In this essay I’ll demonstrate that is morally obligated to sell his body to other men to maximize his personal income for donation to effective charities.

My argument is fairly straightforward:

As a moral realist and Act Utilitarian, BB maintains that the morally correct action is that which produces the greatest good for the greatest number of people.

He is consequently a fan of the Effective Altruist movement, which encourages people to donate large sums of money to “effective charities” that produce as many utils per dollar as possible through efforts like buying malaria nets for impoverished Africans.

BB is so committed to this idea that he embraces the Drowning Child Argument:

…failure to give to effective charities is morally equivalent to walking past drowning children. Therefore, you have an obligation to give to effective charities, just as you would have an obligation to pull drowning children out of ponds

My contention is that by his own premises BB doesn’t go far enough.

He is looking only at what one gives while completely ignoring what one does to increase what he can give, which is obviously morally salient under Utilitarianism (hence the actions of SBF and his infamous polycule of EA conmen).

That’s very convenient, because by the latter standard BB is in fact monstrously immoral to pursue a career as a Philosophy professor.

For starters, the career prospects for that profession are empirically terrible: per the American Philosophical Association only 40% of Philosophy PhDs manage to land a tenure track job. Now BB definitely seems more capable than the 60th percentile philosophy professor, but he’s also written about some incredibly controversial topics and academic hiring committees will absolutely punish him for that.

But let’s assume he gets lucky and is able to land a tenure track position. The median pay for a Philosophy professor is about $110k, with the 90th percentile coming in at $233k. But we’ll be generous to BB and assume he’ll end up around $200k.

This is peanuts compared to what he’d make stacking remote jobs in a STEM field. I’m lazy and technically unskilled (having majored in Philosophy myself) and I already make twice that through easy data analyst positions at sclerotic midwestern insurance companies. Meanwhile some of the guys I know who work multiple software engineer roles hit close to a million in salary for well under 40 hours total of work per week.

If BB took such a route he could easily donate hundreds of thousands per year to effective charities and thereby save dozens of precious melanated lives. He’d also retain plenty of free time to write philosophy essays, and through Substack would achieve a much larger and more engaged readership than he’ll ever see in academia.

I suppose it’s really important to him that he’s eventually able to do boring committee work with Marxist lesbians and teach the cogito to Gen Alpha undergrads who'll ignore his lectures to watch skibidi toilet on their iPhones. But is that worth murdering thousands of African children?

BB owes us a good answer, because by his own logic not maximizing your income produces that outcome and makes you personally morally responsible for their deaths. Deliberate failure to maximize your income is morally equivalent to walking past dozens of drowning children every year.

This obvious fact makes me question how serious BB is about his Utilitarianism. Because technically he doesn’t even need to retrain in a STEM field or pursue any specialized credentials to do this. If he actually believed in what he says then he could easily be making a fortune right now to finance effective charities.

He simply needs to become a gay prostitute and sell his bussy to the highest bidder.

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Ever since I started this publication a consistent theme has been a thoroughgoing commitment to pluralism and coalition building as an end in itself.

One can observe the depth of this commitment in both the fifty podcast episodes I’ve recorded alongside an extraordinarily broad range of guests and in the two detailed manifestos I’ve written: How to Castrate the Left and The Barstool Right.

Looking back I’d say this pluralism basically emerged from four motivating factors:

1. nostalgia for the dynamic “big tent” energy of the 2015 Alt Right

2. a sense that I’d personally benefit from a more pluralistic idea space, being a strange and eccentric feller with lots of peculiar sensibilities that don’t cleanly align with any extant faction of the Dissident Right

3. a civicminded commitment to the idea that a dialectic between contrary worldviews is necessary to produce the best takes

4. a pragmatic determination that bold political goals require a broad coalitional strategy, while the right wing is currently stymied by purity spiraling / inflexibility

None of these motivations were remotely bad and all of them continue to animate me. But I’ve since come to realize that my approach to pluralism was fundamentally wrongheaded and my understanding of coalition building toothless and naive.

Having matured somewhat in my views, I’ve determined it’s time to pivot into a more straightforward and full-throated kind of advocacy for the things I actually want.

And that means the Walt Right’s pick-me era must finally come to an end.

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The above image is one of the most iconic in American history. It features an ornery protestor—either a woman of African descent or a circus clown fleeing a mineshaft explosion—railing against the launch of some NASA space mission.

Despite this picture having been taken during the era of Great Society welfare programs, its subject is furious that the government has chosen to allocate more resources to advancing the cause of technology / innovation than to producing sandwiches with which she might further enlarge her already formidable body.

Dear reader, I don’t have much of a disgust impulse. But to the extent I do, this picture is one of the few things that triggers it in a really visceral way. I despise this woman.

To me she is utterly reprehensible and perfectly emblematic of almost every force in society that I consider my enemy. And that is because she is a fantastic incarnation of what Nietzsche called slave morality.

The inimitable Bentham’s Bulldog just put out an article defending slave morality:

There’s a lot of discussion among many people, especially fans of Nietzsche and those on the right, of master and slave morality. Master morality is supposed to be the type of morality that reveres strength and dominance, toughness and power, while slave morality is that which champions the weak and appeals to the masses….

There are a lot of people—especially online—who treat slave morality with a sort of disdain. They treat it as some sort of modern aberration, as though its proponents are in some way cucked…

But the phrase slave morality is even more annoying. Because the thing it makes taboo is being in favor of good things. People who talk derisively about slave morality seem uniformly to have no idea what morality is, and act as if caring about it is something debased or cucked.

He concludes as follows:

The essence of morality is slave morality. It’s caring about those who are downtrodden who cannot stand up for themselves. It is good that slavery was abolished, and those who were abolitionists were heroic, even though they were standing up for those who couldn’t repay them in return. Similarly, it is good that lots of people are trying to end the abuses on factory farms, even though they don’t get any reward from it. Caring about others involves caring about them even when they don’t benefit you materially.

BB’s rhetorical style is a picture-perfect distillation of how analytic philosophy professors talk; I’m sure he has an excellent GPA, and will obtain a tenure track position more easily than at least 85% of his peers.

Unfortunately, this style of rhetoric is also incredibly unconvincing to normal people, which is why continental philosophers like Nietzsche and Camus are so much more culturally influential than analytic philosophers like Saul Kripke or even Dan Dennett.

But analytic philosophers retain their position of unchallenged dominance over the academy in the English-speaking world, and this has led to their communicative style becoming a popular nerd dialect with its own highly visible and very annoying features, such as the proclivity to make smug and vapid statements like this:

You should want to not be a racist, for instance, because racists care about things that obviously don’t matter.

Don’t matter to whom, BB? Analytic philosophy professors? Liberal college students?

These things which “obviously don’t matter” to you obviously do matter quite a bit to the Hutu and the Tutsi, or to the perpetrators of farm murders in South Africa, or to Knockout Game enthusiasts. Race is an enormously impactful fact of life even in most American cities, let alone the broader world.

These things likewise matter to the numerous scholars of human biodiversity, who catalog politically or socially salient physiological and psychological differences between human subgroups, despite the considerable risk of professional censure (observe the case of Nathan Cofnas) or severe social ostracism this brings.

But you do not even bother making an argument for your position here—you are churlishly relying on the low social prestige of “racism” to simply position it as some exaggerated and unthinkable counterexample to your overall point.

And this is precisely why I don’t take Analytic Philosophy seriously anymore. Back when I majored in it a little over a decade ago, all my professors would do irritating shit exactly like this—basically assume that the tenets of their liberal worldview are true, and then boisterously assert the self-evidence of these tenets using the covert ad baculum of institutional power / social prestige / status bullying.

Sure, these guys would permit you to make an argument against abortion or something banal like that, but they would always shit their pants whenever I advanced arguments in class against things like multiculturalism or feminism. And then on topics like more overt white identity they’d refuse to even engage.

To me that is straightforwardly anti-philosophical.

One can observe something resembling this tendency in BB’s otherwise superb article The Rabbithole Goes Both Ways, where he justifies talking to me (!) despite my somewhat edgy views and continued interaction with fellers like Richard Spencer:

Richard Hanania seems to associate with some pretty far-right individuals. He approvingly quotes Ron Unz, for instance. He also interacts with Walt Bismarck, who interacts with other further-right people including Richard Spencer (I also interact with Bismarck). Lots of people would be concerned: maybe those who like me will start liking Bismarck and then start liking Spencer.

But I’m not concerned about this. I think I have better ideas than Richard Spencer. I don’t think my—average SAT score 1481 readers—will start jumping ship to begin loving white ethnostates!

Shall we really play this childish game, BB? Because my own readers have an average IQ of 125 and a mean openness at the 90th percentile relative to the general public, and I would predict that Spencer’s audience is similarly erudite.

I am no longer a white nationalist, but in my youth I became a white nationalist as someone with a near perfect SAT who started full-time university studies at fourteen. There is absolutely no compelling reason to think that white nationalists are inherently stupid, and if you listen to major figures in the DR and adjacent scenes, like myself, Richard Spencer, Jared Taylor, Ryan Faulk, J.F. Gariepy, and Nick Fuentes, it’s just patently obvious from speech patterns that all of these guys are 130+ IQ.

Plenty of brilliant men love white ethnostates and always will. They are usually strange and disagreeable dudes, but their minds are objectively very impressive.

Anyway, onward to an even crazier claim that BB makes…

Singer’s argument shows that those who don’t care about obviously stupid things like how far away people are should care about faraway children dying of disease.

Obviously stupid things like how far away people are?

This is utterly laughable. I’m sorry BB, but proximity not being a salient moral factor is by no means obvious—I’d say quite the contrary is true, and 99% of people on the planet would find Singer’s rejection of moral proximity retarded and contemptible.

My family is more important than someone else’s family. My countrymen are more important than foreigners. My cat is more important than a chicken in a factory farm.

If you abandon these basic conclusions you are throwing civilization into an unworkable anomie, because people practically extend moral personhood in gradations across concentric circles of intimacy.

As I argued in my last essay directed at you, people don’t give a shit about kids in Africa dying in cobalt mines to make our iPhones, because out of sight is out of mind.

And I know what you’re going to say to this, BB, because you say it in pretty much every article or verbal argument about your ethical worldview:

When justifying not caring about the weak and downtrodden, people will often make these claims like “the strong dominate the weak.” Yes, this often does happen, but inferring from the fact that X happens that X ought to happen is bad reasoning, that derives normative claims from descriptive claims.

Please understand this nuance: precisely nobody is advocating we straightforwardly derive an ought from an is (except for you when you incorrectly define moral standards as objectively binding yet “coming from nowhere,” which is patently absurd compared to my more robust and flexible meta-ethical intersubjectivism… but I digress).

My own stance is predicated instead on the descriptive heuristic that any ethical system that in practice will never be adopted by a psychologically normal human being is a weak paradigm that people will promptly discard the moment it’s inconvenient. It is my emotional / aesthetic preference to dismiss such a paradigm as impotent and gay. And it seems Utilitarianism is very obviously such a paradigm in a million trivial ways.

For instance, you would obviously sacrifice two strangers to save your mother’s life.1

I haven’t read Nietzsche in years, so I’m not certain how properly “Nietzschean” my rejection of slave morality is. But here are the main precepts of my Moral Waltism:

• Politics is transactional and coalitional, but “morality” is basically an ideological Esperanto we created to more painlessly scale human behavior through larger and more abstract agglomerations in the neolithic / agricultural / industrial eras. It isn’t “real”, but we treat it as though it were real, same as the fundamental laws of thought or axioms of mathematics (meta-ethical / epistemic intersubjectivism).

• The use of “morality” naturally reaches a hard limit when you get big temperamental divides in openness and conscientiousness that vary by occupation and region and subculture, at which point you must enter the fully transactional realm of politics and broad coalitions.

