Frosty

I think you're trying to inject too much thinking into what is fundamentally a biological process. Relationships stem from pair bonding and all the associated brain chemistry, you can intellectually understand that but I don't think you can somehow replace or supersede that with philosophy and behaviour based off principle. Philosophy might help you understand how people work and how to pick good partners to get a desired outcome but it can't replace the feelings you have when you pair bond with someone, people get into relationships first and foremost because it satisfies the biological urge to be loved and protected and gives them chemical rewards for doing so. I'm aware of the OKCupid statistics, I've read a lot of their blog posts actually, they're enlightening. This again is bioloigical, it stems from womens sexual market value being naturally higher, eggs are in short supply and sperm isn't, women attract multiple suitors and they get to pick, so evolution has guided them to be naturally picky as a mating strategy, that ensures good genes propagate throughout the population. You'll note that 80% of women go after 20% of men but more than 20% of men will pair off, because while women are picky they're still in a market flooded with female competition and pairing with a lower status males is better than not pairing at all. Yep, just like women are shallow in who they'll pick for mates, men are shallow and are drawn to young attractive females who won the genetic lottery, if it's any consolation women only get this perk until about the age of 30 before they hit The Wall ™, some MGTOW pointed out a good example of this in recent pictures of the Olson twins here http://i.imgur.com/9JMet46.jpg A philosophical nightmare but a biological reality non the less, remember that the history of our genes have males being providers in the very literal sense of going out and doing the hunting and providing for a partner who would stay in the home and look after children, this is just a modern day expression of that. Yes technology and the evolution of self awareness and consciousness allows creatures for the first time to really change their environment to suit them rather than simply adapting to their environment, forming civilizations has completely changed our environment and the pressures we have on evolution, no longer do disease and being handicapped really limit your ability to reproduce, what we have now is a social evolution where whoever can adapt to society the fastest are the ones who go on to reproduce. Remember that men have also solved a lot of their own problems, one of the biggest industries in the world is the pornographic industry, you can now experience virtual reality and be inside porn, be able to look around you and see it in full stereoscopic 3D, we have a huge sex toy industry, strip clubs, brothels, you name it. Primarily the hope is with social evolution, those people who can adapt to meet the new pressures of society will go on to pair off and reproduce and pass on the traits which were responsible for their success, when the environment changes dramatically a species evolved for a specific environment will start to do badly and they will suffer in their ability to reproduce, but that's a healthy thing in the long run, it's weeding out those who cannot survive and encouraging the genes of those who can, without that process we wouldn't be here. Of course there's a market flooded with women (and men) looking for the "robotic" needs to be filled because these needs are much stronger and more universal, also the needs for knowledge and philosophy can be filled outside of relationships, that's why we come to the FDR forums and enter into discussions and debate. The chemical reward feedback systems in the brain don't really rely on higher brain function, in some senses it would be nice to have a very intellectual partner who is interested in philosophy, but that's not needed to provide a flood of feel good chemicals to the brain when you hug each other and be intimate together. There's no evolutionary driver to encourage these traits in people. I don't know that you can decide to care or make an argument that someone should care that would actually make them care, I think either you're predisposed for it or you're not. You're longing for a philosophical system which sounds lovely but it's not based in reality, there are some unicorns out there and you might be lucky enough to find one, but we know that the popularity of philosophy and higher order thinking is not great, it's mostly just a fantasy at this point. I think the TL;DR version of this is that what you're after just doesn't exist, there's no motivator for it, biology just works the way it does. Some people will never be interested in philosophy because they're simply not built to appreciate it. You're not alone in wanting a more balanced relatonship and wanting "better" qualities in women such as more virtue and definitely more intellectual interest in topics like philosophy but also in other people who mirror that interest, but it's just not the way things are or ever will be in our lifetimes outside of fairly rare exceptions. I resigned myself to that years ago.

I was trying to avoid joining the existing sides in this debate but I'll weigh in on this very briefly. It depends on the kind of tactics that PUAs use and the goals they're going for, PUA is a skill and can be misused given what I wrote, so if you're trying to find a LTR using PUA then that's probably not healthy by this definition. The main issue with PUA is some dubious tactics that are used that could be considered fraudulent and in violation of the NAP. Some PUA tactics definitely seem manipulative to the point that women could reasonably be upset if you revealed to them what you're up to, and some are outright lies. Some examples are that sources of PUA info will encourage dressing flashy to represent you having more money than you really have, using lies in intros such as "my friends are nearby" so you don't appear as a creepy loner, and things like that. Obviously there will be some in fighting between proponents of PUAs about what constitutes "real" PUA and certainly a lot of "not a real scotman" fallacies being used, but from the casual outside observer it sure seems fraudulent.

Right so Well that seems like a decent enough definition of healthy to me, I don't even know how I'd define it, health is borrowed from physical health which means normal or at least "intended" or "expected" operation. Sex drives are biological in nature they serve to increase desire for sex until it's unbareable and then slow the drive after sex has occured in order to facilitate making babies and passing on genes. That's more of a compulsion than a desire though because a desire is reasoned but a compulsion is automatic. I can desire to have a 2nd GTX980 video card for my computer but that's not a natural compulsion. In that case I can desire to have sex in order to satiate my natural sex drive, but also desire that not result in the burden of babies, in which case casual hookups meet that demand with as little additional burden as possible. Not everyone has those desires of course because desires are affected by many different mental processes, especially that of social pressure and conditioning to do or not do certain things. So at the very best we can say that these desires are conditional on many things depending on the person in question, and they're also temporal depending on your mood and other factors, at 20 you may want consequence free sex, in your 30's you may want sex that ends in children. So to the answer the question, I guess it depends, if you're being irrational and you're trying to get a girl pregnant who wants only causal sex then that's obviously unhealthy by this definition, it also goes against what I described in my first post where I said that no one should be mislead. I think as long as the NAP applies it's probably "healhy" by any reasonable definition.

