Oddbean new post about login | logout Unpopular opinion, but I believe we will live to see women disenfranchised of voting given the results have been totally disastrous for Western society. https://i.nostr.build/GeAAX.jpg nostr:note10484c4v9hyn22h3zhndvftzkdgdrgh499yek6tqvlpz4j0szhgysyu63pp
I remember seeing a graph of voting outcomes if women's votes are selectively removed... Astounding. The desire for patriarchal safety, provision, security, and authority cannot be satisfied in any civil government. These are domains that only rightly belong to the natural family unit and patriarch as he images God as father. Western women have largely rejected this but still seek it in government; a new kind of father.
The problem we have today is people have been fed a narrative through leftist dominated schooling that the last century of Progressivism has been entirely positive so the starting point makes it difficult. To pick it apart you have to go back to giving women the vote and understand how niche that was back then. Then see what they did with those rights (ie Prohibition in the US). Then you’ve gotta understand the welfare state and how that came about. Then the sexual revolution and “reproductive rights”. Then womens involvement in Civil Rights and thereafter Gay Rights and thereafter Climate Cultism and on and on. Then there’s a whole thread of having two people earning a taxable income and outsourcing child-rearing to the State. It takes a long time to get through all of these points to understand where we came from to get where we are. It’s not the kind of thing you can explain in a post or even over a beer. But it will happen with time simply because of how utterly ruinous women are when given equal power over society. Men will see women voting to send them into meatgrinders and tax all their wealth and decide to change domestically rather than go along with their globalist statist program forever.
Hey, I think you could explain it over a beer 🍺
I have tried, but normies don’t have any of this background so they look at me like this https://i.nostr.build/POVVW.jpg
An increasing number of Western women don't effectively have this choice. They grow up fatherless and there's no husband in sight. The arms of the state, such as the police, are often the men they primarily interact with. I used to say that they should all just get married because it didn't occur to me how improbable that has become. I can't "feel" the scarcity.
To illustrate the point, here are 9 voters who are going to have more impact at the ballot box than you alone. You think they support nuclear? https://v.nostr.build/dwggP.mp4
This is one of my favorite hot takes too Moral arguments aside, it’s undeniable that there is a different distribution curve for male and female political opinions While every individual is different, women skew more collectivist than men, and over a century even a 5% difference on the margin changes the entire shape of politics First-past-the-post elections also play a role
Women only skew collectivist, politically, if somebody else is paying.
Men's self-concept skews both individualist ("I must be comfortable living with my decisions") AND collectivist ("I am an X and willing to sacrifice for the good of X).
Women's self-concept skews relational ("I am a good friend / good mother").
If forced to choose between the good of a collective and the good of social-relationship connections, women will overwhelmingly choose the social relationship (unlike men).
The difficulty is framing that choice that way in our centralised and high-time-preference societies. That’s a fine clarification but with government it’s always “someone else paying”. Many people in my life legitimately believe in concepts like free education and free healthcare. Another generalization which has a lot of truth to it is that men still dominate most “dirty” work fields. Plumbing, construction, carpentry, waste management, roadwork, etc. are all extremely male centric. The people who built society are the people who know what it all has really cost, since they had to experience it. This is not to say that there haven’t been great women that built society, but on a whole especially during the early periods from 1920-1960 women very often had the role of a homemaker and were almost never subjected to that type of work (although wartime offered many opportunities to subvert that social norm). When we look at new deal programs which came about just 15 years after woman’s suffrage and are still in place today, and think about it in the context of “someone else paying” there is something there.
You're absolutely correct there, although the "until the 1960s most women were housewives" is pop culture copium. That was fully sixty years ago. Women's average political choices have gotten worse not better. Single woman: "people I don't know should pay more tax to support my friend's art" Married woman: "my husband should NOT pay tax to support people I don't know." That is why women's votes change much more than men's after marriage. Don't phrase it this way when applying for research grants or public office, but women on average are much more selfish than men on average. People who want them to make better choices need to admit this and harness it.
Female friends reading this - your shoe size may be pretty close to the typical woman's, but you're about five standard deviations from the female mean on everything politically relevant. Sorry if that comes as a shock :p
Unpopular opinion... We went from a Constitutional Republic to a "democracy" when we gave women the vote.
