You could look at it a different way. Incel (involuntarily celibate) is a subset of 'men who are just celibate'. If dealing with women becomes too difficult and risky, then they could just decide to stop bothering. No one is forcing men to have sex and go in to relationships with women. Particularly now that you have pornography, virtual reality etc. Perhaps it will get to the point where men adopt children, etc, in the way that single women sometimes give birth by IVF etc. Would this be such a bad thing? I am not saying that this is a healthy state of affairs, but it could be where the current phase of the 'sexual revolution' is leading to.
I'm inclined towards Houellebecq's answer, that it is "the law of market forces".
The dating market is the most capitalistic and selfish market there is - nobody wants to redistribute wealth in this market. There are a variety of things that make a person attractive - looks, physique, wealth, intelligence, sense of humour, style, youth etc. But each and every one of undeniably has a "sexual market value" based on these factors.
Now enter globalisation.
Up until about 2008, you largely met people through your social networks or your immediate surroundings. Social media didn't exist... you have to remember Facebook was limited to universities only until 2006 and the other stuff, instagram, tiktok, tinder, blah, didn't exist at all. So you'd go to a bar, meet through a college society, the young conservatives, a friend of the family, work colleague etc.
That all changed once our lives went online.
Consider an absolute stunner of a 21 year old girl. She's got model good looks and every man who meets her wants her. In 2005, she probably would have met people through uni, or at a bar, at her place of work, etc. Take out the oldies, the uglies the fatties etc - and she's probably got a dating pool of 1000 eligible bachelors in her town or wider social network to choose from.
Fast forward to 2022. All a beautiful 21 year old has to do is have access to an iphone and instagram and just by posting a few bikini shots, she can have 10,000 followers and premier league footballers in her DMs, if she's pretty enough.
Her sexual market value hasn't changed, but her access to an infinitely larger global sexual marketplace has.
This is very good for the attractive people of this world, but very bad for the unattractive ones. The attractive people have vastly more options at their disposal. The unattractive ones - well, are still unattractive, so many, many, many more rejections. It doesn't matter how many instagram selfies they post, they still get no interest.
We know that this is true of Tinder, if Tinder was a country it would have one of the highest gini coefficients in the world.
What all this means for society is, unfortunately, exactly what you'd get in any society where the resources are so unevenly distributed. You have an aristocracy with high sexual market value (through beauty, money, status etc) hoarding all the wealth, with an impoverished peasantry slowly starving to death.
All of which kind of ignores the fact that many men and women are attracted to each other for reasons other than their looks. Yes, in a nightclub or bar obviously the first thing that catches the eye is looks but it takes about 5 seconds actually talking with someone to realise that, whatever their superficial attractiveness, you sure as hell wouldn't want more than the briefest of flirtations.
This simple truth is proved by the fact that, in spite of the fact that 99% of us - whether male or female - are not 'stunners', the vast majority of us end up in romantic relationships that thankfully outlive the initial superficial attraction.
And again you totally miss the point. I’m not surprised you never got laid for years if you’re this obtuse
Internet dating. Dating apps
They make everything much more instant and visual. So the less good looking guys don’t even have a chance to pull. This is a real phenomenon and it is unquestionably bad for society. See all the incel shooters in the USA
And guess what, unless they are sad sacks like you, the vast majority of people do not use dating apps to get partners. They don't have to because they are able to actually interact with the opposite sex face to face rather than hiding behind a phone. It is you who completely miss the point. You are the incel.
But this is simply and probably wrong (you fat clueless twat etc etc)
These days people meet via social media, very often dating apps. It’s absolutely standard
I wonder if I was one of the earliest PBers to meet a partner through the Internet? I met a GF through a bulletin board (Mono, if anyone remembers that) in 1992. Pre-WWW.
Way back in time, a year or two before the Tories last crashed the economy, I used a national newspaper's 'find love' service where you posted an entry which was printed in the weekend newspaper and then others wrote you a letter in response via the newspaper's PO box if they were interested in finding out more.
I got two or three dozen letters over the course of several weeks and they were all interesting and different and each represented a life and a person's hopes and dreams. I recall being staggered at some the detail of their lives that women sent me - a complete stranger. Some had photos, one had a cartoon sketch. Others just went for words.
The difference between this and the swipe right/left business phone app malarky is staggering imho.
It was a literary way of connecting which is at total odds with our video/snapshot age.
It's a lost world I guess.
I went on three dates in the end iirc. One of the issues was it was nationwide and the reality of meeting someone from Inverness for coffee was definitely a factor.
In the end, I met my wife face to face at a social club.
My understanding of dating apps (not that I have ever used one, I've been in a monogamous relationship for almost 30 years!) is that they are a real variety and many of the more successful ones like eHarmony are focused on personality matches not looks. Isn't tinder more about hooking up for casual sex than meeting your life partner? By definition if most relationships start via dating apps then most of those who use them successfully are probably a bit minging.
You could look at it a different way. Incel (involuntarily celibate) is a subset of 'men who are just celibate'. If dealing with women becomes too difficult and risky, then they could just decide to stop bothering. No one is forcing men to have sex and go in to relationships with women. Particularly now that you have pornography, virtual reality etc. Perhaps it will get to the point where men adopt children, etc, in the way that single women sometimes give birth by IVF etc. Would this be such a bad thing? I am not saying that this is a healthy state of affairs, but it could be where the current phase of the 'sexual revolution' is leading to.
I'm inclined towards Houellebecq's answer, that it is "the law of market forces".
The dating market is the most capitalistic and selfish market there is - nobody wants to redistribute wealth in this market. There are a variety of things that make a person attractive - looks, physique, wealth, intelligence, sense of humour, style, youth etc. But each and every one of undeniably has a "sexual market value" based on these factors.
Now enter globalisation.
Up until about 2008, you largely met people through your social networks or your immediate surroundings. Social media didn't exist... you have to remember Facebook was limited to universities only until 2006 and the other stuff, instagram, tiktok, tinder, blah, didn't exist at all. So you'd go to a bar, meet through a college society, the young conservatives, a friend of the family, work colleague etc.
That all changed once our lives went online.
Consider an absolute stunner of a 21 year old girl. She's got model good looks and every man who meets her wants her. In 2005, she probably would have met people through uni, or at a bar, at her place of work, etc. Take out the oldies, the uglies the fatties etc - and she's probably got a dating pool of 1000 eligible bachelors in her town or wider social network to choose from.
Fast forward to 2022. All a beautiful 21 year old has to do is have access to an iphone and instagram and just by posting a few bikini shots, she can have 10,000 followers and premier league footballers in her DMs, if she's pretty enough.
Her sexual market value hasn't changed, but her access to an infinitely larger global sexual marketplace has.
This is very good for the attractive people of this world, but very bad for the unattractive ones. The attractive people have vastly more options at their disposal. The unattractive ones - well, are still unattractive, so many, many, many more rejections. It doesn't matter how many instagram selfies they post, they still get no interest.
We know that this is true of Tinder, if Tinder was a country it would have one of the highest gini coefficients in the world.
What all this means for society is, unfortunately, exactly what you'd get in any society where the resources are so unevenly distributed. You have an aristocracy with high sexual market value (through beauty, money, status etc) hoarding all the wealth, with an impoverished peasantry slowly starving to death.
All of which kind of ignores the fact that many men and women are attracted to each other for reasons other than their looks. Yes, in a nightclub or bar obviously the first thing that catches the eye is looks but it takes about 5 seconds actually talking with someone to realise that, whatever their superficial attractiveness, you sure as hell wouldn't want more than the briefest of flirtations.
This simple truth is proved by the fact that, in spite of the fact that 99% of us - whether male or female - are not 'stunners', the vast majority of us end up in romantic relationships that thankfully outlive the initial superficial attraction.
And again you totally miss the point. I’m not surprised you never got laid for years if you’re this obtuse
Internet dating. Dating apps
They make everything much more instant and visual. So the less good looking guys don’t even have a chance to pull. This is a real phenomenon and it is unquestionably bad for society. See all the incel shooters in the USA
And guess what, unless they are sad sacks like you, the vast majority of people do not use dating apps to get partners. They don't have to because they are able to actually interact with the opposite sex face to face rather than hiding behind a phone. It is you who completely miss the point. You are the incel.
Vast majority is way wrong, the interweb thinks 40% of relationships start online.
Both my lads met their girlfriends that way, both nice lads but hardly top 10% looks wise.
It’s how everyone meets. Probably a majority of under 40s
It’s how I met my last 38 girlfriends. That’s not an exaggeration
It’s how you find someone who REALLY suits you. It makes total sense. It widens your choice by orders of magnitude
I’m happily married for nearly 20 years, so I’ve never used any of th3 datin* apps. Kinda of feel I’ve missed out, but if what Leon says is right, and it’s believable, I think I’d need to sharpen the old appearance…
My understanding of dating apps (not that I have ever used one, I've been in a monogamous relationship for almost 30 years!) is that they are a real variety and many of the more successful ones like eHarmony are focused on personality matches not looks. Isn't tinder more about hooking up for casual sex than meeting your life partner? By definition if most relationships start via dating apps then most of those who use them successfully are probably a bit minging.
When he was Prince of Wales, King Charles had planned to speak on climate change at COP27. Now he is king, would it be appropriate for him to still do so?
I openly state that the recent riots & unrest in Iran were schemes designed by the US; the usurping, fake Zionist regime; their mercenaries; & some treasonous Iranians abroad who helped them.
You could look at it a different way. Incel (involuntarily celibate) is a subset of 'men who are just celibate'. If dealing with women becomes too difficult and risky, then they could just decide to stop bothering. No one is forcing men to have sex and go in to relationships with women. Particularly now that you have pornography, virtual reality etc. Perhaps it will get to the point where men adopt children, etc, in the way that single women sometimes give birth by IVF etc. Would this be such a bad thing? I am not saying that this is a healthy state of affairs, but it could be where the current phase of the 'sexual revolution' is leading to.
I'm inclined towards Houellebecq's answer, that it is "the law of market forces".
The dating market is the most capitalistic and selfish market there is - nobody wants to redistribute wealth in this market. There are a variety of things that make a person attractive - looks, physique, wealth, intelligence, sense of humour, style, youth etc. But each and every one of undeniably has a "sexual market value" based on these factors.
Now enter globalisation.
Up until about 2008, you largely met people through your social networks or your immediate surroundings. Social media didn't exist... you have to remember Facebook was limited to universities only until 2006 and the other stuff, instagram, tiktok, tinder, blah, didn't exist at all. So you'd go to a bar, meet through a college society, the young conservatives, a friend of the family, work colleague etc.
That all changed once our lives went online.
Consider an absolute stunner of a 21 year old girl. She's got model good looks and every man who meets her wants her. In 2005, she probably would have met people through uni, or at a bar, at her place of work, etc. Take out the oldies, the uglies the fatties etc - and she's probably got a dating pool of 1000 eligible bachelors in her town or wider social network to choose from.