• Specific moral codes are very useful as a means to an end: creating a robust incentive structure that rewards people for being more agentic / productive and punishes indolence / self-destruction. The idea should be to assume that individual selfishness guides behavior and promote the general welfare around that (i.e. Smith’s “Invisible Hand”). This as a happy medium between universalist philosophies like Utilitarianism (which fatally ignore personal incentive structures) and something like Objectivism which is clearly autistic and unworkable.

• When I say “general welfare” this isn’t the same as Utilitarianism because I DGAF about utils / hedonic calculus. I think it’s too easy for your hedonic treadmill to get spun into overdrive by Skinner Boxes if your life is easy / comfortable.

• As a rightist I support relentless conflict and competition with others as a vitalizing force to regularly kick you in the ass. This is what creates something that feels like “free will” in practice.

• I also don’t want people to be “happy” per se, because when people are happy (or at least when men are happy—happy women are prob okay) they become fat lethargic pussies who want to sit around cumming all day. I much prefer being angry or scared because it creates infinitely greater fulfillment in the long term.

• The two most prominent aspects of my moral code are as follows:

  • Reciprocity - Do nice things for people who help you and viciously hurt people who do you harm. Keep your word to people you see as basically inside the friend-enemy distinction. Note that the goal isn’t reward / revenge, but to create a virtuous incentive structure to guide future behavior.

  • Proximity - I owe more to people who are relationally closer to me, and their lives are consequently more valuable. I am currently unmarried and childless, but my basic heuristic if I am in a Runaway Trolley Situation is as follows: biological children > wife > parents / adopted children / siblings / close girlfriends > close male bros / pets > casual girlfriends / extended family > Walt Right Paychads > Americans of my approximate ethnic / (non)religious / ideological background > Walt Right Freefriends > Americans generally plus foreigners of my approximate ethnic / (non)religious / ideological background > foreigners who are very different from me

• I’ll never let someone who doesn’t have my best interests at heart shame me into not taking my own side. Everyone has the basic right to take his own side—this is the most fundamental dignity of sentient life and I would extend this right to even my most hated enemy. Contra Peter Singer, you are allowed to go on vacation even if Senegalese orphans are being torn to shreds by mosquitos. It’s fine.

BB ends by quoting a character named “Philosophy Bear", who maintains that “evil people exist” and describes this evil as a simplistic caricature of right wing vitalism:

As someone who has traveled in edgy right wing internet circles for years, literally nobody says “we should exalt in the cruelty of the strong against the weak.” That sounds like Sid from Toy Story, not Richard Spencer or BAP. This fake and gay strawman is very obviously the product of a hysterical and effeminate academic.

Philosophy Bear should become more aware.

You know who is actually evil? The obese welfare scrounger who kills the space program agitating for food stamps. The middle aged woman who leeches off disability benefits claiming Long Covid or Fibromyalgia and gradually makes everyone in her life a little lazier and less agentic. The pedantic schoolmarm who resents her brightest students and kills their intellectual passion with pointless busywork.

Also, the biggest threat to the future of our species isn’t Nuclear Armageddon or a dystopic totalitarian government. It’s not 1984 or Animal Farm or Brave New World.

It’s fucking Wall-E.

Utilitarianism is the real evil facing our society, not right wing tribalism or vitalism.

Util maximization will invariably result in Wall-E, because whenever you don’t have a painful crisis emerge to reset everyone’s hedonic treadmills and shake things up, the desire to make people happy interfaces in a very dangerous way with advanced technology and basically ensures the arc of history bends towards Honey Boo Boo. Our hyper-optimized Skinner Boxes are just getting too strong.

The longer you go without pain (and more importantly the demand for action) the less capable you become at proactively solving your problems with gusto. You don’t just become a relentless epicurean—you become horribly lazy and anxiety-ridden about any interpersonal conflict, whether it’s driving on a busy road, saying no to sex, or simply ordering a pizza. And that’s why Zoomers are the way they are.

BB is a smart and capable guy and I like him a lot.

This is such an asshole Boomer thing to say, but he reminds me a ton of myself at that age. I’m confident he has a tremendous future ahead of him as a public intellectual.

That said, I hope he abandons some of his intellectual snobbery towards ideologies that code as low prestige in academia. A lot of the views he casually disdains are literally just mainstream opinion in the GOP coalition at this point, so his dismissiveness comes off as incredibly out of touch.

I also hope his time on Substack gets him a bit more sympathetic to ways people think and talk about things outside of the conventions of analytic philosophy. He should probably retain some kind of single-mindedness and fanaticism until he’s at least 25, as that is a huge force multiplier and essential source of energy for a very young guy. But as he becomes a crusty middle aged man like me it would make him a more interesting thinker if he could switch more nimbly between different paradigms.

At which point he can jump on the Substack of 2035 and give some iPad kid the same obnoxious lecture I’m giving him now!

1

I mean, I guess maybe you wouldn’t do this, but if so you are weird.

This essay is a response to an article by recent podcast guest Bentham’s Bulldog, entitled Noem and Factory Farming.

In this piece Bentham’s Bulldog (henceforth BB), who is a vegan and stalwart advocate of animal rights, argues that it’s hypocritical to oppose killing an aggressive farm dog while regularly consuming the flesh of animals raised in factory farms:

Most people think one shouldn’t kill a dog unless the situation is really desperate…Yet most of these people eat meat, and kill hundreds of animals a year for the sake of taste pleasure. You can condemn Noem or you can defend the eating of animals, but you cannot do both.

The pigs that adorn the plates of the typical meat-eater are, in fact, smarter than dogs. The chickens, cows, and turkeys that one stuffs their face with can suffer. And unlike Noem’s dog, the animals on factory farm endure grueling conditions. They have no semblance of a life beneath the cruel walls of the factory farm.

He describes the hellish conditions of these farms in visceral detail:

Chickens that lay eggs spend their entire lives in tiny cages unable to turn around, with the feces of their fellows piling up around them, burning their legs and feed. They stand on sharp wire meshing all the time, leading to ubiquitous agony and foot injuries. Their beaks are sliced off with a knife.

The chickens reared for meat spend their entire lives in sheds with cruel, artificial lighting that leads to chronic sleep deprivation. They’re surrounded with shit and ammonia—two incredibly foul-smelling substances. They have no ability to play or do anything that might bring them joy, and face similar mutilation.

…the basic point is clear: we inflict unimaginable, unspeakable cruelty on around 90 billion animals every year. The animals we factory farm endure conditions that we would not hesitate to call torture if inflicted on either human or dog. And yet despite that, despite paying for animals to rot in filth and feces-ridden cages, we have the audacity to act like we care about animals.

BB then concludes his piece by demanding that readers who consider themselves animal lovers morally reckon with the horrors of industrial meat production:

There is a contradiction at the heart of the way we treat animals…. when one realizes that every time one eats an animal, they are inflicting incalculable cruelty upon animals, their love of animals is in sharp conflict with their love of meat. This produces desperate contortions and rationalizations—one cannot consistently defend eating meat in normal conditions while also holding that cruelty to animals is wrong.

There are various topics where the middle-ground position is completely untenable… One must either consistently hold that animals don’t matter at all, that it would be fine to burn live cats for fuel, or hold that they do matter and that our current practices of eating meat from tortured animals is deeply wrong… If one really thinks we shouldn’t kill animals absent a very good reason, then they must support a complete overhaul of the great juggernauts of doom known as factory farms, that dispense blood, destruction, and flesh.

This is a powerful argument we should grapple with seriously. But I suspect most meat-eaters will either concede the point while refusing to change their behavior, or will just reject it out of chuddish bigotry while sending BB blurry jpegs of hamburgers.

I’m instead going to advance a good faith argument against BB’s thesis, because I believe he’s wrong in an interesting and important way.

I also think I have some unique insights into the topic, because fifteen years ago I was saying all the same things as him.

I’ve always liked animals a lot more than people. So much so that in my youth I was a vegan for about a year, and then a vegetarian for about five or six years after that.

I embraced this lifestyle for basically the same reasons as BB. I simply took the suffering of animals seriously, and after looking at the statistics on factory farms and truly internalizing the enormous scale of suffering that occurs on a daily basis, it seemed to me that animal rights was the single most pressing issue of our age.

For most of my teenage years I was incredibly sanctimonious about this sentiment, because I viewed the consumption of animal flesh as trivially indistinct from murder. For several years in a row I proudly ruined my family’s Thanksgiving celebrations and got into screaming matches with older relatives. And I genuinely despised meat eaters—much more so than I ever resented other races when I was a white nationalist.

Eventually I toned it down, but I always retained a pretty violent disdain for people who don’t consider animals morally important. In freshman year of high school I regularly get into physical altercations with normie chud kids who mocked my animal rights activism. This is a big reason why I decided to drop out and homeschool myself.

Even as I gradually slid to the right during my college years, animal rights remained a huge wedge issue for me. It made conservative politics completely unpalatable even as I increasingly detested the anti-white and anti-male attitudes of modern academia.

Things changed around nineteen or twenty when I started getting into right libertarianism, which at the time was heavily associated with the Paleo lifestyle. This was a more masculine and vitalist framework than vegetarianism, but it left a lot of space for caring about animal welfare, since many Paleos (especially among libertarians, who tend to be spergy moral contrarians) emphatically reject factory farming for free range / pastured / hunted meat.

So for the next few years I started eating meat again, but only the fairly expensive ethically raised shit from Whole Foods. Then around ~22 I gradually started consuming cowschwitz flesh again, for the first time in about a decade.

This final evolution was driven entirely by moral laziness. From 21-23 I basically saw the pigs and chickens on factory farms as morally identical to my own cats and dog, who I very genuinely loved like children. But only consuming ethically sourced meat was simply becoming too inconvenient, too expensive, and too socially isolating, and I simply enjoyed the taste (and relative protein density) of meat too much to give it up.

I was willing to make my peace with what I considered to be a monstrously evil regime, simply because seriously confronting it had become a giant pain in the ass. It’s easy to take an uncompromising and radical stand when you’re a weird autistic teenager with no friends and basically nothing to lose, but as your social circle expands and you make your way in the world, that starts to become a lot harder.

Is holding true to your principles and standing up to a regime you can’t fix worth becoming “that guy” by turning down a hot dog at a company outing? Is it worth alienating your girlfriend’s family by refusing to bond with her dad over the grill?

These are very real questions I had to grapple with as a young man, and on each occasion it seemed obvious to soften my beliefs and take the diplomatic route.

One reason for this is that adopting a hard line on factory farms also forces you to reckon with the countless other exploitative regimes undergirding western man’s constant influx of dopamine cummies.

We all know our phones and shoes and dragon dildos are made by orphans in contemptible Thai sweatshops who are only there because it's better than subsistence farming or prostituting themselves to seedy Australian expats. We all know half the girls on Pornhub are being sex trafficked or controlled with drugs. We all know that rock on our honey’s engagement ring was extracted at gunpoint by a six year-old in Sierra Leone who’s probably since become a child soldier in some warlord’s posse.

But no one gives a fuck.

Obviously most educated people have one or two pet issues where they try to abstain from unethically sourced whatever, but rejecting EVERYTHING produced in an evil way just makes you a tiresome weirdo most people will avoid. And I’d argue that it’s simply impossible to do this under modern capitalism, or really any economic system that relies on massive economies of scale. And that’s because out of sight is out of mind.

The human brain is still basically neolithic, and can only conceive of a small village worth of people as actually being distinct persons. Anyone and anything outside of this sphere is purely an abstraction until either A) they become personally salient to you; or B) you choose to adopt a religious / ideological structure that attaches you to them via some imagined arbitrary ingroup (think “Americans”, “Christendom”, “the sisterhood”, “the White Race”, or “conscious beings capable of suffering”).