👍 I’m glad to see that in general, this discussion has made clear that women are not all the same. We’re not, and cultural trends can be overcome. Raise the children you want to see run the world.
We're not more selfish. We're more solipsistic because we're more vulnerable. It's not fair to us, to phrase it like a design flaw.
Selfishness without any context is not a negative thing. In fact, selfishness can be very virtuous. There’s an entire book about it that I know a lot of people around here like 🤣 https://i.nostr.build/AaWWq.jpg
Interesting… My other half is a staunch socialist, we get married in two weeks time. Are you suggesting her outlook will change from that point? I’ve always veered more toward anarchic behaviour myself although we initially met on a political campaign in 2017.
I feel this revelation should come with a trigger warning on here...
Statistically, the chances of her positions shifting on various issues will be high over the next several years. That doesn't mean she will stop identifying as a Socialist, but she may emphasise different things. My personal pet conspiracy theory is that politically-engaged people of all factions have more in common with each other than with normies in many ways. But most are loathe to admit the possibility
I think that's basically horse shoe theory isn't it? I spend a fair amount of time in a state of cognitive disonance but I try to keep open to different and new ideas. I'm very aware of how little I know. A lot of political people think they have the answers but the world is clearly super complex. Lot's of libertarian ideals sound like they work at small scale but we don't live in that world. We have mega corporations, we all use the same tech, capitalism will centralise production as it's more efficient. Like I said, I don't have any answers....
The irony being that Rand, in later life was taken car off by the state... lol I'm aware of her work but that point always stuck with me. Not as a justification for the state but that people can become unwell or just age and often end up needing care. A life of selfishness ended with her in that position which to my mind, discredits her somewhat. I'm vary aware that my world view at 20 is very different to what it is now and I expect the same to be true if I reach 80. Whilst clearly very smart, I think Rand lacked humility and it kicked her in the arse eventually.
Yeah. She thought she was a person who doesn't need other persons. Induhvidualism.
Seemingly unrelated topics mix into our decision-making, as well. A lot of the married women I personally know aren't using effective forms of birth control, don't like abortion, and haven't slept with large numbers of men, so they feel more existential angst concerning immigration and overall crime. Married women are also more likely to have at least one son or nephew, so we care about "male" issues for a longer time.
Just popping in to say… motherhood is also hard and dirty work that costs much and builds society.
This. And, anecdotally, you almost never find highly-altruistic and accomplished women who are absent mothers. Not true of fathers.
🤔 highly altruistic absent fathers? These features don’t go together. Does not compute, divide by zero
Yes absolutely, and this is the role we need women to play to build strong societies. No different to fiat forcing doctors or engineers to become part-time investors so they don’t lose their wealth - diluting people’s attention from what they are best at and where they provide the most value to the extended order has a net negative impact on everyone else in that order.
I read between your lines and no. The whole career-life-family system is broken, not just for women. The world is not better off when mothers have only the mother and wife role to play, while fathers and husbands are trapped in a system where they are kept from their families much of the time working. Balance is needed. Mothers and fathers are both vital to children and mothers and fathers both should have lives apart from their children as well, including meaningful work.
100%
I say “apart from” but the true ideal in my opinion is “involving the whole family”
There’s no lines to read between. I didn’t say women need to exclusively be mothers, I said that is where they need to focus for the extended order to most benefit. For them to be good mothers they’re going to need to have other interests which is no different to men who should be the breadwinners but will not be well-rounded fathers if they have nothing outside of their work - one-dimensional people do not make good parents. But the idea that people can do multiple things and excel at each is nonsense. We should be moving to a world of hyperfocus where each of us devotes the majority of our productivity to what we are best at (outside interests should be leisure) and realistically we need women to be best at raising the next generation to extend that rather than deferring motherhood or palming it off to the state as that is what perpetuates the very system you identify as broken.
We fundamentally disagree on multiple issues 🤷🏻♀️
Adam was taken from the earth (work), while Eve was formed from the flesh of man (relationship). This ancient Hebrew story says something deep and profound about men and women and differences in their basic life orientations. Adam was inclined to and created to work, while Eve was inclined to and made Adam's helper.
Yyyyep.