Fast forward to 2022. All a beautiful 21 year old has to do is have access to an iphone and instagram and just by posting a few bikini shots, she can have 10,000 followers and premier league footballers in her DMs, if she's pretty enough.
Her sexual market value hasn't changed, but her access to an infinitely larger global sexual marketplace has.
This is very good for the attractive people of this world, but very bad for the unattractive ones. The attractive people have vastly more options at their disposal. The unattractive ones - well, are still unattractive, so many, many, many more rejections. It doesn't matter how many instagram selfies they post, they still get no interest.
We know that this is true of Tinder, if Tinder was a country it would have one of the highest gini coefficients in the world.
What all this means for society is, unfortunately, exactly what you'd get in any society where the resources are so unevenly distributed. You have an aristocracy with high sexual market value (through beauty, money, status etc) hoarding all the wealth, with an impoverished peasantry slowly starving to death.
All of which kind of ignores the fact that many men and women are attracted to each other for reasons other than their looks. Yes, in a nightclub or bar obviously the first thing that catches the eye is looks but it takes about 5 seconds actually talking with someone to realise that, whatever their superficial attractiveness, you sure as hell wouldn't want more than the briefest of flirtations.
This simple truth is proved by the fact that, in spite of the fact that 99% of us - whether male or female - are not 'stunners', the vast majority of us end up in romantic relationships that thankfully outlive the initial superficial attraction.
And again you totally miss the point. I’m not surprised you never got laid for years if you’re this obtuse
Internet dating. Dating apps
They make everything much more instant and visual. So the less good looking guys don’t even have a chance to pull. This is a real phenomenon and it is unquestionably bad for society. See all the incel shooters in the USA
And guess what, unless they are sad sacks like you, the vast majority of people do not use dating apps to get partners. They don't have to because they are able to actually interact with the opposite sex face to face rather than hiding behind a phone. It is you who completely miss the point. You are the incel.
But this is simply and probably wrong (you fat clueless twat etc etc)
These days people meet via social media, very often dating apps. It’s absolutely standard
I wonder if I was one of the earliest PBers to meet a partner through the Internet? I met a GF through a bulletin board (Mono, if anyone remembers that) in 1992. Pre-WWW.
Way back in time, a year or two before the Tories last crashed the economy, I used a national newspaper's 'find love' service where you posted an entry which was printed in the weekend newspaper and then others wrote you a letter in response via the newspaper's PO box if they were interested in finding out more.
I got two or three dozen letters over the course of several weeks and they were all interesting and different and each represented a life and a person's hopes and dreams. I recall being staggered at some the detail of their lives that women sent me - a complete stranger. Some had photos, one had a cartoon sketch. Others just went for words.
The difference between this and the swipe right/left business phone app malarky is staggering imho.
It was a literary way of connecting which is at total odds with our video/snapshot age.
It's a lost world I guess.
I went on three dates in the end iirc. One of the issues was it was nationwide and the reality of meeting someone from Inverness for coffee was definitely a factor.
In the end, I met my wife face to face at a social club.
What you describe is sort of what dating sites were like before the swiping element came along. It was actually about trying to get to know folk. But Tinder fucked it up for everyone else and the majority of them changed their format and setup to try and compete with that.
We have finally found a subject on which PB knows absolutely fuck all
Dating
Indeed, that late, lamentable SeanT used to boast about paying prostitutes, if you were as successful with the ladies as he claimed then that book of his was utter bollocks.
We have finally found a subject on which PB knows absolutely fuck all
Dating
Indeed, that late, lamented SeanT used to boast about paying prostitutes, if you were as successful with the ladies as he claimed then that book of his was utter bollocks.
Tsk. I would never claim to be as notorious a swordsman as the much missed @SeanT
FT: Kwarteng to bring forward publication of fiscal plan and OBR forecasts. The plan sets out a five year agenda to bring down public sector debt through another lengthy bout of austerity.
Cameron and Osborne could get away with austerity (because they possessed some political acumen, had been laying the groundwork for years, and could pin the blame on the money markets and on Labour.) Truss and Kwarteng... won't.
My understanding of dating apps (not that I have ever used one, I've been in a monogamous relationship for almost 30 years!) is that they are a real variety and many of the more successful ones like eHarmony are focused on personality matches not looks. Isn't tinder more about hooking up for casual sex than meeting your life partner? By definition if most relationships start via dating apps then most of those who use them successfully are probably a bit minging.
Speaking as someone who is on a few dating Apps nobody is putting their real personality on there - they curate it to seem “interesting”. The amount of women who seemingly do “hot yoga” and love travel is greater than the spaces in yoga studios and flights from the UK.
Occasionally you will find someone who likes “wine”, “gin and tonic” “lying in bed all day shagging” but unfortunately you also get the pictures of them.
This might sound horrid but for me they are like looking at restaurant menus online where you have an idea before of what is available so when I go out, if I was actually looking for someone at that point in time, then I might recognise someone I saw online as single and give it a go but I really can’t do the whole chatting anonymously, moving to talking over phone then a coffee crap.
I preferto meet someone whilst out, or at a house party or large lunch/dinner event and letting fate, and more hopefully instant chemistry, do it’s worst.
Otherwise it’s all a bit “job interview” than the excitement of the electricity of meeting someone at a bar.
My latest date was on Saturday night at the rather brilliant Newport restaurant in Newport, Fife. Tasting menu. Absolutely superb. Bottle of wine and home with my lady of the night ( and indeed the previous 14k nights) for a very pleasant time.
It is so utterly catastrophic on multiple levels. It feels worse than the ERM debacle
That's because it is.
The ERM was Major being kicked by the markets. That's bad, PMs shouldn't look like a victim. But the culpability wasn't particularly Major's, despite the subsequent rewriting of history.
Kwateng donned a costume with "Kick me, markets" prominently printed on it. He then spent a week ignoring those around him saying "the markets are kicking you, and we're not going to benefit anyway. Are you sure about this?". Only then did he U-turn. Except it's only 2/45 of a U-turn anyway.
One of the rules of Conservatism is "understand why that silly thing is in place before you uproot it." Yes, Rishi's tax rises were and are rubbish. But better to think about why he thought them necessary than say "Conservative hate tax rises. Conservative smash tax rises."
FT: Kwarteng to bring forward publication of fiscal plan and OBR forecasts. The plan sets out a five year agenda to bring down public sector debt through another lengthy bout of austerity.
Cameron and Osborne could get away with austerity (because they possessed some political acumen, had been laying the groundwork for years, and could pin the blame on the money markets and on Labour.) Truss and Kwarteng... won't.
This Parliament was elected on a "no return to austerity" pledge.
My understanding of dating apps (not that I have ever used one, I've been in a monogamous relationship for almost 30 years!) is that they are a real variety and many of the more successful ones like eHarmony are focused on personality matches not looks. Isn't tinder more about hooking up for casual sex than meeting your life partner? By definition if most relationships start via dating apps then most of those who use them successfully are probably a bit minging.
This is beyond clueless
I may know nothing about dating but I can add up. It can't be simultaneously true that adding apps are both preventing most people from finding a partner and helping most people find a partner.
Obviously I wouldn’t know as I have been in a steady relationship of one sort or another since the first Bush Administration, but my understanding is that you don’t need to be some kind of Adonis on the apps.
There are loads of different ones, and some of them reward being interesting, funny, charismatic or whatever.
Leon could surely attest to this as he is pushing 60, so if anyone was ever to be “swiped away” it would be him.
Incidentally there were a couple of posts upthread about Crimea. Some things to remember:
1) Crimea is not historically part of Russia. Although it was held by the Russian Empire from 1783, it was administered usually as part of what is now Ukraine. It didn't formally become part of 'Russia' until 1921. This was largely because Russia wanted to trim Ukraine and make sure it couldn't realistically bid for independence again after its reconquest. Admittedly, as a result of ethnic cleaning in the 1930s and 1940s it became much more Russian, with the Tartars in particular being almost eliminated, but it still was a new, semi-detached part of Russia.
2) It was also an uneasy fit with Russia, because its logistics all pointed to the Ukraine (e.g. its water supply). Khrushchev and Malenkov transferred it because it would make life easier for the people of Crimea. No other reason. And on the one occasion it had a democratic vote on the subject, it voted to stay with Ukraine.
3) Those saying it no longer has strategic importance for Russia because the Black Sea Fleet has been removed and it can be hit by HIMARS are also missing the point. That's not why Russia wants it. It controls access to numerous potentially very rich oil and gas fields in the Black Sea. If Ukraine were able to exploit those, it would be perfectly placed to replace Russia as the supplier of choice for Europe. After all, the pipeline's already there. And of course nobody now trusts Russia an inch, and is looking for alternative suppliers. Its loss would therefore be a colossal medium-term setback for Russia's economy. At the same time, regaining it would be potentially a colossal boost to Ukraine.
Therefore
(1) it isn't 'historically part of Russia.' That is a false narrative from Moscow swallowed by their propagandists in the West.
(2) Although it has a large population that thinks of itself as Russian, it has voted on the one occasion it was actually asked, to stay with Ukraine.
(3) it is being held by Russia illegally for purely selfish reasons, and for the same reasons Ukraine needs it back.
I do not think there will be negotiations over it as a result.
It is so utterly catastrophic on multiple levels. It feels worse than the ERM debacle
That's because it is.
The ERM was Major being kicked by the markets. That's bad, PMs shouldn't look like a victim. But the culpability wasn't particularly Major's, despite the subsequent rewriting of history.
Kwateng donned a costume with "Kick me, markets" prominently printed on it. He then spent a week ignoring those around him saying "the markets are kicking you, and we're not going to benefit anyway. Are you sure about this?". Only then did he U-turn. Except it's only 2/45 of a U-turn anyway.
One of the rules of Conservatism is "understand why that silly thing is in place before you uproot it." Yes, Rishi's tax rises were and are rubbish. But better to think about why he thought them necessary than say "Conservative hate tax rises. Conservative smash tax rises."
Who on earth thought boasting about a tax cut for those earning £150,000+ was a good idea?
You could look at it a different way. Incel (involuntarily celibate) is a subset of 'men who are just celibate'. If dealing with women becomes too difficult and risky, then they could just decide to stop bothering. No one is forcing men to have sex and go in to relationships with women. Particularly now that you have pornography, virtual reality etc. Perhaps it will get to the point where men adopt children, etc, in the way that single women sometimes give birth by IVF etc. Would this be such a bad thing? I am not saying that this is a healthy state of affairs, but it could be where the current phase of the 'sexual revolution' is leading to.
I'm inclined towards Houellebecq's answer, that it is "the law of market forces".
The dating market is the most capitalistic and selfish market there is - nobody wants to redistribute wealth in this market. There are a variety of things that make a person attractive - looks, physique, wealth, intelligence, sense of humour, style, youth etc. But each and every one of undeniably has a "sexual market value" based on these factors.
Now enter globalisation.
