, but it is directionally true."
--
l.)"When we want to agree with people, whether because they are like us, are expressing frustrations we share, or otherwise saying that which we want to be true, we have a very strong motivation to take everything that they say in the most beneficial light. We paper over holes in arguments, we assume we know what they mean when they say something nonsensical, we give them a pass on factual errors as "nonessential to the argument" when they say things we know are wrong. At the extreme end, we assume that what they are saying must be really profound and deep, and we just can't quite grasp it all yet."
m.)"I agree that there are many problems with our society, and the dating process is worse now than it was, for a number of reasons. This essay/article/poem/small book, whatever it is, does not, however, provide anything valuable, and instead is the intellectual equivalent of junk food. It triggers all the emotional responses, the shape and the feel of reasoning and value while providing none of the actual value of intellectual activity, just as a sugary donut triggers all those fun food feelings without actually providing real sustenance. Whether intentionally or not it preys on those who want to agree with it, pretending to reveal truth but instead just telling you what you want to hear.
--
It is in fact just Woke style propaganda, but for those on the right."
I don't think its ad hominem. Hawley isn't making an argument, he is offering advice. Whether or not this advice is valuable can only really be determined by his credibility. His lack of gains speaks to this and to his character, so it is relevant. Not a reason to disregard what he says entirely, just one of many considerations that can be used to indicate how sound his advice may be.
why? we should take this to slack btw, I'm not getting notifications on comments for some reason, the only reason I saw this is because I left the page up after commenting.
So sure, it is advice. Is it true that the advice being valuable can REALLY only be determined by the credibility of the person giving it? No other way to evaluate that? It's argument from authority or nothing? I doubt you really believe that, and if so, why write it?
Now, it is true that when someone makes a claim that is largely backed up by assumed expertise or authority, like Hawley is doing for the most part as presented, that one should reasonably consider whether they are an authority or otherwise have the expertise. If someone is telling you how to maintain your car, and their car is a piece of shit that is falling apart due to improper maintenance, it is quite reasonable to discount their advice.
So is Hawley giving advice on how to get "gains?" Is that what BP is writing about? No. Hawley's advice is about how to get a girlfriend. Considering he is married with kids, as BP points out, he has at least managed to achieve the end he is giving advice about. Apparently even with skinny arms.
So the credibility and advice angle is wrong. What about character?
Please explain, in detail, just exactly what having skinny arms says about his character that is relevant to the proposition that young men who want to have wives or girlfriends need to spend less time on porn and more time on asking out women.
That is why I am disappointed in you, Grant. You know what ad hominem is, or at least I believed you did. I am left either thinking you didn't understand that or were incapable of thinking through it, or you are so eager to defend BP that you bent over backwards trying to justify his bad behavior and compromise yourself in the process.
I had expected you to be able to read what was actually written and say "Yea, that was a stupid cheap shot that lessened the work," or something to that effect. That is why I am disappointed.
This is a pretty lazy response on your part Doctor Hammer which shows you didn't read the essay closely.
//
I'll cover the core of my disagreement and repost it elsewhere.
//
I politely engaged with you in the comments section of my Substack on July 26th, we had a friendly back and forth during which I explained the aesthetic design principles of my essay, and how my style was sculpted in imitation of “The Last Psychiatrist”. So I’m surprised to randomly stumble across this Substack viciously castigating myself. At a minimum, you could’ve tagged me to let me respond in a timely fashion.
//
You make some basic, amateurish factual claims which are wrong. That's not a problem by itself, we're all human, we all make mistakes, but the mistakes impair your analysis and corrupt the data you're working with.
//
1.) You claim in two places the essay Pygmalion and the Anime Girl is "33,000+ avalanche of words" and "Down around word 1,444 of a 33,500+ word essay (if you don't count the image inserts)".
//
Sorry, no, the true length is 17,097 words. You're off by 16,000 words. Maybe you're using hyperbole, if I give you the benefit of the doubt. But you can just copy-paste the Substack into a Word document and run an analysis to get the correct number, should take less than a minute.
//
2.) You claim that I'm making up a quote, which is extremely lazy, almost to an unbelievable extent:
//
"(And who the hell claimed "women are catering to the whims of men"? That isn't referenced in the essay anywhere else, attributed to Hawley or anyone... who are you arguing with, BP?)
--
However, women rejecting "the vast majority of men" isn't relevant here, anyway. The graph presented as evidence refers to a particular online dating app, not asking someone out face to face. He seems to intend to show that most people meet online now, and not asking out flesh and blood people. Yet, all the "pass" data comes from Tinder whereas the source of meeting partners is "Met Online," of which Tindr is but a segment1. If he hoped he was providing evidence for his claim that women now reject men at far higher rates, far higher than they ever used to one presumes, he has failed to."
//
In point of fact, the quote I'm referencing is mentioned at the beginning of the Substack, during the 3rd paragraph, when Josh Hawley comments, "Don’t make her cater to your whims."
//
In the future, I recommend searching a document with the "the Ctrl+F keyboard shortcut" to search for a specific word or phrase, so you can easily find whether phrases are included in a large document.
3.)
You also seem to defend Josh Hawley's ignorance of the dating market, asserting "It seems he considers it Hawley's responsibility to know about this data."
//
To which I can only respond, yes. If an adult presumes to give young kids advice about dating, or major life events, it's his responsibility to spend time thinking about actionable, practical solutions which address their existing problems. The alternative is gesture rhetorically, pat yourself on the back, and sabotage the youth by leading them in the wrong direction — which is what he's doing.
//
4.)
You claim in your comments section that I'm engaging in ad hominem attacks, and say, "1: It is absolutely ad hominem. It would point out hypocrisy if Hawley had said "you need to go to the gym" , or if Hawley had been ripped like Jesus when he got married. I see no evidence of either. BP merely stipulates that masculinity requires apparently a certain arm diameter, says Hawley doesn't have it, and so is not masculine, and therefore... ?"
--
and elsewhere, in your comments section:
--
"You know what ad hominem is, or at least I believed you did. I am left either thinking you didn't understand that or were incapable of thinking through it, or you are so eager to defend BP that you bent over backwards trying to justify his bad behavior and compromise yourself in the process.
--
I had expected you to be able to read what was actually written and say "Yea, that was a stupid cheap shot that lessened the work," or something to that effect. That is why I am disappointed."
//
And yes, I'm every bit as vicious and nasty as you claim. I never pretended to be anything other than that. But there's a beautiful irony in you taking the moral high ground, and criticizing ad hominem attacks, asserting that personal insults are dirty cheap shots, while simultaneously you engage in plenty of ad hominem attacks against me — and keep in mind I can do plenty of research into Senator Josh Hawley, he's a public figure, he has years of promotional media available. But you don't know anything about me — my name, age, career, hometown, or marital status. And yet you assert that I'm:
Your critique returned me to this essay (which I skimmed in full) and I started wondering, why exactly it became so popular. It is an arduous read, actually, due to sheer volume and also due to dizzy feeling one gets from connecting the dots for the author, who just keeps throwing them at you. To what need does it cater? And what does it help to escape? What pain makes withstanding this avalanche of words preferable?
Maybe this is about frustration due to the lack of actionable plan. Imagine some guy feeling sad and unsatisifed with his life. Let's assume he decided to shoulder the responsibility for his life and looks for means to improve it. He read pilosophy and it proved enlightening, but in the end it was all attitude. He went to gym and started lifting and doing cardio, but in the end it only improved his health. He went to therapy and worked through some past negative experiences,and learned some communication and coping skills, but some problems and internal struggles persisted. He started his journey a sad man, and now he was a mentally and physically fit sad man with an attitude. He could try other leads: religion, history, helping others, excelling at work. All this wouldn't make the sadness go.
There was no working plan out there. And our guy ends up on the couch, reading BP's essay. It wasn't that good of a read but provided a brief respite from his search, that adds frustration on top of sadness. A simple and free way to delay a start on another trek, that promises an upward spiral, but ends up being another circle around the void inside.
A bowl of ice cream would probably provide the same respite, take a lot less time, and probably be less damaging to his over all life.
But then, I really like ice cream and really hate sloppy thinking :)
I think the big danger with this sort of writing not only that it doesn't have an actionable plan, but really goes further and implies that there is NO plan one should have: all the changes need to be made by the outside world, not the audience member. What the young men in question are doing is a perfectly correct response to the world as it is, and unless the world changes first they shouldn't change behavior at all. That is advice both appealing and damaging to the reader.
Damaging indeed. Much like excessive consumption of junk food or junk erotic, this is a gateway to addiction. And if there is an addict, then there is a producer and dealer of addictive material.
Thank you for this. I read the BP essay and thought "this dude hates women, no wonder guys find it hard to find dates if they actively dislike the persons that they are seeking to date". I'm with JBP - if we want to get dates then we should be more attractive and certainly less hateful. An attitude that has worked actual wonders.
The essay immediayely reminded me of the green wall of text memes. Memories of cerebral leftist critique sprang to mind immediately after finishing that slog.
Women are not made in the image of God they are made in the image of man. There are no female angels or females in heaven. All angels are celibate except for the ones who did the incursion and had sex with human women hence the need to take human wives.
I don't want to argue Christian theology, but I will note that the Book of Enoch was not canon, last I checked. Nor are angels having sex bits even relevant in most sections, seeing as how they are generally odd collections of eyes and wings and crazy bits. How Christians want to argue over it is their business so far as I am concerned, however.
It's arguably there in Genesis with the men of renown. There are also references to giant men in a number of places, men as tall as cedar trees and repharim.
This is a pretty lazy response on your part Doctor Hammer which shows you didn't read the essay closely.
//
I'll cover the core of my disagreement and repost it elsewhere.
//
I politely engaged with you in the comments section of my Substack on July 26th, we had a friendly back and forth during which I explained the aesthetic design principles of my essay, and how my style was sculpted in imitation of “The Last Psychiatrist”. So I’m surprised to randomly stumble across this Substack viciously castigating myself. At a minimum, you could’ve tagged me to let me respond in a timely fashion.
//
You make some basic, amateurish factual claims which are wrong. That's not a problem by itself, we're all human, we all make mistakes, but the mistakes impair your analysis and corrupt the data you're working with.
//
1.) You claim in two places the essay Pygmalion and the Anime Girl is "33,000+ avalanche of words" and "Down around word 1,444 of a 33,500+ word essay (if you don't count the image inserts)".
//
Sorry, no, the true length is 17,097 words. You're off by 16,000 words. Maybe you're using hyperbole, if I give you the benefit of the doubt. But you can just copy-paste the Substack into a Word document and run an analysis to get the correct number, should take less than a minute.
//
2.) You claim that I'm making up a quote, which is extremely lazy, almost to an unbelievable extent:
//
"(And who the hell claimed "women are catering to the whims of men"? That isn't referenced in the essay anywhere else, attributed to Hawley or anyone... who are you arguing with, BP?)
--
However, women rejecting "the vast majority of men" isn't relevant here, anyway. The graph presented as evidence refers to a particular online dating app, not asking someone out face to face. He seems to intend to show that most people meet online now, and not asking out flesh and blood people. Yet, all the "pass" data comes from Tinder whereas the source of meeting partners is "Met Online," of which Tindr is but a segment1. If he hoped he was providing evidence for his claim that women now reject men at far higher rates, far higher than they ever used to one presumes, he has failed to."
//
In point of fact, the quote I'm referencing is mentioned at the beginning of the Substack, during the 3rd paragraph, when Josh Hawley comments, "Don’t make her cater to your whims."
//
In the future, I recommend searching a document with the "the Ctrl+F keyboard shortcut" to search for a specific word or phrase, so you can easily find whether phrases are included in a large document.
3.)
You also seem to defend Josh Hawley's ignorance of the dating market, asserting "It seems he considers it Hawley's responsibility to know about this data."
//
To which I can only respond, yes. If an adult presumes to give young kids advice about dating, or major life events, it's his responsibility to spend time thinking about actionable, practical solutions which address their existing problems. The alternative is gesture rhetorically, pat yourself on the back, and sabotage the youth by leading them in the wrong direction — which is what he's doing.
//
4.)
You claim in your comments section that I'm engaging in ad hominem attacks, and say, "1: It is absolutely ad hominem. It would point out hypocrisy if Hawley had said "you need to go to the gym" , or if Hawley had been ripped like Jesus when he got married. I see no evidence of either. BP merely stipulates that masculinity requires apparently a certain arm diameter, says Hawley doesn't have it, and so is not masculine, and therefore... ?"
--
and elsewhere, in your comments section:
--
"You know what ad hominem is, or at least I believed you did. I am left either thinking you didn't understand that or were incapable of thinking through it, or you are so eager to defend BP that you bent over backwards trying to justify his bad behavior and compromise yourself in the process.
--
I had expected you to be able to read what was actually written and say "Yea, that was a stupid cheap shot that lessened the work," or something to that effect. That is why I am disappointed."
//
And yes, I'm every bit as vicious and nasty as you claim. I never pretended to be anything other than that. But there's a beautiful irony in you taking the moral high ground, and criticizing ad hominem attacks, asserting that personal insults are dirty cheap shots, while simultaneously you engage in plenty of ad hominem attacks against me — and keep in mind I can do plenty of research into Senator Josh Hawley, he's a public figure, he has years of promotional media available. But you don't know anything about me — my name, age, career, hometown, or marital status. And yet you assert that I'm:
a.) "mentally unhealthy", as mentioned in "A partial examination of a mentally unhealthy essay by "BILLIONAIRE PSYCHO"
b.)"That last line, in particular, along with the opening topic of this excessively long essay, is a strong clue as to the motivating event driving the author: he is angry that Hawley said single men should stop spending time on porn and instead go ask women out. How dare he blame men for being single because they spend their time on porn instead of asking women out (and not on Tindr, I would note.)
--
Apparently Hawley touched a nerve."
c.) "A serious person might say those emotions of the downtrodden were perhaps real, but their diagnosis of problem was apparently way off, and this twit bloviating nonsense wasn't doing them any good... Sure, this particular twit might not know what he is talking about, but the phenomenon is true.
d.) "One can see why he makes this error: better to blame impersonal forces outside one's control for one's ability to find a spouse and thus over-indulge in porn than to consider one's own actions might be contributing. Actions such as "not asking women out but rather spending too much time on porn." It isn't that you don't ask flesh and blood women out on dates, but rather the economy that keeps you from dating."
e.) "BP's argument is that you are either the alpha male who gets all the women like him, or you get zero."
