"But unlike you, I recognize that the world can change in a way that necessitates tactical flexibility. I also update my priors when experience gives me data that challenges my current heuristics and mental models.
>Literally nowhere do I offer women alimony for “situationships.” I’m very specifically offering them alimony for engagements lasting multiple years wherein the man ends the relationship past the woman’s peak SMV. This is grotesquely antisocial behavior that causes women to become femcel man-haters in their thirties, and we need to alter the legal incentive structure to make men less morally lazy in their dating habits.<
I really don't see how this isn't just extending the full-scale disaster of modern divorce norms out to include engagements. You're giving men yet another really big incentive not to bother with marriage at all, because even getting engaged now carries a huge legal risk with it! How do you expect courts to litigate who is at fault in a failed relationship? Regardless of the true situation, the woman is guaranteed to feel that she is the victim, and to present that narrative accordingly. Do you really think it's a good idea to have judges trying to sort out more couples' interpersonal drama for them?
I agree that men shouldn't take advantage of women with false engagements, but your proposed solution seems much worse than the actual problem. I'm also a bit curious as to why this is noted as a problem to begin with. The general issue with men right now is that too many of them are getting no action to begin with. Is there some epidemic of non-committal men who are going around serially engaging and then dumping women? If so, I'd be interested to see the data showing that.
>How do you expect courts to litigate who is at fault in a failed relationship? Regardless of the true situation, the woman is guaranteed to feel that she is the victim, and to present that narrative accordingly. Do you really think it's a good idea to have judges trying to sort out more couples' interpersonal drama for them?
It would be a straightforward and cut and dry thing. If you break an engagement that lasted a certain length you owe alimony, regardless of the reason.
>Is there some epidemic of non-committal men who are going around serially engaging and then dumping women? If so, I'd be interested to see the data showing that.
It's not about serial engagements, but A LOT of guys will be "engaged" to a girl for like three or four years and then break off the engagement after she turns 28 and immediately marry a more attractive 23 year old using their newfound status and money (which the girl often helped him amass as a quasi-wife). I've dated numerous women who had this exact thing happen to them. It's an tragically ubiquitous social script these days.
I don't know about you, but if that happened to my daughter I would literally murder the guy.
>It would be a straightforward and cut and dry thing. If you break an engagement that lasted a certain length you owe alimony, regardless of the reason.<
Again, how does this not create the incentive for men to simply stop bothering to enter into engagements in the first place? In the same way that modern divorce courts incentivize men to just avoid marriage altogether, because the deck is completely stacked against them. If you wanted to give more ammo to the Andrew Tate philosophy of just transparently using women for sex without ever committing to them, this seems like a great way to do it.
>It's not about serial engagements, but A LOT of guys will be "engaged" to a girl for like three or four years and then break off the engagement after she turns 28 and immediately marry a more attractive 23 year old using their newfound status and money (which the girl often helped him amass as a quasi-wife). I've dated numerous women who had this exact thing happen to them. It's an tragically ubiquitous social script these days.<
Again, is there any data you can point to, like at all? I know it's a bit cringe to ask for "soorce, please," but "well some women told me it happened to them" just doesn't cut it. Keep in mind that your experience is colored by selection bias, i.e., this might indeed be a common occurrence in your particular social circle, but by no means does that make it common in society as a whole.
>I don't know about you, but if that happened to my daughter I would literally murder the guy.<
That seems a bit excessive. Is the guy truly at fault in all of these cases--are they all as straightforward as guy bad, girl good? I doubt it. That aside, it seems like an extreme over-correction to jump straight to making it a matter of law and courts. Have these women considered, perhaps, making their expectations clear that they want to get married sooner rather than later, and then actually ending the relationship themselves if those expectations aren't met? No one is forcing them to spend years hanging on to a guy that is stringing them along.
Should either party be compensated if one is severely injured during the engagement and the other backs out? I knew someone who was engaged when his fiancé was in a car crash sustaining major injuries. He was badly shaken and distraught and the thought of accepting compensation from her would have been deeply insulting. It turns the concept of male honor upside down. Female honor on the other hand is chastity.
Tying in with what you said, it's also a consequence of disconnecting marriage from children. Having seen a few very length engagements myself, the couples who engaged in them did not seem very interested in having kids. If you view and understand marriage as primarily being a vehicle for children and family formation, then you also understand that you're on a biological clock, and are thus highly incentivized not to waste years in engagement-limbo.