Up until about 2008, you largely met people through your social networks or your immediate surroundings. Social media didn't exist... you have to remember Facebook was limited to universities only until 2006 and the other stuff, instagram, tiktok, tinder, blah, didn't exist at all. So you'd go to a bar, meet through a college society, the young conservatives, a friend of the family, work colleague etc.
That all changed once our lives went online.
Consider an absolute stunner of a 21 year old girl. She's got model good looks and every man who meets her wants her. In 2005, she probably would have met people through uni, or at a bar, at her place of work, etc. Take out the oldies, the uglies the fatties etc - and she's probably got a dating pool of 1000 eligible bachelors in her town or wider social network to choose from.
Fast forward to 2022. All a beautiful 21 year old has to do is have access to an iphone and instagram and just by posting a few bikini shots, she can have 10,000 followers and premier league footballers in her DMs, if she's pretty enough.
Her sexual market value hasn't changed, but her access to an infinitely larger global sexual marketplace has.
This is very good for the attractive people of this world, but very bad for the unattractive ones. The attractive people have vastly more options at their disposal. The unattractive ones - well, are still unattractive, so many, many, many more rejections. It doesn't matter how many instagram selfies they post, they still get no interest.
We know that this is true of Tinder, if Tinder was a country it would have one of the highest gini coefficients in the world.
What all this means for society is, unfortunately, exactly what you'd get in any society where the resources are so unevenly distributed. You have an aristocracy with high sexual market value (through beauty, money, status etc) hoarding all the wealth, with an impoverished peasantry slowly starving to death.
All of which kind of ignores the fact that many men and women are attracted to each other for reasons other than their looks. Yes, in a nightclub or bar obviously the first thing that catches the eye is looks but it takes about 5 seconds actually talking with someone to realise that, whatever their superficial attractiveness, you sure as hell wouldn't want more than the briefest of flirtations.
This simple truth is proved by the fact that, in spite of the fact that 99% of us - whether male or female - are not 'stunners', the vast majority of us end up in romantic relationships that thankfully outlive the initial superficial attraction.
And again you totally miss the point. I’m not surprised you never got laid for years if you’re this obtuse
Internet dating. Dating apps
They make everything much more instant and visual. So the less good looking guys don’t even have a chance to pull. This is a real phenomenon and it is unquestionably bad for society. See all the incel shooters in the USA
And guess what, unless they are sad sacks like you, the vast majority of people do not use dating apps to get partners. They don't have to because they are able to actually interact with the opposite sex face to face rather than hiding behind a phone. It is you who completely miss the point. You are the incel.
But this is simply and probably wrong (you fat clueless twat etc etc)
These days people meet via social media, very often dating apps. It’s absolutely standard
I wonder if I was one of the earliest PBers to meet a partner through the Internet? I met a GF through a bulletin board (Mono, if anyone remembers that) in 1992. Pre-WWW.
Mono was awesome at its peak. I never met a partner through it, but my sister did. (Genuinely true fact.)
There are a lot - I mean a LOT - of retarded seeming 20-something males.
I don’t blame the girls for steering clear.
The lack of sympathy on this site for socially awkward young men is really quite repulsive
The lack of sympathy is due to the fact most of these socially awkward young men are dicks that think they are owed sex.
Perhaps you'd feel different if it was your son?
I am the father of daughters, btw, so I'm not talking my book. It astounds me: the misanthrophy on here. "These men are stupid dim misogynist layabouts who deserve to have no sex"
No, a lot of them are perfectly pleasant and would really like a nice girlfriend - just one - but technology and society have evolved in a pernicious way that really harms their chances. How is this difficult to understand, and why is sympathy so limited?!
It is so utterly catastrophic on multiple levels. It feels worse than the ERM debacle
That's because it is.
The ERM was Major being kicked by the markets. That's bad, PMs shouldn't look like a victim. But the culpability wasn't particularly Major's, despite the subsequent rewriting of history.
Kwateng donned a costume with "Kick me, markets" prominently printed on it. He then spent a week ignoring those around him saying "the markets are kicking you, and we're not going to benefit anyway. Are you sure about this?". Only then did he U-turn. Except it's only 2/45 of a U-turn anyway.
One of the rules of Conservatism is "understand why that silly thing is in place before you uproot it." Yes, Rishi's tax rises were and are rubbish. But better to think about why he thought them necessary than say "Conservative hate tax rises. Conservative smash tax rises."
Who on earth thought boasting about a tax cut for those earning £150,000+ was a good idea?
People who have spent too much time talking to the IEA and hangers-on, that's who.
I don't particularly believe the Tufton St conspiracy stuff, but sometimes you have to wonder.
It is so utterly catastrophic on multiple levels. It feels worse than the ERM debacle
That's because it is.
The ERM was Major being kicked by the markets. That's bad, PMs shouldn't look like a victim. But the culpability wasn't particularly Major's, despite the subsequent rewriting of history.
Kwateng donned a costume with "Kick me, markets" prominently printed on it. He then spent a week ignoring those around him saying "the markets are kicking you, and we're not going to benefit anyway. Are you sure about this?". Only then did he U-turn. Except it's only 2/45 of a U-turn anyway.
One of the rules of Conservatism is "understand why that silly thing is in place before you uproot it." Yes, Rishi's tax rises were and are rubbish. But better to think about why he thought them necessary than say "Conservative hate tax rises. Conservative smash tax rises."
Who on earth thought boasting about a tax cut for those earning £150,000+ was a good idea?
It is so utterly catastrophic on multiple levels. It feels worse than the ERM debacle
That's because it is.
The ERM was Major being kicked by the markets. That's bad, PMs shouldn't look like a victim. But the culpability wasn't particularly Major's, despite the subsequent rewriting of history.
Kwateng donned a costume with "Kick me, markets" prominently printed on it. He then spent a week ignoring those around him saying "the markets are kicking you, and we're not going to benefit anyway. Are you sure about this?". Only then did he U-turn. Except it's only 2/45 of a U-turn anyway.
One of the rules of Conservatism is "understand why that silly thing is in place before you uproot it." Yes, Rishi's tax rises were and are rubbish. But better to think about why he thought them necessary than say "Conservative hate tax rises. Conservative smash tax rises."
Yep. He has driven up interest rates faster than was necessary threatening even the modest growth we might have hoped for. The base rate rising to 5% will completely overwhelm the modest boost that the tax cuts will provide.
If this was deliberate, a strategy saying that ultra low interest rates had become part of the problem rather than a necessary support, I might have had some sympathy. If he had argued that this is what it was going to take to get the genie of inflation back in the bottle I might even have agreed.
But what it seems to have been was pig ignorance ( I apologise to any pigs insulted by this analogy) and arrogance combined with a complete inability to foresee even the most basic and obvious consequences of his actions. I despair, I really do.
It is so utterly catastrophic on multiple levels. It feels worse than the ERM debacle
That's because it is.
The ERM was Major being kicked by the markets. That's bad, PMs shouldn't look like a victim. But the culpability wasn't particularly Major's, despite the subsequent rewriting of history.
Kwateng donned a costume with "Kick me, markets" prominently printed on it. He then spent a week ignoring those around him saying "the markets are kicking you, and we're not going to benefit anyway. Are you sure about this?". Only then did he U-turn. Except it's only 2/45 of a U-turn anyway.
One of the rules of Conservatism is "understand why that silly thing is in place before you uproot it." Yes, Rishi's tax rises were and are rubbish. But better to think about why he thought them necessary than say "Conservative hate tax rises. Conservative smash tax rises."
Find it hard to argue with any of that
Black Wednesday led to the Tories being in opposition for 13 years. I can see the Trussterfuck doing the same, or worse. Depending on how PM Starmer negotiates the economic rapids
FT: Kwarteng to bring forward publication of fiscal plan and OBR forecasts. The plan sets out a five year agenda to bring down public sector debt through another lengthy bout of austerity.
Cameron and Osborne could get away with austerity (because they possessed some political acumen, had been laying the groundwork for years, and could pin the blame on the money markets and on Labour.) Truss and Kwarteng... won't.
This Parliament was elected on a "no return to austerity" pledge.
Then Covid came along and the people, in their infinite wisdom, demanded lockdown.
Somebody who claims they’ve had 38 girlfriends is a liar
Do you really believe that?
How quaint
Also, I said "my last 38 girlfriends". It wasn't a total. The total is larger. I shall refrain from further vainglorious comments lest Fate smack me upside the head
I was trying to explain to my brother how Liz managed to paint herself into this corner.
Her initial instinct - that raising taxes just as the UK was headed into a recession - was not wrong.
Even borrowing for tax cuts is not necessarily wrong if you can make a coherent case that doing so will deliver economic growth.
What seems to have happened is that she then announced the mother of all energy bungs, got high on her supply and decided that borrowing didn’t matter at all - who cares what idiots like Tom Scholar and the OBR might say! - and then foolishly made a totem of the most egregiously unfair tax cuts in political history.
She simply didn’t notice that even as she was as promising tax cuts, energy prices were spiralling out of control, and the BoE was lifting interest rates.
It is so utterly catastrophic on multiple levels. It feels worse than the ERM debacle
That's because it is.
The ERM was Major being kicked by the markets. That's bad, PMs shouldn't look like a victim. But the culpability wasn't particularly Major's, despite the subsequent rewriting of history.
Kwateng donned a costume with "Kick me, markets" prominently printed on it. He then spent a week ignoring those around him saying "the markets are kicking you, and we're not going to benefit anyway. Are you sure about this?". Only then did he U-turn. Except it's only 2/45 of a U-turn anyway.
One of the rules of Conservatism is "understand why that silly thing is in place before you uproot it." Yes, Rishi's tax rises were and are rubbish. But better to think about why he thought them necessary than say "Conservative hate tax rises. Conservative smash tax rises."
I cannot be the only one who cannot quite believe just how incompetent and out of touch Truss and Kwarteng have been since taking office.
I also cannot quite believe just how terrible Truss is under media pressure. I knew she was awkward and suffered from a charisma bypass but there really does feel like there is something… odd about her. A politician that doesn’t appear to have the slightest clue what the public want, doesn’t seem to be interested in finding out, and seems utterly incapable of speaking to them on any kind of level.
It is almost as if the two have deliberately set out to destroy Tory poll ratings. I cannot think of anything more they could have done to appear out of touch and destroy their popularity or credibility. A nationwide puppy cull, perhaps.
It is quite good to read an article that is realistic about the 'arc of history'. It doesn't neccessarily advance in a positive way although educated people often have a quasi religious faith that it does. For the last 15 years the arc of history has been going in the wrong direction with conservatism and patriarchy in the ascendancy, at least on a global scale. In this context I think we could be a bit more positive about our own society and what it has achieved.
patriairchy in the ascendancy the past 15 years....maybe in the minds of extreme feminists but i dont think modern britain could in any way be described as a patriarchy
Describing Britain as a patriarchy when the person in charge is a woman is an interesting point of view.