Pretty much everyone is aware of mass exploitation, but life is simply too exhausting and complex for anyone to seriously mobilize in opposition until said exploitation hurts a member of their ideological ingroup or starts impacting them personally. Consider how Antebellum Yankees basically ignored slavery when it massively enriched the Boston textile mills, and then suddenly turned against it once they had to compete with southern planters for the best land in Kansas and Missouri. Or consider how lots of dudebros who probably roofied girls at frat parties will have a daughter and suddenly start to adopt all kinds of feminist sensibilities about consent.

Understand this isn’t some cynical take that people are bad or evil. In my experience most people are very concerned about doing right by their friends, family, coworkers, and anyone part of their ideological ingroup.

But giving a shit beyond this is absolutely exhausting and most people don’t really have the resources or energy to do so.

Before we delve further into this issue, I should clarify some broad philosophical differences between Bentham’s Bulldog and myself.

When it comes to meta-ethics, BB is a moral realist, which means he thinks some moral claims are objectively true. I am what I would call a moral intersubjectivist, which means I think moral claims are true to the extent we implicitly agree they’re true.

As I understand him (he can of course correct me if I’m wrong), BB believes in moral realism because of an intuition (or intellectual appearance) that certain moral claims are true independent of anyone’s opinion. I am unsatisfied with this explanation because it gives no account of the origin of moral truths and is unfalsifiable.

Moral realism only makes sense to me when derived from the scripture of an organized religion like Christianity that specifies a clear metaphysical origin for moral truths. BB is a theist, but he doesn’t specify God as the source of his objective moral principles. In his podcast episode with me he says they don’t have a source.

But if something doesn’t have a source, and you believe it exists primarily because of an intuition, it sounds to me like you’re kinda just making it up.

And that’s basically my take on morality—it’s made up. But I’m an intersubjectivist and not a moral nihilist (let alone something really autistic like a non-cognitivist) because I don’t see moral claims as merely frivolous opinions or expressions of sentiment. To me a statement like “torturing babies is wrong” is analogous to modus ponens or the transitive property. Just as those are necessary axioms for thought, “don’t torture babies” is an essential rule for an orderly and peaceful civilization.

Moral principles are not “real,” because they don’t exist in the physical universe, but they sort of “exist by definition,” just like intersubjectively defined concepts / forms like “chair” and “mountain” and “big tiddy goth gf,” which we arbitrarily impose upon patterned amalgamations of quarks in the physical universe.

In other words, moral claims are true to the extent society intersubjectively agrees they are true. And by that token, some things like “torturing babies is wrong” will basically always be true, and on these topics moral realism and intersubjectivism look functionally identical. On the Torturing Babies Question, BB and I shall be eternally aligned, and this generally applies to most of the obvious big ticket items like murder, rape, and ethnic cleansing.

But a substantive disagreement emerges when we discuss common moral dilemmas, which are practically inevitable given the enormous differences observed in the public’s moral foundations. The research of Jonathan Haidt and others clearly shows that liberals, conservatives, and libertarians all have substantially different fundamental moral values. And among intelligent people, this is virtually always the primary cause of downstream policy disagreements on issues like abortion.

Take the statement “abortion is wrong”. A moral nihilist will say it’s false because all moral claims are retarded woo. A moral realist will have some purportedly objective criterion whereby this statement can be assessed. A moral relativist will say the statement is true or false depending on some greater social context.

An intersubjectivist will say it’s true to the extent there’s social alignment in that direction, but will understand intrasocietal moral controversy as more a question of brute power in which different factions with intractably opposed moral intuitions driven by largely genetic temperamental differences will try to bigotedly impose their will on each other, but may occasionally reach some compromise for practical grillpill purposes.

This framework provides a robust basis for building coalitions with people who don’t share your own moral intuitions because it accepts that moral disagreements stem from mostly temperamental factors beyond one’s control. This facilitates a more practical realpolitik attitude towards organizing society than BB’s moral realism.

One major tension in BB’s worldview is that he justifies a lot of his beliefs on the basis of intuition—things seem to be such and such way—while also adopting a lot of moral views that normies would find weird or odious.

I personally don’t like arguing with people based on my own intuitions, unless said intuitions are so aggressively conventional and universal in their appeal that rejecting them would make my interlocutor seem like a retarded psycho. But even then most people won’t bite the bullet and do this, so intuitive arguments are generally not effective in debates. It’s almost always far better to argue with people from their own moral / ideological premises, or by making a callous appeal to their self interest.

And to be fair, BB has an exceptional talent for rhetoric, and is good at reaching people where they are. But some of his positions are weird and hard to defend.

This is because he subscribes to an ethical view called Act Utilitarianism, which says an action is morally correct if it produces the greatest utility (think the presence of happiness and absence of pain) for the greatest number of conscious beings. This sort of thinking is of course associated with the Effective Altruist (EA) movement, which famously tries to get people to be more impactful with their charitable giving by donating to causes with a greater utilitarian ROI, such as investing in malaria nets for impoverished and highly exposed African populations.

Utilitarianism rubs a lot of people the wrong way, and one reason for this is that it gives virtually no weight to proximity or moral particularism based around a tribal ingroup preference. Its most famous advocate is Peter Singer, who famously argued that affluent westerners should donate far more of their income to charity, including to initiatives aimed at alleviating third world poverty:

This attitude will immediately strike most people as absurd, and I share that view.

Almost everyone on the planet has an overpowering and deeply primordial intuition that we all share a sacred duty to take care of “our own” over “outsiders”. This is a deeply prosocial impulse, because it’s impossible to pool resources and coordinate actions at scale without forming exclusive institutions along some friend-enemy distinction. This tribal distinction is also how we adjudicate social tensions and conflicts over shared resources between different factions and interest groups.

Humanity will—very thankfully—never become an undifferentiated mass of fungible moral agents subject to a genuinely universal ethical system, because nobody feels any real loyalty to the species as a whole (other than 40k LARPers on reddit). And it’s very doubtful anyone will until intelligent extraterrestrial life is discovered.

Most people are instead loyal to an ingroup comprising several concentric circles of intimacy, with the nuclear family as the central institution, and then a Dunbar’s Number-sized “village” of friends / extended family as the wider core, and finally a broader and more abstract “ideological ingroup” based on national / racial / religious affiliation as the outermost Matryoshka Doll.

It basically works like this:

The tribal instinct is generally stronger in conservatives than in liberals, stronger in nonwhites than in whites, and stronger in trans-Hajnal whites than cis-Hajnal whites.

It is dismissed as churlish in elite circles, but these elites typically have the same basic impulse—they just see other cosmopolitan / globalist internationalists as their “ideological ingroup” instead of their countrymen / coethnics / coreligionists.

I suspect that Utilitarians who genuinely believe things like Singer’s quote about the Bengali kid typically come from highly cosmopolitan demographic cohorts that are mostly disconnected from the concerns and interests of the greater public. These cohorts have outsized power, and can certainly overrule prole tribalism most the time. But that’s precisely how you get dangerous retards like Trump coming into power.

Instead of trying to force a cosmopolitan ethic on the proles, it would be better if these elites simply encouraged more agentic proles to take care of their neighbors.

When you tell the chuds in Wyoming to donate to Africa, they’re just going to laugh at you. Tell them to help their local tweakers and they’ll probably give it some thought.

One reason almost nobody is a doctrinaire utilitarian is that everyone can easily think of a million thought experiments where maximizing general utility might cause you to break morally particularist loyalties in some obviously unacceptable way.

For instance, say The Joker kidnaps your kid. and also two rando stranger kids, and then forces you to choose to between your kid dying and the other two.

Obviously over 90% of people would say that someone should choose to protect their own child because they have some special moral obligation there. The idea is there’s something primordial and existentially significant about being a parent that means you always have a pressing obligation to protect your kid. But you’d probably have smaller majorities agreeing to the same idea in regards to friendship and nationality.

I don’t see how you can make purist utilitarianism practically workable in this situation. To me a moral philosophy is untenable if you can’t devise an incentive structure around it that doesn’t horribly contravene everyone’s basic intuitions, a lot of which stem from our incredibly tribal neolithic lizard brain.

If you don’t account for ingroup preference your morality is just LARPing and is completely unworkable in the real world.

And now, at long last, we’ll return to animals.

My basic contention in opposition to BB’s thesis is that mankind actually has a special moral relationship with certain animals—most notably dogs and cats, and to a lesser extent horses. This relationship entails a more substantial obligation to these creatures that doesn’t exist for livestock animals like cows, pigs, and chickens.

It’s important to recognize how deep our connection is with the animals we love most. We domesticated dogs 30,000 years ago, back in the ooga booga paleolithic era, to help chase down game and serve as crucial nighttime guardians. Then as humanity began to put down roots in the early neolithic, our feline friends domesticated us, clearing our granaries of vermin and keeping us free of disease. Then a few thousand years later we domesticated horses, first using them to carry us by chariot and then gradually breeding them over many generations to accommodate us on their backs. It goes without saying this increase in mobility was an enormous force multiplier.

Dogs, cats, and horses were always treated with a lot more respect than other animals because they were useful for what they could do rather than what they could provide.

And that’s a big reason there’s such a huge stigma around eating them. It’s not just because we love them—it’s because they were historically seen as useful tools. Eating a horse would be like dismantling your Subaru for scrap metal. It seems really retarded and barbaric—a horrible waste of a useful asset.

The sentimental attitude we display towards our pets today is mostly a postwar thing, and in premodern times was mostly confined to very wealthy people. But it’s worth noting that as life has grown more comfortable and more urban over the past few centuries, we’ve been breeding our domestic pet animals (dogs in particular) to be a lot softer and cuddlier than they used to be. I think this, too, is a good argument for giving them some special moral status.

Modern dogs and cats are basically hyper-neotenous cuddle machines that we’ve selectively bred to be eternal toddlers. Their entire purpose in life is to provide us love and companionship. A lot of them never know anything else. This doesn’t necessarily apply to a farm dog like Noem’s Cricket, but I’d wager he still came from much softer stock than a farm dog from several centuries ago.

Finally, dogs are simply more proximate than chickens are for most people. They are “part of the family” and thus part of the ingroup. It makes sense to care more about your cute doge than an obese beakless retarded zombie chicken in a factory farm, for the same reason it makes sense to value your own children more than someone else’s. People talk about how disgusting Noem is while scarfing down Torture Hell Meat for the same reason a guy will be horrified when his own sister is sexually exploited but will spend an evening on Motherless without feeling a lick of shame.

Proximity matters. Different things are different.

And universalist utilitarianism is weird, unintuitive, and alien to 90% of people.

Please understand none of this is to defend factory farms in the slightest. I would be fine with immediately criminalizing the industrial extraction of animal flesh, because I think ending that level of mass suffering would be entirely worth making it unaffordable for poor people to eat meat.

It would be very annoying to pay $30 for a free range burger until lab grown meat becomes ubiquitous, but I like animals enough to support this if it ever becomes politically tenable. But I very much doubt that will happen.

People simply value their dopamine cummies far far more than animals not being tortured, girls not being sex trafficked, and children not being exploited in Asian sweatshops or African diamond mines.

You might not like this—I don’t either—but if you want to achieve any incremental improvement you must operate within the world that is, not the world that ought to be. And that means creating a virtuous incentive structure that simply assumes selfishness and tribalism as banal facts of life and lets us move forward from there.

That’s the only way to liberate Cowschwitz.

A few weeks ago I launched a broadside on behalf of artists against philistine conservative chuds who don’t understand art and regularly alienate creative young people by adopting provincial and unreflective attitudes toward culture and society.

Today I’m pointing my cannons in the other direction.