I'll agree with your earlier comment that very long engagements breaking off is not something I've seen in real life. It might be common outside my slice of the world, or it might be peculiar to Walt's social circles. I do think men tend to bounce back from long-lasting relationships faster though. You can see in the stats that men remarry more, and I suspect you'll find (but there aren't stats) that they bounce back from both relationships and broken engagements faster as well.
But I HAVE seen some long engagements ultimately end in marriage. In at least two cases I can think of, they were related to "Bridezillas" who wanted the exact right wedding, in the exact right venue, and didn't mind a three-year wait for that venue because they were living together and functionally married anyway. I think this is the "marriage as capstone" mentality -- the idea that marriage is like the final trophy in a video game that women are playing, a bonus objective that shows complete mastery of the material.
In both cases, I declined to attend those weddings.
Well, if we're going to talk about gender differentials in "bouncing back," that would be a wholly separate discussion. But suffice it to say that, even if we accept the premise that breakups are harder on women than men generally speaking, I think the current state of divorce law and family court more than makes up for whatever legitimate grievances might derive from that tendency.
I will add, I suppose, that I personally know of no long-term (i.e. 3 year plus) engagements that fell through, and most certainly not of any such affairs in which the male then married a woman noticeably younger shortly afterwards. That's such a highly specific situation that I imagine you'd have difficulty finding decent data on it even if you really went looking.
While I agree that there is a huge cultural aspect to the problem, there is an equally large economic aspect. Large swathes of the population have been priced out of housing; financial stability takes longer than ever for young people to achieve, and many find themselves unable to achieve it at all.
Most people in their 20s do not have the money to travel the world and eat expensive food. They don't have the money to buy a house and pay for children either. This is one obvious cause of the rise in incels--young men no longer out-earn young women, with the result that young women have no reason to marry them. The whole "traveling the world and eating food" thing I have more commonly seen as what affluent childless professionals say they are going to do with their lives instead of having a family. I knew one affluent single childless female professional in particular who described her desire to make a lot of money so that she could retire and "travel," to which I was tempted to ask her "with who?"
I know your focus is on something new and exciting and energetic, but putting the bulwark behind tactical compromise is not something that’s going to get my adrenaline going.
How am I supposed to get excited about “addressing women’s issues”? I’m not going to get hyped about a strategy where we can maybe get girls to vote for our side. I’m not skipping off to war with the back of my mind reminding me that there’s an immutable, natural pressure on the girlies’ coalition group to get a one-up on mine if they can.
I’m supposed to be excited about a “Castizo future” — getting to revel in a snippet of racially-purist tribalism, but then having to tone it down a bit once we hit a barrier?
Yours is a strategy for politicking and winning gains, but something I would carry a banner into machine-gun fire for? I think not.
I'm pro-life and my family is involved with our local crisis pregnancy center (one of the best in the country) but generally agree with you on the maximalism point. Worth noting that a number of more conventional voices in the pro-life movement are also trying to make this point, e.g. Patrick T. Brown.
But I do think Greene made a valid point: more pragmatic pro-lifers aren't going to "aggressively sideline" the uncompromising faction. Or if we did, they would be right not to trust us -- we would come across as a bunch of David Frenches, who has lost any influence with his "fellow" conservative evangelicals precisely because of the naked contempt he has for us.
The rhetorical approach Brown takes in that essay is more likely to work. From my standpoint, these are my people, my brothers in Christ, and they need to be persuaded to be more pragmatic if they actually want to see results. They are not my enemies.
I see your point--if this is a major issue for you, you can't cast them out of your coalition or be too aggro with them. Fair enough. But in a sense this is precisely why I want to be in a coalition with guys like you and Dave. It is your job to reproach them in a rhetorically impactful way. If I try to do so they will see me as satanic or something and just double down.
I think it would help if you were, yourself, actually pro-life. If you are telling pro-life people to shut up, and you yourself aren't pro-life, frankly, pro-lifers are justified in not trusting your intentions. If it's coming from someone who genuinely agrees that abortion is abhorrent and should be banned, it's much more trustworthy as legitimate tactical advice.
My position is that it should be legal in the first trimester in all cases and banned excepting rape/incest thereafter. I also would support executing abortionists of third trimester babbies. To my mind that could be called either Pro Life or Pro Choice depending on my interlocutor.