Emotionally healthy? Now there's an elastic term, depends what you mean. I did it throughout a lot of my 20's and enjoyed it, I was always up front about it and always made sure they knew the deal so there was no one being mislead. You need to be sensible and set some ground rules about intimacy and what is and is not allowed, the moment one of you starts developing feelings which is inevitable then you need to do the difficult but sensible thing of breaking it off, no matter how good it is. I was doing rather well for a period before I met a girl I really fell for, she wasn't very virtuous and I knew it, but still amazing in a lot of ways, she was insanely hot and we shared hobbies of playing games (which is very rare quality in women) so we were both friends with benefits but also pretty good buddies. Anyway I started to fall for her, broke it off which was very difficult to do, she eventually dragged me back in by saying she felt the same and wanted more, and then it all went to hell and I crashed and burned. I'm 31 now and I've not bothered since, that's something great for your 20's but once you've had a few really hot partners and a lot of sex, the novelty wears off. I can't speak to emotional health, it was a decade of fun with a horrible ending but I don't know that it was unhealthy for me, I'm more experienced, wiser, I have thicker skin emotionally, I know better what I'm looking for in women now. I'm also aware of how some of the traits of sociopathic women manifest which is super important because they're excellent manipulators and It's part of why I don't really buy this "use philosophy to spot good women" because you can mimic virtue just as you can mimic anything else.

That's true but they don't kill themselves with suicide rates that are 20x higher than the normal population, we're talking about people who are profoundly unhappy. I don't think they're masochists for pain, that's the whole point, this seems unavoidable and it's why I lean towards the more traditional definition of mental illness, the unhappiness near as we can tell doesn't stem from being in the wrong body, certainly nothing that surgery can solve. Like Stefan has said before that solving a lot of issues comes down to first defining what we're talking about and being under the constant impression you're in the wrong body is a mental issue, once we've accepted that we can stop indulging this delusion and look at better alternatives to fixing the problem. HRT certainly seems like a better option for some people although we should probably be aiming to alleviate mental suffering rather than aid in transition. Presumably that would be a desirable end goal? Some kind of synthetic hormone you inject once in a while and it removes this mental conflict but doesn't have the body changing aspects of oestrogen to aid transition. I think ultimately people will be better off when this is seen as a medical issue rather than us wrapping peoples mental gender in a special bow and saying that because you feel this way then it must be this way so that's what we'll work toward. This is why I liked Justine Tunneys approach to this, she described it in a very practical and pragmatic way that it's a problem not unlike a medial issue like cancer and you deal with that the best you can, I get the impression if we did have drug we could offer her that would remove the disconnected feeling of body and mind with respect to sex, that'd probably be something she'd consider, just a guess.