Not against artists as a whole, of course, but against a certain species of snooty luddite contrarian that’s recently begun popping up on this part of Substack. These guys want you to know they have a Big Fucking Problem with AI generated content:

A Forest Rebel won’t be reading any of this due to my use of that AI-generated crying artist thumbnail above, so let me take this opportunity to say I have it on good authority that he eats his boogers and pees sitting down.

He’s also hardly alone in this view.

When I first posted my tract against conservative philistinism, I received this charming comment from one Michael Vincent Hawthorne:

More recently, Hawthorne has expressed a sentiment almost identical to that of AFR, in his beautifully titled Reject AI Bullshit, Embrace Human Jank:

I hate artificial generative intelligence.

I hate it a lot.

I hate it so much, not only have I written about the subject, but I hold a pretty firm, no AI policy on Substack.

If you use AI in your thumbnails, I don’t read your content, I don’t follow, and I certainly don’t subscribe. If I see someone I do follow or subscribe to use it, I’m out.

Like many of the Zoomers marching for Palestine, Hawthorne refuses to respect or seriously engage with anyone who can’t meet his own puritanical standard, and in doing so he castrates himself rhetorically and fatally limits his own message.

If he were more willing to reach out in the spirit of polite and friendly debate he’d have a lot more success, but with this dour and aggressive attitude he limits himself to a ghetto where he can’t reach even the folks who agree with him.

And that’s why Hawthorne will almost certainly earn more followers from this essay attacking him than he has from any of his own articles.

It honestly makes perfect sense this would happen to a Luddite. These aren’t strategic, adaptive, or mentally flexible people. Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if Hawthorne instinctively associates such attributes with shiftiness and a lack of honor.

The sort of person who displays an extreme hostility toward a promising new tool is also the sort of person who is bad at solving problems and accomplishing his goals more generally. The Luddite never learns the tool himself so he can more reliably assert his will to power on the world. Instead he sits around impotently complaining about everything going in a direction he doesn’t like, and hilariously tries to position his anger as some kind of rugged righteous indignation.

But perhaps I’m being unfair.

One can tell from Hawthorne’s writing he isn’t a dumb guy by any means. He has a crisp and distinctive voice (I’m assuming a background in journalism?) and boasts a fairly extensive vocabulary. I’d probably estimate his IQ in the 115-120 range.

But he also has a lot of pretty embarrassing takes that suggest he’s relatively low in openness to experience, particularly for his IQ. The guy is certainly a disciplined thinker (and is clearly disagreeable enough to spit contrarian takes, which I obviously respect), but he is by no means a creative or adaptable one. He is rigid. Brittle.

And I think that’s a big reason his footprint is so small relative to the quality of his writing, the breadth of his publications, and the length of his tenure on Substack.

Because low openness is what makes you chose thumbnails like these:

See what I mean? Horribly off-putting. The color scheme of every image is painful to the eye, and you can literally see a watermark in the central thumbnail. It looks like something an autistic nine year-old put together at summer camp.

If he fixed this shit he’d easily have ten times the follower count. But like most low openness people, Hawthorne is actually proud of his stubborn incompetence:

My thumbnails are janky. They are fucked up. The thumbnail for my most successful article (to date) is photoshopped with a picture of Hillary Clinton that couldn’t get more pixelated. My logo is shoved in the corner, and it’s way too fucking big. It’s a “graphic design is my passion” joke of a thumbnail.

I cooked that image up, absolutely hammered trying to get the article published, and thought, “That’d be funny. Let's do that,” and I did it.

Do I put more effort into thumbnails? Absolutely.

But an actual human put those together. I found the images and put them together without some AGI cooked up by a misanthropic tech bro stealing from a hardworking artist.

Michael. A question. What do you think that fugly watermark is for?

Do you ever check the copyright status of the random ugly shit you pull from google images? If not, you might want to get on that, because if you’re currently making anything off your Substack you might have some photographers and digital media editors who aren’t especially happy with you. You are “stealing from a hardworking artist” a lot more directly than I am.

Also, I refuse to indulge the retarded idea that LLMs are stealing at all. If AI is “stealing from artists,” then so is every human artist whenever he is (deliberately or accidentally) inspired by the aesthetic sensibilities of another artist.

A Large Language Model is nothing more than a digital manifestation of what Carl Jung called the Collective Unconscious. When you say to Dall-E, “draw a chair,” this tool will produce something that basically resembles the human psychological aggregate of all images corresponding to the form “chair.”

So if it’s “stealing” to train an LLM on human art, it’s likewise “stealing” for anyone who wants to create art to consume someone else’s art and draw inspiration from it.

I put them together the way I wanted them to come out. I didn’t hope that an apathetic machine would do it for me at the expense of another living, breathing human being who worked to put their vision to paper.

No Michael.

You waited for someone else to take a photograph, someone else to edit that photograph in Photoshop, and someone else to take care of the legal shit and upload it to the internet through their big legacy media publication. You then copied the photograph from google image search and made a few shitty alterations in an image processor programmed by another “misanthropic tech bro.”

When I use an AI generated image for my thumbnail, I typically will explore a lot of different concepts, and typically need to get very creative with the prompt engineering to produce exactly what I want.

This is oftentimes very tricky because I always have to think in multiple dimensions (i.e. what best matches the content of my article, what is most engaging, what coheres with other images on my home page…)

This requires a lot more creative vision and genuine effort than anything you’re doing, but the results speak for themselves. Just look at how quickly my articles have made a splash. A major reason for this is that I use highly engaging thumbnails like this:

My approach is objectively less plagiaristic, objectively more effective, and very obviously more artistically meritorious.

Ultimately Hawthorne is an easy target, so I’ll let up on him. I’m honestly a lot more pissed at the actual artists I occasionally see buying into these horrific arguments.

Most of these people just seem like gatekeeping snobs who don’t actually value art as a philosophical ideal, and are just selfishly agitating against something that threatens their ability to passively coast without intelligently adapting to changes in the market. Genuinely talented artists have always been able to adapt, and there’s no reason they should stop now. Operating under dynamism and constraints makes art better.

But even if AI put every existing artist out of business permanently I would still support it, because in practice it is democratizing the act of creation to a staggering degree. It lets you implement a fantastical concept without any niche technical training or expensive gear, and this will allow millions of talented people to pursue their creative aspirations in a way that was never remotely possible before.

This is amazing for artists who are high openness, novelty-seeking “idea guys” like me. But it’s also *terrible* for low openness “craftsmen” type artists who don’t have a lot of great ideas themselves, and mostly earn a living realizing someone else’s vision.

You know who really hates AI? People who used to make a lot of money drawing furry porn or Dungeons and Dragons character sheets for wealthy but aesthetically moronic software engineers. These days the SWE chuds can do that themselves with Stable Diffusion, so a lot of hipsters with no marketable skills have suddenly lost their comfy sinecure. These are 99% of the dweebs you see bitching about AI art tools.

Actually talented and inspired artists are not threatened by AI one iota. They can easily ignore it and continue to make great art the old fashioned way if they want. But a lot of them actually love it, because it allows them to upscale their existing processes and massively reduce costs by “insourcing” parts of their art once sent to technicians.

This development was incredibly useful for me given my background as a song parodist. I am pretty decent at writing funny and compelling lyrics, but I have zero training as a composer. I’m also a pretty amateurish singer, while my talents in audio editing aren’t much more extensive than a basic knowledge of Audacity.

But thanks to AI that doesn’t matter, because I now have a robotic Sullivan to my Gilbert plus an entire orchestra at my disposal, so I can create cool shit like this:

Now maybe you don’t like any of these songs.

That’s fine—other people do, and ultimately I’m just creating them to have fun.

But if you’re going to tell me it’s somehow immoral or degenerate not to develop those other skills myself (or instead spend thousands of dollars on a composer, performers, and a professional audio editor) then I’m just going to call you a fucking asshole.

The alternative wasn’t me hiring those people, it was me not being able to create at all.

AI has democratized art in a way that is massively salient to me personally, and I take personal umbrage at anyone opposing this. I also feel incredible contempt for anyone so ignorant as to assume the machine is doing *literally everything*, which ignores in an incredibly pigheaded way the role of the artist as producer and curator.

When it comes to my AI generated songs, I usually write the lyrics entirely myself, and that is what I care most about artistically. I let the machine handle what I don’t have the technical skills to do myself, using creative and iterative prompt engineering and rigorous curation to make sure it sounds decent in the end. I’ll admit this aspect of creation puts me in the role of producer rather than artist, but the final product is a legitimate work of art and a genuine reflection of my aesthetic sensibilities.

When it comes to my essays, the art is obviously in the prose. That I write entirely by hand, and would never dream of outsourcing to Chat GPT. There is also obviously a lot of creativity involved in prompt engineering the thumbnail (as described above), but I similarly view this as more of a marketing / production activity. It’s important, and authentically creative in an entirely meritorious way, but by itself is not “art” per se. But holistically speaking, the final product to which it contributes is obviously art.

The people who bigotedly dismiss this sort of creation as inherently less valid are ignorant and dangerous. This impulse is not that of a genuinely inspired artist, who can and will adapt to any technological ecology. It is the province of bigoted chuds, gatekeeping snobs, and broke furry porn technicians.

At the end of the day, if we say it’s illegitimate for artists to use this specific tool, we’ll need to say the same thing about the camera and applications like Photoshop.

This was, of course, frequently said of such tools when they first emerged.

And today we rightly consign such opinions to the dustbin of history.

Shəlaka Uvach

Age of puberty in girls

In a recent post, called Girls are going through puberty too early, Walt Bismarck pointed to the drastic decrease in age of puberty in girls and blamed it for the overall fear and contempt that most adult women seem to have for male sexuality nowadays. As a 25 year old woman, I can readily observe how sex negative most of my peers are. And the subject o…

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2 years ago · 30 likes · 24 comments · Sai

Just Saying

Bring Back the Red Tent

The afternoon after I got my first period, I bused home from school, called my mom at work to tell her the news, and then I took off my shoes and went directly to my bedroom to apologize to my wall of meticulously-hung Jonathan Taylor Thomas posters. I told him I was sorry, but something had changed and I was a woman now, and I couldn’t devote so much o…

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2 years ago · 15 likes · 11 comments · Lirpa Strike

The Cassandra Complex

The Lost Girls and Boys

This post is too long for email, you’ll have a better reading experience if you click through to read it directly on Substack…

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2 years ago · 97 likes · 38 comments · Meghan Bell

One thing I’ve noticed talking to various female friends / girlfriends over the years is that basically all of them complain about having been sexualized as a preteen girl in a very traumatic way. Usually these stories involve a sleepover / pool party at a friend’s house and creepy behavior from said friend’s dad or older brother. The other big one is being ogled or catcalled at Target or something.

I am convinced that this phenomenon is mostly responsible for the fear and contempt modern women increasingly have for male sexuality (i.e. the rise of sex negative feminism among Zoomer women). I also suspect it to be the primary cause of the massively inflated rates of transgender identification among adolescent girls:

I came to this conclusion after doing some basic research and discovering that the modern era has ushered in an enormous decrease in the age of female puberty:

It seems very obvious to me what is happening here.

Girls are getting their periods and developing secondary sexual characteristics (boobs) 1-3 years earlier than they “should be” biologically. But they can’t psychologically handle the stresses of incipient womanhood (menstruation, intrasexual competition, sexual attention from men) because they still have the mind of a little girl.

And no, this isn’t simply due to improved nutrition from industrial agriculture—the trend has continued well into modern times. Consider this recent study showing a decrease in the age of menarche of ~1.5 years between mothers and daughters:

From the abstract:

A secular declining trend in the age of menarche has been reported in most of the developed and developing countries since the beginning of 20th century across the globe. Many studies were conducted to track this decline in the recent times.