Well, speaking as someone who is pro life, it means you are pro choice. As far as I've ever seen, everyone who identifies as pro life believes that life begins at conception. If the average pro life person believed abortion was fine in the first trimester, there wouldn't really be so much disagreement about it to begin with, since that is a pretty common position for a right-wing pro-choice person to have.
I would encourage you to perhaps think and consider a bit why you believe abortion is okay in the first trimester, but not in the second or third, and to then see if you can articulate those reasons without any references to political expediency.
The simple answer would be that the fetus is not conscious and can't feel pain in the first trimester. Now obviously there is debate about exactly when it CAN feel pain, since it's not like you can ask, and the standard view has been that until the cortex develops in the brain around 24 weeks, there is no consciousness and therefore no ability to feel pain. But even for people who argue that it's possible to feel pain before that point through some sort of direct mechanism between pain receptors and the developing brain plate, no one seriously posits that it's possible prior to 12 weeks, AKA first trimester. Because pain receptors are not linked to the developing brain until 12-15 weeks.
The pro-life idea of life beginning at conception is a religious belief, but you don't need to be religious to think it's wrong to inflict suffering and pain, hence why first trimester is generally accepted by the vast majority of Americans and Europeans. I don't expect evangelicals and others dedicated to the extremist position to be swayed by such things, but the reality is that their position on this issue is extremely unpopular.
And also, abortion rates went UP significantly after Dobbs, for the first time in 30 years, reflecting the backlash Walt described. Or actually, I'd say it's more like how gun owners run out and buy up all the ammunition every time something happens where they're afraid of more restrictive laws...the 6 week bans likely forced an early decision on some women who might have otherwise decided to keep it, if they'd hadn't been racing against the legal clock to make a decision.
>The simple answer would be that the fetus is not conscious and can't feel pain in the first trimester.<
This one has been done to death a million times. If I go up to a baby and headshot it point blank with a large rifle, the baby will feel no pain. And yet the act will still be murder. Likewise, if a human consumes a drug that disables their pain receptors, or otherwise carries a condition with that symptom (this is a real condition that you can look up on Google in 5 seconds), it does not suddenly become okay to murder them.
>The pro-life idea of life beginning at conception is a religious belief, but you don't need to be religious to think it's wrong to inflict suffering and pain, hence why first trimester is generally accepted by the vast majority of Americans and Europeans.<
The idea that it's wrong to inflict suffering and pain is also religious in nature. Religion of a different sort I suppose, but you're still claiming it as a first principle with no further principles behind it, you're just saying that it's wrong because it just is (in the same way that a dreaded "religious person" might say something is wrong "because God said so," which is actually more coherent than an atheist saying something is wrong "just because").
There's nothing wrong with having first principles, of course. We need to have them in order to have any sort of real morality, and "don't hurt people" is a good first principle to have. The point is just to disabuse you of the notion that this is somehow an issue of religious vs non-religious. It is an issue of those who see the unborn as people vs those who do not. We all agree that killing people is bad; where we disagree is on who counts as a person or as a "clump of cells."
>I don't expect evangelicals and others dedicated to the extremist position to be swayed by such things, but the reality is that their position on this issue is extremely unpopular.<
And here is the appeal to political expediency, which I explicitly called out ahead of time, since it is always forthcoming.
Yes, I agree that total abortion bans are of course not expedient in the immediate situation. But if you believe that abortion is not wrong, you must have a better reason than "because other people don't think it is." The mass public believes in all manner of falsehoods and nonsense. "My position is right because other people also think it's right," without any actual evidence or reasoning at any point, is an empty tautology.
Can you please stop with the black reparation thing?
The black reparation thing will not work for two reasons:
- Winner’s Curse (energy could be spent solving the problem for much cheaper. If you already have the power to do this, blacks will line up to your party innately, because you can do this.)
- Even if laid out explicitly, so long as the incentives to have large-scale out-group preference exists, the white women will justify it as not enough. Why would we expect either party to follow through? White Guilt is fashionable and fashionable people don’t care how many cheetahs must die for their cheetah-wear. They care only when socially shamed, which is a lot cheaper than reparations.
The goal for a while has been to invent strategies that grant you more power as you engage with them. Either by stealing from your enemy or concentrating from your allies. Black reparations is an exertion of energy with no amount of corresponding gain to make it worthwhile.