I appreciate the response, it's given me some things to think about, I agree most of this is just opinion and I'm not in the game of selling MGTOW although I do feel a desire to defend it when it comes under certain types of criticism, here's my response, sorry it's a bit long winded. Well I'm in the same camp as Stefan on this one, that PUA and game is fine if you want sex, but if you want a successful long term relationship with someone virtuous then game is more likely to hurt than help because a good woman will see straight through game. Some requirements women have in men are ones which men naturally excel at, I earn a decent wage because I want that money to liberate me and give me choices in life, and I'm just naturally interested in things that come with good wages. Women will find that attractive in a man, a decent career and ability to provide, so that naturally boosts my attractiveness to some women without me jumping through any hoops at all. I'm a strong proponent of working on things because you want them for yourself, if that's your body or career or hobbies, make yourself a happy, productive and wealthy person and people will naturally gravitate towards you anyway. I was talking more long term strategy like over 10,000+ years, neomasculinity is heavily based from natural arguments but they apply less and less in modern society, I've studied a lot of the concepts from evolution and so I agree with the mechanics and observations. It's all fantastic red pill knowledge and it's important to understand why we have lust and certain urges, but these are biological sysems built to solve a problem in a specific environment that we're no longer in. Technology is changing the landscape significantly inside even just my generation much less over tens or even hundreds of generations. Let me use a specific example, men like alluring hourglass figure and we like the figure because wide hips were indicative of ability to birth children safely so biology selects for that, the biological mutation that made some men attracted to that replicated faster because it lead to better chance for a healthy birth and the passing on of the genes responsible for wide hips. But what does that matter in a society that can give birth 100% of the time because hospitals can perform life saving surgery? Will it mean even less when eventually some or maybe all of our children come from artificial wombs to spare women carrying children and childbirth? These are just appeals to traditionalist methods which worked when civilization more closely matched the environment we evolved in, that's a bad argument for a rapidly changing society, we should treat arguments from nature with heavy scepticism. Most men do disagree with me, that's just a hard fact which I do not deny, and while observationally we can verify that MGTOW is in a period of exponential growth it won't always be, I do not expect the numbers to get particularly large as a percentage of the population, at least not in the current climate, if statism carries on the way it's going then who knows, I've not ruled out seeing bachelor taxes in my lifetime. But the popularity of MGTOW isn't really in any way relevant to it's success as a method of self preservation. I've seen the metrics for health of men in marriage and I'm one of the MGTOWs who accept this, some don't, in fact I recently watched Dianna Davisons video on Molyneux where she really just proves her own blind ideology on the matter and I'd previously been a fan of her work. So I'd definitely say I'm one of the more level headed MGTOWs with regard to this, I have no strong reason to stand against those numbers unless I see other metrics which prove otherwise. But I'd also add that statistically people are happier when they've just gone sky diving and they're on a high from adrenaline, but no one would advocate sky diving if there was a 50% chance your parachute won't open, the benefits of skydiving are not even in the sphere of concern when the odds of parachutes failing is 1:2, and right now that's exactly the kind of argument people are posing to MGTOWs, somehow thinking that discussion of relatively minor benefits is going to distract people from the horrendous drawbacks. Advising caution is a nice idea in theory but in practice I just can't wrap my head around this mental image that I need to construct of the world in order to buy this advice. The way I look at this is that in order to take that line of thinking seriously you have to accept that 50% of these marriage that failed were just people not being cautious, like people routinely just jump into life long commitments that often take years to plan an execute, but do it on whim. OK so there's a small number of last minute Vegas weddings but most people take this pretty damn seriously. The flip side of this is asking the question of what kind of acumen would I require in order to reasonably assess that I'm somehow making a better decision than 50% of married couples, I see this as profoundly arrogant to say that 50% of everyone else gets this wrong but I'm so sure that I can get this right because <reasons>. The truth is that everyone is saying that, including the vast majority of the people who end divorcing. Round up 100 married couples and then discuss the statistic that 40-50% of them will split and then try and have the group self arrange the pairs into the 2 groups of who will stay together and who will split. How do we predict that experiment might turn out? Well I'd predict that a few marriages on the rocks might honestly classify themselves in the "fail" category, so maybe 5%. But everyone else is going to have some degree of confidence it's all going to work out and be roses and kittens forever, after all they wouldn't likely be in that position if they thought it was going to fail. Now reflect on how you'd fit into that situation. When are you going to marry the one? Well when you're sure...welcome to the delusional 95%. It differs a lot, your deeper analysis is fair, and there's other issues often overlooked, these stats include people splitting and remarrying and the 2nd, 3rd+ marriages failing, first time marriages don't divorce at a 50% rate it's something lower like 43% or something, it differs from place to place as well, these are all completely fair points based on evidence. But whether my chance of parachute opening is 50%, 63%, 69% or 71%, I don't care, no rational person goes sky diving unless the odds of failure is 99.99% to maybe 5-6 decimal place accuracy. It depends how large it gets, the grass eaters in Japan are something like 60% of the young healthy male population displaying at least some "herbivore" like tendencies while outright disinterest in sex and dating is about half that, their population is set to shrink to be about two thirds by 2060 which is an insane U-turn in population. MGTOW and the grass eaters aren't exactly the same, but they both share certain things in common, there are social pressures which expect men to behave in certain sacrificial ways which men are now rejecting, in both cases the demands of women are seen as unreasonable. In Japan its typical the man to work a high powered job and hand over his pay cheque to the wife a the end of the month and she gives him an allowance - it's not hard to see how modern Japanese men might scowl at that tradition. But I don't think I'd ever classify it as movement, the Japanese men were labelled herbivores by their peers they didn't self identify as such, MGTOWs however do self identify as such and there is a sense of community among us because many of us are lost once we've woken up from the red pill and need good advice on how to proceed, dissemination of information is extremely important. But what we share in common with the grass eaters is that there's no real interest in fighting to actually affect change or achieve goals in society, people often call MGTOW the same as feminism but there's a clear and distinct difference, feminist get together and plan to solve their problems by changing other people and changing government and society at large, MGTOW is inwards facing, we look at how to change our own behaviour to mitigate the madness of modern society. It's entirely possible that we bounce back as a society, if marriage and kids become rarer and that's something women want then they might be faced with having to sweeten the deal for men by using legislation to reform the institutions that give men a bad deal in the first place, that will be entirely coincidental to MGTOW however.