//
Doctor Hammer, you can claim that ad hominem attacks are disrespectful and unacceptable — a failure in logical analysis, the product of weak rhetoric which latches on to personal flaws rather than dealing with substance. Or you can smear me with ad hominem attacks as much as you choose (which I note, you are doing so from a place of total ignorance in regards to my personal situation, as opposed to my focused research into a public figure).
--
Either way, I don't take any criticism personally. We're all strangers pontificating on the Internet, and exploring ideas, which hopefully leads towards some aspirational outcomes.
--
But it's bizarre, and incoherent for you to reject ad hominem insults as an unfair rhetorical tactic, and then to use them yourself. I do take great pleasure in this sort of social comedy.
–
It's also funny self-parody that you claim I'm a porn-addicted loser who can't get a date, and is too much of a coward to approach a beautiful woman in public, but also simultaneously a ruthless "alpha male who gets all the women."
--
You seem to be missing the point... the brutal game-theory of a defect-defect equilibrium causes a bifurcation in the aggregate results, because it's a WINNER-TAKE-ALL SYSTEM. You seem unable to process the concept that even someone who wins in a dysfunctional ecosystem could be deeply troubled by social problems while personally benefiting from social decay.
--
In fairness, you seemed to miss every point I made in this essay, starting with the opening paragraphs, to the dating graphs, to the mythology and media dissection, to the origins of the past century’s power structures. If you find it objectionable that there's a connection between muscles and masculinity, I despair of any prospect of explaining to you how complex macroeconomics interact together over the course of centuries on an industrial scale.
--
Honestly, you indicate a deep cluelessness about athleticism and social behavior among groups when you ask the question, "BP merely stipulates that masculinity requires apparently a certain arm diameter, says Hawley doesn't have it, and so is not masculine, and therefore... ?"
--
Likewise, when you question, "Social media is industrial?"
--
I simply ask myself — How am I supposed to explain how fiber-optic cables and vast, transcontinental electrical networks created social media as an accidental byproduct? How am I supposed to explain semiconductor factories and global supply chains which provide every teenager with a smartphone, a pocket camera broadcasting subtle variants of mental illness? This is a very abstract and technologically complex subject. If you are making basic mistakes in reading an essay, I'm not sure how to verbally condense the mechanized interworkings of industrial technology, and how social media functions in physical terms.
5.) Lazy analysis — it's surprising to me that you write here that you don't understand a Bible verse, and yet you don't bother to do a basic Google search to find the passage. You say, "Then BP claims modern religion tries to glorify women at the expense of men which... what the hell has that to do with the previous points? Oh, the single line about "women being created in the image of God" which isn't apparently perfectly accurate (or is it? the quoted passage from the Bible is unclear). Where the hell is this going?"
--
But I clearly cited the relevant Bible verses, 1st Corinthians 11:7-9
I don't understand why you didn't just read 1st Corinthians 11 to figure out what the passage means.
--
And yes, Senator Josh Hawley is at a large Christian event, making a Biblical argument, referencing a key passage of Scripture. He's referencing Genesis 1:26-28, when God created Adam and Eve "in the image of God". Literally this is the first Chapter of the Bible, it's a foundational text of Western Civilization, everyone who speaks English should be familiar with this passage, and I find it perplexing you are confused by this reference.
--
Later religious teachers criticized and clarified this passage, which speaks to the origins of humanity, and the biological purpose of LIFE itself, which is to be fruitful and multiply. In other words, to have sex and procreate.
--
Quotation:
"Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals,[a] and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”
--
27 So God created mankind in his own image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.
—Genesis 1:26-28
--
I just find it weird that you would stumble across this, not bother to dig into the source materials, then accuse me of ignorance and incoherence.
--
6.) Repeatedly, you contradict yourself. Simultaneously you argue that my Substack is too long, and not long enough. You claim that "Pygmalion and the Anime Girl" is an excessive length, nobody can sit thru a massive essay of this size (I will note here that more than 20,000 readers have viewed it). And at the same time you argue that I lack evidence for my position, that I don't bother presenting sufficient evidence to justify the extensive propositions and assertions presented here.
--
Here you argue my essay is too long:
a.) "I find this sort of work repugnant, even if I agree with many of the general themes. Indeed, perhaps because I agree. If you have time for a two hour podcast and a 33,000+ avalanche of words"
b.) "what the hell has that to do with the previous points? Oh, the single line about "women being created in the image of God" which isn't apparently perfectly accurate (or is it? the quoted passage from the Bible is unclear). Where the hell is this going?
--
Oh... eventually he gets to the point that women tend to reject a lot of men, and apparently there is data detailing how much."
c.) "That last line, in particular, along with the opening topic of this excessively long essay, is a strong clue as to the motivating event driving the author: he is angry that Hawley said single men should stop spending time on porn and instead go ask women out."
--
Here you argue that I didn't bother to show evidence:
--
a.) "The graph presented as evidence refers to a particular online dating app, not asking someone out face to face. He seems to intend to show that most people meet online now, and not asking out flesh and blood people. Yet, all the "pass" data comes from Tinder whereas the source of meeting partners is "Met Online," of which Tindr is but a segment1. If he hoped he was providing evidence for his claim that women now reject men at far higher rates, far higher than they ever used to one presumes, he has failed to."
b.) "The evidence for women being the reason for this disintegration of the family is a statistic that 70% of divorces are initiated by women. Why might that be other than women being at fault?"
c.)"Then of course we get another assertion that is simply wrong. (One suspects that a more focused essay with more thought put into the claims and their truth value might help avoid these problems.)"
d.)"The images of Tweets he chooses to highlight this point are another good example of the loose thinking, the "well emotionally it feels right, so it is probably true" approach."
e.) "I note he doesn’t bother to note what the incomes of those 1990’s middle class people are, either."
f.)"Moreover, we are left with no way to check whether what he is claiming is true. Focus on the emotion, not the reason."
g.) "What is "our culture's sexual dysfunction?" Is that related directly to its economic problems? If so, how? Is it related to women being more picky and nasty now than in some previous era you had in mind?"
h.)"Our poisoned ecosystem is destroying happy relationships? Where the hell did that come from? I thought people couldn't form happy relationships from the get go, but now they existed and are being destroyed by the ecosystem?
--
And what the hell is the rest of that? Do you intend to explain or demonstrate what you mean, perhaps with examples, BP?
--
No. No he does not.
--
Thus dies the hope of a coherent argument emerging from this rant as the author shifts into full on "state everything I perceive as wrong with the world," mode."
i.)"I am going to stop here for a moment, as my brain starts to scream "What the actual fuck am I reading about?" This essay so far (my description is now up to a bit over 18,000 words into the essay after the swarm of fever dream stream of consciousness) is a great example of how semi-coherent mindless bullshit can trick the sympathetic audience member."
//
I note again, you're failing at counting basic arithmetic Doctor Hammer, the Substack doesn't have 18,000 words.
//
j.)"The expected emotional beats are there, and words that are shaped into something resemble dialogue, spoken in an order that appears to be related to the progression of the story as shown by the scenes that seem to follow logically from one to another. But then you step back and think about it for a moment and realize hey, this part doesn't quite make sense, and this doesn't really follow... What those sympathetic hearts do not notice, however, is that they are making it all up; in their desire to give the author the benefit of the doubt, they are doing the author's job for them, and writing a coherent narrative that is not present in the actual work itself. Those dots don’t connect, those reasons are not reasonable, and the meaning isn’t there."
--
Billionaire Psycho's essay, brings out the same behavior."
k.)"So what does BP mean when he says "the end of cheap energy" and blames much of the current economic problems on it? Doesn't matter, just insert whatever you think it means such that it makes his story coherent.
--
Do his claims and statistics hold up in how he combines them? Well... we can assume he really means to say something slightly different.
--
Is this coherent at all? Well, no, not really, but it is directionally true."
--
l.)"When we want to agree with people, whether because they are like us, are expressing frustrations we share, or otherwise saying that which we want to be true, we have a very strong motivation to take everything that they say in the most beneficial light. We paper over holes in arguments, we assume we know what they mean when they say something nonsensical, we give them a pass on factual errors as "nonessential to the argument" when they say things we know are wrong. At the extreme end, we assume that what they are saying must be really profound and deep, and we just can't quite grasp it all yet."
m.)"I agree that there are many problems with our society, and the dating process is worse now than it was, for a number of reasons. This essay/article/poem/small book, whatever it is, does not, however, provide anything valuable, and instead is the intellectual equivalent of junk food. It triggers all the emotional responses, the shape and the feel of reasoning and value while providing none of the actual value of intellectual activity, just as a sugary donut triggers all those fun food feelings without actually providing real sustenance. Whether intentionally or not it preys on those who want to agree with it, pretending to reveal truth but instead just telling you what you want to hear.
--
It is in fact just Woke style propaganda, but for those on the right."
But you seem to lack self-awareness, Doctor Hammer, because while you excoriate the academic rigor of my thesis, I note that you fail to live up to your own evidentiary standard. The statistical, sociological claims you make in this Substack are pure emotional projection and vague allusions to personal anecdotes, without any proof comparable to what I presented myself. You simply expect your readers to accept your nebulous, unsupported assertions that:
//
a.) "Considering most people only date one other person at a time, rejecting the majority of those interested is expected. Most people who marry only do so once, which implies they reject the majority of those who they have ever dated, just as they rejected the vast majority of everyone of the appropriate sex they met as dating partners."
b.)"Well, one might consider why one initiates divorce. Infidelity, drug and alcohol abuse, and physical abuse come to mind immediately. Which sex is more likely to commit those, leading to the other spouse to initiate divorce, I wonder... I wonder, but apparently BP doesn't."
c.) "Skinny arms are a symptom of genetics and less time spent making ones arms bigger. One aspect is beyond ones control, but another is not."
//
Laughable fitness advice here, Doctor Hammer. Professional sports is a science, muscle building is measurable, you're clearly ignoring hundreds of millions of dollars invested into organizations such as the NFL and their athletic trainers.
//
d.)"Although I am unsure as to the exact position of politics and culture relative to each other, leaning towards politics being mostly downstream of culture, I am quite certain that culture is not downstream of economics, nor economics downstream of technology. All three are mutually interacting, like any good complex adaptive system."
e.)"I was a teenager in the 90's and I knew precious few people who went overseas every 5 years. Zero, in fact. And today, save the overseas holiday and adding in a few more road trips, that pretty much describes my household, and we make a hell of a lot less than 400k$ (unless my wife is really holding out on me.) "
f.)"It is entirely possible Mr. Shell has a very specific idea in mind. Maybe he is talking middle class in and relative to coastal California or NYC, both places which have seen costs of living get extremely high extremely quickly. For the big cities in general that might be true. But lots of the population doesn't live in the major big cities, so we should be a bit careful there."
g.)"To be fair, I think it is largely true that the economy is worse now than a lot of people credit. Many things are more expensive, particularly things like health care, college, housing, food and child care. This is partially masked by the decrease in the cost of consumer goods. In other words, the less regulated or government subsidized industries are doing great in terms of "better quality for less money" while the more regulated and subsidized industries are the opposite, at best pulling off "questionable quality improvements for a lot more money." Again, much of these numbers are driven by urban areas, but health care and college prices know no geographical boundaries. Especially as the official inflation numbers don't generally include food, energy or housing prices in a way buyers would recognize, I am very sympathetic to arguments that actual inflation, particularly in specific areas of the country, is far greater than the official numbers would imply."
//
The truth is that yes, Pygmalion and the Anime Girl is a long essay. I designed it to be read in 4-5 sessions, and I was shocked so many people read it in a single morning. The Substack is punctuated by numerous pictures, which provide an easy stopping point for readers to quit reading, return later, and remember where they stopped reading.
--
I provided more than 140 images — these included photos, artwork, Twitter poasts, news headlines, and statistical graphs. It's incoherent for you to claim that I failed to offer any evidence. You are always welcome to disagree, and I'm certainly not perfect. But again, I find it quite strange that you argue both sides of the issue, and simultaneously criticize excessive length but a lack of evidence.
//
I will end by noting that the section “Female Exhaustion” devoted more than a thousand words to a sympathetic portrayal of the difficulties women experience in the modern dating scene. Numerous women reached out to me to express how deeply “Pygmalion and the Anime Girl” reflected their personal struggles with heartbreak, loneliness, and the desire for a passionate romance — a few suggested that I take them on dates, and messaged me their phone numbers. Flattering, but I politely declined.
–
I also spoke with numerous young men who felt this essay personally spoke to them, and provoked deep thought as to their romantic futures. Even men in their 40s and 50s felt a similar reaction, whether entrepreneurs who had waited decades to establish their fortunes before searching for a life partner, or recently divorced men who were horrified by the dating scene. One man told me that he was newly divorced, he remembered what it was like to be a bachelor 15 years ago, and he felt as if a nuclear bomb had gone off in the sexual dating scene, because the women he was encountering were bitter, abrasive, sad, lonely, and full of a deep rage based on the accumulated years of failed relationships.
–
This is the dismal, widespread reality you are blind to — but for your sake, I pray that you continue to be blind, and never are forced to suffer these kinds of experiences yourself. Ignorance is bliss, and I hope you retain your contented prosperity.
–
Congratulations Doctor Hammer that you seem to be happily married. I of course wish you the best. I think you’re a good guy, simply naive and ill-mannered. Your inability to piece together economic trends is an intellectual failure, not a moral character flaw.
Ok, wait, this is funny... too funny to just answer front to back. How should I start...
a. "Considering most people only date one other person at a time, rejecting the majority of those interested is expected. Most people who marry only do so once, which implies they reject the majority of those who they have ever dated, just as they rejected the vast majority of everyone of the appropriate sex they met as dating partners."
I... this is apparently "pure emotional projection and vague allusions to personal anecdotes, without any proof comparable to what [BP] presented [himself]."
Is there a part of the country I am unaware of where most people marry multiple times? Is it actually crazy to say that most people date fewer people than they know, and marry fewer people than they date? I am trying to imagine the world in which that isn't true and even the strangest San Fran polycule thing seems to bear it out in at least the broad outlines.
b: You seem to be misunderstanding how burden of proof works. You are claiming that 70% of women initiating divorce is meaningful to your argument. When one can off the top of their head come up with reasons why divorce initiation might be one sided, and they are pretty self evident (or at least really easy to google as 'what causes divorce?') those need to be ruled out as relevant before one can claim that the 70% number is relevant.
c: "Professional sports is a science, muscle building is measurable, you're clearly ignoring hundreds of millions of dollars invested into organizations such as the NFL and their athletic trainers."