I understand that their might be a snarky way to get it to work, but everything works in a bull market. What we want is solid things that get us to a bull market wherein your proposal will be compared against every other one.
Your bit on Jewish identity and "plan" is totally delusional. This has been tried for the last 70 years.
"I am operating under a framework that accepts HBD and is explicitly focused on undermining the epistemics of white guilt"
Dave: "But he does not seem to understand from the same history, that reparations will not outrage the White community."
I agree with Dave on this. What if people from NW Europe innately tend to think individualistically and in a universalist way, rather than a tribal and particularist way? Can you break down how you see this playing out?
>You give people who don't support you or your political ideas patronage
>???
"Affirmative Action is being rolled back as we speak"
No, its not. Harvard laughed in the face of SCOTUS and will be accepting written statements instead of people checking a box. The idea should be to totally discredit and destroy these institutions rather than "reform" them and save them, thereby saving the regime.
"I am not ignorant about HBD or naive about Jews. I am not an adherent of the magic soil hypothesis. I am not a colorblind civnat, and I don’t think you can trust average IQ people to make good decisions absent a firmly paternalistic incentive structure."
What are you? What is the legitimating basis for the social and political community?
"only way to meaningfully progress toward the world you desire is to change hearts and minds at the grassroots level"
Do you believe in democracy rather than elite theory?
The personal insults are superfluous and fail to contribute any meaningful substance. What is so great about anon accounts and these platforms is that you have to judge people based solely on their written ideas.
Congratulations. Between your original piece and this, all you’ve succeeded in doing is convincing me, from the moment I discovered you, that you’re not worth listening to.
I need to ask about the Job Stacking thing: how do you manage conflicting meetings, handle work load? Some days I am on calls back to back, that's at my one remote job. Are there certain types of jobs more suited for this? Seems like if I could have found something that low-output I would have already. More importantly how am I going to write my substack if I'm juggling 4 jobs all day?
So now that you've gotten the opinions of dissident right intellectuals, have you talked to anyone in your local GOP to see how practical this is? You may not wish to answer, but I would suggest it.
I get the feeling the pro-life movement, having been handed a victory with Dobbs, isn't going to settle for half measures at this point, as they'll want to push their victory. Constructive ambiguity and talking out of both sides of your mouth are important political skills, but it's harder when you've just put that on your blog. That said this may be some clever 4D chess cover for your actual position, in which case please accept my apologies and carry on.
My biggest concern would be that anything that even *smells* of situationship alimony is going to be a huge turnoff to young men, because you're going to have women suing men nonstop after every breakup. "He led me to believe..."
As for the Jews...eh, turning a couple of billionaires can pay huge dividends. I mean, I don't think I've ever seen Harvard blink.
Take a moment to think about why that's different.
1. You have a relative uniparty consensus on immigration. Center-right parties all over the world constantly betray their base on this issue. So there's not as clear-cut a difference as with abortion, where the Democrats have purged any hint of pro-life sensibilities. Even Biden was chastised by his handlers when he said, away from the mic, that he was personally opposed to abortion. There's a clearer-than-ever difference between the parties on abortion, which is the sort of thing that motivates people to vote for one party over the other.
2. The consequences of mass immigration are gradual, indirect, and often far away and hard for normies to perceive. The consequences of not being able to get an abortion are obvious and personal to even low-IQ normies. Especially in an atomized society like ours, normies care far more about their own autonomy being secure than they care about stopping other people from doing horrific things to their own children. This is also why stopping the transing of kids isn't all that motivating for normies.
"Uni party" is a spectrum. It's too simplistic to say the parties are entirely undifferentiated. There are issues on which the parties are more differentiated, and issues on which they are less. Abortion might be the single issue on which they are most differentiated, and at least in terms of rhetoric, if not substance, they're far more differentiated on it today than when pro-life Democrats (like Biden!) were something that existed.
I'll just agree to disagree on your second paragraph.