"The problem with democracy is that everyone gets what a majority deserve." We could solve this problem differently by maximising decentralisation, so that BANANAs have no veto over other communities and NIMBYs are only a blight on their neighborhood. In general and on average, women have closer social horizons than men, and are more conformist within them. But if the vote becomes "do you want your neighborhood to have load shedding at night or do you want to permit nuclear?", then some women in some places will give the decision some thought. Those populations will benefit economically, and their women will have more shiny and more social visibility.
Contrary to Churchill’s take, I believe Democracy is perhaps the worst form of government to exist. 100,000 Lichtensteins is the model I think can work at scale. Lots of smaller autonomous communities who are not beholden to the whims of people hundreds or thousands of kilometres away let alone on the other side of the planet, with localised leadership of people who have skin in the game. This accounts for social/cultural differences between areas and peoples. The people of Broome shouldn’t be beholden to the Socialists of Melbourne - in fact they should share zero governance between them. And the people of Broome and Melbourne should have absolutely nothing to do with edicts from cunts like the WHO or IMF or any other supranational body. Decentralising will force those with a collectivist mindset to focus on their own backyards rather than being enabled to virtue signal about the poors that they have zero interaction with. Seeing chuggers successfully go around collecting money mostly from women to purportedly send to some poors overseas whilst there are homeless people sitting 10m away, junkies all over, kids down the street who don’t get regular meals and men forced out of work by immigrants who those women supported importing, that really drives home the need for decentralisation and localisation over these retarded globalist socialist forms of governance.
100%. I'd emphasise rather it is centralisation that is the enemy of good choices, rather than democracy per se.
And women's decision quality suffers more than men's at increasing scales.
What happens if a tyrant starts gobbling up these small Lichtensteins? I agree it would be better to have many microstates but history shows you also need a way to prevent forced consolation. Or maybe with Bitcoin you can reduce the incentives to invade?
Serious risk, and an ongoing one. Tyranny is monopoly, and monopolies are synergistic with one another. The more monopolies we can make structurally impossiblev the less tyrants can hope to grasp. (Enter Bitcoin)
With our modern lens it’s easy to forget, but traditionally people would go and cut the heads off people like this. This modern period where politicians get away with all sorts and never have to face the reality of themselves being sacks of flesh and bone is an anomaly that won’t last, it is perpetuated precisely because optionality doesn’t exist in the modern world. Back then you didn’t need passports and visas to leave a tyrant like you do today. You didn’t have to traverse oceans. Didn’t have permissioned money that you couldn’t take with you. Didn’t have mass surveillance and Intelligence agencies infiltrating every nook and cranny where people might organise etc etc. There is always a risk of an evil king, no doubt about it. Taking out one person is a lot easier than the hydra of a liberal democracy where no-one is accountable for anything though. The key is to build wealth and prosperity through specialisation. Germany had this during its city state period (and it largely remained although bastardised thereafter), as did Italy before them. You can even see it in places in Asia albeit their culture is a bit different. Allowing smaller regions to excel at certain things and having to compete is how the remaining principalities/city states have flourished whilst larger countries deal with non-stop internal and external conflict caused by trying to homogenise radically different groups into some incoherent mess of a society. https://i.nostr.build/zdYYz.jpg
A high rate of gun ownership among the population might deter an invader or at least drive up the cost significantly if you know that on every street behind every window could be a granny with a rifle.
This is a given for decentralisation to work. Relying on centralised security whether that is police or military leaves the people vulnerable. They don’t need to be well-trained militias, they just need to be well-armed enough that the MAD of any invader is sufficient deterrent that conflict is avoided in most scenarios.
The very idea is offensive: strong, righteous men having to ask permission of the dull majority to do what is right.
And it is perhaps even more offensive for the strong and righteous to bow down to the "votes" of the more numerous cowardly and low, and the parasitic overclass that controls them.
Society will always have layers of aggregation and centralization, as they are downstream of the natural forcing function (economies of scale). What is most important is what services at what layer... The wrong service at the wrong layer leads to abusive relationships.
"Women"? Is that the AI app that talks to me very nice and makes me feel good.
Yeah, I don't think women should vote. I think voting should be a peaceful proxy for war and women shouldn't be warring. But I'm not going to stop voting, while the others still do.
I think we should have a draft where only winning voters are eligible. Far fewer people would vote, and they would be people with conviction who are willing to actually stand by their ideas.