Recent study by Population Association of America noted a significant decline in the age at menarche worldwide, which was observed irrespective of socioeconomic status, race or ethnicity. A downward trend from >16 years in the mid-1800s to< 13 years by the 1980s was reported.

Studies also documented the trend towards earlier menarche in England, Israel, China, India, Korea, Ghana, Mexico, Thailand, and the USA.

Results of the study showed that in Europe, the menarcheal age decreased from 16 to 17 years in the mid-19th century to 13 years in the mid-20th century, and among the Chinese girls the age at menarche declined from 14.25 in girls born before 1976 to 12.60 in girls born after 2000, with an estimated decline of 0.51 years per decade.

Here is another dataset I found specifically for the USA:

As you can see, the decrease has started to level off somewhat, but clearly hasn’t abated, despite the median American having been in a state of nutritional post-scarcity for decades now.

This is a big deal, because age of menarche is highly correlated with age of breast development and the onset of other dimorphic characteristics that will cause men to start treating you very differently:

And not just men, but also female peers:

I don’t think this phenomenon has a single cause, and suspect it to be overdetermined by various diseases of modernity—likely some combination of environmental endocrine disruptors, a sedentary lifestyle, a more unstable social ecology, fatherlessness, and increased exposure to pornographic material as young children.

Whatever the cause, girls are developing adolescent bodies alongside basically childlike minds and this is causing enormous trauma on a civilizational scale.

And that’s why you get so many teenagers these days wanting to cut their boobs off:

(Obviously this clip doesn’t portray Bebe as “trans,” but I think it very accurately captures the underlying sentiment behind this toxic fad in young girls)

It’s also why so many adult Zoomer women are increasingly disinterested in sex and are becoming femcels, political lesbians, or sex negative Dworkinites. This is actually an entirely reasonable response to the sort of experiences a girl will have after growing boobs 2-3 years too early.

My goal in writing this piece is to get female Substackers to write about this issue and spread awareness using a style of rhetoric that will appeal to more normie women (something I am very bad at and not interested in optimizing for).

This really needs to be addressed as a feminist issue—women have to lead the discussion. Normal people are too stupid and bigoted to let a man express any opinion on something as sensitive as this. The only reason I’m willing to start the discussion is that I’m incredibly autistic and disagreeable.

But most men aren’t going to touch this with a ten foot pole, because whenever you point out this phenomenon around normies you inevitably get some hatchet-faced schoolmarm going “WELL MEN SHOULDN’T BE LOOKING AT YOUNG GIRLS ANYWAY” and implying you’re a pedophile for even talking about this. Men are extremely afraid of being called pedophiles, so this shuts down all discussion.

Most of these women are simply retarded low openness bigots, but some are just reacting to their own adolescent trauma in an unproductive way, and I have a lot of sympathy for them. But this kind of censorious impulse is incredibly toxic and doesn’t help young girls at all. When trying to solve difficult social problems on the ground we must speak candidly about the world that actually exists, not the world that should be.

A lot of girls complain about creepy looks from their friend’s dad at a pool party. Suspiciously few of them wonder if anyone says the same thing about their own dad.

If they did I think they’d start approaching this from a more constructive direction.

Unfortunately, normies don’t really care about arguments and facts. They care about personal credibility and a position’s prestige coding.

Given this reality, I recognized very early on that I need to get women publicly endorsing this line of inquiry and adding their perspective.

That’s why I’ve spent the last few weeks asking my female guests about this topic on my podcast, Walt Right Perspectives.

In Episode 6 I spoke with Sai from Shəlaka Uvach, who offered some expert-level scientific insight on the chemical / social causes of early puberty.

She also presented a compelling explanation for how missing out on a pre-pubescent (but relatively mentally mature) adolescence prevents girls from developing a nonsexual intimacy with boys and feeling comfy in male spaces.

In Episode 9 I discussed the same issue with Lirpa Strike, who has been aware of this issue for a long time, having once incited controversy by railing against endocrine disruptors as a contrarian feminist blogger.

She also pointed out something that really resonated with me—a lot of the sex ed literature we were given as kids said that girls get their period between 14-16, even though all the girls around us got it from 11-13.

In retrospect this disconnect feels positively Orwellian!

Finally, in Episode 12 I spoke with the sex therapist Raven Connolly, who pointed out that early puberty produces many negative social consequences for young girls, and suggested that a degree of adolescent sex segregation might be an interim solution.

Raven emphasized the importance of effective parental communication during female adolescence, and highlighted the extreme psychological difficulty of raising an attractive teenage daughter.

Her comments about the large modern age gap between mothers and daughters (and the power dynamic that often emerges from this) are especially fascinating:

I don’t pretend to have any perfect solution to this issue. Neutralizing environmental endocrine disruptors is prohibitively difficult at this point, and it seems like puberty blockers are too risky. I also don’t want to spend too much time talking about this myself, because it’s just kind of a weird thing for a man to focus on.

But it really bothers me that more women aren’t talking about this, because I see it as an incredibly salient feminist issue that is causing an enormous amount of trauma to young girls on the ground and is poisoning relations between the sexes.

So to all the women reading this: please fucking write about this topic!

Talk about your personal experiences, look through the many many many many studies on decreasing age of menarche and see if you can’t come to any novel insights, and propose some creative solutions. I don’t care how crazy these solutions are—literally any suggestion is appreciated, because we really need to get people talking about this. That has to be the first step. If you send me some hot takes on how to move forward on this as a society, I will promote you very aggressively.

To all the men reading this: please send this article to all the rational and high openness women in your life who will give it a thoughtful read. It is civilizationally vital that we mainstream this conversation, but the only way that’s going to happen is if we can get the sheilas talking about it amongst themselves.

One of the biggest things holding back conservatism in the West is that conservatives are terrible at art, don’t understand it, and behave in a way that artistic people find repulsive. This is a massive obstacle to success in the culture war, for obvious reasons.

This phenomenon is mostly caused by differences in personality and temperament. Quantitative studies show that liberals are usually creative thinkers with low conscientiousness, high openness, and high neuroticism. Meanwhile, conservatives are linear thinkers with high conscientiousness and low openness and neuroticism.

This means conservatives are better at making money than liberals, and are also happier and less likely to kill themselves or chop their dick / tiddies off. Sadly, it also makes them boring and uncreative people who lack a mythic vision for the world and are far too “sensible” to pursue the risky and precarious life of an artist. They also tend to simply lack the verbal intelligence to properly understand things like subtext and symbolism and irony, and without these tools it’s virtually impossible to create emotionally satisfying and sophisticated art.

These factors combine to make conservatives laughably inept at influencing popular culture in mainstream society. And this is the main reason conservatives always lose—the culture is always shifting beneath their feet and throwing them off balance. In this essay I’ll explore how this works and explain how conservatives can fix the problem.

First I need to dispel the fiction popular among Boomers that conservatives are deliberately driven out of popular culture or the world of art because of their beliefs.

This opinion is retarded. Hollywood is all about money, and artists like Mel Gibson, Clint Eastwood, and RDJ are untouchable despite their conservative views because they’re actually talented and their creations print money.

The real issue is most conservatives are uncreative and untalented, and can only raise funding from expressly ideological entities interested in a “conservative movie”.

This always results in kitschy dogshit like God’s Not Dead:

This obviously isn’t art.

It isn’t even propaganda, because it sure as hell wasn’t made to convince anyone. If anything it serves the opposite purpose—the cultural equivalent of rollin’ coal.

Films like this are self-indulgent garbage, likely designed by a committee of fat guys with pink cheeks and glassy eyes. Nobody watches this dreck except for dissociating Sunday schoolers, homeless junkies looking for a free meal, Filipinas recently liberated from sex trafficking, and depressed housewives with a pill problem.

No intelligent person wants to watch a “conservative movie”—not even conservatives. Most of the time conservatives just watch liberal-coded movies and either complain about them or root for the bad guys. But even when a good conservative-coded movie does emerge, low openness conservative chuds always find something to bitch about.

I remember when Passion of the Christ was first released. My grandma and aunt kept complaining about all the blood and violence. They loved seeing Jesus in a major picture, but didn’t want to see their beloved savior tortured. They unironically thought the brutality and gore made Passion a bad movie.

I was only a little kid at the time, but this inspired a ferocious anger in me. Even then I recognized that Jesus’s suffering was the emotional centerpiece of Christianity. Depicting his sacrifice in gruesome and visceral detail is probably one of the very best ways to do “conservative art”, but small-brained conservative chuds have too high a disgust reflex and are too low openness to appreciate this (and the same thing applies to candid portrayals of sexuality). Thank God Mel Gibson is probably 0th percentile agreeableness, or Passion never would have been made!

Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino is another great example of conservachud pigheadedness. This is probably the most positive portrayal of an old racist white guy in any mainstream work of art since the 1960s. It also has some of the funniest ethnic banter you’ll hear in any film made this century. But STILL edgy wignats counter-signaled the movie because the protagonist gives his car to the Asian kid at the end.

These people can’t handle being challenged at all. They want everything to be pretty and nice and comfortable. They want ideas to fit together neatly and cleanly, and get really fucking annoyed at the prospect of any nuance or contradiction.

This tendency also surfaces with argumentation.

A lot of people on the right and in the rationalist community are annoyed by the style of my essays here on Substack because I don’t always explicitly say how I feel about something or directly resolve tensions / contradictions in my worldview.

Instead of laying out my beliefs syllogistically in a manifesto, I use a stream of consciousness rhetoric that builds intimacy with my reader and advances my point covertly through subtext or implication.

In other words, I am arguing artistically. This is why my essays are actually enjoyable to read. I’m going for Voltaire, Franklin, or Nietzsche—not Kant or Noam Chomsky.

Because of this style, I’ve grown very explosively on Substack during my short tenure here, even going viral on multiple occasions. At this rate, by the end of the year I will have a huge platform and enough subscription income to doxx myself and quit my job. Whatever I am doing, it is very obviously working.

But to a certain type of conservative mind my style comes off as shifty slimy sophistry. They have an instinctive aversion to rhetorical provocation, and think of posts like this as “engagement farming” because, again, they don’t understand art. They don’t see you as trustworthy or “serious” unless you write in a very boring and direct way.

They obsess over tensions in your worldview because they don’t have the emotional intelligence to see the world as a messy and complicated place that’s inescapably contradictory and makes hypocrites of us all. To these guys the only legitimate approach to political debate is stoically presenting your opinions as a straightforward “platform” or “ideology” with perfectly Kantian internal coherence.

This mindset is frankly retarded.

Having fixed views on object-level issues is basically just LARPing. Nobody of consequence thinks this way in practice, and virtually nothing in politics gets done like this. You will always refine and pivot your exact positions based on edge cases, in accordance with changing macroeconomic / technological / geopolitical conditions, or in response to coalitional pressures.

How I feel about trade, immigration, monetary, or foreign policy is hugely circumstantial, so I don’t feel any pressing need to write some elaborate general treatise explaining my views on all these things. I can just align directionally with subject matter experts in my coalition where appropriate, and instead focus my energies on more engaging topics where I have something interesting to say.

Similarly, I don’t have a fixed level of white ingroup preference because—as Shane Gillis observes—racial sentiment is almost always a function of your environment. I became a WN in 2015 because of conditions on the ground, and stopped being a WN once those conditions changed, but if things got really bad for white people again I’d be the first back in the trenches. This doesn’t mean I’m “not consistent in my morality”; it means my morality recognizes we live in an incredibly dynamic world that demands perpetual recalibration of one’s views.

I also don’t feel like it’s some great defeat if I modify my views in response to an insight gained from an interlocuter. I am very firm in my basic convictions, but how these convictions manifest is flexible, and this is by design.

I think future podcast guest sunshine describes my attitude best in these comments:

This, to my mind, is the only proper way to do right wing politics.