"But unlike you, I recognize that the world can change in a way that necessitates tactical flexibility. I also update my priors when experience gives me data that challenges my current heuristics and mental models.
this is how we win
>Literally nowhere do I offer women alimony for “situationships.” I’m very specifically offering them alimony for engagements lasting multiple years wherein the man ends the relationship past the woman’s peak SMV. This is grotesquely antisocial behavior that causes women to become femcel man-haters in their thirties, and we need to alter the legal incentive structure to make men less morally lazy in their dating habits.<
I really don't see how this isn't just extending the full-scale disaster of modern divorce norms out to include engagements. You're giving men yet another really big incentive not to bother with marriage at all, because even getting engaged now carries a huge legal risk with it! How do you expect courts to litigate who is at fault in a failed relationship? Regardless of the true situation, the woman is guaranteed to feel that she is the victim, and to present that narrative accordingly. Do you really think it's a good idea to have judges trying to sort out more couples' interpersonal drama for them?
I agree that men shouldn't take advantage of women with false engagements, but your proposed solution seems much worse than the actual problem. I'm also a bit curious as to why this is noted as a problem to begin with. The general issue with men right now is that too many of them are getting no action to begin with. Is there some epidemic of non-committal men who are going around serially engaging and then dumping women? If so, I'd be interested to see the data showing that.
>How do you expect courts to litigate who is at fault in a failed relationship? Regardless of the true situation, the woman is guaranteed to feel that she is the victim, and to present that narrative accordingly. Do you really think it's a good idea to have judges trying to sort out more couples' interpersonal drama for them?
It would be a straightforward and cut and dry thing. If you break an engagement that lasted a certain length you owe alimony, regardless of the reason.
>Is there some epidemic of non-committal men who are going around serially engaging and then dumping women? If so, I'd be interested to see the data showing that.
It's not about serial engagements, but A LOT of guys will be "engaged" to a girl for like three or four years and then break off the engagement after she turns 28 and immediately marry a more attractive 23 year old using their newfound status and money (which the girl often helped him amass as a quasi-wife). I've dated numerous women who had this exact thing happen to them. It's an tragically ubiquitous social script these days.
I don't know about you, but if that happened to my daughter I would literally murder the guy.
>It would be a straightforward and cut and dry thing. If you break an engagement that lasted a certain length you owe alimony, regardless of the reason.<
Again, how does this not create the incentive for men to simply stop bothering to enter into engagements in the first place? In the same way that modern divorce courts incentivize men to just avoid marriage altogether, because the deck is completely stacked against them. If you wanted to give more ammo to the Andrew Tate philosophy of just transparently using women for sex without ever committing to them, this seems like a great way to do it.
>It's not about serial engagements, but A LOT of guys will be "engaged" to a girl for like three or four years and then break off the engagement after she turns 28 and immediately marry a more attractive 23 year old using their newfound status and money (which the girl often helped him amass as a quasi-wife). I've dated numerous women who had this exact thing happen to them. It's an tragically ubiquitous social script these days.<
Again, is there any data you can point to, like at all? I know it's a bit cringe to ask for "soorce, please," but "well some women told me it happened to them" just doesn't cut it. Keep in mind that your experience is colored by selection bias, i.e., this might indeed be a common occurrence in your particular social circle, but by no means does that make it common in society as a whole.
>I don't know about you, but if that happened to my daughter I would literally murder the guy.<
That seems a bit excessive. Is the guy truly at fault in all of these cases--are they all as straightforward as guy bad, girl good? I doubt it. That aside, it seems like an extreme over-correction to jump straight to making it a matter of law and courts. Have these women considered, perhaps, making their expectations clear that they want to get married sooner rather than later, and then actually ending the relationship themselves if those expectations aren't met? No one is forcing them to spend years hanging on to a guy that is stringing them along.
Should either party be compensated if one is severely injured during the engagement and the other backs out? I knew someone who was engaged when his fiancé was in a car crash sustaining major injuries. He was badly shaken and distraught and the thought of accepting compensation from her would have been deeply insulting. It turns the concept of male honor upside down. Female honor on the other hand is chastity.
Tying in with what you said, it's also a consequence of disconnecting marriage from children. Having seen a few very length engagements myself, the couples who engaged in them did not seem very interested in having kids. If you view and understand marriage as primarily being a vehicle for children and family formation, then you also understand that you're on a biological clock, and are thus highly incentivized not to waste years in engagement-limbo.
I'll agree with your earlier comment that very long engagements breaking off is not something I've seen in real life. It might be common outside my slice of the world, or it might be peculiar to Walt's social circles. I do think men tend to bounce back from long-lasting relationships faster though. You can see in the stats that men remarry more, and I suspect you'll find (but there aren't stats) that they bounce back from both relationships and broken engagements faster as well.