Very interesting thread which I've read through all of. My take on this is that women can expect from a relationship whatever their sexual market value can buy them in the free market of available men, very few people date down with people they perceive to have less value (however you want to measure that), and the few people who do are snapped up very quickly because that's a super desirable trait for people to have. So i'd say that I'm a 6 and I'd really love it that women who are 8's, 9's and 10's have lower standards but if they did then my pool of competition is now much larger and they become quickly paired off. This is all just biology and taking a biological view is really the only one which makes sense, our bodies have needs/desires/compulsions which we seek to satiate and being able to fulfil them has value, let's not make the mistake of feminist ideologues and assume that men and women are identical or even very similar in these regards. Our needs and desires are different and this comes from biology, there was a good example of this in the biological evolution of women, they're predisposed to letting go of emotional attachment faster because back when we were fiercely tribal people, men from neighbouring tribes would invade and murder the men but any women who could swap allegiance quickly went on to survive and reproduce. There's an awful temptation to over-think and turn what is biological into what is philosophical, pair bonding only feels good because evolution slowly crafted creatures which had this mechanism to encourage optimal mating strategy for their environment, pair bonding helped pass on genes and so it was selected for in humans. I sometimes think of these things as biological tricks, in a animal with little to no consciousness the biology needed to have a natural propensity to do certain things like eat, mate, defend, and so we get biological tricks like hunger, sex drive and testosterone etc. Having a really solid evolutionary understanding of humans is super important to understanding behaviour between people. There's nothing really philosophical about any of this, we build euphemisms up on top of biology and talk about things like love and other concepts that represent how we feel, but that's just a notion of fantasy, there is no magical true love, there is simply our biological needs, a selfish desire to feed them and a response/feedback system that rewards us with certain chemicals when we acquire the things we need. It's fantastic that we've become self aware beings with the ability to think and do philosophy but this doesn't elevate human relationships to some sort of zen plane of existence were biology doesn't matter, biology is what drives human behaviour, it's even biology that drives some of us to study philosophy, because if we get a good response/feedback from doing so then we'll do it again with the desire for the same reward. With regards to caring of feelings, there's 2 things worth mentioning. First of all that no one really cares that much for anyone else's feelings who they do not have much emotional investment in, empathy and mirror neurons will fire to mirror experience, but we cannot be invested in everyone unilaterally like this, it's simply not good evolutionary theory to feel the pain of everyone around you, just those people who you've formed a bond with and its in your benefit to care for. So the concern of feelings comes later in relationships, it's not automatic. In order to form that bond with someone you first need to shop around for a mate who represents the best value you can get, who simultaneously see's that same value condition in you. That's why lust is a super great way to push people together in mutual benefit of the sexy time without any prior other feelings and bootstrap that pair bonding which then grows over time. Judging people as whores because there's an exchange of sex for other resources is just a societal judgement put on this whole process, who are you to judge you settling your need for sex with say a woman's asymmetric need to feel validated about her self worth, or her desire to go somewhere nice and have a nice meal. You think it should just be like for like where we can only exchange sex or sex or trade goods for goods? I'm sorry to be the one to break it to you but men and women have different sex drives, different desires and they weight all this stuff differently in importance, these again are just biological realities. Maybe you should question why that bothers you so much, why you have this double standard that you can expect someone to satisfy your needs but them having theirs satisfied in exchange is somehow morally reprehensible? There's certainly no real objective moral judgement to make there, I mean be honest about your intentions because you don't want to essentially defraud anyone, so be honest about your intentions and obviously it has to be voluntary, otherwise the NAP is not being violated and you're good to go. If what you want is a long lasting relationship then it has to be based on more than just sex obviously, with regular dopamine hits from pair bonding eventually the reward/feedback system of chemicals in your brain dulls, after about 3 years (the honeymoon period) if the relationship is dependent on that it will probably fail. Biologically speaking this ought to be long enough to have children in nature and so you start a natural cycle of co dependency there and father/mother bonds kick in, in modern relationships we put this off with contraception so I think that's a strain on relationships, we simply weren't biologically evolved to pair bond and then never produce children, pair bonding is specifically a trick used to further the goal of reproducing and passing on genes. Lastly just to address drkmdn because I think it's cool we have women weighing in on this discussion (that always helps!). There is a couple of things I would comment on, first of all being that something like an expectation or desire to find a partner with a deeper more philosophical understanding is fine, but it certainly narrows down the field. Philosophical thinking isn't that conducive to reproduction and so there's no real driver in nature that causes it, interest in it is probably somewhat of an anomaly, in which case it's like looking for a needle in a haystack. But also it doesn't need to be a mutually exclusive desire, what is wrong with finding a successful and well groomed man who also can see your value unclouded of sex, and what's wrong with him intellectually understanding your value in addition to also wanting sexy time? I can't help but think any person (but especially more so women) that if they found the perfect unclouded male that they'd only find them-self somewhat disappointed that there was no lust or desire to be swept of their feet and be taken, it just seems like that would lack a lot of validation that people tend to have with regards to their own attractiveness and desirability. Secondly, if we can intellectually understand our desires and where they come from, what do we do? Do we indulge in them responsibly or do we try and elevate ourselves above them? If lust is just a trick of evolution to drive people together for the purpose of procreation and furthering of the genes then do we subvert our own biology, or do we indulge? It's funny because we see things like drug habits as really bad, we understand the high is good but the addiction and constant craving for more all the time is probably worse, yet we're sort of OK with this same concept which naturally occurs with dopamine in our brains, how many of us would eliminate that system if we could, like if we could eliminate our sex drives with an injection then who would do it? At this point (I'm 31) I see my sex drive as more of a nuisance than anything else, after 4-5 days my brain just becomes deficient and it's like "right time to find some porn that's still novel and whack off", that's actually really annoying when I'm trying to get other things done and my brain is involuntarily thinking of female body parts and the inevitable depravity that follows. Then mere milliseconds after orgasm the clarity comes back and you're like "ah what the hell am I doing?" and you go back to whatever you were trying to do. It's all so terribly inconvenient Best strategy as a woman with regards to this stuff might be to sleep with a man you're interested in, really let him get it out of his system and then talk to him straight after, a man's mind is never more straight and unclouded by hormones than right after sex, how acute the difference is, is something quite hard to convey to women.

Feminist ideology in a nutshell. It states that we're equal, when we're demonstrably not equal, then demands we expect equal outcomes because if we're equal then that's what we'd expect, when we don't observe equal outcomes it's not because we're unequal, it's because patriarchy. Feminists want women to be equal to men but men aren't even equal to each other! It's fucking nuts.