My approach recognizes that society isn’t a computer that can be programmed in a systematic and predictable way, but rather a living and breathing organism that does lots of weird shit. You need to approach it like a physician, not a software engineer.

And therein lies the biggest flaw of rationalism and adjacent schools of conservative and centrist thought—too many goddamned programmers.

The world is messy and nuanced, and literally all debate is curtailed by implicit power relations, incentive structures, and courtesy norms. A lot of these dynamics are literally too subtextual and complicated for more linear-thinking shape rotator men to grasp, and that’s why women and liberals feel such naked contempt for rationalists, incels, and libertarians. Such dynamics are the actual forces shaping political development, especially on a generational level. Contra Hunter Wallace, metapolitics are much more important and vastly more interesting than object-level politics.

But by definition you can’t influence metapolitics through debate. It can be done directly through propaganda or strategic activism, or it can be done indirectly (and usually MUCH more impactfully) through art. Either way, to properly compete in the metapolitical idea space, the conservative cannot afford to alienate the artist.

Sadly, conservatives don’t just alienate artists. They actively drive them away.

This is a huge unforced error, because attracting these people wouldn’t otherwise be hard. Liberals have created a monstrously repressive and finger-wagging ecology where a lot of disagreeable and free-thinking creatives who’d otherwise be staunch progressives (think Dasha, Nick Mullen, or the Dirtbag Left in general) are very sympathetic to the right. But when these people enter conservative spaces they’re mocked at best (i.e. Dasha’s bodycount) and treated with suspicion or hostility at worst.

The best example of this is Delicious Tacos, a writer who accurately and beautifully describes the world from the perspective of a sensitive man with many diseases of modernity, most notably a crippling sex addiction. His style is similar to Houellebecq’s, and he’d probably be just as influential if Americans weren’t so grotesquely hypocritical about sex and intimacy.

DT’s stories are without exception politically incorrect and even somewhat fash-coded, but they’re also strikingly vulnerable and display tremendous empathy and even romantic idealism. This makes them the perfect vehicle for sending a degenerate urbanite like me down a more “trad” path emotionally.

But the conservative chud refuses to see them as such. Instead he’ll just call Tacos a degenerate race mixer for fucking Filipina hookers, in the same way the catty little Zoomer bitches on reddit call him a pedophile rapist.

They refuse to meet Tacos where he is. They refuse to meet the world where it is.

And that is why they always lose.

It’s also why so many of their kids fucking despise them and end up moving to Minneapolis to become a lesbian or some shit .

A lot of conservative beliefs are highly maladaptive and will alienate creative people.

One such belief is an unsophisticated insistence on very simplistic sex roles.

I say this with a caveat because I am clearly no feminist, and generally celebrate the existence of sex roles both in my personal life and on a societal level. I love spending money on women, holding the door open, etc., and look down on men who don’t.

But conservatives tend to have an incredibly primitive and grug understanding of masculinity / femininity that makes people feel inadequate and insecure for very stupid things. This drives tremendous resentment and in practice actually prevents people from self-actualizing into healthy sex roles.

It’s also bound to alienate artists, because to make great art you need to call upon both masculine and feminine energy—in Jungian terms you need to integrate your anima / animus. This means that talented artists are usually gender nonconforming in some significant way. And that doesn’t have to mean gay or trans. It often does, but it usually doesn’t. It’s more that male artists are more sensitive / empathetic than the median man, while female artists are more rational / objective than the median girl.

This nonconformity often draws hostility from the Chud Right because smooth brained conservatives tend to view masculine and feminine as “opposite”, while non-woke liberals and more enlightened conservatives view them more as orthogonal.

Our goal isn’t to become some amorphous nonbinary blobfish, but rather to cultivate a lot of both masculine and feminine energy, as this combination gives you the almost superhuman charisma of a David Bowie or Cate Blanchett.

In the chud conservative worldview being a theater kid makes a man “sissy” or “gay”. To a more enlightened mind it’s what lets you tap into your anima and do shit like this:

Simpleminded chuds without any dimensionality to their manhood hate seeing shit like this because it reminds them how painfully mundane they are. Even if they had Spencer’s height and money, they’d never be able to inspire the reaction he does in the above clip. The chud conservative worldview severs men from their anima and this makes them horribly uncharismatic, especially in a sexual or romantic context.

If you think I’m exaggerating, just listen to chuds talk. They’re always painfully monotone, because as a kid their chud dad told them it’s faggish to speak in an exuberant or theatrical way. Because of this they have no power over language, and this prevents them from scaling up or exploiting more exponential / asymmetrical life strategies. The chud never rises beyond middle management and a $200k salary, and nobody ever sees him as a real leader—not even his children after 10 or so.

And the chud will certainly never make a girl bounce. Instead he brute forces his way out of inceldom with a gym body or money, and even then girls will only ever settle for him after that late twenties anxiety kicks in. If the chud ever experiences genuine lust from a woman it’s only thanks to sweet oxytocin—the beta male’s best friend.

Another highly maladaptive conservative view is the extreme hostility to homosexuality and promiscuity.

By this I don’t mean “not wanting gay marriage” or “preferring your daughter not start an Onlyfans.” I don’t even mean expressing disdain for the licentious sexuality of degenerate urbanites when one enters your particular community. I believe in thoroughgoing freedom of association, and if you want to live in a community that discourages homosexuality and promiscuity, that’s perfectly fine by me.

What I mean is pigheadedly refusing to build tactical coalitions of mutual interest with gays / rakes / sluts, even when doing so would very obviously benefit you.

What I mean is being hostile to us for literally no reason, when we just want to live in a city and do our degenerate thing in peace, far away from your fat people suburb.

Look chud—you don’t have to “protect” anyone from me. I have no desire to infiltrate your “parish” and despoil your rectangular sister. And we’re certainly not competing for anything. At this point any woman you’d consider wifeable would probably seem frigid and unfeminine to me, and you’d likewise be repulsed by my women. These days I exclusively date neurotic Jewesses on Seeking—the sort of girls who are always fighting with their mom and used to strip and have eaten a bottle of Xanax at least twice. Half of them have sleeve tattoos or septum piercings, and the rest have twenty grand in medical debt. That’s the type of girl who I find hot and who understands me. These are the gals that give a degenerate guy a triple digit bodycount. Not your sister who works at Denny’s and writes Wizard101 fanfiction. I’m not “corrupting” anyone.

Guys like me and Delicious Tacos don’t create slutty women.

Conservative chuds do when they molest their daughter.

Alright, that was probably too harsh. That’s enough anti-chud invective for one essay.

At this juncture I should make at least some overture to more thoughtful conservatives and propose a concrete list of ways to get out of this mess.

To that end, my first solution is pretty straightforward—stop attacking degenerates and nonconformists. When you do that, you’re just going to negatively polarize guys like me against you, and the same principle applies even more strongly with the sloots and the gays. There are an enormous number of us in creative positions, and all you need to do to benefit from our outsized cultural influence is be slightly less annoying than the hectoring schoolmarms of the modern left. Not exactly a high bar.

My second solution is to spend your money better on actually good art.

Namely, please stop funding retarded organizations like The Daily Wire that make cringeworthy and kitsch “conservative art”. That isn’t even how art works.

Liberal creatives aren’t trying to make “liberal art;” they are merely creating good art that subtextually (and often unconsciously) reflects their authentic worldview, which for most artsy people is going to be liberal for the myriad of reasons spelled out above.

But plenty of exceptions exist, especially among disagreeable contrarian types. Hell, a lot of the best art with a conservative message is actually made by intellectually honest liberals who simply follow their creative instincts to their natural conclusion.

Perhaps the most notable example of this is Lena Dunham’s Girls, which is very famously a favorite of Ross Douthat and other elite, high openness conservatives because it brilliantly eviscerates the narcissism of liberal millennial women. The reason this works artistically is that Lena herself is a tremendously narcissistic liberal millennial woman, so she knows how to couch otherwise intolerably bitter redpills about life and love in language / aesthetics that won’t alienate her demographic with a hectoring Charlie Kirk approach.

If you want to create conservative art you need to empower independent and authentic voices like Lena, and you need to make peace with the fact that they won’t always agree with you on everything—or even most things. Sometimes their creations won’t be polished and will turn out weird or offensive or even cringeworthy. That’s all part of the process. You just need to give these people your money and then step away to let them ride the tiger, and if you’re lucky the kid you patronize will mature into someone like Dasha or Delicious Tacos and send aging rakes / sluts back to the pews.

You specifically need to patronize independent art scenes. Your contributions to artists in these communities are tremendously significant, especially in an age where AI increasingly allows artists to create high quality products without any expensive equipment or training. These days getting started as a career artist can be as simple as not needing to wagecuck.

(Speaking of that, now is a good time to become a Paychad and contribute to the Walt Bismarck Doxxing Fund if you are a man of means. I’m certain I could write three books worth of great essays and even a Hamilton-esque musical this year if I could stop wagecucking. But back to the show…)

The most important thing is that you stop discouraging your children and family and friends from pursuing a career in anything creative while insisting that it isn’t “practical”. Not everybody should be practical. A lot of people simply can’t be.

If I’d had the balls to monetize Walt Bismarck on Patreon in 2016 and resisted Disney’s copyright lawyers I probably could have figured out a way to support myself as a full time satirist. Instead I was a pussy and wasted my twenties in dissociated STEM wagecuck hell, and I’ve regretted this for a long time.

But it was only ever my fans who encouraged me to take Walt Bismarck pro—my parents and other family members thought it abject lunacy to give up a promising career for such a risky proposition. At the time I was only 23 and very naive about the world, so I reluctantly followed their advice.

The ironic thing is that for the past eight years I’ve been living an incredibly risky life anyway, rapidly jumping between jobs and consistently getting promoted despite never really learning anything. I can tread water and exploit my companies well enough by dint of raw IQ, but this feels patently undignified, and my life is infinitely better now that an engaging writing career has become a real option.

So if you ever encounter someone in your life who has a creative dream—especially your own kid—don’t be the asshole to kill that dream and push them back in the cubicle. Be a stolid practical conservative all you want, but learn from John Adams:

The final thing conservatives need to do is very consciously develop their own faculties for media literacy and art appreciation.

The first priority is to get better at understanding things like subtext and symbolism and irony. This isn’t that hard if you have a high IQ—not even for a shape rotator mathcel. Once you do it enough it will become almost algorithmic via pattern recognition, and you’ll be able to keep up with wordcels in most discussions.

I suggest you specifically begin by watching The Sopranos—which strongly appeals to conservative sensibilities on an aesthetic level and will be easy to watch—and then consulting this blog after every episode. Also watch Pure Kino’s episode recaps on YouTube. If you do this for the entire series you will become a lot better at understanding art, and will also have an easier time keeping up with liberals and women when they try to weaponize their superior social intelligence in everyday life.

The second step is to kill your urge to look away when your disgust response is activated by art involving sexuality, violence, and weirdness / eccentricity. We all have this response to some degree, but conservatives feel it a lot harder on average. It isn’t entirely a bad thing, and has some prosocial implications, but it also leads to things like my grandma hating Passion because of the Jesus torture, or chuds turning off Netflix the moment dudes kiss or they see a bit of man ass.

Honestly, if you want to be taken seriously as an adult you can’t do shit like this. It’s fine for you to be disgusted or offended by something. But you should realize that is often the point. Not all art is meant to be pleasant. Disgust and offense can and often are weaponized by artists to subtextually invoke a prosocial message you’d probably approve of. This is everywhere in Houellebecq and Delicious Tacos. It’s usually how high openness degens are actually drawn to more “trad” lifestyles in practice.

Weaponizing disgust was also the point of movies like Cuties and Pretty Baby, but conservatives chuds are too dense to understand that and so they hysterically condemn such films as pedo bait.