Are you seriously contending that just ANYONE can play in the NFL if they just exercise enough? Genetics has nothing to do with it? Because if you read the sentence you quoted again I say "Skinny arms are a symptom of genetics and less time spent making ones arms bigger. One aspect is beyond ones control, but another is not."
Either you misread that or are wildly unaware of the role genetics plays in top tier athletic performance.
d: Fair enough, I thought it was obvious on the face of it, but maybe I will write an essay on the matter. Of course, you ought to do the same if you want to use it as an important point to your argument.
e: So, again, some asshole saying what he thought a middle class lifestyle was in the 90's in a Tweet is sufficiently debunked by another asshole saying something different. If you want to support the claim you need actual proof, not just some twitter guy asserting things.
f: Which point here are you contending as untrue? CA and NYC seeing large cost of living increases? Major cities? Lots of the population not living in major cities?
g: Again, what are you contending here? This is pretty general and basic stuff, although maybe with more of an economics bent than most people know off hand. The most contentious part I would guess would be that highly regulated or government subsidized industries are those doing the worst and the less regulated the best, but that was contained in one of your own graphs (although not explicitly described as such in the graph.)
Overall point: 140 images is not "evidence" when it is a collection of assertions by people on Twitter, photos, or artwork, nor news headlines or statistical graphs that contradict your point or only tangentially relate to it. Length is not the same as evidence. You put in a lot, but it doesn't support conclusion you are trying to draw. You could throw in a recipe for chocolate chip cookies and it would make it longer but not provide evidence of your claim.
Just throwing everything together in a big pile does not an argument supported by evidence make.
Now yes, I think a lot of people would feel moved by this; I spent quite a bit of time arguing with people right here that did. My point is that it is wrong, not that it isn't moving, or that there is not a problem with our society. Right up that the top of my essay I specified that I agreed with many of the themes. I specifically state why I don't like the work, right there at the end. People feel moved by Woke propaganda. DEI struggle sessions are very popular amongst the kind of people they prey upon. Crack is really popular with crack addicts, too. I think your essay is functioning on the same pathways, only for the anti-Woke crowd. (Well, not the same pathways as crack, obviously.)
Yea, shit's not great now. Your essay remains to my mind an entirely incorrect diagnosis of the problem, however.
5: I am not confused by the reference so much as that the section you swing into is almost entirely irrelevant to the rest of your essay. So, ok, Christians disagree about parts of the Bible, which has... nothing really to do with your essay. Maybe it does to Christians, I don't know, I am not religious, but I struggle to see what it would be other than "Hawley is wrong about this point (if you think he is) so he is wrong about this other point."
6: Again, you are putting words in my mouth, which is odd, because I don't think I needed to be more critical of your work.
"You claim that "Pygmalion and the Anime Girl" is an excessive length, nobody can sit thru a massive essay of this size "
Do I? I referenced its length in part of because it was just a mess of everything jammed together without connection, but also to highlight that we shouldn't read it assuming you left out important points, because, goddamn, you had space.
I even explicitly say I recommend reading it if you have time in the very sentence you quote!
"If you have time for a two hour podcast and a 33,000+ avalanche of words, I recommend listening and reading to get the other side."
And I didn't say you "didn't bother to show evidence" but rather that the evidence you put out doesn't show what you seem to think it shows. I didn't get into picking apart the graphs, but you have tons of quotes there of me saying why things don't line up the way you seem to believe.
4.a: "Mentally unhealthy" describes the essay, as in it is "Junk Food for the Mind", per the title. If I were describing you I would have written "A partial examination of an essay by the mentally unhealthy "Billionaire Psycho"", which, given your nom de plume, might have been funny, but wasn't what I intended nor wrote.
4.b: Ad hominem is when you attack a person's argument by attacking irrelevant aspects of the person making the argument. By contrast, starting with your work and examining what might be the motivations is not. It is, as I say and you quote, a clue as to why the work exists.
4.c. Not sure what you are objecting to here; is it my calling the DEI presenter a twit, and then comparing your prose to him?
4.d. Again, I am addressing the argument, particularly why it is appealing to make what is otherwise a very odd error.
4.e. Again, directly addressing the argument, not you. You write "Women reject the vast majority of men, and chase fruitlessly after a small handful of conceited, womanizer jerks (such as myself)."
So, no, those are not ad hominem attacks, nor cheap shots. They directly address the work itself. As I rather thought I made clear by the end, the essay comes off not as a well reasoned or carefully thought out work, but instead is an emotional torrent, a "primal scream" as one fellow put it, and that is important to recognize.
It is worrying that you seem to equate criticism of the argument with ad hominem attack. Indeed, you are taking all criticism of the work as personal criticism, in the face of your claim to the contrary.
Let's examine the rest:
Where, precisely, do I state you are "a porn-addicted loser who can't get a date, and is too much of a coward to approach a beautiful woman in public, but also simultaneously a ruthless "alpha male who gets all the women."" I am quite certain I suggested nothing of the sort.
As to the game theory point, well you don't actually make that in the essay, but even if you did as it turns out a prisoner's dilemma style game is probably not the best model. Especially because the dating market is not winner take all; if that were true a handful of men at most would have all the wives and everyone else zero. That doesn't mean it works great, but generally we clearly don't see the outcome of a winner take all system, so it must be a different one.
Possibly I missed all your points. Or, possibly, they were shoddily made arguments and bare assertions unsupported by the things you put forth as evidence, which is what I wrote about. Maybe, just maybe though, it was just too brilliant for me to grasp. It is notable, however, that the general theme of those defending you has been "don't hold him to that high of a standard" not "no, see, the logic all holds together".
Regarding social media as industrial... see, here I can't tell if you are being intentionally misleading, or just clumsy. When people use the word "industry" or "industrial" they generally mean something related to the manufacture of physical things, say in factories. If I were to describe some area of land as an "industrial park", for instance, one expects signs requiring hard hats or steel toes boots perhaps, not software development. When one says "industrial toxins" one thinks nasty chemicals or soot, not email spam. "Digital" is usually the word people apply to those latter things. So, sure, social media needs a big industrial base to allow it to function, but if that makes it "industrial" then so is everything we use "industrial", so what's the point of the word? Television is industrial, the internet is industrial, cars and steam trains are industrial. So what? What does the grouping of these under "industrial contagions" mean?" It isn't elaborated upon, which suggests that we are to merely mentally connect "industrial contagions" with perhaps "industrial waste" to drive an unpleasant emotional feeling in our minds, however inappropriate or unearned.
Oh, and "you indicate a deep cluelessness about athleticism and social behavior among groups": if you have a point to make about this such that it underpins part of your essay, you probably want to make the point in the essay or at least link to it in a foot note. I mean, I am sure you were pressed for space, but still, if the notion is doing a lot of work, which you seem to imply here, you ought not leave it out.
Sorry I didn't tag you directly, here I thought Substack always notified an author when their 'Stack was linked in another 'Stack. I guess one needs to use the @ business? Damned if I know.
To your points:
1: When I copy/paste dumped the essay into Google Docs (I believe... it's been a while, maybe it was a text editor) it said 33,500 words. Maybe it counted oddly, or hell, maybe I hit Ctrl+V twice by accident. So sure, the essay is shorter than I believed.
2: Does Hawley say "women are catering to the whims of men"? No, as you point out he says "Don’t make her cater to your whims." I hope you understand the difference between those two statements. "Don't make your cats sleep in a box" is very different from "Your cats are sleeping in a box" in meaning. So when you write "It’s delusional to claim that women are catering to the whims of men, when they reject 95% of their options at first glance," who is claiming that? If women were doing it, or willing to do it, suggesting not to make women do it wouldn't make a lot of sense, sure. But if women are not catering to the whims of men, which seems true enough, doesn't suggesting "Don't make her cater to your whims" follow, because you know, she won't? In other words, Hawley isn't saying women are catering to the whims of men.
3: If you read on I discuss why that data isn't actually terribly relevant to the point at hand. Hawley probably is also ignorant of data regarding the year on year trends in chocolate heart production, but that probably isn't terribly relevant to the matter at hand, either. I specifically said that the data you provide does not demonstrate what you seem to believe it does.
4: Ad hominem isn't necessarily a result of being vicious and nasty, but almost always sloppy thinking is necessary. It is what the brain resorts to when it is failing to justify or rationalize its desired result in other ways. I will address the points you make in the next comment under the next comment.
(Did you hit a character limit in Substack's comments? I didn't know there was one.)
Many things are discussed in this article, but dating isn’t happening, marriages aren’t happening, children aren’t happening because of legislation. No one’s talking about that. Why not talk about it?
At the same time women scream about “equal rights” they can take men to the cleaners with but a few words. Marital rape carries the same penalties as any other kind and in my state at least, just the woman’s say-so is all that’s required for conviction. Without evidence and with zero proof. The PFA is the most common first-strike in any divorce action here, the protection from abuse order, also requires no evidence or corroborating testimony and is automatically granted. A man with zero warning finds his firearms confiscated and himself homeless with no communication or access to his children, until such time as the court gets around to a hearing. By that time he is labeled an abuser, is ready to negotiate for his right to exist. Dating to marriage is no longer a sane option. Only those unaware or unwilling to accept the real probability of these things actually happening to him, will try it. It is an agreement to becoming of lower staus than the average road-squashed toad. The drop in the birth rate is a direct result.
I have no problem talking about the decline in dating and marriage, in fact I think it is important that we should. However, we should do so reasonably and not in a way that plays upon the emotions why being logically inconsistent. You don't solve problems by incoherent griping about them. That is the problem with the leftist DEI/Woke politicos: they want to profit by the problems, and so do their damnedest to make sure they persist. Persistence reqires never finding out the true root causes.
I note that you manage to compress in your final paragraph about all the content of the 33,500+ word essay. Well done!
With regards to birth rates dropping, it is interesting that there are step changes in the rate of decrease, but it has been pretty steadily decreasing since the 90's, after a brief rally from the cliff it fell off in the 70's. I am curious as to what happened in the 90's, too. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/crude-birth-rate?tab=chart&country=~USA
Didn’t mean to “diss” any of the content. I read it all. Your reply to me, however does seem to disregard what I’ve pointed out. There is no need to discuss pornography, digitalization, habits of new generations if there is an entirely unrelated root cause, and I’ve given it to you. Step changes are shown in steps because that’s the way data is presented. Following myriad changes in civil law, the use of it to womens’ advantage has gradually increased, as it was found to work and more women resorted to its use.
But you are right. I’m only “griping” because I have no solutions. Anyone with the testicular fortitude tp propose reversal of it would be demonized and stripped of his career accomplishments. If population decline will end humanity, then we are absolutely doomed.
At least, now you will know why.
I apologize for the trespass of compression.
Sorry Ken, I didn’t mean you were griping, but that BP was. I didn’t mean you in particular; I probably should have used ‘one’ for clarity.
I was being a little cute with the bit about your last paragraph, but I think you have a good point there. I don’t know that many young men are thinking about that when they decide to get married and start a family or not, but it probably varies state to state depending on the laws as you say.
The birth rate thing though is tough. It would be useful to have birth rates per state, though, so you could see if a certain law being passed changes the rate of change. Looking at the nationwide data you can kind of see the effects of the sexual revolution/birth control thing in the 70’s, then.... something in the 90’s... but it isn’t clear if those smaller changes in direction are localized changes or just random blips or what.
I strongly suspect the inglourious basterd generic 'you' was invented presactly to populate many a convo minefield, to make our otherwise uneventful communication so much more fun 🤪
Trust me, young men are thinking about it. It would be foolish to commit their lives to a family under the current state of legalities. I knew one man who couldn’t face the consequences of false accusation and paid with his life. I know another who spent a year in prison.
We are gifted with one life. It shouldn’t be wasted.
I favor motorcycles.
Population decline ending humanity is worth it if we preserve these legal advantages for women. Even if we go extinct, we'll all go to heaven and God will confirm that we did the right thing. It's not the continuation of the species that He cares about but preservation of divorce laws favoring women. Sometimes you have to destroy this life to do God's will.
That’s hilarious. Made my night 😄
kek
Clearly you do have problems discussing it
"ready to negotiate for his right to exist.." I liked that one. I am subscriber to Ken, as it turns out, but I rarely go there! I must have liked it at some point but it did not stick? I asked a girl who obviously liked me for a date and she turned me down flat. She said it was not "romance" that she was after. Yeah I know babe but I was trying to find a path. What the hell did she want I do not know. Some fantasy thing?
Excellent critique of the bafflegab. Especially appreciated: "When we want to agree with people, whether because they are like us, are expressing frustrations we share, or otherwise saying that which we want to be true, we have a very strong motivation to take everything that they say in the most beneficial light. We paper over holes in arguments, we assume we know what they mean when they say something nonsensical, we give them a pass on factual errors as "nonessential to the argument" when they say things we know are wrong. At the extreme end, we assume that what they are saying must be really profound and deep, and we just can't quite grasp it all yet."
(I fall into this error more often than I'd like to admit.)
Thanks man. I think that everyone is deeply prone to that error, which is exactly what makes it so dangerous. It worries me a great deal that those that oppose the leftists in America seem unaware that the tactics and techniques work as well in them as those on the left.
Bafflegab is a great word too! I need to remember that!
Excellent use of the word bafflegab.
Hey I liked your essay. I ended up going and reading the entire essay your referenced by Billionaire Psycho. I think that like many new Right figures the author has become a puritan. We have to take our alliances where we can get them. Demanding our version of perfection from everyone we listen to isn't constructive. Good Essay - keep up the writing.
I don’t know about that... I have been kicking around an essay on that notion of allies where you can get them. I often think the biggest mistake the left people (that is those individuals on the left, not the movement) made was adopting the “no enemies to the left” stance. I think it turned out that those to their left turned out to be bigger enemies in the end, as the socialists in the Spanish civil war found out.
In a nutshell an ally that wants to fight your enemy so that he can be the one to enslave you instead is no real ally. So where then is the line? Does it include people who mouth things you want to hear only? I don’t know yet, but I will always hate sloppy thinking :)
True. But purity spirals are a real thing. Not considering someone conservative enough because they don't lift weights, or they are giving marriage advice that hasn't worked out for everyone, seems like a way to end up on a team all by yourself. Using ones perception of oneself as the measuring stick to measure other people by is a bad idea.
I agree that grifters need to go and possibly some wingnuts on the fringe - but Josh Hawley has been a fairly consistent supporter of conservative values. I think America needs people like him.