My impression of Roosh has always been that he's basically just a glorified pick-up artist, he has the same kind of problems with his world view and definition of neomasculinity as every other PUA, it's gynocentric. It puts women at the centre of his world and defines masculinity as whatever gets you the most women, ignoring the fact that female sexual strategy is to use their naturally high SMV in order to extract the most resources from men. In essence he's saying "these are all the hoops that women demand you jump through, and I'll show you how to best do that", that's the perfect strategy for getting more hoops. This neo-masculinity appeals to nature and traditionalism which seems a bit silly considering that human civilization is changing extremely quickly and nature/evolution has not had time to adapt yet, evolution is a very slow mechanism which takes many generations to make any significant biological changes. Our environment is evolving around us at a pace so great that even inside just 1 generation we see completely new paradigms for dating, human interactions and sexual relationships. What traditionally applied in nature doesn't apply any more, the wealthiest man is no longer the man who can carry the biggest deer on his back but the banker who can make the best investments, facial symmetry or hourglass figures won't tell you if a woman is going to use the force of the state to rob you of your money after a few years of marriage. These are static strategies that will only fail more and more as modern society evolves and diverges from our biological roots. As for the MGTOW side of things, his assertion is that it will die in 10 years, however the reality is that all the evidence shows that MGTOW and interest in MGTOW is growing at an exponential rate, what people seem to fail to understand is that MGTOW is reactionary to the circumstance we find ourselves in, it's adaptive. Providing that society stays gynocentric there will be a steady stream of men either going their own way by choice and good decision making, in addition there will also always be the inevitably burned out husks of men who crashed and burned in the system, divorce is at an all time high and increasing. Stats for MGTOW growth here - http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=MGTOW MGTOW isn't here to fix society or create healthy relationships, it's not here to protect the family unit and ensure a good environment for children, it doesn't value the propagation of the species, it doesn't value family units or even healthy relationships with women, it's not here as a force for the greater good. It's about what is good for you, put yourself first above others, to be independent, self reliant and mitigate the damage that modern society and especially women have on your lifestyle, to give you the most control of your future as you can possibly have. By defining what it means to be a man by your own values you eliminate the ability for other people to define it however they like and then shame you for not meeting those standards, by shedding that burden you are set free. There is no progress in MGTOW because it's not a movement, we're not trying to create social change, we don't care about society and some of us don't even care about each other, only to the degree that the discourse in the community is interesting, intellectually stimulating and helpful (some people like Sandman on youtube are trying to cash in by gaining numbers and spreading the word but many older MGTOWs that aren't just Sandman fanboys reject this behaviour as inherently blue pill and gynocentric) We care about ourselves, MGTOW is a personal philosophy for the self. There are talking points in the community and there's lots of dissemination of information and strategy for minimizing impact of society on your lifestyle, like how to replace traditional systems with better ones, that is what is growing and coming from the MGTOW community, that is not diminishing, that's exploding and growing. But, but, but, families and vagina and propagation of the species and the opinions of women. Sorry but if your world view is gynocentric like Roosh's is, then MGTOW has absolutely nothing to offer you. Why people like Roosh even mention MGTOW is beyond me, it's completely pointless to address a community of people who categorically and explicitly reject social definitions of masculinity and maleness because we see them as methods of controlling men, and then lecture those men on how to be a man. It's like repeatedly smashing your head on a large sign that reads "do not smash your head on this sign, it will achieve nothing".

Feminism is a war on women, it's a race to the bottom for women with regards to their happiness, just take a look at a lot of modern feminists and you can see they're deeply troubled, unhappy and bitter people. These people use the ideology of gender equality to insist that women behave like men and adopt male traits, instead of being empowered by their own femininity. All it has lead to is a large number of women becoming very unhappy, they get jobs they really don't want, they abandon traditionally feminine things such as the joy of looking after children and being part of a family unit. Every time we measure female happiness over the last 30+ years we find that women's is in decline and continues to decline, where as men's is not only much higher but it's also increasing. I'd hazard a guess that while feminists have fought for greater freedoms and greater equality for women, they've also created some level of societal expectation and women feel pressured into these new roles rather than seeing them as optional, so in some sense women are less free and the pressure is on them to do things they simply don't bring them as much happiness.

I take some issues with this piece. Mainly that the implications are that unless men can satisfy women in a relationship then they're not a "grown ass man" but presumably a child? This is what is known as shaming tactics, they're frequently used by women to manipulate men by shaming them in to accepting raw deals that benefit women at the expense of men. So for example This seems to assume that all women deserve a "grown ass man" irrelevant of their own behaviour which is extremely hypocritical. This takes away agency from women and infantilizes them, so it's not the fault of the woman who picked previous partners for bad reasons, it's the mans fault, they put non-committed men as the fault and not their ability to pick good men. Oh if only every single man was a committed grown ass man then women's choices wouldn't matter at all. Translation, he's independent and career driven but I can't be the same, I have to have the expectation that he'll support me while supporting himself. This is another inherent double standard, hey guys don't you know you're not real men unless you support both yourself and your partner by default. I find this also quite funny, in once sentence they crave objectivity: But then in the next sentence they demand they see you as equals even in cases where you're objectively not equal, for example opinions formed on something that one person knows more about: People aren't equal, there's a tough objective truth for you to swallow, your opinion on something is less valid if you know nothing about it, objective truths exist and sometimes you're just wrong and need correcting on it by someone who knows better. Oh it just goes on and on. This is clearly an article of why women are entitled, they feel they deserve all this irrelevant of their own behaviour, they have a laundry list of what they expect from men, half of which they're hypocritical about and the rest they have no such expectations of behaving like that themselves, others are downright contradictory. How about women apply these standards to themselves first and maybe they'll attract men who are also like this.