And then they go buy their preteen daughter a smart phone.

This was a characteristically meandering and uncharacteristically inflammatory essay, but I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.

If I said anything too provocative I’ll ask you to forgive me—this was written in one sitting, in a fit of passion and under the influence of a bit too much Adderall.

I’m going to end this piece by grifting again, because I have become incredibly serious about building this Substack into a platform with legs.

I want to spit insightful new essays on this platform every day and collate them into book form. Eventually I want to form a real thinktank that pays guys like Ryan Faulk and Sean Last an annual salary to publish books, journal articles, and white papers.

So far Walt Right Perspectives has been an unqualified success. But I need to massively scale it up and engage with a lot more alternative scenes and subcultures. Eventually I intend to get the DR / AR / whatever talking to freethinkers of all backgrounds.

I want to create a comprehensive daily newscast to give us something comparable to TRS circa 2015. We also need weekly salons where high IQ freethinkers and contrarians can shoot the shit with no rules in a heavily gatekept environment. This will be developed alongside a fundraising / patronage network for provocative and independent young artists.

I also need to upscale my own artistic production by hiring AI prompt engineers to help me execute my vision and create lots of great content for you all. I intend to use this approach to write a musical—a biting and provocative synthesis of Hamilton and 1776—that goes viral and pushes my ideas into mainstream metapolitical discourse. If I managed this in 2016 with poorly sung Disney parodies, I can absolutely do it in 2024 with something a lot more polished.

To execute this vision I need manpower and lots of money, and I’m not worried about getting either those things long-term. I’ll just need to brush off my slide deck skills from my days in consulting, and will spend lots of time talking to rich dudes behind the scenes. Eventually I will convince someone into helping us out. I’ve done it before for a friend’s startup, and it will be a lot easier for something that’s mine.

Unfortunately, this kind of fundraising simply can’t happen until I crowdfund sufficient income to doxx myself and quit my job. Rich guys just won’t take me seriously under a pseudonym, so I need to show my face and ditch the Walt Bismarck label (or perhaps change my actual name to Walt Bismarck, since I identify with that a lot more than my real name). Ideally I will reach this point before the election.

To do that I need your help. I need you to upgrade to Paychad status and send me five bucks a month. If you can afford more, send that too. But if just a few hundred people did the $5 I could absolutely make this work, and the return on your investment will be nothing short of colossal. I will work 110 hour weeks and publish a veritable tsunami of top shelf content, and this will absolutely get the discourse moving in a more productive direction.

This doesn’t require you to agree with my vision even 50% of the time. If you agree with me more than the median CNN anchor, giving me money can only benefit you.

Also it’s literally only $5.

Please consider it and help make this dream a reality. We’re building something truly special here on Substack—something better even than the 2015 AR—and with just a bit of help from you I am confident I can take it to the next level.

Thank you,

Brother Walt

I am going to start publicly bullying guys who are excessively mean to promiscuous women or women with a promiscuous past, and will loudly encourage other men on the Right to do the same thing.

One reason for this is that I am a novelty-seeking urbanite with high openness to experience, so these women comprise much of my friend group. I therefore feel a lot of loyalty to this type of person and want people to hear her side of the story.

I also identify with her more than I do other promiscuous men, because I’m too strange and autistic to ever be seen as a “Chad”. Most of my own relationships have a kind of Elon/Grimes vibe that sometimes pisses people off. When low openness chuds see a weirdo who’s successful with beautiful women they tend to feel he doesn’t “deserve” it, and will go after him in the same way they do sluts (but NEVER will with normie “Chads” they don’t perceive as soft targets).

But the main reason for this move is that I mostly support the goal “Trads” have to create a more sexually inhibited and monogamous culture. I just think they are going about it in a stupid, offensive, and counterproductive way.

The low openness and proudly middle class chuds and schoolmarms who constitute the Normie Right never optimize their rhetoric for persuasiveness and practical impact. Instead they mostly try to create space for themselves to bully people and feel superior, which to be fair is very useful for building internal solidarity, aligning norms, accruing status within a subculture, etc. This is what I did with the Alt Right in 2015, so it’s very easy for me to spot.

But I also am friends with a lot of thoughtful and empathetic “Trad” types who don’t do this, have more nuanced thoughts on the matter, are usually a little older, and often themselves come from a more licentious background. They’re also higher status, and don’t need to get their neurochemical cummies from bullying OnlyFans models.

I am addressing the current essay to this type of person, and will do my best to convince them a softer and gentler approach to degeneracy will generate more success

The first point I want to emphasize is that Trads have more in common with degenerates than they imagine, and that it’s possible to work together on this issue.

I am extremely degenerate in my own behavior, but I seek a more restrained culture because that would make it a lot more fun to be an elite degenerate.

Degeneracy is ruined when you make it accessible to poor and uneducated proles who have less control over their actions and can’t financially absorb the consequences of bad behavior. It fills degenerate spaces with stupid and ugly people who kill the vibe because you have to explain everything to them.

This in turn makes it necessary to sanitize these spaces and restrain predators or hucksters who might exploit these people, and the resulting middle class HR culture of “safe, sane, and consensual” very quickly ruins any transgressive appeal. One can observe this in the decline of 1970s style “swinger” culture into modern polyamory, or the grotesquely explicit contractualism of BDSM that emerges from non-elites being shit at conveying power relations through subtext.

The resulting need for harder transgression creates a lot more perverse and dangerous kinds of degeneracy that aren’t as “open to the public”. And that’s how you get things like NXIVM or Epstein’s Island or the stuff portrayed in movies like Eyes Wide Shut.

The thing is, wealthy and sophisticated elites will always figure out ways to be degenerate, because they are a lot more verbally talented than church ladies and their stolid bean counter husbands. They’ll always think of possibilities for transgression that normies couldn’t even fathom, let alone control.

But when the overall sexual culture is more conservative you can get the same feelings of transgression without people doing anything truly harmful, and you can also create vibrant spaces for elites that serve as a healthy transgressive “release valve” for novelty-seeking people.

A wise ruling class will very deliberately organize society to achieve this end.

Las Vegas serves as a great example both of how cordoned off degeneracy enables the Tradlife and of how stupid poor people and even middle class normies will completely ruin degeneracy.

Today Vegas is sanitized for mass tourism and manages to be extremely degenerate without being cool or sexy. It’s basically Disneyland with Hooker Pokémon Cards.

But during the Rat Pack era it was “Sin City”—a space for elite and high openness people to work self-destructive urges out of their system in a controlled environment where nothing followed you home.

Hence the famous motto—“What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas”.

It was also controlled by the Mafia, so the consequences for fucking up were severe, and this kept away most people who couldn’t handle it. Meanwhile, the people involved in the culture understood the risks and could deal with the negative consequences. Some lives were ruined for sure, but that just added to the transgressive appeal and taught everyone else what lines to draw.

And so you briefly had a glamorous place where rich guys could blow off steam and the rules were optimized to meet their needs. They could wave their dick around in a high stakes poker game with other powerful men, snort cocaine off a young actress’s tit or knock back a few shots of whiskey with Sinatra, and experience catharsis by losing half a million at the blackjack table.

Such behavior horrifies middle class finger-waggers and Dave Ramsey enjoyers who could never afford to do this and pretend it has no appeal to decent people like themselves. But it’s ironically the abundance of elite degenerate spaces like Vegas that enabled the stability and hyper-conservative mindset of the 1950s and early 1960s.

The sort of men who rise to the top of society have an enormous desire for conflict and risk-taking. If you don’t give them a Vegas they will start a war and send your son into the trenches. If they can’t lose their fortune gambling they will take those sort of risks with their business, and soon your husband or father will be out of a job.

Gambling is a vital social technology for this reason. You just can’t make it accessible to the masses. That’s what gets you the Zoomer guy who treats sports betting like a video game and becomes hopelessly addicted. Or even worse, the braless grandma who wastes her entire social security check at a penny slots machine in a quasi-hypnotized state. This kind of danger and transgression isn’t cool or sexy, it’s fucking disgusting and should be banned.

Precisely the same principle applies to sex. Las Vegas used to be a place to have a cocaine-fueled adventure with an overeducated and adventurous girl half your age rebelling against her stuffy affluent family. This was psychologically useful to both of you, and enabled general conformity to more conventional hot dog sexual morality.

As a man you could experience sexual novelty and feel young again, and this made it significantly easier to be nice to your wife with a cottage cheese ass. It made sure you didn’t do something a lot worse, like leave her for your big tiddy secretary. Women hate to hear this (in fact it’s not something you should ever talk about with a woman, unless you’re paying her or she has Asperger’s Syndrome), but elite men find monogamy very taxing and pretty much always cheat.

Meanwhile, as a woman you got to work through psychosexual frustration with your tyrannical father by using your pussy to control someone much richer and more impressive than him in the Cleopatrian manner. It’s easy to stop hating your dad for controlling you with tuition money when your sugar daddy casually drops a few grand on a necklace or takes you out to enjoy some premium yayo on his yacht.

A lot of Lana Del Rey’s earlier work is about this kind of dynamic. I particularly enjoy “Off to the Races” and “National Anthem”, and encourage more normie people to listen if they don’t understand the appeal of what I describe.

You can despise this sort of thing all you want, but you can’t really stop elite men from acting this way. If you don’t create a separate world where rebellious bohemian girls can become their Little Scarlet Harlot, these guys will come after your daughter.

And this is why it’s a very good thing for “loose women” who enjoy this life to exist.

I consider myself a Traditionalist Degenerate because I want to go back to the Vegas model of degeneracy. Let guys who deserve it be a bit rakish behind closed doors in elite urban spaces without any dumb normies ruining the vibe.

In mainstream and especially suburban life we can let the Church Lady think she is controlling things and everyone will be happy. Most suburban Trads will never even get exposed to the Vegas lifestyle, and can continue to pursue a risk averse hamBurgher life without ever being troubled by the thought of someone having fun.

Meanwhile, marginal “edge case” types who can’t really handle degeneracy (and in today’s world get chewed up by it and become an aimless party girl at best and a hooker / addict at worst) will probably stay away from the things that lead them down those roads, because in my ideal world it’s a lot scarier and less sanitized.

That means if any of your kids are rebellious (or end up significantly more degenerate than you because of genetic drift), my ideal would work strongly to your benefit.

You need to realize that elites have always been slutty and always will. The main problem with the Sexual Revolution is that it’s made sexual license too pedestrian. It’s superficially much safer, but in the long run is vastly (yet subtly) more dangerous.

Poor and even middle class people can’t handle promiscuity. The inequalities it produces when men can’t easily use money / fame / erudition / creative talent to level the playing field with tall and handsome men are too much for most men to handle.

Some 15% of the population will inevitably become incel in any society, and that’s a good eugenic thing. But Tinder has taken this to an unsustainable 30% that will include a lot of perfectly fine guys who just happen to be 5’7 or Norwood 5 or bad at taking selfies, and that will inevitably produce a ferocious hatred in low status men.

You really need to take measures to crack down on this, and that is why I support sexual conservatism for poor people.

Another reason I hate modern promiscuity is that it’s so unglamorous.

It’s produced a dating landscape full of really bad shit. Optimized Tinder profiles. Hiring a professional to take Hinge pics for you. Men neurotically obsessing over their looks like women and doing weird shit like mewing. Existentially horrifying experiments with “Chadfishing".

Wild Vegas escapades have likewise given way to Netflix and Chill. Simultaneously texting thirteen girls “you up?” and going with your Back of the Fridge Option because your cuter FWB is too busy binging the latest serial killer show. Fingering a Brand Marketing Manager next to a crumpled McDonalds bag.

Groace.

We should ban dating apps for aesthetic reasons alone.