Leon is 83, so that’s only one girlfriend every two years, roughly, removing the years of minority.
I was hardly active in Pershing conquests but I still managed 8 girlfriends before I married my wife. I dont think 38 is impossible. Sad. Being in a relationship is far better than soulless hookups.
My understanding of dating apps (not that I have ever used one, I've been in a monogamous relationship for almost 30 years!) is that they are a real variety and many of the more successful ones like eHarmony are focused on personality matches not looks. Isn't tinder more about hooking up for casual sex than meeting your life partner? By definition if most relationships start via dating apps then most of those who use them successfully are probably a bit minging.
This is beyond clueless
I may know nothing about dating but I can add up. It can't be simultaneously true that adding apps are both preventing most people from finding a partner and helping most people find a partner.
They are increasing inequality. In a global sexual marketplace, with millions of participants, everyone is competing for the top 20% or so's attention. In a much smaller marketplace, everyone more or less finds their place - because eventually you run out of viable candidates.
With tinder, you can theoretically keep swiping forever until you meet your perfect match, the right match is only ever another swipe away. So people keep swiping.
Furthermore, for attractive people, easy access to unlimited matches disincentivises them settling down in the first place. So it may well be the case that the top 20% of people are having far more frequent casual sex, while the bottom 80% or so is hardly getting laid at all.
The findings from Tinder, Hinge and OkCupid are summarised as thus:
"The great majority of women are only willing to communicate romantically with a small minority of men while most men are willing to communicate romantically with most women... It seems hard to avoid a basic conclusion: that the majority of women find the majority of men unattractive and not worth engaging with romantically, while the reverse is not true. Stated in another way, it seems that men collectively create a “dating economy” for women with relatively low inequality, while women collectively create a “dating economy” for men with very high inequality.
In terms of inequalities between attractive people (by times swiped) vs unattractive people, the gini coefficient for women is fairly average (men will swipe on most things, including average women) but the gini coefficient for men is equivalent to the 8th most unequal country in the world (women will only swipe on the very most attractive men).
The great thing about stats like those provided by the above article is they cut out all the *personal experience* of what it was like "in my day" or "for my lad, who's average looking" etc, and looks at the raw data of hundreds of thousands of users and millions of swipes.
And the data doesn't lie, here. The dating game is harder than it has ever been (for men at least) and the brutal truth is most men aren't getting sex, because most women simply don't find them attractive.
The study OKCupid publised using their own stats sets this out in absolutely brutal terms - women find very few men attractive, and rate almost all men as below average in attractiveness:
Leon is 83, so that’s only one girlfriend every two years, roughly, removing the years of minority.
I was hardly active in Pershing conquests but I still managed 8 girlfriends before I married my wife. I dont think 38 is impossible. Sad. Being in a relationship is far better than soulless hookups.
I dunno. There's quite a lot to be said for "soulless hookups", especially when compared to "no hookups at all"
Some of my best times have been utterly bleak in their emotionless lust. Glorious
Another belting piece from John Harris, reporting from middle england heartlands once again. He is usually the must-read of the week.
"And so to one last rather overlooked point. As our economic troubles pile up, there is talk of renewed austerity: in her interview with Kuenssberg, Truss pointedly declined to rule out public spending cuts. She and her colleagues ought to bear in mind the words of the writer and academic Ross McKibbin, written in 1999 but every bit as relevant to 2022: “The middle classes make more use of the NHS, public transport, public libraries, local swimming pools, public parks and their right to state welfare than anyone else.” Therein we see one key aspect of the Tories’ snowballing crisis, and further proof of this surreal period’s defining political fact: that if Conservatives only seem able to bring to their own heartlands worry and despair, the game is surely up."
Just saw this story in NYT and immediately thought of Sandpit (as resident of UAE not as grifter's grifter!)
NYT ($) - Tillerson, Ex-Secretary of State, Expected to Testify in Foreign Influence Trial Prosecutors are calling on him to testify in the case of Thomas Barrack, who is accused of acting as an agent for the United Arab Emirates during the Trump administration.
Rex Tillerson, the former Exxon Mobil chief executive who served as former President Donald J. Trump’s first secretary of state, is expected to testify on Monday in the trial of one of Mr. Trump’s closest allies.
Prosecutors are calling Mr. Tillerson as a witness in the case of Thomas J. Barrack Jr., a private-equity investor accused of acting as an illegal agent of the United Arab Emirates while seeking to influence the Trump campaign and administration on behalf of the Emiratis.
. . . . Mr. Barrack was a vocal supporter of Mr. Trump’s presidential candidacy, served as the chairman of his inaugural committee and helped guide his transition into office; Mr. Tillerson was Mr. Trump’s secretary of state and clashed with the president often until he was fired, via Twitter, in March 2018. . . .
Prosecutors have said that Mr. Barrack sought to advance the Gulf nation’s interests in the United States at the direction of Emirati officials; evidence so far shows a frenzy of correspondence about media appearances and policy positions. Mr. Barrack’s lawyers have called the accusations “ridiculous” and have said he was acting on his own accord, not as a secret agent.
Mr. Tillerson would be the first witness who could offer a firsthand account of the early days of Mr. Trump’s administration, including the impact of Mr. Barrack’s efforts.
During his brief and tumultuous tenure as the secretary of state, Mr. Tillerson was often at odds with the president over a range of issues, including Middle East policy. . . .
Prosecutors have accused Mr. Barrack of using his sway with Mr. Trump to advance the interests of the Emiratis, serving as a secret back channel for communications without disclosing his efforts to the attorney general, as the government contends he should have.
U.S. law requires anybody “operating under the control of foreign governments or foreign officials,” other than diplomats, to notify the U.S. attorney general. Mr. Barrack faces a charge that the Justice Department has described as “espionage lite,” because it typically involves “espionage-like or clandestine behavior.”
He faces nine counts in all, including counts of acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign government, obstruction of justice and making false statements. Prosecutors say Mr. Barrack repeatedly lied to Federal Bureau of Investigation agents when questioned in 2019 about his dealings with the Emiratis. . . .
Another belting piece from John Harris, reporting from middle england heartlands once again. He is usually the must-read of the week.
"And so to one last rather overlooked point. As our economic troubles pile up, there is talk of renewed austerity: in her interview with Kuenssberg, Truss pointedly declined to rule out public spending cuts. She and her colleagues ought to bear in mind the words of the writer and academic Ross McKibbin, written in 1999 but every bit as relevant to 2022: “The middle classes make more use of the NHS, public transport, public libraries, local swimming pools, public parks and their right to state welfare than anyone else.” Therein we see one key aspect of the Tories’ snowballing crisis, and further proof of this surreal period’s defining political fact: that if Conservatives only seem able to bring to their own heartlands worry and despair, the game is surely up."
Leon is 83, so that’s only one girlfriend every two years, roughly, removing the years of minority.
I was hardly active in Pershing conquests but I still managed 8 girlfriends before I married my wife. I dont think 38 is impossible. Sad. Being in a relationship is far better than soulless hookups.
The grass is always greener.
But my single mates look at bit bloody lonely and desperate now, and when they come to my house it’s like some kind of sexual Scrooge has come to visit the chaste but contentedly happy Cratchit family.
My understanding of dating apps (not that I have ever used one, I've been in a monogamous relationship for almost 30 years!) is that they are a real variety and many of the more successful ones like eHarmony are focused on personality matches not looks. Isn't tinder more about hooking up for casual sex than meeting your life partner? By definition if most relationships start via dating apps then most of those who use them successfully are probably a bit minging.
This is beyond clueless
I may know nothing about dating but I can add up. It can't be simultaneously true that adding apps are both preventing most people from finding a partner and helping most people find a partner.
They are increasing inequality. In a global sexual marketplace, with millions of participants, everyone is competing for the top 20% or so's attention. In a much smaller marketplace, everyone more or less finds their place - because eventually you run out of viable candidates.
With tinder, you can theoretically keep swiping forever until you meet your perfect match, the right match is only ever another swipe away. So people keep swiping.
Furthermore, for attractive people, easy access to unlimited matches disincentivises them settling down in the first place. So it may well be the case that the top 20% of people are having far more frequent casual sex, while the bottom 80% or so is hardly getting laid at all.
The findings from Tinder, Hinge and OkCupid are summarised as thus:
"The great majority of women are only willing to communicate romantically with a small minority of men while most men are willing to communicate romantically with most women... It seems hard to avoid a basic conclusion: that the majority of women find the majority of men unattractive and not worth engaging with romantically, while the reverse is not true. Stated in another way, it seems that men collectively create a “dating economy” for women with relatively low inequality, while women collectively create a “dating economy” for men with very high inequality.
In terms of inequalities between attractive people (by times swiped) vs unattractive people, the gini coefficient for women is fairly average (men will swipe on most things, including average women) but the gini coefficient for men is equivalent to the 8th most unequal country in the world (women will only swipe on the very most attractive men).
The great thing about stats like those provided by the above article is they cut out all the *personal experience* of what it was like "in my day" or "for my lad, who's average looking" etc, and looks at the raw data of hundreds of thousands of users and millions of swipes.
And the data doesn't lie, here. The dating game is harder than it has ever been (for men at least) and the brutal truth is most men aren't getting sex, because most women simply don't find them attractive.
The study OKCupid publised using their own stats sets this out in absolutely brutal terms - women find very few men attractive, and rate almost all men as below average in attractiveness:
Don't you go blinding PBers with actual data. We have @Richard_Tyndall here, who once had fumbling bad sex in the 1980s, to tell us what's what. And @Foxy is a doctor so he knows things about things
What we are consistently seeing is mobile, well equipped and trained forces out manoeuvring static, poorly equipped and trained forces leaving them in a position where they can surrender, die or run away.
It reminds me a bit of the Falklands war where professionally trained troops ran a much larger force of conscripts ragged and defeated them.
There are a lot - I mean a LOT - of retarded seeming 20-something males.
I don’t blame the girls for steering clear.
The lack of sympathy on this site for socially awkward young men is really quite repulsive
The lack of sympathy is due to the fact most of these socially awkward young men are dicks that think they are owed sex.
Perhaps you'd feel different if it was your son?
I am the father of daughters, btw, so I'm not talking my book. It astounds me: the misanthrophy on here. "These men are stupid dim misogynist layabouts who deserve to have no sex"
No, a lot of them are perfectly pleasant and would really like a nice girlfriend - just one - but technology and society have evolved in a pernicious way that really harms their chances. How is this difficult to understand, and why is sympathy so limited?!
As a father of daughters the way you talk about women is like a teenage boy going through puberty. I think you’re full of shit
My understanding of dating apps (not that I have ever used one, I've been in a monogamous relationship for almost 30 years!) is that they are a real variety and many of the more successful ones like eHarmony are focused on personality matches not looks. Isn't tinder more about hooking up for casual sex than meeting your life partner? By definition if most relationships start via dating apps then most of those who use them successfully are probably a bit minging.