Oh I am with you there. My purity spiral seeks to avoid irrational people and authoritarians. I don’t have a particular problem with Harley beyond him being a politician (I have seen some clips of him grilling people in the senate that seem pretty good, at least). I do feel disgust towards those who seem to think that a statement is made invalid by arm size. :) The lack of clear thinking capacity is a bad sign, especially when mixed with emotional pressure.
I'm not demanding perfection Last Scientist
I read some of BP's piece after I read yours. His struck me as flashes of brilliance surrounded by eons of stupidity. Just too meandering and unfocused. Was there a point in there?
He has potential, but could benefit from a few writing classes. I was taught that every unnecessary word loses a reader. I think he lost a boatload.
Yes indeed. I also think that volume of unconnected thoughts tends to be a defense mechanism for bad reasoning. If people can’t recognize all your mistakes they see tons of stuff and a handful of obvious errors and think “well, the rest is probably all right; it feels right at least.” Plus eventually they tune out and start just skimming instead of considering closely.
Thanks Don
Maybe you're being sarcastic, don't know. But I meant it for good. I really did see some good things, one or two great things. Please take my criticism in the vein it was meant and keep writing. You'll find your voice. Wishing you all the best.
I would say that I'm lightly teasing you in a friendly manner.
That's good. No hard feelings then. That's a mark of a good man.
I rotate subscriptions or I'd spend a grand month on Substack. I'll check out more of your stuff and maybe sub for a few months. Take care, and I'll see you at Billionaire Psycho.
My work is free and always will be. You are welcome to subscribe, mostly I write about niche literature technique which only interests about a third of my FrogTwitter audience, sometimes I write about politics.
Everything's cool. Much love bro. I'm always happy to have new readers, every performer wants an audience.
Cool. I'll see you on your stack. Take care.
Hey, don't know if you've ever read this, but an excellent book for all aspiring writers is Elements of Style, by William Strunk Jr. He would have a field day with BP's piece and a red pen. 😁
Strunk and White is an excellent reference work! I like McCloskey’s Economical Writing as well, but Strunk and White is an absolute classic.
The essay is long and windy. And lacks substance. However it hits the right emotional beats and elicits imagination. And this is what matters in this kind of writing. We are not robots so emotions work on us. And this is substack - place where people write whatever they can to get attention in a best way they can.
It's just an essay(poem/ small book). Not an algorithm to solve issues . You yourself are not objective at judging the piece for what it is. And demanding it to be bigger than what it is. And btw this post of your own is just a critique coattailing of a trendy article. So well...
Thanks for the kind words Max
Much as I enjoy your descriptions of smithing, this is my personal favourite DHA article. You have perfectly articulated my internal critique of certain right-wing misery themes.
I'm old enough to remember when we could differentiate between left and right, broadly, by seeing who attributed their fortune or misfortune to internal or external forces.
What's funny, at this point, is that parts of the new right come across as Woke-with-guns.
This whining about women not forming queues to fuck them is especially undignified.
Thanks for saving me the bother of reading that piece.
Much appreciated! The question of the locus of agency is definitely one that used to be the driver, but I think increasingly Bryan Caplan’s formulation is correct: the left is anti market, and the right is anti-left. The importance of self development and virtue, solving problems yourself instead of expecting people to solve them for you, that seems to be increasingly lacking but considered fine if you just oppose stuff the left pushes.
I think this is one of the most interesting currents that seemed to surface with the pandemic. And it's not just the right adopting a left vibe. Rebel Wisdom pointed out that the conservative moral intuition of 'sanctity', in Haidt's moral foundations theory, was adopted by the left, with masks and health. On the general principle of locus of control, I noticed that my own rightward shift came from facing down adversity during a bad spell, 3 years ago, instead of sinking into self-pity. Seems to me there has never been a better time to reject both the poles I grew up with.
Thanks Mike I always admire someone cultured and sophisticated like yourself, who confidently critiques essays he doesn't bother to read. Truly the mark of a superior intellect. After all, why bother to familiarize yourself with the topic? Research is so passé
Good snark, to be fair
Thanks I would hate to be unfair to someone with your level of emotional investment in my ideas.
I can only stand to read 33000+words if it's a novel - not non-fiction - so I have to base my comment on your precis. The BP essay does sound like an incontinent rant. But it does seem (however inelegantly) to touch on something real that gets almost zero recognition in journalism about sexual mating in the 21st c. West. Evolutionary psychology (David Buss et al) does seem to have shown pretty clearly that, when they have the choice, young women will tend to hanker after the same small pool of successful 'alpha' males. Men will tend to be less picky but still major in (if they can) on the prettiest women.
'That's life' you might say 'no one said life has to be fair'. And that's the way any grown up non-whinger will see things....me included. But what I personally do find irritating is that the vast majority of journalism on 'the mating game' completely ignores this huge INTRA-sexual asymmetry and the pain and disappointment it leaves in its wake. The feminist journos tend to just talk in terms of their stereotypical 'Men' .... 'Men' always cheat on 'Women' etc etc. (Ironically I suspect that feminist journos' stereotype is the successful 'alpha' males who populate their mental universe because they are the only ones they've ever noticed.) The male journo meanwhile doesn't like to talk about the above asymmetries either - presumably because he doesn't want to come across as a loser - wants you to know that he personally of course is a bit of a babe magnet.
In all of this, what I call 'The Less Desired' of both sexes get a pretty poor deal out of sex discourse.
Indeed, I think the dating market (pardon my economist framing) has gotten worse, and as you correctly point out it is not well understood, from the perspective of either men or women. At the same time, applying the methods of discussion and analysis used by the CRT types is only going to make the situation worse, which I think is what BP is doing, albeit probably unintentionally.
Hello Graham. His estimate is off by 16,000 words. Pygmalion and the Anime Girl is 17,000 words long. Which is extremely long, but not the 33,000 word novella he claims.
Since this (July) comment thread, I have posted an essay expanding on my thoughts about 'The Less Desired'....which you might find of interest: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/the-less-desired
Very exciting, I look forward to reading it, will restack if I like it. Issac Simpson's Carousel had an excellent guest column about feminism, sex, etc..
https://thecarousel.substack.com/p/blame-women
I enjoyed the original essay, but I appreciate this critique. There were too many leaps over too many abysses of logic in BP’s essay.
could not agree more with you...even though everything said in this absurdingly long essay is true, it reads like a long verbal logorrhea and made me almost feel like I was stuck in an sick mind...We need some clarity and we need all men of our side to focus on those practices that elevate them....
I won't try to defend the genius of the essay, that is too difficult for it is truly magnificent in a way that is difficult to describe. I'll just cover some of what you missed here. First, you mistake his initial discussion of porn as endorsement. It is clearly not. He is simply pointing out that it is more symptom than cause. Not a big deal for you to miss this, but then you go on to complain that he is inconsistent in decrying how porn is problematic, which you interpret as inconsistent. Not inconsistent, you're just operating under an assumption stemming from a conclusion that you jumped to independently.
Is lifting important outside of fitness discussion? Of course it is. It is one of many proxy indicators that we can use to infer character. I mean, DYEL?
The end of cheap energy is open to interpretation, but there are many reasons why this might be the case (I'd say because globohomo demands it) but that is beside the point. Either this is a prior you have or it isn't. If it is, it is a salient point that plays into the mosaic being painted here. The thing about cost of living is most apparent if you think about housing prices anywhere you might want to settle down. If you own a home you won't see this. If housing prices keep going up it will be very hard to find a place to settle down. The whole agenda 2030 thing is in full swing and the trend is worsening. You might be comfortable, but if you don't focus on the numbers for a second and think about your level of education and how marketable your skills are in comparison to, I don't know, >90% of other Americans you should be able to appreciate the point being made there for what it is.
These things tie into my last criticism of your take. You demand for data to support arguments that might sway you to believe stuff that the intended audience takes for granted. There are many other things that leave me with a high degree of confidence about a lot of this stuff. I wouldn't depend on this essay for that, and I wouldn't expect anyone else to. In other words, this essay isn't for you, and you thinking such is the only thing that makes your comparison of it with leftist stuff coherent. A leftist version of this would be expected to be believed without question, because all leftist dogma is to be taken as a priori Truth, and those who disagree are definitionally Evil.
The nuclear family is in terminal decline. Exactly why is obviously multifactorial, but it is plausible if not likely that many of the things BP touches on have contributed to the phenomenon. This essay helps to convey to people who already largely share BPs priors on an emotional level what young men are having to contend with these days. Josh Hawley's advice is F&G, and if you can't understand that, anything you have to say on this matter will be interpreted by the folks dealing with this shit and doing their best in earnest as F&G as well. I lift weights so as not to be F&G, but it isn't enough. I have to also not act like Josh Hawley, which I know understand at a visceral level thanks to BP.
Your comment about politics, culture, and economics mutually reacting is spot on, and I've always kind of thought the Breitbart politics downstream from culture thing is F&G, especially since McConkey pointed out how it is obviously a bidirectional relationship, if not the inverse in some cases.
TL;DR: This article isn't for you. If you're interested in data driven arguments about the state of marriage, community, and cost of living in the U.S. you can make those arguments yourself, because you're an expert at that kind of thing. This article is for people who share priors with BP, not because of some top-down ideological enforcement mechanism as is the case with our opposition, but for our own reasons. Not every article has to be a stand alone hermetically sealed argument, although those are definitely helpful and necessary.
Rather than start a new comment thread, I'll append my response to Grant's, because he said a lot of what I was going to say (but said it better than I would have). To do like all those coworkers you hate who say in work meetings, "Just to piggyback off what [last speaker] said..." 😉
I don't think Billionaire Psycho's (BP) criticism of Hawley for not lifting is meant as an ad hominem attack to invalidate his argument, but rather as an indication of Hawley's hypocrisy. Hawley harangues young men for not doing more to get real women, yet physical fitness being one metric by which young women judge a man's attractiveness, Hawley is not really doing these things either. of course, Hawley has other things going for him (he comes from money, he has political connections, he has parlayed these things into a successful career in politics) which I certainly do not fault him for; however, he betrays a lack of understanding that for young men today, they follow the conventional wisdom yet still strike out in the romance department. Obviously porn escapism is not the answer -- neither are opiates the answer to the lack of career options for rust belt workers whose jobs have been shipped overseas or automated out of existence -- and any kind of escapism fuels a negative downwards cycle, but it's not fair to point to the palliatives that are taken as a consequence of defeat and demoralization as the primary cause of that defeat and demoralization. I know with this, we can get into the weeds, where, yes, no matter where you are, you can always improve your situation, and pursuing an active, rather than passive and escapist, response to one's problems is always a better option; however, issuing blanket condemnations of, and clichéd moralizing to, people in tough situations is also counterproductive. I take BP to be criticizing Hawley for doing that.
From your essay: "Women reject the vast majority of men, and chase fruitlessly after a small handful of conceited, womanizer jerks (such as myself)." [BP quote]
"There are only extremes, all one or the other, nothing in between." [Your response]
No doubt there are opportunities in the middle, especially as people get older, they realize that holding out for the perfect guy (or gal) is not a good strategy, and they adjust their standards towards something more realistic. That said, in modern life the competition is much more difficult than it used to be, in that young men are competing with many more people for a piece of a shrinking pie. This is true economically/career wise for sure, but this also seems to be true in terms of being considered “attractive” as a potential mate. Speaking as a man, if I was alive in 1850, I would have far fewer women available for me to consider as a point of comparison when assessing female attractiveness; now, I’m comparing the woman next door to outliers from around the world – and even from different eras, as I can watch a movie with someone like Claudia Cardinale – she’s old now, but in her day (she was in the first Pink Panther movie in 1965) she was an absolute fox. So if I’m looking at the woman next door, I might consider her “mid” when in an earlier age, she would be one of the prettiest women in the village. And the same would go for guys, when it comes to attracting women. And if you get into a relationship with someone thinks of you as a “mid,” rather than very attractive, that’s going to have an impact on the dynamics of your relationship. I don't know what the answer to this is, but it does add to the problems young people (men and women) would face in forming healthy relationships.
You make a fair point about there being other potential explanations for why more women than men file for divorce and give examples like infidelity, substance abuse, and physical abuse. But 40% (or whatever the rate is) of marriages end in divorce. That's a lot of failed marriages. Are all, or even most, of those failures due to infidelity, drug and alcohol abuse, physical abuse, etc.? I don’t know, but I suspect that the vast majority of marriages fail because both parties are so ill-prepared for it, as we live in a culture where people are encouraged to remain childlike well into adulthood, where people are encouraged to lay claim to rights without bothering with any attendant responsibilities, where people are encouraged to look to others to provide their happiness for them and to blame others for their unhappiness, where the social norms and institutions that used to facilitate successful marriages have all been hallowed out and undermined, etc. As their marriages (and lives in general) fail, people turn to harmful palliatives, like having an affair, getting blackout drunk, lashing out at those around them, etc. In some cases, those tendencies are probably an originating cause for the marriage going bad, but I would bet that in a large number of cases things start going bad first, and then the people involved respond by engaging in these harmful palliatives (which of course would just worsen the underlying problem). I take BP to be pointing out that saying most marriages fail because people engage in these harmful palliatives is a very incomplete explanation, and he is proposing alternatives to that, without denying that in some cases, those explanations are accurate.
What you said about the responses to this essay matching some of the responses to DEI workshops is an important note of caution that did make me stop and reflect. This essay agrees with many of my priors, so I am not as concerned with how well it argues its case. BP’s preaching to the choir, in which I am one of the lead vocalists. And yes, this is similar to what’s going on with DEI-type audiences, but -- and I know this is going to be cliché – but my answer to that is: I am right, and they are wrong. As in, I do not believe that there is much evidence or many good faith arguments that support a belief that, in America in 2023, black or female are disfavored classes, but there is plenty of evidence and many good-faith arguments that support a belief that being white or male is an actively disfavored identity (absent some participation in the Rainbow Pride cult, in which case your identity becomes good again). As for BP's essay, I think there are good faith arguments and solid evidence that support the overarching contention he is making, even if he does not provide those in this essay, and even stipulating that he may be incorrect on a few particulars.
I enjoyed reading your critique and you raise some important points and notes of caution. I also enjoyed BP’s essay and think that he gives voice to a perspective that is almost never presented sympathetically or even fairly in our culture. His overarching point is good: that young men face challenges that – at least in many ways – are simply so different than what their grandfathers faced, that the conventional wisdom of their grandfathers is little help at all, and that young men today are the targets of much lecturing and condemnation that is unfair and even malicious.
Hitting your points in order:
1: It is absolutely ad hominem. It would point out hypocrisy if Hawley had said "you need to go to the gym" , or if Hawley had been ripped like Jesus when he got married. I see no evidence of either. BP merely stipulates that masculinity requires apparently a certain arm diameter, says Hawley doesn't have it, and so is not masculine, and therefore... ?