Contra incels, the problem with women isn’t that their standards are too high, it’s that they’re too low. Girls let themselves get fucked on a Floor Mattress next to a pile of laundry in an apartment with no books on the shelf or art on the wall, and then they get all pissy at “men” when the dude doesn’t text them back.

Well what were you expecting when you fucked the guy with no bed frame, Mia1? If a man doesn’t invest in furniture that makes it inconvenient to move, he’s probably not wanting something serious.

And contra my retrospectively cringe song “Wife the Girl”, I absolutely don’t blame young guys for that. Hell, I myself used to be a Floor Mattress Guy, and for good reason. The modern world is far too complex and sophisticated for most men to make a major commitment prior to becoming fairly established in life. In his twenties a man needs a ton of flexibility to respond with agility to new opportunities and challenges, and a serious girlfriend will complicate that. A lot of men are losers at 30 simply because at 24 they stayed with a lower status girl who held them back. Ambitious men are often kind of incentivized to be fuckboys for this reason.

But the consequences of this are, of course, emotionally devastating to a lot of women, and most of them are inevitably going to get taken advantage of at least once or twice in this landscape.

Thankfully the more glamorous kind of degeneracy still exists on the fringes of society. It has some interesting overlap with fellow travelers of the edgy online right. People like Dasha and Delicious Tacos come from this world, as do I at this point.

I’ve also discovered that a lot of “Trad” women have a past like this. They just never talk about it because they don’t want incel Zoomers to bully them. But this is basically why so much of Tradwife culture has such a fetishistic vibe.

Being a “Tradwife” is sexy and glamorous among some cohort of Zoomer women because it stole a lot of aesthetics and concepts from the world of sugaring and laundered / sanitized them into a more domestic and “cozy” thing that appeals to low openness Republican types. And that is precisely why someone like Nala can move so seamlessly between OnlyFans and Tradlife. The vibe is incredibly similar.

Hell, a lot of the hardcore Trad stuff you see on Twitter actually reminds me of BDSM.

And I don’t mean the sanitized fetlife shit that appeals to middle class soyboys and fat chicks, I’m talking the darker NXIVM stuff that appeals to actual elite men and which most normies have no idea about (honestly for good reason). The idea of “Marital Debt” is basically Consensual Non-Consent in a sundress. It’s very 50 Shades, the sort of thing elites demand from their Kept Woman behind an ironclad NDA.

The thing is women in these situations don’t resent a CNC dynamic because they’re probably getting a six figure allowance and access to cool opportunities. They’re also high openness people who have a lot of options, as well as the verbal IQ to advocate for themselves even when dealing with Dark Triad CEOs and surgeons. They know what they’re doing.

Hell, when an intensely charismatic girl like Dasha or Lana gets in a situation like this she usually ends up calling the shots. Finding another millionaire is always trivial and she’ll always end up independently wealthy and famous by her mid thirties.

There’s a great song about this dynamic in the musical Evita, which shows the protagonist tactically hypergamizing her way through a series of progressively influential sugar daddies until she acquires enough power and social clout to become the dictator of a medium-sized country:

When you’re providing these kinds of opportunities to a girl, doing whatever you want to her in bed whenever you want is a pretty reasonable ask, especially if she is an ambitious and risk-tolerant person. Besides, at the back of your mind you know if you do anything too fucked up she could probably have you killed in ten years.

But imposing something like “Marital Debt” on your 105 IQ low openness chubby wife when you’re a boring and mediocre guy who makes like $75k / year and lives in the suburbs is exceptionally fucked up.

This is especially the case if you expect her to sit at home with screaming toddlers all day changing shitty diapers. There is nothing glamorous about this and you’re not “providing” at a level that inspires real submission. In practice she will just feel like a human trafficking victim.

And this is why elite women like Radfem Hitler who understand the world in a nuanced way have such contempt for “Trad” guys who support things like Marital Debt. They are basically trying to have their cake and eat it too. They want to demand an exceptional and glamorous level of submission from a woman without themselves rising to any kind of exceptional or glamorous standard of masculinity, or giving her anything comparable in return.

And they never go after elite women who are very Faustian / BPD and crave this intensity, because they know they aren’t nearly impressive enough to dominate such women. Instead they expect dumb normie girls who listen to Taylor Swift to go along with this insane shit. They’re basically just incels trying to scam girls into sexual slavery with scripture—just one step above the Rotherham grooming gangs. .

Anyway, despite weird wrinkles like this, I am strongly in favor of girls like Nala providing a “transitional aesthetic space” between Onlyfans / Sugaring / BDSM on one hand and Tradlife on the other.

It’s the same reason I don’t counter-signal Andrew Tate. Despite being something of a low grade beige pimp, he is inspiring a huge number of Zoomer guys to act more masculine and become rich and powerful, and in a world that so seeks to chop our balls off, this can only be a good thing.

Practically speaking you need to make traditional femininity not just beautiful to young women, but glamorous and sexy. It’s not the worst thing in the world for it to be a little weird and transgressive. You inspire people to change their lifestyle by hitting them in a place of Eros, not Logos or Pathos.

There are hundreds of affluent young women who work as project managers for Deloitte or McKinsey and regularly post content flaunting their glamorous and materialistic lifestyle. These videos are infectious and absolutely pull elite college-aged girls in that direction. They demand a countervailing force that can pull those same girls back to valuing a more domestic orientation.

In practice such a force will and must rely on women who are extremely attractive and charismatic and have a very high verbal IQ. Because of the way our current society is structured, those sorts of women are often going to be pretty slutty, and it’s not uncommon for them to have a background in lighter kinds of sex work.

Thankfully, they will also be smart enough to know how to make the opprobrium mostly go away by publicizing a theatrical and highly erotic ritual where they’re “saved” or “redeemed” (and very frequently are submerged in water). Such a woman is then in a great position to marry an elite man whose position allows her to make TikToks where she spends all day making sourdough or canning peppers or getting a mani / pedi with her doula while some Guatemalan broad cleans her toilet offscreen.

This is the sort of woman who will save traditional femininity. Not the “modest” girl.

Obviously this will be a controversial view because of the huge class element at play.

On Twitter and elsewhere there is a large contingent of “Trad” women with low earning husbands who are very clearly overworked and bored because hubby doesn’t make enough to pay someone to handle the unpleasant parts of being a housewife, and they have no time for hobbies other than posting on Twitter.

Unlike wealthier housewives, their life is actually kind of hard and unpleasant (particularly if they end up like my cousin and marry a guy with a lower IQ and earning potential). These women don’t have a lot of glamor in their day to day existence because they need to clean up shit and puke and watch Peppa Pig all day.

I truly feel for these women, and they deserve to feel seen and appreciated. I want to make life easier for them by supporting policies that help the lower middle and working classes specifically by lowering the cost of underclass labor. I could write an entire white paper on how to make life better for these ladies, and probably will at some point.

But purely in the realm of propaganda and cultural outreach to young women, the perspective of working class housewives needs to be minimized, if not silenced entirely. Realistically speaking, smart and educated young women will usually marry a guy who makes more than enough to hire a maid and a nanny. These women actually *can* have the glamorous Trad lifestyle, and this must be made palpable to them. It’s always been possible for elites to have their cake and eat it too.

Making traditional femininity less appealing to elite girls by forcing norms of “modesty” on them is incredibly stupid and will just push them into a pantsuit and away from having children. This is a huge problem, since high IQ women not having children is already one of the biggest issues in society (the gap between high and low IQ men is much smaller and IMO not worth thinking about). Doing anything to make this problem worse is monstrously dysgenic and any “modesty” discourse needs to be forcefully suppressed for this reason.

“Modesty” is a mostly bullshit concept anyway that primarily exists as a way for resentful and lower status women to bully beautiful elite women into not trading on their looks and fashion sense for power / money / social capital. It has always been these femcel old maid types pushing the hardest for modesty, along with incels who just want to hurt women.

If you let the modestycels suppress the glamor of a traditional lifestyle you’re just going to ensure your movement stays on the margins of society and permanently optimizes around the emotional needs of fat girls who cry a lot.

The same thing applies to a woman’s sexual past.

They say you can’t turn a hoe into a housewife, and to be fair that is probably true for the sort of guys who say things like that. But in practice hoes are turned into housewives all the time—just by men who are even bigger hoes.

And here again it becomes an issue of class. The simple fact of the matter is that elite men often prefer slutty women.

A guy who gets laid easily isn’t thinking about minimizing the chance his wife cheats on him or divorces him. He’s thinking about maximizing the chance that she lets him get a side chick or will be down for a threesome. It’s not about raising the floor so much as raising the ceiling.

And once you reach a certain point as a guy there’s just no way any woman can keep up with you. They simply don’t have a comparable sex drive or desire for novelty, and women are much pickier besides, especially when they already have a guy they like. In most upper income marriages if you “opened things up” you would easily sleep with five women in the time she’d need to find one other guy she likes half as much as you.

Hell, sometimes you even want her to have side dudes so she doesn’t get jealous / clingy and text you all the time. This is why incredibly charismatic guys like Patrice O’Neal get drawn into scenes like swinging and frequently are much less territorial over their own women.

But obviously this is an extreme example and most degenerate men still want her to be monogamous after you get together. It’s more about her being open to another girl occasionally or not getting grossed out by weird stuff that makes slutty women appealing to high openness elite men. To guys like Trump or Logan Paul, who probably have a triple digit bodycount, it would feel incredibly retarded to reject a girl in the 25-50 range for being a “slut”. To guys like this she probably is the ideal wife.

And this is why it’s so cringe when low status guys virtue signal against promiscuous women. This kind of thing is inherently coded as incel because all powerful men and beautiful women are aware of this dynamic. You are just outing yourself as sexually and probably economically unsuccessful when you loudly verbalize this opinion and are lowering the prestige of “Trad” views by association.

Meanwhile, when you aggressively castigate slutty women you just negatively polarize them into being more slutty in response, while discouraging some proportion of girls on the margins from ever exploring Tradlife because they’re worried about being stigmatized for their past. People are generally going to do what they want to, and there will always be a space or subculture or scene available to validate their desire.

If you want people to pursue a more traditional life you need to create real desire for it

Thankfully, it’s not hard at all to do that. I actually suspect it will happen more or less automatically no matter what, because women basically want to be feminine and submissive on a deep primordial level.

I’m already noticing this happen in the dating world. The pantsuit mindset has receded a lot over the past decade. My impression dating Zoomer girls is that they mostly accept gender roles as a fact of life and don’t push back on them like Jezebel-reading Millennial girls used to. This may be selection bias since the domain is inherently restricted to girls willing to date a cheugy and decrepit Millennial, but I don’t think this is the case, as the tendency appears to exist across all social classes and subcultures.

I think they’re just reacting to growing up with a cohort of Zoomer men who had internalized all redpill truths by 13 and came of age watching Andrew Tate videos. Zoomers never really accepted bluepill delusion like us Millennials did as kids. You can’t seriously believe gender denialist blank slate platitudes when you’re growing up in a post-Tinder world.

Ironically, the one thing that’s probably slowing down the proliferation of more avowedly traditional sex norms is Trads being so obnoxious to charismatic high openness girls in their late twenties who are looking to settle down and adopt a slower paced life. If you let those girls into the fold society would reform in a direction you like easily twice as fast.

The real limiting factor has always been a shortage of men who can Lead and Provide in a substantive way that most trads only LARP about. Once an individual man self actualizes he usually finds it very easy to inspire submission in women, and they do so very happily. Women direct change at a societal level in a passive way, but at the individual level they basically follow a man’s lead.

And that is the answer to the Woman Question: it is indelibly a Man Question.

The challenge is, always has been, and always will be to create the right social incentive structure to maximize the number of agentic and capable men

But that is a topic for another time.