This is beyond clueless
I may know nothing about dating but I can add up. It can't be simultaneously true that adding apps are both preventing most people from finding a partner and helping most people find a partner.
They are increasing inequality. In a global sexual marketplace, with millions of participants, everyone is competing for the top 20% or so's attention. In a much smaller marketplace, everyone more or less finds their place - because eventually you run out of viable candidates.
With tinder, you can theoretically keep swiping forever until you meet your perfect match, the right match is only ever another swipe away. So people keep swiping.
Furthermore, for attractive people, easy access to unlimited matches disincentivises them settling down in the first place. So it may well be the case that the top 20% of people are having far more frequent casual sex, while the bottom 80% or so is hardly getting laid at all.
The findings from Tinder, Hinge and OkCupid are summarised as thus:
"The great majority of women are only willing to communicate romantically with a small minority of men while most men are willing to communicate romantically with most women... It seems hard to avoid a basic conclusion: that the majority of women find the majority of men unattractive and not worth engaging with romantically, while the reverse is not true. Stated in another way, it seems that men collectively create a “dating economy” for women with relatively low inequality, while women collectively create a “dating economy” for men with very high inequality.
In terms of inequalities between attractive people (by times swiped) vs unattractive people, the gini coefficient for women is fairly average (men will swipe on most things, including average women) but the gini coefficient for men is equivalent to the 8th most unequal country in the world (women will only swipe on the very most attractive men).
The great thing about stats like those provided by the above article is they cut out all the *personal experience* of what it was like "in my day" or "for my lad, who's average looking" etc, and looks at the raw data of hundreds of thousands of users and millions of swipes.
And the data doesn't lie, here. The dating game is harder than it has ever been (for men at least) and the brutal truth is most men aren't getting sex, because most women simply don't find them attractive.
The study OKCupid publised using their own stats sets this out in absolutely brutal terms - women find very few men attractive, and rate almost all men as below average in attractiveness:
Don't you go blinding PBers with actual data. We have @Richard_Tyndall here, who once had fumbling bad sex in the 1980s, to tell us what's what. And @Foxy is a doctor so he knows things about things
There are a lot - I mean a LOT - of retarded seeming 20-something males.
I don’t blame the girls for steering clear.
The lack of sympathy on this site for socially awkward young men is really quite repulsive
The lack of sympathy is due to the fact most of these socially awkward young men are dicks that think they are owed sex.
Perhaps you'd feel different if it was your son?
I am the father of daughters, btw, so I'm not talking my book. It astounds me: the misanthrophy on here. "These men are stupid dim misogynist layabouts who deserve to have no sex"
No, a lot of them are perfectly pleasant and would really like a nice girlfriend - just one - but technology and society have evolved in a pernicious way that really harms their chances. How is this difficult to understand, and why is sympathy so limited?!
I have a son not a daughter he just turned 30 today and he would echo my views he knows these sort of people and his comment would be "Well if they weren't complete arseholes who do things like take a girl out then tell her she owes them sex as they paid for the date then...."
Just for fun, here is the latest EMA of polls including the latest two. Labour is 19% ahead and is predicted to have an overall majority of 224 under the new boundaries. The odd thing is that Labour is predicted to get six extra seats under the new boundaries.
I've also looked at the Greens passing 50% of their share to Labour.
What we are consistently seeing is mobile, well equipped and trained forces out manoeuvring static, poorly equipped and trained forces leaving them in a position where they can surrender, die or run away.
It reminds me a bit of the Falklands war where professionally trained troops ran a much larger force of conscripts ragged and defeated them.
How on earth did the Russians get this bad?
hence the nuclear missiles heading for the border...Putin needs a game changer and a nuclear test on the border can be seen as a show of power without directly attacking
My understanding of dating apps (not that I have ever used one, I've been in a monogamous relationship for almost 30 years!) is that they are a real variety and many of the more successful ones like eHarmony are focused on personality matches not looks. Isn't tinder more about hooking up for casual sex than meeting your life partner? By definition if most relationships start via dating apps then most of those who use them successfully are probably a bit minging.
This is beyond clueless
I may know nothing about dating but I can add up. It can't be simultaneously true that adding apps are both preventing most people from finding a partner and helping most people find a partner.
They are increasing inequality. In a global sexual marketplace, with millions of participants, everyone is competing for the top 20% or so's attention. In a much smaller marketplace, everyone more or less finds their place - because eventually you run out of viable candidates.
With tinder, you can theoretically keep swiping forever until you meet your perfect match, the right match is only ever another swipe away. So people keep swiping.
Furthermore, for attractive people, easy access to unlimited matches disincentivises them settling down in the first place. So it may well be the case that the top 20% of people are having far more frequent casual sex, while the bottom 80% or so is hardly getting laid at all.
The findings from Tinder, Hinge and OkCupid are summarised as thus:
"The great majority of women are only willing to communicate romantically with a small minority of men while most men are willing to communicate romantically with most women... It seems hard to avoid a basic conclusion: that the majority of women find the majority of men unattractive and not worth engaging with romantically, while the reverse is not true. Stated in another way, it seems that men collectively create a “dating economy” for women with relatively low inequality, while women collectively create a “dating economy” for men with very high inequality.
In terms of inequalities between attractive people (by times swiped) vs unattractive people, the gini coefficient for women is fairly average (men will swipe on most things, including average women) but the gini coefficient for men is equivalent to the 8th most unequal country in the world (women will only swipe on the very most attractive men).
The great thing about stats like those provided by the above article is they cut out all the *personal experience* of what it was like "in my day" or "for my lad, who's average looking" etc, and looks at the raw data of hundreds of thousands of users and millions of swipes.
And the data doesn't lie, here. The dating game is harder than it has ever been (for men at least) and the brutal truth is most men aren't getting sex, because most women simply don't find them attractive.
The study OKCupid publised using their own stats sets this out in absolutely brutal terms - women find very few men attractive, and rate almost all men as below average in attractiveness:
Don't you go blinding PBers with actual data. We have @Richard_Tyndall here, who once had fumbling bad sex in the 1980s, to tell us what's what. And @Foxy is a doctor so he knows things about things
There are a lot - I mean a LOT - of retarded seeming 20-something males.
I don’t blame the girls for steering clear.
The lack of sympathy on this site for socially awkward young men is really quite repulsive
The lack of sympathy is due to the fact most of these socially awkward young men are dicks that think they are owed sex.
Perhaps you'd feel different if it was your son?
I am the father of daughters, btw, so I'm not talking my book. It astounds me: the misanthrophy on here. "These men are stupid dim misogynist layabouts who deserve to have no sex"
No, a lot of them are perfectly pleasant and would really like a nice girlfriend - just one - but technology and society have evolved in a pernicious way that really harms their chances. How is this difficult to understand, and why is sympathy so limited?!
As a father of daughters the way you talk about women is like a teenage boy going through puberty. I think you’re full of shit
Fair enough. You are entitled to your opinion. But on this occasion I can politely inform you that you are factually wrong. And you can disbelieve that, if you prefer fiction as the facts make you uncomfortable
It is quite good to read an article that is realistic about the 'arc of history'. It doesn't neccessarily advance in a positive way although educated people often have a quasi religious faith that it does. For the last 15 years the arc of history has been going in the wrong direction with conservatism and patriarchy in the ascendancy, at least on a global scale. In this context I think we could be a bit more positive about our own society and what it has achieved.
patriairchy in the ascendancy the past 15 years....maybe in the minds of extreme feminists but i dont think modern britain could in any way be described as a patriarchy
Describing Britain as a patriarchy when the person in charge is a woman is an interesting point of view.
What do you mean? We have a King and everything now. And Truss is not really in charge of anything.
My understanding of dating apps (not that I have ever used one, I've been in a monogamous relationship for almost 30 years!) is that they are a real variety and many of the more successful ones like eHarmony are focused on personality matches not looks. Isn't tinder more about hooking up for casual sex than meeting your life partner? By definition if most relationships start via dating apps then most of those who use them successfully are probably a bit minging.
This is beyond clueless
I may know nothing about dating but I can add up. It can't be simultaneously true that adding apps are both preventing most people from finding a partner and helping most people find a partner.
They are increasing inequality. In a global sexual marketplace, with millions of participants, everyone is competing for the top 20% or so's attention. In a much smaller marketplace, everyone more or less finds their place - because eventually you run out of viable candidates.
With tinder, you can theoretically keep swiping forever until you meet your perfect match, the right match is only ever another swipe away. So people keep swiping.
Furthermore, for attractive people, easy access to unlimited matches disincentivises them settling down in the first place. So it may well be the case that the top 20% of people are having far more frequent casual sex, while the bottom 80% or so is hardly getting laid at all.
The findings from Tinder, Hinge and OkCupid are summarised as thus:
"The great majority of women are only willing to communicate romantically with a small minority of men while most men are willing to communicate romantically with most women... It seems hard to avoid a basic conclusion: that the majority of women find the majority of men unattractive and not worth engaging with romantically, while the reverse is not true. Stated in another way, it seems that men collectively create a “dating economy” for women with relatively low inequality, while women collectively create a “dating economy” for men with very high inequality.
In terms of inequalities between attractive people (by times swiped) vs unattractive people, the gini coefficient for women is fairly average (men will swipe on most things, including average women) but the gini coefficient for men is equivalent to the 8th most unequal country in the world (women will only swipe on the very most attractive men).
The great thing about stats like those provided by the above article is they cut out all the *personal experience* of what it was like "in my day" or "for my lad, who's average looking" etc, and looks at the raw data of hundreds of thousands of users and millions of swipes.
And the data doesn't lie, here. The dating game is harder than it has ever been (for men at least) and the brutal truth is most men aren't getting sex, because most women simply don't find them attractive.
The study OKCupid publised using their own stats sets this out in absolutely brutal terms - women find very few men attractive, and rate almost all men as below average in attractiveness:
Don't you go blinding PBers with actual data. We have @Richard_Tyndall here, who once had fumbling bad sex in the 1980s, to tell us what's what. And @Foxy is a doctor so he knows things about things
Leon is 83, so that’s only one girlfriend every two years, roughly, removing the years of minority.
I was hardly active in Pershing conquests but I still managed 8 girlfriends before I married my wife. I dont think 38 is impossible. Sad. Being in a relationship is far better than soulless hookups.
The grass is always greener.
But my single mates look at bit bloody lonely and desperate now, and when they come to my house it’s like some kind of sexual Scrooge has come to visit the chaste but contentedly happy Cratchit family.
And yet nothing is as sexless as the sexless marriage
for bit of partisan balance, again courtesy of the Gray Lady . . .
NYT ($) - Democrats’ Troubles in Nevada Are a Microcosm of Nationwide Headwinds Inflation and a rocky economy are bolstering Republicans in their races against incumbent Democrats, motivating “an electorate that simply wants change,” as one G.O.P. consultant says.