But I HAVE seen some long engagements ultimately end in marriage. In at least two cases I can think of, they were related to "Bridezillas" who wanted the exact right wedding, in the exact right venue, and didn't mind a three-year wait for that venue because they were living together and functionally married anyway. I think this is the "marriage as capstone" mentality -- the idea that marriage is like the final trophy in a video game that women are playing, a bonus objective that shows complete mastery of the material.
In both cases, I declined to attend those weddings.
Well, if we're going to talk about gender differentials in "bouncing back," that would be a wholly separate discussion. But suffice it to say that, even if we accept the premise that breakups are harder on women than men generally speaking, I think the current state of divorce law and family court more than makes up for whatever legitimate grievances might derive from that tendency.
I will add, I suppose, that I personally know of no long-term (i.e. 3 year plus) engagements that fell through, and most certainly not of any such affairs in which the male then married a woman noticeably younger shortly afterwards. That's such a highly specific situation that I imagine you'd have difficulty finding decent data on it even if you really went looking.
While I agree that there is a huge cultural aspect to the problem, there is an equally large economic aspect. Large swathes of the population have been priced out of housing; financial stability takes longer than ever for young people to achieve, and many find themselves unable to achieve it at all.
Most people in their 20s do not have the money to travel the world and eat expensive food. They don't have the money to buy a house and pay for children either. This is one obvious cause of the rise in incels--young men no longer out-earn young women, with the result that young women have no reason to marry them. The whole "traveling the world and eating food" thing I have more commonly seen as what affluent childless professionals say they are going to do with their lives instead of having a family. I knew one affluent single childless female professional in particular who described her desire to make a lot of money so that she could retire and "travel," to which I was tempted to ask her "with who?"
I know your focus is on something new and exciting and energetic, but putting the bulwark behind tactical compromise is not something that’s going to get my adrenaline going.
How am I supposed to get excited about “addressing women’s issues”? I’m not going to get hyped about a strategy where we can maybe get girls to vote for our side. I’m not skipping off to war with the back of my mind reminding me that there’s an immutable, natural pressure on the girlies’ coalition group to get a one-up on mine if they can.
I’m supposed to be excited about a “Castizo future” — getting to revel in a snippet of racially-purist tribalism, but then having to tone it down a bit once we hit a barrier?
Yours is a strategy for politicking and winning gains, but something I would carry a banner into machine-gun fire for? I think not.
I'm pro-life and my family is involved with our local crisis pregnancy center (one of the best in the country) but generally agree with you on the maximalism point. Worth noting that a number of more conventional voices in the pro-life movement are also trying to make this point, e.g. Patrick T. Brown.
https://eppc.org/publication/the-arizona-abortion-law-repeal-a-lesson-in-pro-life-prudence/
But I do think Greene made a valid point: more pragmatic pro-lifers aren't going to "aggressively sideline" the uncompromising faction. Or if we did, they would be right not to trust us -- we would come across as a bunch of David Frenches, who has lost any influence with his "fellow" conservative evangelicals precisely because of the naked contempt he has for us.
The rhetorical approach Brown takes in that essay is more likely to work. From my standpoint, these are my people, my brothers in Christ, and they need to be persuaded to be more pragmatic if they actually want to see results. They are not my enemies.
I see your point--if this is a major issue for you, you can't cast them out of your coalition or be too aggro with them. Fair enough. But in a sense this is precisely why I want to be in a coalition with guys like you and Dave. It is your job to reproach them in a rhetorically impactful way. If I try to do so they will see me as satanic or something and just double down.
I think it would help if you were, yourself, actually pro-life. If you are telling pro-life people to shut up, and you yourself aren't pro-life, frankly, pro-lifers are justified in not trusting your intentions. If it's coming from someone who genuinely agrees that abortion is abhorrent and should be banned, it's much more trustworthy as legitimate tactical advice.
My position is that it should be legal in the first trimester in all cases and banned excepting rape/incest thereafter. I also would support executing abortionists of third trimester babbies. To my mind that could be called either Pro Life or Pro Choice depending on my interlocutor.
Well, speaking as someone who is pro life, it means you are pro choice. As far as I've ever seen, everyone who identifies as pro life believes that life begins at conception. If the average pro life person believed abortion was fine in the first trimester, there wouldn't really be so much disagreement about it to begin with, since that is a pretty common position for a right-wing pro-choice person to have.