I agree with DaviesMa on any collapse potentially taking a long time to occur and being over quickly but it will leave behind long lasting issues of trust in the system and the market, we'll have to enter a recession before the market corrects itself, which will cause people to horde and save what little they have, especially the job security being an unsure factor. I'm fairly sure however that people would see therapy as a luxury cost, your happiness is a luxury and during hard times people do away with luxury and focus on working hard and providing the basics like paying your rent, food, pay the bills and then save the rest in case you lose your job. Earnings and spendings during a recession are way down, any jobs which provide non essentials are the ones at the greatest risk, obviously nothing is certain and you could potentially do just fine during a recession but it's a case of playing the odds. However if being a therapist is something you aspire to and really want to do then it's not something you should give up lightly, the world needs more good people in roles like this for sure.

Honestly I'm not sure, I personally think that things such as therapy will be seen as somewhat of a luxury during any kind of collapse, if that is one of your primary concerns, it's hard to back up that kind of opinion with data though, that's very much a gut feeling kind of a thing. I'm not sure what is required to be a licensed therapist either, that's something you'd need to look into and what kind of time frame is required to achieve that. Sorry I don't think that's terribly helpful.

You've only stated that a pubic conversation isn't analogous to wireless communication you haven't actually demonstrated this. You're being mealy mouthed which is not helping the situation, let's clear some of that up to make this a bit easier to reason. First of all you've created a fallacy of ambiguity, you're equivocating with the use of the term "access" and continue to misuse this despite being pointed out several times that this simply isn't true. There's 2 senses in which the term access could be applied here, you say: then You're conflating the 2 and using them interchangeably and that's causing confusion, let's be extremely crystal clear on this. You are not accessing a device, there is no sense in which you are accessing the device. There are senses in which accessing it could be true such as sending radio waves in order to negotiate a session which authenticates you with the network and/or lets you log into and manage the device, we're not talking about this. Accessing a device you don't own could reasonably be seen as violation of the NAP to which I'm sure we both agree. Where as accessing or interpreting data has not been demonstrated to be in violation of the NAP, radio waves aren't property any more than sound waves are, you don't own exclusive rights to them, nor has it been demonstrated that interpreting that data is in any way aggression. Next, you use the term intercept, this is misleading because it suggests that you stop the radio message from reading its destination, you do not, so lets not use misleading words like intercept. I never said that you weren't aware of what you are interpreting, nor did I say or infer that it's magical floating data without a source, the sources are very clear, it's a router or some kind of access point and a 2nd device negotiating with it. All the data you need to decrypt/decypher the information is self contained within the packets of data that are sent, you don't require anything other than passively reading the data to decypher it. Yes the wireless standard clearly states that in the header of the packet you put the address of the device it is intended for, this means that wireless devices are interpreting all electromagnetic data and inspecting the headers of all packets to determine if the content of the data packet is intended for itself or not. There is no ambiguity that you're accessing data which is not intended for your use, but how is this in any way in violation of the NAP. What do intentions have to do with anything? Does that mean if I transmit a message through some medium (lets say verbal) and it's interpreted by an eavesdropper (let's say you), and my intention is that this message remains private and only intercepted by the intended recipient (lets say by my brother Joe) then does that mean you're also in violation of the NAP when you interpret the message because you're physically located between me and Joe? Hold on, but you're the one saying that there's no such thing as privacy and that it's only a euphemism you only get what many people would consider "privacy" through the degree to which you can protected the message such that it requires a violation of the NAP to interpret it, so surely the technicalities actually matter? Accessing a telephone cable that you don't own is certainly in violation of the NAP as this is someone else's property, however the electromagnetic spectrum used for radio waves, or the air used for sound waves cannot reasonably be owned by anyone as we all use them to communicate. Besides it's not just a case of not touching the router with your bare hands, you're not "touching" it or "accessing" it in any sense of the word, you can capture 4 way hand shakes with hardware which is designed to be receive only and is completely incapable of transmitting or in any way capable of interacting with another piece of hardware, this is all purely data in the air.

It's not easy to do it inside 1 generation, it's a multi-generational change, one of the best things we can do is encourage parents to raise children peacefully in win/win environments in order to teach them that violence isn't a good way to get what you want, children growing up with empathy will naturally tend to want to help other people rather than hurt them and tend to want to avoid systems that use force and instead opt in for systems that require cooperation. it's kind of like trying to get rid of religion among the population, you can appeal to fresh minds really easily and in the UK at least the national census shows that religion is on the decline but that religious belief is highly correlated with age, those people in the 60+ range have high incidence of religious belief, teenagers have very little, and it's a fairly linear relationship in between. It turns out that to get rid of religion you make good arguments for a secular society and evidence based world view, lets children grow up freely in that environment and it goes away on its own. This is why Stefan focuses so much on peaceful parenting, it's going to be one of the biggest changes in society over the next few centuries as we become more educated about the effects parenting has on children we drastically improve society.