LAS VEGAS — The Culinary Workers Union members who are knocking on doors to get out the vote are on the cursed-at front lines of the Democratic Party’s midterm battle.
Most voters do not open their doors. And when some do answer, the canvassers might wish they hadn’t.
“You think I am going to vote for those Democrats after all they’ve done to ruin the economy?” a voter shouted one evening last week from her entryway in a working-class neighborhood of East Las Vegas.
Miguel Gonzalez, a 55-year-old chef who described himself as a conservative Christian who has voted for Republicans for most of his life, was more polite but no more convinced. “I don’t agree with anything Democrats are doing at all,” he said after taking a fistful of fliers from the union canvassers. . . .
Democrats in Nevada are facing potential losses up and down the ballot in November and bracing for a seismic shift that could help Republicans win control of both houses of Congress. Senator Catherine Cortez Masto remains one of the most vulnerable Democratic incumbents in the country. Gov. Steve Sisolak is fighting his most formidable challenger yet. And the state’s three House Democrats could all lose their seats.
The Democratic juggernaut built by former Senator Harry M. Reid is on its heels, staring down the most significant spate of losses in more than a decade.
The party had in recent years relied on the state’s changing demographics, capitalizing on the workers who flocked there in search of an attainable path to middle-class dreams. But Nevada Democrats are learning that demographics alone are not destiny. The state’s transient population has made building a reliable base of voters difficult, with would-be voters leaving in search of work elsewhere, as more children of immigrants in the state reach voting age. And with Mr. Reid’s death last year, Democrats are missing the veteran leader who never hesitated to twist arms to get donors and activists on board.
The vulnerabilities in Nevada reflect Democrats’ challenges nationwide, most acutely in the West. Worries over inflation and the economy overshadow nearly every other concern, particularly for the working-class and Latino voters the party has long counted on. And Republicans believe that voters blame the Democrats in power for the dour economic outlook. . .
SSI - Democratic electoral difficulties in the Silver State in 2022 being exacerbated by cack-handed congressional gerrymander engineered by . . . wait for it . . . the Democrats.
There are a lot - I mean a LOT - of retarded seeming 20-something males.
I don’t blame the girls for steering clear.
The lack of sympathy on this site for socially awkward young men is really quite repulsive
The lack of sympathy is due to the fact most of these socially awkward young men are dicks that think they are owed sex.
Perhaps you'd feel different if it was your son?
I am the father of daughters, btw, so I'm not talking my book. It astounds me: the misanthrophy on here. "These men are stupid dim misogynist layabouts who deserve to have no sex"
No, a lot of them are perfectly pleasant and would really like a nice girlfriend - just one - but technology and society have evolved in a pernicious way that really harms their chances. How is this difficult to understand, and why is sympathy so limited?!
I have a son not a daughter he just turned 30 today and he would echo my views he knows these sort of people and his comment would be "Well if they weren't complete arseholes who do things like take a girl out then tell her she owes them sex as they paid for the date then...."
I don't think there's any doubt that there's a small sub-set of men who have developed a warped sense of reality and do exactly that, and for which they should be rightly smacked upside the head.
But they are no more representative of the entire possible cohort than saying "all Tories are scum" or "all Labour voters are lefty wokists" or whatever lazy broad brush statements folk make. There's much more nuance to the debate than that.
FT: Kwarteng to bring forward publication of fiscal plan and OBR forecasts. The plan sets out a five year agenda to bring down public sector debt through another lengthy bout of austerity.
Cameron and Osborne could get away with austerity (because they possessed some political acumen, had been laying the groundwork for years, and could pin the blame on the money markets and on Labour.) Truss and Kwarteng... won't.
This Parliament was elected on a "no return to austerity" pledge.
iirc Liz Truss also ruled out austerity during the leadership campaign. That would make sense given her conviction that tax cuts lead to growth which enables debt reduction without austerity.
What we are consistently seeing is mobile, well equipped and trained forces out manoeuvring static, poorly equipped and trained forces leaving them in a position where they can surrender, die or run away.
It reminds me a bit of the Falklands war where professionally trained troops ran a much larger force of conscripts ragged and defeated them.
How on earth did the Russians get this bad?
They're a bunch of inebriated and not particularly bright thugs, lacking in discipline, restraint, or empathy and, moreover, the capacity to express any emotion other than hatred?
More power to him, I say, We need to take the threat of Armageddon a lot more seriously. We are close
yes i think Putin is about to start seriously testing the waters here...this nuclear test may be a first step in the hope to him that it panics the west...he is a dangerous cornered rat
My advice for 20 year old “socially akwards” is to focus on your career, and some suitably outdoorsy hobbies, and return to the “market” at 30.
The market winnows pretty quickly.
That's good advice. My advice for socially awkward 20 year olds (and I was one as well, in a way), is to listen more than talk, and be nice. Don't lie to impress, as they'll discover the truth soon enough.
And whatever you do, do not follow *any* of the advice in "Millions of Women are Waiting to Meet You"
My memory is vague, but doesn’t the author of that book end up having quite a lot of sex with a large number of women? ie in the hundreds, albeit not millions?
Might all be lies of course - probably is - but if true it suggests his advice is not all bad
Doesn't he also ends up divorced after a short marriage to a much younger woman, with two daughters who don't live with him (and one lives on the other side of the world?) Doesn't he end up spending much of his time on the Internet, trying to convince strangers that his globe-trotting life is anything more than an empty shell?
Didn't he also get tried (and acquitted) for rape?
No thanks.
Wait: would it have been better if he'd been convicted of rape?
More power to him, I say, We need to take the threat of Armageddon a lot more seriously. We are close
yes i think Putin is about to start seriously testing the waters here...this nuclear test may be a first step in the hope to him that it panics the west...he is a dangerous cornered rat
Yes, Putin is surely going to do *something* - because he has to. His army is being routed here and now, the mobilisation has come too late
I'm kinda praying it's "just" biological or chemical, or a test explosion over water
I can fully believe that the internet dating ‘scene’, coupled with the now seemingly all-pervasive modern obsession with body image (particularly in the young)*, causes significant mental health issues and feelings of isolation/rejection. The hardest challenge is getting through to young people who face this cycle of rejection that there truly is someone for them and that the answer is not to retreat inside themselves. Some people will always be superficial: but there are many more who are not, and as you get older speaking from experience this stuff becomes far less important compared to being with someone who, you know, you actually like and get on with as a person.
*a problem for a long time for women, but increasingly now so with men.
You could look at it a different way. Incel (involuntarily celibate) is a subset of 'men who are just celibate'. If dealing with women becomes too difficult and risky, then they could just decide to stop bothering. No one is forcing men to have sex and go in to relationships with women. Particularly now that you have pornography, virtual reality etc. Perhaps it will get to the point where men adopt children, etc, in the way that single women sometimes give birth by IVF etc. Would this be such a bad thing? I am not saying that this is a healthy state of affairs, but it could be where the current phase of the 'sexual revolution' is leading to.
I'm inclined towards Houellebecq's answer, that it is "the law of market forces".
The dating market is the most capitalistic and selfish market there is - nobody wants to redistribute wealth in this market. There are a variety of things that make a person attractive - looks, physique, wealth, intelligence, sense of humour, style, youth etc. But each and every one of undeniably has a "sexual market value" based on these factors.
Now enter globalisation.
Up until about 2008, you largely met people through your social networks or your immediate surroundings. Social media didn't exist... you have to remember Facebook was limited to universities only until 2006 and the other stuff, instagram, tiktok, tinder, blah, didn't exist at all. So you'd go to a bar, meet through a college society, the young conservatives, a friend of the family, work colleague etc.
That all changed once our lives went online.
Consider an absolute stunner of a 21 year old girl. She's got model good looks and every man who meets her wants her. In 2005, she probably would have met people through uni, or at a bar, at her place of work, etc. Take out the oldies, the uglies the fatties etc - and she's probably got a dating pool of 1000 eligible bachelors in her town or wider social network to choose from.
Fast forward to 2022. All a beautiful 21 year old has to do is have access to an iphone and instagram and just by posting a few bikini shots, she can have 10,000 followers and premier league footballers in her DMs, if she's pretty enough.
Her sexual market value hasn't changed, but her access to an infinitely larger global sexual marketplace has.
This is very good for the attractive people of this world, but very bad for the unattractive ones. The attractive people have vastly more options at their disposal. The unattractive ones - well, are still unattractive, so many, many, many more rejections. It doesn't matter how many instagram selfies they post, they still get no interest.
We know that this is true of Tinder, if Tinder was a country it would have one of the highest gini coefficients in the world.
What all this means for society is, unfortunately, exactly what you'd get in any society where the resources are so unevenly distributed. You have an aristocracy with high sexual market value (through beauty, money, status etc) hoarding all the wealth, with an impoverished peasantry slowly starving to death.
All of which kind of ignores the fact that many men and women are attracted to each other for reasons other than their looks. Yes, in a nightclub or bar obviously the first thing that catches the eye is looks but it takes about 5 seconds actually talking with someone to realise that, whatever their superficial attractiveness, you sure as hell wouldn't want more than the briefest of flirtations.
This simple truth is proved by the fact that, in spite of the fact that 99% of us - whether male or female - are not 'stunners', the vast majority of us end up in romantic relationships that thankfully outlive the initial superficial attraction.
And again you totally miss the point. I’m not surprised you never got laid for years if you’re this obtuse
Internet dating. Dating apps
They make everything much more instant and visual. So the less good looking guys don’t even have a chance to pull. This is a real phenomenon and it is unquestionably bad for society. See all the incel shooters in the USA
And guess what, unless they are sad sacks like you, the vast majority of people do not use dating apps to get partners. They don't have to because they are able to actually interact with the opposite sex face to face rather than hiding behind a phone. It is you who completely miss the point. You are the incel.
Vast majority is way wrong, the interweb thinks 40% of relationships start online.
I am just dropping in. Is anyone discussing Iran? Or what it means to realise that universal human rights are not in fact universal? Or indeed the courage of women in such countries, courage few of us would be able to replicate?
Or are we back to @Leon's views on sex and why young men are not getting enough of it? And that this is all women's fault for not wanting to be pawed by men they don't like? Again.
Self-importance verging on Get professional help now, levels. Nobody is obliged by law to read your essays, you have been told a thousand times to self-edit or actually get edited to make them readable and you just won't listen, and yes we were talking about techniques for removing feminine underwear with one's teeth.
My latest date was on Saturday night at the rather brilliant Newport restaurant in Newport, Fife. Tasting menu. Absolutely superb. Bottle of wine and home with my lady of the night ( and indeed the previous 14k nights) for a very pleasant time.
Know all about this dating lark, me.
Which suggests that in the long run two things count: maths; and that a plurality of folks go eventually for sporadically punctuated monogamy, either 'till death udp', or at least of the serial sort.
Which means that however long it takes to settle - and growing up seems a lengthy process these day - there is available roughly one female at a time for one male and roughly one male at a time for one female. Which is exactly right.