I would encourage you to perhaps think and consider a bit why you believe abortion is okay in the first trimester, but not in the second or third, and to then see if you can articulate those reasons without any references to political expediency.
The simple answer would be that the fetus is not conscious and can't feel pain in the first trimester. Now obviously there is debate about exactly when it CAN feel pain, since it's not like you can ask, and the standard view has been that until the cortex develops in the brain around 24 weeks, there is no consciousness and therefore no ability to feel pain. But even for people who argue that it's possible to feel pain before that point through some sort of direct mechanism between pain receptors and the developing brain plate, no one seriously posits that it's possible prior to 12 weeks, AKA first trimester. Because pain receptors are not linked to the developing brain until 12-15 weeks.
The pro-life idea of life beginning at conception is a religious belief, but you don't need to be religious to think it's wrong to inflict suffering and pain, hence why first trimester is generally accepted by the vast majority of Americans and Europeans. I don't expect evangelicals and others dedicated to the extremist position to be swayed by such things, but the reality is that their position on this issue is extremely unpopular.
And also, abortion rates went UP significantly after Dobbs, for the first time in 30 years, reflecting the backlash Walt described. Or actually, I'd say it's more like how gun owners run out and buy up all the ammunition every time something happens where they're afraid of more restrictive laws...the 6 week bans likely forced an early decision on some women who might have otherwise decided to keep it, if they'd hadn't been racing against the legal clock to make a decision.
>The simple answer would be that the fetus is not conscious and can't feel pain in the first trimester.<
This one has been done to death a million times. If I go up to a baby and headshot it point blank with a large rifle, the baby will feel no pain. And yet the act will still be murder. Likewise, if a human consumes a drug that disables their pain receptors, or otherwise carries a condition with that symptom (this is a real condition that you can look up on Google in 5 seconds), it does not suddenly become okay to murder them.
>The pro-life idea of life beginning at conception is a religious belief, but you don't need to be religious to think it's wrong to inflict suffering and pain, hence why first trimester is generally accepted by the vast majority of Americans and Europeans.<
The idea that it's wrong to inflict suffering and pain is also religious in nature. Religion of a different sort I suppose, but you're still claiming it as a first principle with no further principles behind it, you're just saying that it's wrong because it just is (in the same way that a dreaded "religious person" might say something is wrong "because God said so," which is actually more coherent than an atheist saying something is wrong "just because").
There's nothing wrong with having first principles, of course. We need to have them in order to have any sort of real morality, and "don't hurt people" is a good first principle to have. The point is just to disabuse you of the notion that this is somehow an issue of religious vs non-religious. It is an issue of those who see the unborn as people vs those who do not. We all agree that killing people is bad; where we disagree is on who counts as a person or as a "clump of cells."
>I don't expect evangelicals and others dedicated to the extremist position to be swayed by such things, but the reality is that their position on this issue is extremely unpopular.<
And here is the appeal to political expediency, which I explicitly called out ahead of time, since it is always forthcoming.
Yes, I agree that total abortion bans are of course not expedient in the immediate situation. But if you believe that abortion is not wrong, you must have a better reason than "because other people don't think it is." The mass public believes in all manner of falsehoods and nonsense. "My position is right because other people also think it's right," without any actual evidence or reasoning at any point, is an empty tautology.
Can you please stop with the black reparation thing?
The black reparation thing will not work for two reasons:
- Winner’s Curse (energy could be spent solving the problem for much cheaper. If you already have the power to do this, blacks will line up to your party innately, because you can do this.)
- Even if laid out explicitly, so long as the incentives to have large-scale out-group preference exists, the white women will justify it as not enough. Why would we expect either party to follow through? White Guilt is fashionable and fashionable people don’t care how many cheetahs must die for their cheetah-wear. They care only when socially shamed, which is a lot cheaper than reparations.
The goal for a while has been to invent strategies that grant you more power as you engage with them. Either by stealing from your enemy or concentrating from your allies. Black reparations is an exertion of energy with no amount of corresponding gain to make it worthwhile.
I understand that their might be a snarky way to get it to work, but everything works in a bull market. What we want is solid things that get us to a bull market wherein your proposal will be compared against every other one.
Reparations only with separation of some kind.