Look at it a different way: I tell BP "No, the first step to the solution is to stop looking at porn and go ask women out." Is the argument now unassailable because my arms are roughly the size of Hawley's thighs and I quench my blades in my own testosterone excretions? If no, was the shortcoming really the hypocrisy?
(On a related note, hypocrisy isn't itself an argument for the falsehood of a statement, anyway. It might be evidence that the speaker doesn't actually believe it himself, like climate change preachers buying ocean front property. On the other hand, if an alcoholic tells me "Look man, you really want to stay away from alcoholism" he might be totally correct, even if he can't pull it off himself.)
2: Only extremes: be fair, I am not inferring that BP thinks there are only extremes from that sentence alone. The quote also contained this one, for starters: "Feast, or famine. There’s no middle ground."
BP's argument is that you are either the alpha male who gets all the women like him, or you get zero. That is not only empirically false, not only incredibly destructive to believe, but also shows a Manichean view of the world as simple enough to cast as extremes outside of human agency, instead of varying levels where people's actions can make a difference in their lives.
That is an excellent point about the comparisons between "prettiest girl in town" and "statistical outlier of all humanity", by the way. I used to refer to that as "Hollywood Ugly" where an actress is sort of meh but would easily be the hottest woman anyone knew personally. I don't care for Angelina Jolie, but she would definitely have all the boys in the yard back home. More on point, I think that effect does impact modern dating, as men expect women to be far lovelier than is reasonable based on the ratio of crazy hot to standard on TickTock or whatever vs the real world, and women do the same. However, some of that is mitigated with age as you say, and more is mitigated by spending time with actual humans who become attractive as much because of personality and attainability as the far characteristics of presentation online. Likewise, porn makes that worse because again, the apparent universe of women is filtered to the unusually sexy (and over sexualized) women who engage in it.
There's a fair number of reasonably attractive young women out there who aren't nuts. You won't meet them on PornHub or whatever, though. Maybe join a church, or a club or something... I am going to expand on these ideas a bit more in the following weeks I hope.
3: Divorce is a tricky one. I don't have the number in front of me (although now that I look Forbes has a handy little reference sheet https://www.forbes.com/advisor/legal/divorce/divorce-statistics/ ) but many marriages end before kids are had. Another big chunk is second and third marriages, which makes sense because, well, sometimes the only constant in your failed relationships is you. :D According to the Forbes sheet, with references I didn't check because they match what I remembered reading before, about 60% of people cite infidelity as what pushes them over the edge to divorce. Now, I expect a LOT of things go wrong before it culminates in infidelity; some people are just dogs like that, but I imagine quite a few are suffering for a while before they go looking to shuck some side corn. (I refuse to give up that phrase, even if I am the last man on Earth using it :D )
Only 24% cite abuse, while 35% cite substance abuse. I am actually surprised the abuse claims aren't higher, as what Ken points out in another comment (that women claim abuse as a tactic) would seem pretty likely. I suppose if it is obviously not the case it gets retracted from the record or something, but whatever, it doesn't come up much; maybe people without kids just don't bother and dissolve the marriage without all the crazy.
It does look like your guess of "both parties unprepared" is a pretty common one too, so well done! :D
More on point though, it is pretty clear BP want to blame women for men not having good relationships. Everything, from rejection in dating to ending what relationships did form a marriage, is pointed out as women's fault. It's a bit much, isn't it? I mean, data on divorces isn't hard to find, so you say "Huh, I wonder if women initiating 70% of divorces really means it is women's fault" and then find out more information to understand it better. Unless, of course, one is trying to tell men who are struggling with relationship problems "Hey, it isn't your fault, it is everyone else's fault. Never change. You are healthy at any weight!"
Oh... hold on, that last bit is from a different type of demagogue.
4: I am right, they are wrong. That's probably true, given what I know about you :) However, it is not enough to be right, but one must endeavor to be right for the right reasons. I know that sounds obnoxiously puritanical, but let me by way of example discuss why that is important:
Say I discover one morning that my hip is really bothering me. Walking around hurts a bit, and it is stiff. I go to the doctor and he asks about my workout routine, and points out I probably just pulled a few tendons; happens to a lot of guys my age. Yea, totally over did it on the leg presses, so I start dialing those back at the gym. Hooray, hip gets better. Over time, however, it never quite gets all the way better, and in fact is getting slightly worse. I cut out the leg presses all together, chicken legs be damned. Eventually, however, the pain is worse. I go get an x-ray and it turns out, whoops, it wasn't strained muscles, but bone on bone arthritis because I don't cartilage anymore. I need total hip replacement surgery, and then boom, all better. (It might be a slightly extended "boom")
So what's the point? The wrong diagnosis of the problem led not only to not solving the problem early, but it actually made it worse (loss of muscle mass). The first doctor was right that the joint had problems, but was wrong about why, and while he was right that rest was needed he was wrong about whether or not it would solve the issue.
Likewise, I think it is quite right to say that young men of all races are struggling these days in a real way that, say, specific races are not struggling; the cases are not 1:1. However, understanding why they are struggling takes more than listening to their complaints and repeating them back to them while saying "never change, it isn't your fault." One must actually understand the problems and recognize what can be changed by fixing society and what must be changed by the individual. Of course the individuals always want to hear "everyone needs to change but you," so there are always those willing to say that.
5: Gell-Mann Amnesia: (I always remember this as a special attack effect from a gel-man, where if it hits you you forget things.) Ignoring whether his arguments are in good faith, is BP's evidence "solid"? You have spotted or noted some particulars where he is incorrect (and I have seen many where it is contradictory). Presumably you noticed the errors in the topics where you are knowledgeable personally, but are you sure the errors he makes are ONLY confined to the topics you are personally knowledgeable about? Are you missing other errors because you simply don't know whether they are right or wrong, but just assuming they are correct?
That's the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect: We watch some bloviating head on the news, and catch him making some egregious error on a topic we know about, despite how confidently he speaks as an expert. Then he talks about another topic, and we assume what he is saying is true, because look how confident he seems, and we don't know any differently. But if he spoke confidently when he was totally wrong, why believe his confidence signals accuracy other times? It is as though we completely forgot he was talking BS earlier.
That's the (dark) power of throwing tons of shit at the audience without bothering to tie them together: no one knows enough to counter every point, and hey, some might even be true, so the over all effect is "Wow, he has tons of evidence for his point! Even if some are not really good, the rest is overwhelming."
Well... no, chances are really good the rest is also crap.
I think the upshot of what you say is good, i.e., that even if the situation in which today's young men find themselves is more difficult (at least in some ways) than prior generations, their most beneficial course of action is to stop looking at porn and just try to talk to women in real life and, yes they will get rejected and that will feel bad, but they can keep going and get better at it and eventually find someone with whom they can have a good relationship. Certainly that is better than continuing to look at porn and avoiding real life because it's difficult and then just getting ever more bitter about everything, which is a recipe for a terrible life. If trying involves some risk of failure, not trying increases the risk of failure to 100%. So on a practical level, I do agree completely with that.
Also, you brought up an important point, that this new reality sucks for everyone, male and female, and women are not solely to blame for it. BP is strongly biased towards the male perspective and dismissive of female concerns (even where the female perspective captures some very legitimate points), but given how society has gone to a pro-feminine extreme ("The Future Is Female!"), I think that his bias is understandable in the context of this essay. But yes, it is important to counter the "Future Is Female" wackos, not with an equally unbalanced "The Future Is Male" movement, but with a movement that says, "The Future Is *Human*, Male AND Female."
And what you said about Gell-Mann Amnesia is important. I know I fell for a lot of shit because even though I could spot areas where the regime/mainstream media/so-called experts were wrong about things I knew something about, I still trusted them (very naively) in areas where I knew I was ignorant. So that's a good reminder to be alert to that.
This is a pretty lazy response on your part Doctor Hammer which shows you didn't read the essay closely.
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I'll cover the core of my disagreement and repost it elsewhere.
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I politely engaged with you in the comments section of my Substack on July 26th, we had a friendly back and forth during which I explained the aesthetic design principles of my essay, and how my style was sculpted in imitation of “The Last Psychiatrist”. So I’m surprised to randomly stumble across this Substack viciously castigating myself. At a minimum, you could’ve tagged me to let me respond in a timely fashion.
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You make some basic, amateurish factual claims which are wrong. That's not a problem by itself, we're all human, we all make mistakes, but the mistakes impair your analysis and corrupt the data you're working with.
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1.) You claim in two places the essay Pygmalion and the Anime Girl is "33,000+ avalanche of words" and "Down around word 1,444 of a 33,500+ word essay (if you don't count the image inserts)".
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Sorry, no, the true length is 17,097 words. You're off by 16,000 words. Maybe you're using hyperbole, if I give you the benefit of the doubt. But you can just copy-paste the Substack into a Word document and run an analysis to get the correct number, should take less than a minute.
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2.) You claim that I'm making up a quote, which is extremely lazy, almost to an unbelievable extent:
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"(And who the hell claimed "women are catering to the whims of men"? That isn't referenced in the essay anywhere else, attributed to Hawley or anyone... who are you arguing with, BP?)
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However, women rejecting "the vast majority of men" isn't relevant here, anyway. The graph presented as evidence refers to a particular online dating app, not asking someone out face to face. He seems to intend to show that most people meet online now, and not asking out flesh and blood people. Yet, all the "pass" data comes from Tinder whereas the source of meeting partners is "Met Online," of which Tindr is but a segment1. If he hoped he was providing evidence for his claim that women now reject men at far higher rates, far higher than they ever used to one presumes, he has failed to."
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In point of fact, the quote I'm referencing is mentioned at the beginning of the Substack, during the 3rd paragraph, when Josh Hawley comments, "Don’t make her cater to your whims."
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In the future, I recommend searching a document with the "the Ctrl+F keyboard shortcut" to search for a specific word or phrase, so you can easily find whether phrases are included in a large document.
3.)
You also seem to defend Josh Hawley's ignorance of the dating market, asserting "It seems he considers it Hawley's responsibility to know about this data."
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To which I can only respond, yes. If an adult presumes to give young kids advice about dating, or major life events, it's his responsibility to spend time thinking about actionable, practical solutions which address their existing problems. The alternative is gesture rhetorically, pat yourself on the back, and sabotage the youth by leading them in the wrong direction — which is what he's doing.
//
4.)
You claim in your comments section that I'm engaging in ad hominem attacks, and say, "1: It is absolutely ad hominem. It would point out hypocrisy if Hawley had said "you need to go to the gym" , or if Hawley had been ripped like Jesus when he got married. I see no evidence of either. BP merely stipulates that masculinity requires apparently a certain arm diameter, says Hawley doesn't have it, and so is not masculine, and therefore... ?"
--
and elsewhere, in your comments section:
--
"You know what ad hominem is, or at least I believed you did. I am left either thinking you didn't understand that or were incapable of thinking through it, or you are so eager to defend BP that you bent over backwards trying to justify his bad behavior and compromise yourself in the process.
--
I had expected you to be able to read what was actually written and say "Yea, that was a stupid cheap shot that lessened the work," or something to that effect. That is why I am disappointed."
//
And yes, I'm every bit as vicious and nasty as you claim. I never pretended to be anything other than that. But there's a beautiful irony in you taking the moral high ground, and criticizing ad hominem attacks, asserting that personal insults are dirty cheap shots, while simultaneously you engage in plenty of ad hominem attacks against me — and keep in mind I can do plenty of research into Senator Josh Hawley, he's a public figure, he has years of promotional media available. But you don't know anything about me — my name, age, career, hometown, or marital status. And yet you assert that I'm:
//
a.) "mentally unhealthy", as mentioned in "A partial examination of a mentally unhealthy essay by "BILLIONAIRE PSYCHO"
b.)"That last line, in particular, along with the opening topic of this excessively long essay, is a strong clue as to the motivating event driving the author: he is angry that Hawley said single men should stop spending time on porn and instead go ask women out. How dare he blame men for being single because they spend their time on porn instead of asking women out (and not on Tindr, I would note.)
--
Apparently Hawley touched a nerve."
c.) "A serious person might say those emotions of the downtrodden were perhaps real, but their diagnosis of problem was apparently way off, and this twit bloviating nonsense wasn't doing them any good... Sure, this particular twit might not know what he is talking about, but the phenomenon is true.
d.) "One can see why he makes this error: better to blame impersonal forces outside one's control for one's ability to find a spouse and thus over-indulge in porn than to consider one's own actions might be contributing. Actions such as "not asking women out but rather spending too much time on porn." It isn't that you don't ask flesh and blood women out on dates, but rather the economy that keeps you from dating."
e.) "BP's argument is that you are either the alpha male who gets all the women like him, or you get zero."
//
Doctor Hammer, you can claim that ad hominem attacks are disrespectful and unacceptable — a failure in logical analysis, the product of weak rhetoric which latches on to personal flaws rather than dealing with substance. Or you can smear me with ad hominem attacks as much as you choose (which I note, you are doing so from a place of total ignorance in regards to my personal situation, as opposed to my focused research into a public figure).
--
Either way, I don't take any criticism personally. We're all strangers pontificating on the Internet, and exploring ideas, which hopefully leads towards some aspirational outcomes.
--
But it's bizarre, and incoherent for you to reject ad hominem insults as an unfair rhetorical tactic, and then to use them yourself. I do take great pleasure in this sort of social comedy.
–
It's also funny self-parody that you claim I'm a porn-addicted loser who can't get a date, and is too much of a coward to approach a beautiful woman in public, but also simultaneously a ruthless "alpha male who gets all the women."
--
You seem to be missing the point... the brutal game-theory of a defect-defect equilibrium causes a bifurcation in the aggregate results, because it's a WINNER-TAKE-ALL SYSTEM. You seem unable to process the concept that even someone who wins in a dysfunctional ecosystem could be deeply troubled by social problems while personally benefiting from social decay.
--
In fairness, you seemed to miss every point I made in this essay, starting with the opening paragraphs, to the dating graphs, to the mythology and media dissection, to the origins of the past century’s power structures. If you find it objectionable that there's a connection between muscles and masculinity, I despair of any prospect of explaining to you how complex macroeconomics interact together over the course of centuries on an industrial scale.
--
Honestly, you indicate a deep cluelessness about athleticism and social behavior among groups when you ask the question, "BP merely stipulates that masculinity requires apparently a certain arm diameter, says Hawley doesn't have it, and so is not masculine, and therefore... ?"