If there is an increase in non voluntary incels that seems to me to be due to social factors and bad influences not the unavailability of the opposite sex.
You could look at it a different way. Incel (involuntarily celibate) is a subset of 'men who are just celibate'. If dealing with women becomes too difficult and risky, then they could just decide to stop bothering. No one is forcing men to have sex and go in to relationships with women. Particularly now that you have pornography, virtual reality etc. Perhaps it will get to the point where men adopt children, etc, in the way that single women sometimes give birth by IVF etc. Would this be such a bad thing? I am not saying that this is a healthy state of affairs, but it could be where the current phase of the 'sexual revolution' is leading to.
I'm inclined towards Houellebecq's answer, that it is "the law of market forces".
The dating market is the most capitalistic and selfish market there is - nobody wants to redistribute wealth in this market. There are a variety of things that make a person attractive - looks, physique, wealth, intelligence, sense of humour, style, youth etc. But each and every one of undeniably has a "sexual market value" based on these factors.
Now enter globalisation.
Up until about 2008, you largely met people through your social networks or your immediate surroundings. Social media didn't exist... you have to remember Facebook was limited to universities only until 2006 and the other stuff, instagram, tiktok, tinder, blah, didn't exist at all. So you'd go to a bar, meet through a college society, the young conservatives, a friend of the family, work colleague etc.
That all changed once our lives went online.
Consider an absolute stunner of a 21 year old girl. She's got model good looks and every man who meets her wants her. In 2005, she probably would have met people through uni, or at a bar, at her place of work, etc. Take out the oldies, the uglies the fatties etc - and she's probably got a dating pool of 1000 eligible bachelors in her town or wider social network to choose from.
Fast forward to 2022. All a beautiful 21 year old has to do is have access to an iphone and instagram and just by posting a few bikini shots, she can have 10,000 followers and premier league footballers in her DMs, if she's pretty enough.
Her sexual market value hasn't changed, but her access to an infinitely larger global sexual marketplace has.
This is very good for the attractive people of this world, but very bad for the unattractive ones. The attractive people have vastly more options at their disposal. The unattractive ones - well, are still unattractive, so many, many, many more rejections. It doesn't matter how many instagram selfies they post, they still get no interest.
We know that this is true of Tinder, if Tinder was a country it would have one of the highest gini coefficients in the world.
What all this means for society is, unfortunately, exactly what you'd get in any society where the resources are so unevenly distributed. You have an aristocracy with high sexual market value (through beauty, money, status etc) hoarding all the wealth, with an impoverished peasantry slowly starving to death.
All of which kind of ignores the fact that many men and women are attracted to each other for reasons other than their looks. Yes, in a nightclub or bar obviously the first thing that catches the eye is looks but it takes about 5 seconds actually talking with someone to realise that, whatever their superficial attractiveness, you sure as hell wouldn't want more than the briefest of flirtations.
This simple truth is proved by the fact that, in spite of the fact that 99% of us - whether male or female - are not 'stunners', the vast majority of us end up in romantic relationships that thankfully outlive the initial superficial attraction.
And again you totally miss the point. I’m not surprised you never got laid for years if you’re this obtuse
Internet dating. Dating apps
They make everything much more instant and visual. So the less good looking guys don’t even have a chance to pull. This is a real phenomenon and it is unquestionably bad for society. See all the incel shooters in the USA
And guess what, unless they are sad sacks like you, the vast majority of people do not use dating apps to get partners. They don't have to because they are able to actually interact with the opposite sex face to face rather than hiding behind a phone. It is you who completely miss the point. You are the incel.
Vast majority is way wrong, the interweb thinks 40% of relationships start online.
Both my lads met their girlfriends that way, both nice lads but hardly top 10% looks wise.
It’s how everyone meets. Probably a majority of under 40s
It’s how I met my last 38 girlfriends. That’s not an exaggeration
It’s how you find someone who REALLY suits you. It makes total sense. It widens your choice by orders of magnitude
You could look at it a different way. Incel (involuntarily celibate) is a subset of 'men who are just celibate'. If dealing with women becomes too difficult and risky, then they could just decide to stop bothering. No one is forcing men to have sex and go in to relationships with women. Particularly now that you have pornography, virtual reality etc. Perhaps it will get to the point where men adopt children, etc, in the way that single women sometimes give birth by IVF etc. Would this be such a bad thing? I am not saying that this is a healthy state of affairs, but it could be where the current phase of the 'sexual revolution' is leading to.
I'm inclined towards Houellebecq's answer, that it is "the law of market forces".
The dating market is the most capitalistic and selfish market there is - nobody wants to redistribute wealth in this market. There are a variety of things that make a person attractive - looks, physique, wealth, intelligence, sense of humour, style, youth etc. But each and every one of undeniably has a "sexual market value" based on these factors.
Now enter globalisation.
Up until about 2008, you largely met people through your social networks or your immediate surroundings. Social media didn't exist... you have to remember Facebook was limited to universities only until 2006 and the other stuff, instagram, tiktok, tinder, blah, didn't exist at all. So you'd go to a bar, meet through a college society, the young conservatives, a friend of the family, work colleague etc.
That all changed once our lives went online.
Consider an absolute stunner of a 21 year old girl. She's got model good looks and every man who meets her wants her. In 2005, she probably would have met people through uni, or at a bar, at her place of work, etc. Take out the oldies, the uglies the fatties etc - and she's probably got a dating pool of 1000 eligible bachelors in her town or wider social network to choose from.
Fast forward to 2022. All a beautiful 21 year old has to do is have access to an iphone and instagram and just by posting a few bikini shots, she can have 10,000 followers and premier league footballers in her DMs, if she's pretty enough.
Her sexual market value hasn't changed, but her access to an infinitely larger global sexual marketplace has.
This is very good for the attractive people of this world, but very bad for the unattractive ones. The attractive people have vastly more options at their disposal. The unattractive ones - well, are still unattractive, so many, many, many more rejections. It doesn't matter how many instagram selfies they post, they still get no interest.
We know that this is true of Tinder, if Tinder was a country it would have one of the highest gini coefficients in the world.
What all this means for society is, unfortunately, exactly what you'd get in any society where the resources are so unevenly distributed. You have an aristocracy with high sexual market value (through beauty, money, status etc) hoarding all the wealth, with an impoverished peasantry slowly starving to death.
All of which kind of ignores the fact that many men and women are attracted to each other for reasons other than their looks. Yes, in a nightclub or bar obviously the first thing that catches the eye is looks but it takes about 5 seconds actually talking with someone to realise that, whatever their superficial attractiveness, you sure as hell wouldn't want more than the briefest of flirtations.
This simple truth is proved by the fact that, in spite of the fact that 99% of us - whether male or female - are not 'stunners', the vast majority of us end up in romantic relationships that thankfully outlive the initial superficial attraction.
And again you totally miss the point. I’m not surprised you never got laid for years if you’re this obtuse
Internet dating. Dating apps
They make everything much more instant and visual. So the less good looking guys don’t even have a chance to pull. This is a real phenomenon and it is unquestionably bad for society. See all the incel shooters in the USA
And guess what, unless they are sad sacks like you, the vast majority of people do not use dating apps to get partners. They don't have to because they are able to actually interact with the opposite sex face to face rather than hiding behind a phone. It is you who completely miss the point. You are the incel.
Is thay true any more - that yhe vast majority of people don't use dating apps to get partners?
Certainly looks to be that way from all the stats. Not least because, taking Tinder as an example, in 2021 89% of all Tinder users were male and only 9% female. Unless there are a hell of a lot of gangbangs going on that is not a recipe for a majority of dates being by online dating.
Edit. The other stat I find amusing is that 42% of all Tinder users in the UK are already married or in a 'steady' relationship.
To be fair, I suspect that other dating apps don't skew so male. Tinder, after all, being "who wants a shag", rather than "who wants a serious relationship".
You could look at it a different way. Incel (involuntarily celibate) is a subset of 'men who are just celibate'. If dealing with women becomes too difficult and risky, then they could just decide to stop bothering. No one is forcing men to have sex and go in to relationships with women. Particularly now that you have pornography, virtual reality etc. Perhaps it will get to the point where men adopt children, etc, in the way that single women sometimes give birth by IVF etc. Would this be such a bad thing? I am not saying that this is a healthy state of affairs, but it could be where the current phase of the 'sexual revolution' is leading to.
I'm inclined towards Houellebecq's answer, that it is "the law of market forces".
The dating market is the most capitalistic and selfish market there is - nobody wants to redistribute wealth in this market. There are a variety of things that make a person attractive - looks, physique, wealth, intelligence, sense of humour, style, youth etc. But each and every one of undeniably has a "sexual market value" based on these factors.
Now enter globalisation.
Up until about 2008, you largely met people through your social networks or your immediate surroundings. Social media didn't exist... you have to remember Facebook was limited to universities only until 2006 and the other stuff, instagram, tiktok, tinder, blah, didn't exist at all. So you'd go to a bar, meet through a college society, the young conservatives, a friend of the family, work colleague etc.
That all changed once our lives went online.
Consider an absolute stunner of a 21 year old girl. She's got model good looks and every man who meets her wants her. In 2005, she probably would have met people through uni, or at a bar, at her place of work, etc. Take out the oldies, the uglies the fatties etc - and she's probably got a dating pool of 1000 eligible bachelors in her town or wider social network to choose from.
Fast forward to 2022. All a beautiful 21 year old has to do is have access to an iphone and instagram and just by posting a few bikini shots, she can have 10,000 followers and premier league footballers in her DMs, if she's pretty enough.
Her sexual market value hasn't changed, but her access to an infinitely larger global sexual marketplace has.
This is very good for the attractive people of this world, but very bad for the unattractive ones. The attractive people have vastly more options at their disposal. The unattractive ones - well, are still unattractive, so many, many, many more rejections. It doesn't matter how many instagram selfies they post, they still get no interest.
We know that this is true of Tinder, if Tinder was a country it would have one of the highest gini coefficients in the world.
What all this means for society is, unfortunately, exactly what you'd get in any society where the resources are so unevenly distributed. You have an aristocracy with high sexual market value (through beauty, money, status etc) hoarding all the wealth, with an impoverished peasantry slowly starving to death.
All of which kind of ignores the fact that many men and women are attracted to each other for reasons other than their looks. Yes, in a nightclub or bar obviously the first thing that catches the eye is looks but it takes about 5 seconds actually talking with someone to realise that, whatever their superficial attractiveness, you sure as hell wouldn't want more than the briefest of flirtations.
This simple truth is proved by the fact that, in spite of the fact that 99% of us - whether male or female - are not 'stunners', the vast majority of us end up in romantic relationships that thankfully outlive the initial superficial attraction.