"courting Hispanics has been an incredibly effective strategy for Republicans"
LOL:
https://content.gallup.com/origin/gallupinc/GallupSpaces/Production/Cms/PMCMS/j4qljn8kme2io3jfhltspw.png
Your bit on Jewish identity and "plan" is totally delusional. This has been tried for the last 70 years.
"I am operating under a framework that accepts HBD and is explicitly focused on undermining the epistemics of white guilt"
Dave: "But he does not seem to understand from the same history, that reparations will not outrage the White community."
I agree with Dave on this. What if people from NW Europe innately tend to think individualistically and in a universalist way, rather than a tribal and particularist way? Can you break down how you see this playing out?
>You give people who don't support you or your political ideas patronage
>???
"Affirmative Action is being rolled back as we speak"
No, its not. Harvard laughed in the face of SCOTUS and will be accepting written statements instead of people checking a box. The idea should be to totally discredit and destroy these institutions rather than "reform" them and save them, thereby saving the regime.
"I am not ignorant about HBD or naive about Jews. I am not an adherent of the magic soil hypothesis. I am not a colorblind civnat, and I don’t think you can trust average IQ people to make good decisions absent a firmly paternalistic incentive structure."
What are you? What is the legitimating basis for the social and political community?
"only way to meaningfully progress toward the world you desire is to change hearts and minds at the grassroots level"
Do you believe in democracy rather than elite theory?
The personal insults are superfluous and fail to contribute any meaningful substance. What is so great about anon accounts and these platforms is that you have to judge people based solely on their written ideas.
Congratulations. Between your original piece and this, all you’ve succeeded in doing is convincing me, from the moment I discovered you, that you’re not worth listening to.
says the guy with literally zero followers
This might have read better without the general ad hominens on this guy Dave, I counted 3 in 2 paragraphs and gave up.
I need to ask about the Job Stacking thing: how do you manage conflicting meetings, handle work load? Some days I am on calls back to back, that's at my one remote job. Are there certain types of jobs more suited for this? Seems like if I could have found something that low-output I would have already. More importantly how am I going to write my substack if I'm juggling 4 jobs all day?
Meetings are the big limiting factor but I write more about it in my job stacking article
So now that you've gotten the opinions of dissident right intellectuals, have you talked to anyone in your local GOP to see how practical this is? You may not wish to answer, but I would suggest it.
I get the feeling the pro-life movement, having been handed a victory with Dobbs, isn't going to settle for half measures at this point, as they'll want to push their victory. Constructive ambiguity and talking out of both sides of your mouth are important political skills, but it's harder when you've just put that on your blog. That said this may be some clever 4D chess cover for your actual position, in which case please accept my apologies and carry on.
My biggest concern would be that anything that even *smells* of situationship alimony is going to be a huge turnoff to young men, because you're going to have women suing men nonstop after every breakup. "He led me to believe..."
As for the Jews...eh, turning a couple of billionaires can pay huge dividends. I mean, I don't think I've ever seen Harvard blink.
Is he on drugs? Listened to the Kaschuta ep…
Hes pro abortion and giving black people money ? ( based on other things ive misread ) and hes not blackpilled.
And hes rich, has a gf and is an anom.
Im so confused.
Yeah I caught that one too. If power decides abortion is wrong, the people will follow.
Take a moment to think about why that's different.
1. You have a relative uniparty consensus on immigration. Center-right parties all over the world constantly betray their base on this issue. So there's not as clear-cut a difference as with abortion, where the Democrats have purged any hint of pro-life sensibilities. Even Biden was chastised by his handlers when he said, away from the mic, that he was personally opposed to abortion. There's a clearer-than-ever difference between the parties on abortion, which is the sort of thing that motivates people to vote for one party over the other.
2. The consequences of mass immigration are gradual, indirect, and often far away and hard for normies to perceive. The consequences of not being able to get an abortion are obvious and personal to even low-IQ normies. Especially in an atomized society like ours, normies care far more about their own autonomy being secure than they care about stopping other people from doing horrific things to their own children. This is also why stopping the transing of kids isn't all that motivating for normies.
"Uni party" is a spectrum. It's too simplistic to say the parties are entirely undifferentiated. There are issues on which the parties are more differentiated, and issues on which they are less. Abortion might be the single issue on which they are most differentiated, and at least in terms of rhetoric, if not substance, they're far more differentiated on it today than when pro-life Democrats (like Biden!) were something that existed.
I'll just agree to disagree on your second paragraph.