--
Likewise, when you question, "Social media is industrial?"
--
I simply ask myself — How am I supposed to explain how fiber-optic cables and vast, transcontinental electrical networks created social media as an accidental byproduct? How am I supposed to explain semiconductor factories and global supply chains which provide every teenager with a smartphone, a pocket camera broadcasting subtle variants of mental illness? This is a very abstract and technologically complex subject. If you are making basic mistakes in reading an essay, I'm not sure how to verbally condense the mechanized interworkings of industrial technology, and how social media functions in physical terms.
--
//
5.) Lazy analysis — it's surprising to me that you write here that you don't understand a Bible verse, and yet you don't bother to do a basic Google search to find the passage. You say, "Then BP claims modern religion tries to glorify women at the expense of men which... what the hell has that to do with the previous points? Oh, the single line about "women being created in the image of God" which isn't apparently perfectly accurate (or is it? the quoted passage from the Bible is unclear). Where the hell is this going?"
--
But I clearly cited the relevant Bible verses, 1st Corinthians 11:7-9
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Corinthians%207&version=NIV
--
I don't understand why you didn't just read 1st Corinthians 11 to figure out what the passage means.
--
And yes, Senator Josh Hawley is at a large Christian event, making a Biblical argument, referencing a key passage of Scripture. He's referencing Genesis 1:26-28, when God created Adam and Eve "in the image of God". Literally this is the first Chapter of the Bible, it's a foundational text of Western Civilization, everyone who speaks English should be familiar with this passage, and I find it perplexing you are confused by this reference.
--
Later religious teachers criticized and clarified this passage, which speaks to the origins of humanity, and the biological purpose of LIFE itself, which is to be fruitful and multiply. In other words, to have sex and procreate.
--
Quotation:
"Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals,[a] and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”
--
27 So God created mankind in his own image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.
—Genesis 1:26-28
--
I just find it weird that you would stumble across this, not bother to dig into the source materials, then accuse me of ignorance and incoherence.
--
6.) Repeatedly, you contradict yourself. Simultaneously you argue that my Substack is too long, and not long enough. You claim that "Pygmalion and the Anime Girl" is an excessive length, nobody can sit thru a massive essay of this size (I will note here that more than 20,000 readers have viewed it). And at the same time you argue that I lack evidence for my position, that I don't bother presenting sufficient evidence to justify the extensive propositions and assertions presented here.
--
Here you argue my essay is too long:
a.) "I find this sort of work repugnant, even if I agree with many of the general themes. Indeed, perhaps because I agree. If you have time for a two hour podcast and a 33,000+ avalanche of words"
b.) "what the hell has that to do with the previous points? Oh, the single line about "women being created in the image of God" which isn't apparently perfectly accurate (or is it? the quoted passage from the Bible is unclear). Where the hell is this going?
--
Oh... eventually he gets to the point that women tend to reject a lot of men, and apparently there is data detailing how much."
c.) "That last line, in particular, along with the opening topic of this excessively long essay, is a strong clue as to the motivating event driving the author: he is angry that Hawley said single men should stop spending time on porn and instead go ask women out."
--
Here you argue that I didn't bother to show evidence:
--
a.) "The graph presented as evidence refers to a particular online dating app, not asking someone out face to face. He seems to intend to show that most people meet online now, and not asking out flesh and blood people. Yet, all the "pass" data comes from Tinder whereas the source of meeting partners is "Met Online," of which Tindr is but a segment1. If he hoped he was providing evidence for his claim that women now reject men at far higher rates, far higher than they ever used to one presumes, he has failed to."
b.) "The evidence for women being the reason for this disintegration of the family is a statistic that 70% of divorces are initiated by women. Why might that be other than women being at fault?"
c.)"Then of course we get another assertion that is simply wrong. (One suspects that a more focused essay with more thought put into the claims and their truth value might help avoid these problems.)"
d.)"The images of Tweets he chooses to highlight this point are another good example of the loose thinking, the "well emotionally it feels right, so it is probably true" approach."
e.) "I note he doesn’t bother to note what the incomes of those 1990’s middle class people are, either."
f.)"Moreover, we are left with no way to check whether what he is claiming is true. Focus on the emotion, not the reason."
g.) "What is "our culture's sexual dysfunction?" Is that related directly to its economic problems? If so, how? Is it related to women being more picky and nasty now than in some previous era you had in mind?"
h.)"Our poisoned ecosystem is destroying happy relationships? Where the hell did that come from? I thought people couldn't form happy relationships from the get go, but now they existed and are being destroyed by the ecosystem?
--
And what the hell is the rest of that? Do you intend to explain or demonstrate what you mean, perhaps with examples, BP?
--
No. No he does not.
--
Thus dies the hope of a coherent argument emerging from this rant as the author shifts into full on "state everything I perceive as wrong with the world," mode."
i.)"I am going to stop here for a moment, as my brain starts to scream "What the actual fuck am I reading about?" This essay so far (my description is now up to a bit over 18,000 words into the essay after the swarm of fever dream stream of consciousness) is a great example of how semi-coherent mindless bullshit can trick the sympathetic audience member."
//
I note again, you're failing at counting basic arithmetic Doctor Hammer, the Substack doesn't have 18,000 words.
//
j.)"The expected emotional beats are there, and words that are shaped into something resemble dialogue, spoken in an order that appears to be related to the progression of the story as shown by the scenes that seem to follow logically from one to another. But then you step back and think about it for a moment and realize hey, this part doesn't quite make sense, and this doesn't really follow... What those sympathetic hearts do not notice, however, is that they are making it all up; in their desire to give the author the benefit of the doubt, they are doing the author's job for them, and writing a coherent narrative that is not present in the actual work itself. Those dots don’t connect, those reasons are not reasonable, and the meaning isn’t there."
--
Billionaire Psycho's essay, brings out the same behavior."
k.)"So what does BP mean when he says "the end of cheap energy" and blames much of the current economic problems on it? Doesn't matter, just insert whatever you think it means such that it makes his story coherent.
--
Do his claims and statistics hold up in how he combines them? Well... we can assume he really means to say something slightly different.
--
Is this coherent at all? Well, no, not really, but it is directionally true."
--
l.)"When we want to agree with people, whether because they are like us, are expressing frustrations we share, or otherwise saying that which we want to be true, we have a very strong motivation to take everything that they say in the most beneficial light. We paper over holes in arguments, we assume we know what they mean when they say something nonsensical, we give them a pass on factual errors as "nonessential to the argument" when they say things we know are wrong. At the extreme end, we assume that what they are saying must be really profound and deep, and we just can't quite grasp it all yet."
m.)"I agree that there are many problems with our society, and the dating process is worse now than it was, for a number of reasons. This essay/article/poem/small book, whatever it is, does not, however, provide anything valuable, and instead is the intellectual equivalent of junk food. It triggers all the emotional responses, the shape and the feel of reasoning and value while providing none of the actual value of intellectual activity, just as a sugary donut triggers all those fun food feelings without actually providing real sustenance. Whether intentionally or not it preys on those who want to agree with it, pretending to reveal truth but instead just telling you what you want to hear.
--
It is in fact just Woke style propaganda, but for those on the right."
I don't think its ad hominem. Hawley isn't making an argument, he is offering advice. Whether or not this advice is valuable can only really be determined by his credibility. His lack of gains speaks to this and to his character, so it is relevant. Not a reason to disregard what he says entirely, just one of many considerations that can be used to indicate how sound his advice may be.
I am disappointed in you, Grant.
why? we should take this to slack btw, I'm not getting notifications on comments for some reason, the only reason I saw this is because I left the page up after commenting.
So sure, it is advice. Is it true that the advice being valuable can REALLY only be determined by the credibility of the person giving it? No other way to evaluate that? It's argument from authority or nothing? I doubt you really believe that, and if so, why write it?
Now, it is true that when someone makes a claim that is largely backed up by assumed expertise or authority, like Hawley is doing for the most part as presented, that one should reasonably consider whether they are an authority or otherwise have the expertise. If someone is telling you how to maintain your car, and their car is a piece of shit that is falling apart due to improper maintenance, it is quite reasonable to discount their advice.
So is Hawley giving advice on how to get "gains?" Is that what BP is writing about? No. Hawley's advice is about how to get a girlfriend. Considering he is married with kids, as BP points out, he has at least managed to achieve the end he is giving advice about. Apparently even with skinny arms.
So the credibility and advice angle is wrong. What about character?
Please explain, in detail, just exactly what having skinny arms says about his character that is relevant to the proposition that young men who want to have wives or girlfriends need to spend less time on porn and more time on asking out women.
That is why I am disappointed in you, Grant. You know what ad hominem is, or at least I believed you did. I am left either thinking you didn't understand that or were incapable of thinking through it, or you are so eager to defend BP that you bent over backwards trying to justify his bad behavior and compromise yourself in the process.
I had expected you to be able to read what was actually written and say "Yea, that was a stupid cheap shot that lessened the work," or something to that effect. That is why I am disappointed.
This is a pretty lazy response on your part Doctor Hammer which shows you didn't read the essay closely.
//
I'll cover the core of my disagreement and repost it elsewhere.
//
I politely engaged with you in the comments section of my Substack on July 26th, we had a friendly back and forth during which I explained the aesthetic design principles of my essay, and how my style was sculpted in imitation of “The Last Psychiatrist”. So I’m surprised to randomly stumble across this Substack viciously castigating myself. At a minimum, you could’ve tagged me to let me respond in a timely fashion.
//
You make some basic, amateurish factual claims which are wrong. That's not a problem by itself, we're all human, we all make mistakes, but the mistakes impair your analysis and corrupt the data you're working with.
//
1.) You claim in two places the essay Pygmalion and the Anime Girl is "33,000+ avalanche of words" and "Down around word 1,444 of a 33,500+ word essay (if you don't count the image inserts)".
//
Sorry, no, the true length is 17,097 words. You're off by 16,000 words. Maybe you're using hyperbole, if I give you the benefit of the doubt. But you can just copy-paste the Substack into a Word document and run an analysis to get the correct number, should take less than a minute.
//
2.) You claim that I'm making up a quote, which is extremely lazy, almost to an unbelievable extent:
//
"(And who the hell claimed "women are catering to the whims of men"? That isn't referenced in the essay anywhere else, attributed to Hawley or anyone... who are you arguing with, BP?)
--
However, women rejecting "the vast majority of men" isn't relevant here, anyway. The graph presented as evidence refers to a particular online dating app, not asking someone out face to face. He seems to intend to show that most people meet online now, and not asking out flesh and blood people. Yet, all the "pass" data comes from Tinder whereas the source of meeting partners is "Met Online," of which Tindr is but a segment1. If he hoped he was providing evidence for his claim that women now reject men at far higher rates, far higher than they ever used to one presumes, he has failed to."
//
In point of fact, the quote I'm referencing is mentioned at the beginning of the Substack, during the 3rd paragraph, when Josh Hawley comments, "Don’t make her cater to your whims."
//
In the future, I recommend searching a document with the "the Ctrl+F keyboard shortcut" to search for a specific word or phrase, so you can easily find whether phrases are included in a large document.
3.)
You also seem to defend Josh Hawley's ignorance of the dating market, asserting "It seems he considers it Hawley's responsibility to know about this data."
//
To which I can only respond, yes. If an adult presumes to give young kids advice about dating, or major life events, it's his responsibility to spend time thinking about actionable, practical solutions which address their existing problems. The alternative is gesture rhetorically, pat yourself on the back, and sabotage the youth by leading them in the wrong direction — which is what he's doing.
//
4.)
You claim in your comments section that I'm engaging in ad hominem attacks, and say, "1: It is absolutely ad hominem. It would point out hypocrisy if Hawley had said "you need to go to the gym" , or if Hawley had been ripped like Jesus when he got married. I see no evidence of either. BP merely stipulates that masculinity requires apparently a certain arm diameter, says Hawley doesn't have it, and so is not masculine, and therefore... ?"
--
and elsewhere, in your comments section:
--
"You know what ad hominem is, or at least I believed you did. I am left either thinking you didn't understand that or were incapable of thinking through it, or you are so eager to defend BP that you bent over backwards trying to justify his bad behavior and compromise yourself in the process.
--
I had expected you to be able to read what was actually written and say "Yea, that was a stupid cheap shot that lessened the work," or something to that effect. That is why I am disappointed."
//
And yes, I'm every bit as vicious and nasty as you claim. I never pretended to be anything other than that. But there's a beautiful irony in you taking the moral high ground, and criticizing ad hominem attacks, asserting that personal insults are dirty cheap shots, while simultaneously you engage in plenty of ad hominem attacks against me — and keep in mind I can do plenty of research into Senator Josh Hawley, he's a public figure, he has years of promotional media available. But you don't know anything about me — my name, age, career, hometown, or marital status. And yet you assert that I'm:
Your critique returned me to this essay (which I skimmed in full) and I started wondering, why exactly it became so popular. It is an arduous read, actually, due to sheer volume and also due to dizzy feeling one gets from connecting the dots for the author, who just keeps throwing them at you. To what need does it cater? And what does it help to escape? What pain makes withstanding this avalanche of words preferable?
Maybe this is about frustration due to the lack of actionable plan. Imagine some guy feeling sad and unsatisifed with his life. Let's assume he decided to shoulder the responsibility for his life and looks for means to improve it. He read pilosophy and it proved enlightening, but in the end it was all attitude. He went to gym and started lifting and doing cardio, but in the end it only improved his health. He went to therapy and worked through some past negative experiences,and learned some communication and coping skills, but some problems and internal struggles persisted. He started his journey a sad man, and now he was a mentally and physically fit sad man with an attitude. He could try other leads: religion, history, helping others, excelling at work. All this wouldn't make the sadness go.
There was no working plan out there. And our guy ends up on the couch, reading BP's essay. It wasn't that good of a read but provided a brief respite from his search, that adds frustration on top of sadness. A simple and free way to delay a start on another trek, that promises an upward spiral, but ends up being another circle around the void inside.
A bowl of ice cream would probably provide the same respite, take a lot less time, and probably be less damaging to his over all life.
But then, I really like ice cream and really hate sloppy thinking :)
I think the big danger with this sort of writing not only that it doesn't have an actionable plan, but really goes further and implies that there is NO plan one should have: all the changes need to be made by the outside world, not the audience member. What the young men in question are doing is a perfectly correct response to the world as it is, and unless the world changes first they shouldn't change behavior at all. That is advice both appealing and damaging to the reader.
Damaging indeed. Much like excessive consumption of junk food or junk erotic, this is a gateway to addiction. And if there is an addict, then there is a producer and dealer of addictive material.