For long term planning you'll want to think about what kind of jobs will maintain their value during trouble times, if the economy does start to crash then jobs such as politicians may not be the best place to be, medicine will always be in demand but that is a path which requires something like 7-8 years of education which is an insane investment so that's something you have to think very carefully about, what kind of funds you'll need to complete school and how you'd pay that debt back. With regards to things like psychology I think you'll find that these are going to be hard fields to get work in because the amount of women who go into these fields seems to be constantly growing, but the amount of people finding work here is terrible, it's a more general problem with university at the moment where people are getting fairly useless degrees and just ending up with debt they cannot pay back. I'd personally recommend that if you want to invest in your future by taking higher education then look at taking a STEM degree, engineering, maths, mechanics, computer science, and possibly in addition to that things like law/medicine which legally require those degrees in order to work in the fields. Do some research into how many young people are earning degrees and how many of them struggle to put them to good use in the job market afterwards, aim to get something you're confident will be a benefit. A degree in psychology to my knowledge won't get you anywhere you need to go on to do a lot more studying after the degree before you can use it.

I don't think it's a fair grievance, it takes a lot of electricity and hardware and time to mine cryptocurrency, those people who mined it first are people who took huge risks in investing into a currency they had no idea would increase in value, in fact most of the millionaires who came out of bitcoin were about 3 years into mining before they saw significant returns, and the bottom could have fallen out of the market at any time. If it was a sure bet then you'd have seen a great many big investors dump a very large amount of money into mining, but they didn't, so it's risk vs reward system, those who take the risk early and invest the most get the most reward, it's really not unlikely any other investment except the risk was exceptional at the time because no one had any idea if crypto currency would take off. Your discussion of inflation is kinda pointless, if you print more money but it goes to everyone so that no ones % share changes, then you're just wasting your time mining it, no one is going to mine currency which cost money only to maintain the same share of the currency, bitcoin is already hugely divisible so it's not necessary to continue to mine it just to pump the numbers up. QE is used to rob/tax everyone who holds savings or assets in a specific currency in order to give that money to someone else to spend at the current value. If the currency is voluntary then of course there's no argument against it by libertarians/anarchists, but encouraging people to use it when it represents some automatic loss in value to them over time is a hard sell, remember that if you're giving money to other people in any way by inflating the total supply you're devaluing everyone else's savings, there's no way around that, even in principle.

Not all work places are created equal, neither are all bosses and managers. Our CEO is a ball buster but our general managers are actually very good and treat people with a lot of respect. Working for smaller businesses helps a lot because they tend to be very friendly and more respectful, for them having a small turnover of staff and more dedicated workers who are willing to span several job roles really helps the business run more smoothly and efficiently. Generally speaking the more value you have the more negotiating power you have with a business, there's absolutely nothing to stop you from asking them to modify your contract to suit your needs better, my brother for example is a developer who works in our office and he didn't need the additional cash from a full work week and instead likes his spare time more, so he knocked his working week down to 4 days and shaved 1/5th off his pay. The main problem is that in the work place part of your value is your experience so people going in on the bottom rung of the career ladder have less assets to negotiate with, you need to put in some effort first to earn that position to negotiate. You say that a job environment is not like a good fit for you but that's an awful generalization, there are many different job environments which people respond to differently, I'd not be able deal with customers easily because I have too little patience with people, however I can sit behind a computer for 8 hours a day programming or doing admin work. After 10 years of work I'm now head of IT and get to set my departments work environment within a certain degree and I try and make it as nice as possible. Our office has beanbags a large 52" TV and a play station for people to play on during break/lunch, it's a super chill place to work, managers treat us to breakfast every friday, we occasionally do bowling, there's always cake and snacks when its someones birthday, we do pub crawls, we'll get off early if sales do well that kinda thing. Anyway work sucks, almost everyone would not work if they could, not that people necessarily hate their jobs, but you're not there to have fun you're there to generate value and make money. My advice to anyone struggling with entry level stuff is that adding value to yourself you go up the ladder and have more room to negotiate better conditions, sometimes putting up with the first few rungs is a good investment for better conditions later on.

In a free market schools would be at liberty to set dress policy however they wanted, it's undeniable that certain types of clothing such as very short skirts, tight shorts, yoga pants, etc, these all distracting. They're distracting for most normal healthy males and even some females, but it's probably an order of magnitude worse for young boys going through puberty. The problem with the notice that was put up is that it makes several very bad inferences. First of all she's inferring that she is being shamed for her body, she isn't. She's inferring that her education is being put above that of boys, which it is not, there are surely rules by which boys follow in order to protect girls education. Lastly she infers that boys are only distracted by girls because they objectify women, which is a stupid feminist assumption about men and how their brains work, it completely ignores the fact that millions of years of evolution have created a strong natural response in men to react to a healthy female body and mentally priorities that above damn near everything else. This idea that males wouldn't be distracted if they were taught to not objectify women is completely laughable.

It can affect economics but I don't think it's to a scale that is terribly important, people so weak minded they can be influenced by bad arguments are constantly going to hop between lots of positions, those people make bad allies to anyone because while its easy to win them over with stupid arguments, they're also easily lost to others doing the same.

I'd agree with this, I'd also add that economic collapse can bring about government and social collapses as well, if we can't find a good way to recover immediately then it could have knock of effects, it makes sense to refer to this more broad problem as simply "a collapse" because it's going to bring down everything, at least temporarily.