Eat less ice cream, lift more weights. Your life will improve.
Thank you for this. I read the BP essay and thought "this dude hates women, no wonder guys find it hard to find dates if they actively dislike the persons that they are seeking to date". I'm with JBP - if we want to get dates then we should be more attractive and certainly less hateful. An attitude that has worked actual wonders.
The essay immediayely reminded me of the green wall of text memes. Memories of cerebral leftist critique sprang to mind immediately after finishing that slog.
Women are not made in the image of God they are made in the image of man. There are no female angels or females in heaven. All angels are celibate except for the ones who did the incursion and had sex with human women hence the need to take human wives.
I don't want to argue Christian theology, but I will note that the Book of Enoch was not canon, last I checked. Nor are angels having sex bits even relevant in most sections, seeing as how they are generally odd collections of eyes and wings and crazy bits. How Christians want to argue over it is their business so far as I am concerned, however.
It's arguably there in Genesis with the men of renown. There are also references to giant men in a number of places, men as tall as cedar trees and repharim.
This is a pretty lazy response on your part Doctor Hammer which shows you didn't read the essay closely.
//
I'll cover the core of my disagreement and repost it elsewhere.
//
I politely engaged with you in the comments section of my Substack on July 26th, we had a friendly back and forth during which I explained the aesthetic design principles of my essay, and how my style was sculpted in imitation of “The Last Psychiatrist”. So I’m surprised to randomly stumble across this Substack viciously castigating myself. At a minimum, you could’ve tagged me to let me respond in a timely fashion.
//
You make some basic, amateurish factual claims which are wrong. That's not a problem by itself, we're all human, we all make mistakes, but the mistakes impair your analysis and corrupt the data you're working with.
//
1.) You claim in two places the essay Pygmalion and the Anime Girl is "33,000+ avalanche of words" and "Down around word 1,444 of a 33,500+ word essay (if you don't count the image inserts)".
//
Sorry, no, the true length is 17,097 words. You're off by 16,000 words. Maybe you're using hyperbole, if I give you the benefit of the doubt. But you can just copy-paste the Substack into a Word document and run an analysis to get the correct number, should take less than a minute.
//
2.) You claim that I'm making up a quote, which is extremely lazy, almost to an unbelievable extent:
//
"(And who the hell claimed "women are catering to the whims of men"? That isn't referenced in the essay anywhere else, attributed to Hawley or anyone... who are you arguing with, BP?)
--
However, women rejecting "the vast majority of men" isn't relevant here, anyway. The graph presented as evidence refers to a particular online dating app, not asking someone out face to face. He seems to intend to show that most people meet online now, and not asking out flesh and blood people. Yet, all the "pass" data comes from Tinder whereas the source of meeting partners is "Met Online," of which Tindr is but a segment1. If he hoped he was providing evidence for his claim that women now reject men at far higher rates, far higher than they ever used to one presumes, he has failed to."
//
In point of fact, the quote I'm referencing is mentioned at the beginning of the Substack, during the 3rd paragraph, when Josh Hawley comments, "Don’t make her cater to your whims."
//
In the future, I recommend searching a document with the "the Ctrl+F keyboard shortcut" to search for a specific word or phrase, so you can easily find whether phrases are included in a large document.
3.)
You also seem to defend Josh Hawley's ignorance of the dating market, asserting "It seems he considers it Hawley's responsibility to know about this data."
//
To which I can only respond, yes. If an adult presumes to give young kids advice about dating, or major life events, it's his responsibility to spend time thinking about actionable, practical solutions which address their existing problems. The alternative is gesture rhetorically, pat yourself on the back, and sabotage the youth by leading them in the wrong direction — which is what he's doing.
//
4.)
You claim in your comments section that I'm engaging in ad hominem attacks, and say, "1: It is absolutely ad hominem. It would point out hypocrisy if Hawley had said "you need to go to the gym" , or if Hawley had been ripped like Jesus when he got married. I see no evidence of either. BP merely stipulates that masculinity requires apparently a certain arm diameter, says Hawley doesn't have it, and so is not masculine, and therefore... ?"
--
and elsewhere, in your comments section:
--
"You know what ad hominem is, or at least I believed you did. I am left either thinking you didn't understand that or were incapable of thinking through it, or you are so eager to defend BP that you bent over backwards trying to justify his bad behavior and compromise yourself in the process.
--
I had expected you to be able to read what was actually written and say "Yea, that was a stupid cheap shot that lessened the work," or something to that effect. That is why I am disappointed."
//
And yes, I'm every bit as vicious and nasty as you claim. I never pretended to be anything other than that. But there's a beautiful irony in you taking the moral high ground, and criticizing ad hominem attacks, asserting that personal insults are dirty cheap shots, while simultaneously you engage in plenty of ad hominem attacks against me — and keep in mind I can do plenty of research into Senator Josh Hawley, he's a public figure, he has years of promotional media available. But you don't know anything about me — my name, age, career, hometown, or marital status. And yet you assert that I'm:
//
a.) "mentally unhealthy", as mentioned in "A partial examination of a mentally unhealthy essay by "BILLIONAIRE PSYCHO"
b.)"That last line, in particular, along with the opening topic of this excessively long essay, is a strong clue as to the motivating event driving the author: he is angry that Hawley said single men should stop spending time on porn and instead go ask women out. How dare he blame men for being single because they spend their time on porn instead of asking women out (and not on Tindr, I would note.)
--
Apparently Hawley touched a nerve."
c.) "A serious person might say those emotions of the downtrodden were perhaps real, but their diagnosis of problem was apparently way off, and this twit bloviating nonsense wasn't doing them any good... Sure, this particular twit might not know what he is talking about, but the phenomenon is true.
d.) "One can see why he makes this error: better to blame impersonal forces outside one's control for one's ability to find a spouse and thus over-indulge in porn than to consider one's own actions might be contributing. Actions such as "not asking women out but rather spending too much time on porn." It isn't that you don't ask flesh and blood women out on dates, but rather the economy that keeps you from dating."
e.) "BP's argument is that you are either the alpha male who gets all the women like him, or you get zero."
//
Doctor Hammer, you can claim that ad hominem attacks are disrespectful and unacceptable — a failure in logical analysis, the product of weak rhetoric which latches on to personal flaws rather than dealing with substance. Or you can smear me with ad hominem attacks as much as you choose (which I note, you are doing so from a place of total ignorance in regards to my personal situation, as opposed to my focused research into a public figure).
--
Either way, I don't take any criticism personally. We're all strangers pontificating on the Internet, and exploring ideas, which hopefully leads towards some aspirational outcomes.
--
But it's bizarre, and incoherent for you to reject ad hominem insults as an unfair rhetorical tactic, and then to use them yourself. I do take great pleasure in this sort of social comedy.
–
It's also funny self-parody that you claim I'm a porn-addicted loser who can't get a date, and is too much of a coward to approach a beautiful woman in public, but also simultaneously a ruthless "alpha male who gets all the women."
--
You seem to be missing the point... the brutal game-theory of a defect-defect equilibrium causes a bifurcation in the aggregate results, because it's a WINNER-TAKE-ALL SYSTEM. You seem unable to process the concept that even someone who wins in a dysfunctional ecosystem could be deeply troubled by social problems while personally benefiting from social decay.
--
In fairness, you seemed to miss every point I made in this essay, starting with the opening paragraphs, to the dating graphs, to the mythology and media dissection, to the origins of the past century’s power structures. If you find it objectionable that there's a connection between muscles and masculinity, I despair of any prospect of explaining to you how complex macroeconomics interact together over the course of centuries on an industrial scale.
--
Honestly, you indicate a deep cluelessness about athleticism and social behavior among groups when you ask the question, "BP merely stipulates that masculinity requires apparently a certain arm diameter, says Hawley doesn't have it, and so is not masculine, and therefore... ?"
--
Likewise, when you question, "Social media is industrial?"
--
I simply ask myself — How am I supposed to explain how fiber-optic cables and vast, transcontinental electrical networks created social media as an accidental byproduct? How am I supposed to explain semiconductor factories and global supply chains which provide every teenager with a smartphone, a pocket camera broadcasting subtle variants of mental illness? This is a very abstract and technologically complex subject. If you are making basic mistakes in reading an essay, I'm not sure how to verbally condense the mechanized interworkings of industrial technology, and how social media functions in physical terms.
--
//
5.) Lazy analysis — it's surprising to me that you write here that you don't understand a Bible verse, and yet you don't bother to do a basic Google search to find the passage. You say, "Then BP claims modern religion tries to glorify women at the expense of men which... what the hell has that to do with the previous points? Oh, the single line about "women being created in the image of God" which isn't apparently perfectly accurate (or is it? the quoted passage from the Bible is unclear). Where the hell is this going?"
--
But I clearly cited the relevant Bible verses, 1st Corinthians 11:7-9
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Corinthians%207&version=NIV
--
I don't understand why you didn't just read 1st Corinthians 11 to figure out what the passage means.
--
And yes, Senator Josh Hawley is at a large Christian event, making a Biblical argument, referencing a key passage of Scripture. He's referencing Genesis 1:26-28, when God created Adam and Eve "in the image of God". Literally this is the first Chapter of the Bible, it's a foundational text of Western Civilization, everyone who speaks English should be familiar with this passage, and I find it perplexing you are confused by this reference.
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Later religious teachers criticized and clarified this passage, which speaks to the origins of humanity, and the biological purpose of LIFE itself, which is to be fruitful and multiply. In other words, to have sex and procreate.
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Quotation:
"Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals,[a] and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”
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27 So God created mankind in his own image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.
—Genesis 1:26-28
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I just find it weird that you would stumble across this, not bother to dig into the source materials, then accuse me of ignorance and incoherence.
--
6.) Repeatedly, you contradict yourself. Simultaneously you argue that my Substack is too long, and not long enough. You claim that "Pygmalion and the Anime Girl" is an excessive length, nobody can sit thru a massive essay of this size (I will note here that more than 20,000 readers have viewed it). And at the same time you argue that I lack evidence for my position, that I don't bother presenting sufficient evidence to justify the extensive propositions and assertions presented here.
--
Here you argue my essay is too long:
a.) "I find this sort of work repugnant, even if I agree with many of the general themes. Indeed, perhaps because I agree. If you have time for a two hour podcast and a 33,000+ avalanche of words"
b.) "what the hell has that to do with the previous points? Oh, the single line about "women being created in the image of God" which isn't apparently perfectly accurate (or is it? the quoted passage from the Bible is unclear). Where the hell is this going?
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Oh... eventually he gets to the point that women tend to reject a lot of men, and apparently there is data detailing how much."
c.) "That last line, in particular, along with the opening topic of this excessively long essay, is a strong clue as to the motivating event driving the author: he is angry that Hawley said single men should stop spending time on porn and instead go ask women out."
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Here you argue that I didn't bother to show evidence:
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a.) "The graph presented as evidence refers to a particular online dating app, not asking someone out face to face. He seems to intend to show that most people meet online now, and not asking out flesh and blood people. Yet, all the "pass" data comes from Tinder whereas the source of meeting partners is "Met Online," of which Tindr is but a segment1. If he hoped he was providing evidence for his claim that women now reject men at far higher rates, far higher than they ever used to one presumes, he has failed to."
b.) "The evidence for women being the reason for this disintegration of the family is a statistic that 70% of divorces are initiated by women. Why might that be other than women being at fault?"
c.)"Then of course we get another assertion that is simply wrong. (One suspects that a more focused essay with more thought put into the claims and their truth value might help avoid these problems.)"
d.)"The images of Tweets he chooses to highlight this point are another good example of the loose thinking, the "well emotionally it feels right, so it is probably true" approach."
e.) "I note he doesn’t bother to note what the incomes of those 1990’s middle class people are, either."
f.)"Moreover, we are left with no way to check whether what he is claiming is true. Focus on the emotion, not the reason."
g.) "What is "our culture's sexual dysfunction?" Is that related directly to its economic problems? If so, how? Is it related to women being more picky and nasty now than in some previous era you had in mind?"
h.)"Our poisoned ecosystem is destroying happy relationships? Where the hell did that come from? I thought people couldn't form happy relationships from the get go, but now they existed and are being destroyed by the ecosystem?
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And what the hell is the rest of that? Do you intend to explain or demonstrate what you mean, perhaps with examples, BP?
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No. No he does not.
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Thus dies the hope of a coherent argument emerging from this rant as the author shifts into full on "state everything I perceive as wrong with the world," mode."
i.)"I am going to stop here for a moment, as my brain starts to scream "What the actual fuck am I reading about?" This essay so far (my description is now up to a bit over 18,000 words into the essay after the swarm of fever dream stream of consciousness) is a great example of how semi-coherent mindless bullshit can trick the sympathetic audience member."
//
I note again, you're failing at counting basic arithmetic Doctor Hammer, the Substack doesn't have 18,000 words.
//
j.)"The expected emotional beats are there, and words that are shaped into something resemble dialogue, spoken in an order that appears to be related to the progression of the story as shown by the scenes that seem to follow logically from one to another. But then you step back and think about it for a moment and realize hey, this part doesn't quite make sense, and this doesn't really follow... What those sympathetic hearts do not notice, however, is that they are making it all up; in their desire to give the author the benefit of the doubt, they are doing the author's job for them, and writing a coherent narrative that is not present in the actual work itself. Those dots don’t connect, those reasons are not reasonable, and the meaning isn’t there."
--
Billionaire Psycho's essay, brings out the same behavior."
k.)"So what does BP mean when he says "the end of cheap energy" and blames much of the current economic problems on it? Doesn't matter, just insert whatever you think it means such that it makes his story coherent.
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Do his claims and statistics hold up in how he combines them? Well... we can assume he really means to say something slightly different.
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Is this coherent at all? Well, no, not really, but it is directionally true."
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l.)"When we want to agree with people, whether because they are like us, are expressing frustrations we share, or otherwise saying that which we want to be true, we have a very strong motivation to take everything that they say in the most beneficial light. We paper over holes in arguments, we assume we know what they mean when they say something nonsensical, we give them a pass on factual errors as "nonessential to the argument" when they say things we know are wrong. At the extreme end, we assume that what they are saying must be really profound and deep, and we just can't quite grasp it all yet."
m.)"I agree that there are many problems with our society, and the dating process is worse now than it was, for a number of reasons. This essay/article/poem/small book, whatever it is, does not, however, provide anything valuable, and instead is the intellectual equivalent of junk food. It triggers all the emotional responses, the shape and the feel of reasoning and value while providing none of the actual value of intellectual activity, just as a sugary donut triggers all those fun food feelings without actually providing real sustenance. Whether intentionally or not it preys on those who want to agree with it, pretending to reveal truth but instead just telling you what you want to hear.
--
It is in fact just Woke style propaganda, but for those on the right."
//
But you seem to lack self-awareness, Doctor Hammer, because while you excoriate the academic rigor of my thesis, I note that you fail to live up to your own evidentiary standard. The statistical, sociological claims you make in this Substack are pure emotional projection and vague allusions to personal anecdotes, without any proof comparable to what I presented myself. You simply expect your readers to accept your nebulous, unsupported assertions that:
//
a.) "Considering most people only date one other person at a time, rejecting the majority of those interested is expected. Most people who marry only do so once, which implies they reject the majority of those who they have ever dated, just as they rejected the vast majority of everyone of the appropriate sex they met as dating partners."
b.)"Well, one might consider why one initiates divorce. Infidelity, drug and alcohol abuse, and physical abuse come to mind immediately. Which sex is more likely to commit those, leading to the other spouse to initiate divorce, I wonder... I wonder, but apparently BP doesn't."
c.) "Skinny arms are a symptom of genetics and less time spent making ones arms bigger. One aspect is beyond ones control, but another is not."
//
Laughable fitness advice here, Doctor Hammer. Professional sports is a science, muscle building is measurable, you're clearly ignoring hundreds of millions of dollars invested into organizations such as the NFL and their athletic trainers.
//
d.)"Although I am unsure as to the exact position of politics and culture relative to each other, leaning towards politics being mostly downstream of culture, I am quite certain that culture is not downstream of economics, nor economics downstream of technology. All three are mutually interacting, like any good complex adaptive system."
e.)"I was a teenager in the 90's and I knew precious few people who went overseas every 5 years. Zero, in fact. And today, save the overseas holiday and adding in a few more road trips, that pretty much describes my household, and we make a hell of a lot less than 400k$ (unless my wife is really holding out on me.) "
f.)"It is entirely possible Mr. Shell has a very specific idea in mind. Maybe he is talking middle class in and relative to coastal California or NYC, both places which have seen costs of living get extremely high extremely quickly. For the big cities in general that might be true. But lots of the population doesn't live in the major big cities, so we should be a bit careful there."
g.)"To be fair, I think it is largely true that the economy is worse now than a lot of people credit. Many things are more expensive, particularly things like health care, college, housing, food and child care. This is partially masked by the decrease in the cost of consumer goods. In other words, the less regulated or government subsidized industries are doing great in terms of "better quality for less money" while the more regulated and subsidized industries are the opposite, at best pulling off "questionable quality improvements for a lot more money." Again, much of these numbers are driven by urban areas, but health care and college prices know no geographical boundaries. Especially as the official inflation numbers don't generally include food, energy or housing prices in a way buyers would recognize, I am very sympathetic to arguments that actual inflation, particularly in specific areas of the country, is far greater than the official numbers would imply."
//
The truth is that yes, Pygmalion and the Anime Girl is a long essay. I designed it to be read in 4-5 sessions, and I was shocked so many people read it in a single morning. The Substack is punctuated by numerous pictures, which provide an easy stopping point for readers to quit reading, return later, and remember where they stopped reading.
--
I provided more than 140 images — these included photos, artwork, Twitter poasts, news headlines, and statistical graphs. It's incoherent for you to claim that I failed to offer any evidence. You are always welcome to disagree, and I'm certainly not perfect. But again, I find it quite strange that you argue both sides of the issue, and simultaneously criticize excessive length but a lack of evidence.
//
I will end by noting that the section “Female Exhaustion” devoted more than a thousand words to a sympathetic portrayal of the difficulties women experience in the modern dating scene. Numerous women reached out to me to express how deeply “Pygmalion and the Anime Girl” reflected their personal struggles with heartbreak, loneliness, and the desire for a passionate romance — a few suggested that I take them on dates, and messaged me their phone numbers. Flattering, but I politely declined.
–
I also spoke with numerous young men who felt this essay personally spoke to them, and provoked deep thought as to their romantic futures. Even men in their 40s and 50s felt a similar reaction, whether entrepreneurs who had waited decades to establish their fortunes before searching for a life partner, or recently divorced men who were horrified by the dating scene. One man told me that he was newly divorced, he remembered what it was like to be a bachelor 15 years ago, and he felt as if a nuclear bomb had gone off in the sexual dating scene, because the women he was encountering were bitter, abrasive, sad, lonely, and full of a deep rage based on the accumulated years of failed relationships.
–
This is the dismal, widespread reality you are blind to — but for your sake, I pray that you continue to be blind, and never are forced to suffer these kinds of experiences yourself. Ignorance is bliss, and I hope you retain your contented prosperity.
–
Congratulations Doctor Hammer that you seem to be happily married. I of course wish you the best. I think you’re a good guy, simply naive and ill-mannered. Your inability to piece together economic trends is an intellectual failure, not a moral character flaw.
...are we on 6 still? Let's stick with 6.
Ok, wait, this is funny... too funny to just answer front to back. How should I start...
a. "Considering most people only date one other person at a time, rejecting the majority of those interested is expected. Most people who marry only do so once, which implies they reject the majority of those who they have ever dated, just as they rejected the vast majority of everyone of the appropriate sex they met as dating partners."
I... this is apparently "pure emotional projection and vague allusions to personal anecdotes, without any proof comparable to what [BP] presented [himself]."
Is there a part of the country I am unaware of where most people marry multiple times? Is it actually crazy to say that most people date fewer people than they know, and marry fewer people than they date? I am trying to imagine the world in which that isn't true and even the strangest San Fran polycule thing seems to bear it out in at least the broad outlines.
b: You seem to be misunderstanding how burden of proof works. You are claiming that 70% of women initiating divorce is meaningful to your argument. When one can off the top of their head come up with reasons why divorce initiation might be one sided, and they are pretty self evident (or at least really easy to google as 'what causes divorce?') those need to be ruled out as relevant before one can claim that the 70% number is relevant.
c: "Professional sports is a science, muscle building is measurable, you're clearly ignoring hundreds of millions of dollars invested into organizations such as the NFL and their athletic trainers."
Are you seriously contending that just ANYONE can play in the NFL if they just exercise enough? Genetics has nothing to do with it? Because if you read the sentence you quoted again I say "Skinny arms are a symptom of genetics and less time spent making ones arms bigger. One aspect is beyond ones control, but another is not."
Either you misread that or are wildly unaware of the role genetics plays in top tier athletic performance.
d: Fair enough, I thought it was obvious on the face of it, but maybe I will write an essay on the matter. Of course, you ought to do the same if you want to use it as an important point to your argument.
e: So, again, some asshole saying what he thought a middle class lifestyle was in the 90's in a Tweet is sufficiently debunked by another asshole saying something different. If you want to support the claim you need actual proof, not just some twitter guy asserting things.
f: Which point here are you contending as untrue? CA and NYC seeing large cost of living increases? Major cities? Lots of the population not living in major cities?
g: Again, what are you contending here? This is pretty general and basic stuff, although maybe with more of an economics bent than most people know off hand. The most contentious part I would guess would be that highly regulated or government subsidized industries are those doing the worst and the less regulated the best, but that was contained in one of your own graphs (although not explicitly described as such in the graph.)
Overall point: 140 images is not "evidence" when it is a collection of assertions by people on Twitter, photos, or artwork, nor news headlines or statistical graphs that contradict your point or only tangentially relate to it. Length is not the same as evidence. You put in a lot, but it doesn't support conclusion you are trying to draw. You could throw in a recipe for chocolate chip cookies and it would make it longer but not provide evidence of your claim.
Just throwing everything together in a big pile does not an argument supported by evidence make.
Now yes, I think a lot of people would feel moved by this; I spent quite a bit of time arguing with people right here that did. My point is that it is wrong, not that it isn't moving, or that there is not a problem with our society. Right up that the top of my essay I specified that I agreed with many of the themes. I specifically state why I don't like the work, right there at the end. People feel moved by Woke propaganda. DEI struggle sessions are very popular amongst the kind of people they prey upon. Crack is really popular with crack addicts, too. I think your essay is functioning on the same pathways, only for the anti-Woke crowd. (Well, not the same pathways as crack, obviously.)
Yea, shit's not great now. Your essay remains to my mind an entirely incorrect diagnosis of the problem, however.
5: I am not confused by the reference so much as that the section you swing into is almost entirely irrelevant to the rest of your essay. So, ok, Christians disagree about parts of the Bible, which has... nothing really to do with your essay. Maybe it does to Christians, I don't know, I am not religious, but I struggle to see what it would be other than "Hawley is wrong about this point (if you think he is) so he is wrong about this other point."
6: Again, you are putting words in my mouth, which is odd, because I don't think I needed to be more critical of your work.
"You claim that "Pygmalion and the Anime Girl" is an excessive length, nobody can sit thru a massive essay of this size "
Do I? I referenced its length in part of because it was just a mess of everything jammed together without connection, but also to highlight that we shouldn't read it assuming you left out important points, because, goddamn, you had space.
I even explicitly say I recommend reading it if you have time in the very sentence you quote!
"If you have time for a two hour podcast and a 33,000+ avalanche of words, I recommend listening and reading to get the other side."
And I didn't say you "didn't bother to show evidence" but rather that the evidence you put out doesn't show what you seem to think it shows. I didn't get into picking apart the graphs, but you have tons of quotes there of me saying why things don't line up the way you seem to believe.
On to the next!
4.a: "Mentally unhealthy" describes the essay, as in it is "Junk Food for the Mind", per the title. If I were describing you I would have written "A partial examination of an essay by the mentally unhealthy "Billionaire Psycho"", which, given your nom de plume, might have been funny, but wasn't what I intended nor wrote.
4.b: Ad hominem is when you attack a person's argument by attacking irrelevant aspects of the person making the argument. By contrast, starting with your work and examining what might be the motivations is not. It is, as I say and you quote, a clue as to why the work exists.
4.c. Not sure what you are objecting to here; is it my calling the DEI presenter a twit, and then comparing your prose to him?
4.d. Again, I am addressing the argument, particularly why it is appealing to make what is otherwise a very odd error.
4.e. Again, directly addressing the argument, not you. You write "Women reject the vast majority of men, and chase fruitlessly after a small handful of conceited, womanizer jerks (such as myself)."
So, no, those are not ad hominem attacks, nor cheap shots. They directly address the work itself. As I rather thought I made clear by the end, the essay comes off not as a well reasoned or carefully thought out work, but instead is an emotional torrent, a "primal scream" as one fellow put it, and that is important to recognize.
It is worrying that you seem to equate criticism of the argument with ad hominem attack. Indeed, you are taking all criticism of the work as personal criticism, in the face of your claim to the contrary.
Let's examine the rest:
Where, precisely, do I state you are "a porn-addicted loser who can't get a date, and is too much of a coward to approach a beautiful woman in public, but also simultaneously a ruthless "alpha male who gets all the women."" I am quite certain I suggested nothing of the sort.
As to the game theory point, well you don't actually make that in the essay, but even if you did as it turns out a prisoner's dilemma style game is probably not the best model. Especially because the dating market is not winner take all; if that were true a handful of men at most would have all the wives and everyone else zero. That doesn't mean it works great, but generally we clearly don't see the outcome of a winner take all system, so it must be a different one.
Possibly I missed all your points. Or, possibly, they were shoddily made arguments and bare assertions unsupported by the things you put forth as evidence, which is what I wrote about. Maybe, just maybe though, it was just too brilliant for me to grasp. It is notable, however, that the general theme of those defending you has been "don't hold him to that high of a standard" not "no, see, the logic all holds together".
Regarding social media as industrial... see, here I can't tell if you are being intentionally misleading, or just clumsy. When people use the word "industry" or "industrial" they generally mean something related to the manufacture of physical things, say in factories. If I were to describe some area of land as an "industrial park", for instance, one expects signs requiring hard hats or steel toes boots perhaps, not software development. When one says "industrial toxins" one thinks nasty chemicals or soot, not email spam. "Digital" is usually the word people apply to those latter things. So, sure, social media needs a big industrial base to allow it to function, but if that makes it "industrial" then so is everything we use "industrial", so what's the point of the word? Television is industrial, the internet is industrial, cars and steam trains are industrial. So what? What does the grouping of these under "industrial contagions" mean?" It isn't elaborated upon, which suggests that we are to merely mentally connect "industrial contagions" with perhaps "industrial waste" to drive an unpleasant emotional feeling in our minds, however inappropriate or unearned.
Oh, and "you indicate a deep cluelessness about athleticism and social behavior among groups": if you have a point to make about this such that it underpins part of your essay, you probably want to make the point in the essay or at least link to it in a foot note. I mean, I am sure you were pressed for space, but still, if the notion is doing a lot of work, which you seem to imply here, you ought not leave it out.
Ho boy! Let's jump in!
Sorry I didn't tag you directly, here I thought Substack always notified an author when their 'Stack was linked in another 'Stack. I guess one needs to use the @ business? Damned if I know.
To your points:
1: When I copy/paste dumped the essay into Google Docs (I believe... it's been a while, maybe it was a text editor) it said 33,500 words. Maybe it counted oddly, or hell, maybe I hit Ctrl+V twice by accident. So sure, the essay is shorter than I believed.
2: Does Hawley say "women are catering to the whims of men"? No, as you point out he says "Don’t make her cater to your whims." I hope you understand the difference between those two statements. "Don't make your cats sleep in a box" is very different from "Your cats are sleeping in a box" in meaning. So when you write "It’s delusional to claim that women are catering to the whims of men, when they reject 95% of their options at first glance," who is claiming that? If women were doing it, or willing to do it, suggesting not to make women do it wouldn't make a lot of sense, sure. But if women are not catering to the whims of men, which seems true enough, doesn't suggesting "Don't make her cater to your whims" follow, because you know, she won't? In other words, Hawley isn't saying women are catering to the whims of men.
3: If you read on I discuss why that data isn't actually terribly relevant to the point at hand. Hawley probably is also ignorant of data regarding the year on year trends in chocolate heart production, but that probably isn't terribly relevant to the matter at hand, either. I specifically said that the data you provide does not demonstrate what you seem to believe it does.
4: Ad hominem isn't necessarily a result of being vicious and nasty, but almost always sloppy thinking is necessary. It is what the brain resorts to when it is failing to justify or rationalize its desired result in other ways. I will address the points you make in the next comment under the next comment.
(Did you hit a character limit in Substack's comments? I didn't know there was one.)