Generally speaking we do not know what a future outside of government force would look like, it's impossible to predict far into the future based on social changes, I think the general argument is that it doesn't matter how it looks, what matter is that we stop the use of force/violence/aggression to get what we want, improve our moral behaviour and leave the rest up to chance, let the chips fall as they may. Stefan uses a good argument from time to time that we didn't know how we'd pick the cotton in the fields that slaves worked when we wanted to abolish slavery, but that wasn't relevant to the moral issue that slavery is wrong, so we abolish it to achieve better ethical behaviour and consequences be damned. It turned out that fields ended up being farmed with large machines because people had to innovate to make such a large amount of work plauisble. Libertarianism just means to be free of aggression of other people, how we fix social problems will be open to the free market and the collective innovation of billions of people to provide solutions where we need them, it's unlikely that anyone could accurately predict what those solutions will end up being, and really it doesn't matter all that much, what matters is that we stop using violence against each other.

Feminists don't understand the free market and economics basically, they want more of certain things but the market on average doesn't demand this, they're projecting their ideology onto everyone else. Most notably we do not see feminists or SJWs taking advantage of this perceived deficiency in the market and themselves providing that content and making some good money doing it, they just perpetually complain that others are doing things they don't like. It's something that was annoying about the whole Anita Sarkeesian project, she raised $160,000 on kickstarter and far more since and that money could have made an indie game that contains the kind of content she wants to see, instead it just went into a failed series about how others are doing it wrong.

Oh and I absolutely do not think it's purely a psychological issue, the difference in brains of trans people through scans clearly shows there is some biological difference, and quite frankly I believe that all mental states are inherently backed by biology because I believe there's nothing magical about the brain, it's just a bunch of nerves and so all mental states are necessarily just some configuration of neurons. What I'm trying to say is that I think the mental issues can be separate from this, we shouldn't lump everyone into the same pot, some people feel like they have a brain very different from their sex and just go about their lives happily, there was a fantastic interview with a MtF trans on Gavin McInnes free speech show which i saw a few days ago (that guy has some very non-PC views on trans which got him into a lot of trouble, but it was a very level headed and respectful interview, which you can see on daily motion). There's a striking difference between this happy person who just saw their transgenderism as merely an annoyance and presented as female and that's more or less the end of the story, vs someone who is plagued by all this stress and discomfort of things not being "right". There's something very hard to fathom about this curious problem that some trans people are perpetually bothered and in this state of discomfort, having a brain that is biologically closer to that of the opposite sex doesn't seem enough to cause the discomfort, after all plenty of males have male brains and are perfectly fine. The question that keeps coming back to me is why can't you just go on with your life, outside of other unrelated problems you're a normal functioning person who can go get a job, earn a living and do whatever you desire and be happy. I see anyone in this level of discomfort they feel they need to go under the knife and mutilate parts of themselves as having a mental problem. The more I think about it the more I see these things as distinctly different issues, the occurrence of happy and productive trans people who don't suffer this seems to be evidence of this, I don't think it's merely a difference in being able to cope better. Here's the interview I was on about - http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2ke4nq_free-speech-justine-tunney_fun

Well I'm not linking them, I'm exploring different ideas and possibilities, as I've said before I've not made up my mind on this whole thing, part of getting to a solid understanding of what is going on is investigating and rejecting some bad ideas. My mothers anxiety isn't about anything specific, it's just a constant feeling of impending doom with no real driving motivator, it causes her to go looking for end of the world scenarios and she ends up on David Ikes site and god knows where else, clearly this is a mental issue and again she fails to be able to describe the feeling in a coherent concise way. Not being able to describe the source is suggestive to me that it's the sign of a mental issue, if for example she'd been bitten by a dog before and a dog is snarling at her and she is scared then we can trace that emotion to a specific source, but to be perpetually worried about something vague and non-descript doesn't have a clear cause, especially given not much obvious has changed in her life. I don't think it's a case of education, I think if you have a foreboding feeling or a compulsion to do something and there's no obvious cause then that is going to be hard to describe or articulate to someone because there's no way other people can relate to that feeling. I'm not so much cross-linking these things, I'm just open to the possibility that a more general mental problem that causes a person to be bothered or upset/unhappy with the current state of affairs for no obvious reason could manifest in different people for different reasons. They seem to share this common element that the mental issue cannot be satiated by actually making changes, my mother is no more happy hording food and many people that transition simply still aren't happy in accepting their new body and go on to have depression and in many cases kill themselves. Again what makes me think this is that we know for sure that some men are very feminine and some women and very masculine and also are perfectly happy to act and behave that way and have no other issues, they're not bothered by the fact that they have what many would describe as a female brain or a male brain, they just sorta get on with life and are happy. That seems very distinct from somoene who has these same feelings but is perpetually bothered that they're not "in the right body" or society doesn't perceive them how they feel. It was just a hypothetical, but hormones are very close to drugs, they're substances which alter how the body functions and we know scientifically alter the brain, especially their presence and amount during foetal development. What you're describing as extreme discomfort and/or stress is precisely the kind of thing that appears in my mother and mirrors how people with xenomelia feel, these people clearly suffer to the point they want reality to mirror their mental state by removing a limb, very similar to trans people wanting to modify their body to appear like the other sex. We now know after long term studies that this doesn't address the underlying mental problem for a large number of people who have transitioned, that feeling of discomfort and stress doesn't go away. Nor does it when my mother prepares of the end of the world with her food stash, it still nags at her day and night. I'd be interested in seeing the studies so I can review the details, if you have any citations? I've not been able to find much on this and quite frankly given the rare occurrence of this we'd need an extensive study of many people to be fairly sure there's no occurrence of this outside of trans folk. The Norwegian documentary has English subs and can be found online, I highly recommend you watch it as there's some really good insights into a lot of gender issues which are extremely common misunderstandings and a lot of which are being peddled in so called educational institutions which fly in the face of modern science.