And again you totally miss the point. I’m not surprised you never got laid for years if you’re this obtuse
Internet dating. Dating apps
They make everything much more instant and visual. So the less good looking guys don’t even have a chance to pull. This is a real phenomenon and it is unquestionably bad for society. See all the incel shooters in the USA
And guess what, unless they are sad sacks like you, the vast majority of people do not use dating apps to get partners. They don't have to because they are able to actually interact with the opposite sex face to face rather than hiding behind a phone. It is you who completely miss the point. You are the incel.
Vast majority is way wrong, the interweb thinks 40% of relationships start online.
Both my lads met their girlfriends that way, both nice lads but hardly top 10% looks wise.
It’s how everyone meets. Probably a majority of under 40s
It’s how I met my last 38 girlfriends. That’s not an exaggeration
It’s how you find someone who REALLY suits you. It makes total sense. It widens your choice by orders of magnitude
What we are consistently seeing is mobile, well equipped and trained forces out manoeuvring static, poorly equipped and trained forces leaving them in a position where they can surrender, die or run away.
It reminds me a bit of the Falklands war where professionally trained troops ran a much larger force of conscripts ragged and defeated them.
How on earth did the Russians get this bad?
hence the nuclear missiles heading for the border...Putin needs a game changer and a nuclear test on the border can be seen as a show of power without directly attacking
I am not sure whether that's meant as an answer to the question, but it could possibly be one, i.e. hey we've got nukes so it's OK to sacrifice thousands of our own soldiers first because we're safe if we need to escalate. If you haven't got great logistics on average, assuming it makes sense to talk of an average, where do you concentrate the best of it?
According to the write-up in the Times, a train has been spotted in Central Russia. The headline says "Putin orders nuclear military train to Ukraine front line" (!)
Labour 52% (+6) Conservative 24% (-5) Liberal Democrat 10% (-3) Green 5% (+1) SNP 5% (+2) Reform UK 3% (-1) Other 1% (–)
Changes +/- 28-29 Sept
redfieldandwiltonstrategies.com/latest-gb-voti…
Whoops
Lead below 30 points.
Conference bounce for Truss?
Why are Lib Dems taking a hammering - they didn’t aid and abet the bad budget! 😠
Libdems the only challengers throughout Blue wall so why don’t they share the Tory slump? Something whiffs about these polls to me, I think they are Mickey Mouse polls, I don’t trust them as being remotely permanent.
There has been ephemeral polling glitches before, Hague wiped out Blair’s lead during Labour conference week one year, voter frustration with not liking being unable to put petrol in car. It was all short lived, polls went straight back to normal a few weeks later.
Without that foundation in fact Lib Dems should not be dropping by a quarter, they should be going up with blue wall voters switching from Tory to them, I refuse to believe these polls are for keeps, I choose to believe it will be back to a Lab lead about 10 in a few weeks and Lib Dems back to 12+. You can’t believe something is for real when its not founded in fact. Do you see what I mean.
Fickle anti-Tory voters wanting to back the winning team / shifting to Labour?
If the government are serious about replacing GDPR and not just nationalising it, it will mean a lot of headaches for some kinds of trade with the EU and peer jurisdictions like California, but possibly a good business for those within the walled garden if they can do more.
My advice for 20 year old “socially akwards” is to focus on your career, and some suitably outdoorsy hobbies, and return to the “market” at 30.
The market winnows pretty quickly.
That's good advice. My advice for socially awkward 20 year olds (and I was one as well, in a way), is to listen more than talk, and be nice. Don't lie to impress, as they'll discover the truth soon enough.
And whatever you do, do not follow *any* of the advice in "Millions of Women are Waiting to Meet You"
My memory is vague, but doesn’t the author of that book end up having quite a lot of sex with a large number of women? ie in the hundreds, albeit not millions?
Might all be lies of course - probably is - but if true it suggests his advice is not all bad
You could look at it a different way. Incel (involuntarily celibate) is a subset of 'men who are just celibate'. If dealing with women becomes too difficult and risky, then they could just decide to stop bothering. No one is forcing men to have sex and go in to relationships with women. Particularly now that you have pornography, virtual reality etc. Perhaps it will get to the point where men adopt children, etc, in the way that single women sometimes give birth by IVF etc. Would this be such a bad thing? I am not saying that this is a healthy state of affairs, but it could be where the current phase of the 'sexual revolution' is leading to.
I'm inclined towards Houellebecq's answer, that it is "the law of market forces".
The dating market is the most capitalistic and selfish market there is - nobody wants to redistribute wealth in this market. There are a variety of things that make a person attractive - looks, physique, wealth, intelligence, sense of humour, style, youth etc. But each and every one of undeniably has a "sexual market value" based on these factors.
Now enter globalisation.
Up until about 2008, you largely met people through your social networks or your immediate surroundings. Social media didn't exist... you have to remember Facebook was limited to universities only until 2006 and the other stuff, instagram, tiktok, tinder, blah, didn't exist at all. So you'd go to a bar, meet through a college society, the young conservatives, a friend of the family, work colleague etc.
That all changed once our lives went online.
Consider an absolute stunner of a 21 year old girl. She's got model good looks and every man who meets her wants her. In 2005, she probably would have met people through uni, or at a bar, at her place of work, etc. Take out the oldies, the uglies the fatties etc - and she's probably got a dating pool of 1000 eligible bachelors in her town or wider social network to choose from.
Fast forward to 2022. All a beautiful 21 year old has to do is have access to an iphone and instagram and just by posting a few bikini shots, she can have 10,000 followers and premier league footballers in her DMs, if she's pretty enough.
Her sexual market value hasn't changed, but her access to an infinitely larger global sexual marketplace has.
This is very good for the attractive people of this world, but very bad for the unattractive ones. The attractive people have vastly more options at their disposal. The unattractive ones - well, are still unattractive, so many, many, many more rejections. It doesn't matter how many instagram selfies they post, they still get no interest.
We know that this is true of Tinder, if Tinder was a country it would have one of the highest gini coefficients in the world.
What all this means for society is, unfortunately, exactly what you'd get in any society where the resources are so unevenly distributed. You have an aristocracy with high sexual market value (through beauty, money, status etc) hoarding all the wealth, with an impoverished peasantry slowly starving to death.
All of which kind of ignores the fact that many men and women are attracted to each other for reasons other than their looks. Yes, in a nightclub or bar obviously the first thing that catches the eye is looks but it takes about 5 seconds actually talking with someone to realise that, whatever their superficial attractiveness, you sure as hell wouldn't want more than the briefest of flirtations.
This simple truth is proved by the fact that, in spite of the fact that 99% of us - whether male or female - are not 'stunners', the vast majority of us end up in romantic relationships that thankfully outlive the initial superficial attraction.
And again you totally miss the point. I’m not surprised you never got laid for years if you’re this obtuse
Internet dating. Dating apps
They make everything much more instant and visual. So the less good looking guys don’t even have a chance to pull. This is a real phenomenon and it is unquestionably bad for society. See all the incel shooters in the USA
And guess what, unless they are sad sacks like you, the vast majority of people do not use dating apps to get partners. They don't have to because they are able to actually interact with the opposite sex face to face rather than hiding behind a phone. It is you who completely miss the point. You are the incel.
Vast majority is way wrong, the interweb thinks 40% of relationships start online.
Both my lads met their girlfriends that way, both nice lads but hardly top 10% looks wise.
It’s how everyone meets. Probably a majority of under 40s
It’s how I met my last 38 girlfriends. That’s not an exaggeration
It’s how you find someone who REALLY suits you. It makes total sense. It widens your choice by orders of magnitude
...last 38...
...someone who REALLY suits you...
Hmm...
It surely depends what you are looking for. Someone might suit you for a few nights, or a few weeks - and this more transient need should be mutual
Realising this was a breakthrough moment for me. ie Not every woman had to be potentially The One, and maybe the girl isn't looking for The One either!
Instead you get an affable companion, some agreeable sex, no one falls in love, then you move on. It is pleasant, and the internet enables you to do this because you can find partners seeking the same
Comments
I got two or three dozen letters over the course of several weeks and they were all interesting and different and each represented a life and a person's hopes and dreams. I recall being staggered at some the detail of their lives that women sent me - a complete stranger. Some had photos, one had a cartoon sketch. Others just went for words.
The difference between this and the swipe right/left business phone app malarky is staggering imho.
It was a literary way of connecting which is at total odds with our video/snapshot age.
It's a lost world I guess.
I went on three dates in the end iirc. One of the issues was it was nationwide and the reality of meeting someone from Inverness for coffee was definitely a factor.
In the end, I met my wife face to face at a social club.
Dating
If Putin goes, there's a non-trivial chance the ayatollahs will go down with him.
Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of absolute scumbags.
PB full of people in fulfilling long-term relationships
FT: Kwarteng to bring forward publication of fiscal plan and OBR forecasts. The plan sets out a five year agenda to bring down public sector debt through another lengthy bout of austerity.
Cameron and Osborne could get away with austerity (because they possessed some political acumen, had been laying the groundwork for years, and could pin the blame on the money markets and on Labour.) Truss and Kwarteng... won't.
Occasionally you will find someone who likes “wine”, “gin and tonic” “lying in bed all day shagging” but unfortunately you also get the pictures of them.
This might sound horrid but for me they are like looking at restaurant menus online where you have an idea before of what is available so when I go out, if I was actually looking for someone at that point in time, then I might recognise someone I saw online as single and give it a go but I really can’t do the whole chatting anonymously, moving to talking over phone then a coffee crap.
I preferto meet someone whilst out, or at a house party or large lunch/dinner event and letting fate, and more hopefully instant chemistry, do it’s worst.
Otherwise it’s all a bit “job interview” than the excitement of the electricity of meeting someone at a bar.
Tasting menu. Absolutely superb. Bottle of wine and home with my lady of the night ( and indeed the previous 14k nights) for a very pleasant time.
Know all about this dating lark, me.
The ERM was Major being kicked by the markets. That's bad, PMs shouldn't look like a victim. But the culpability wasn't particularly Major's, despite the subsequent rewriting of history.
Kwateng donned a costume with "Kick me, markets" prominently printed on it. He then spent a week ignoring those around him saying "the markets are kicking you, and we're not going to benefit anyway. Are you sure about this?". Only then did he U-turn. Except it's only 2/45 of a U-turn anyway.
One of the rules of Conservatism is "understand why that silly thing is in place before you uproot it." Yes, Rishi's tax rises were and are rubbish. But better to think about why he thought them necessary than say "Conservative hate tax rises. Conservative smash tax rises."
There are loads of different ones, and some of them reward being interesting, funny, charismatic or whatever.
Leon could surely attest to this as he is pushing 60, so if anyone was ever to be “swiped away” it would be him.
1) Crimea is not historically part of Russia. Although it was held by the Russian Empire from 1783, it was administered usually as part of what is now Ukraine. It didn't formally become part of 'Russia' until 1921. This was largely because Russia wanted to trim Ukraine and make sure it couldn't realistically bid for independence again after its reconquest. Admittedly, as a result of ethnic cleaning in the 1930s and 1940s it became much more Russian, with the Tartars in particular being almost eliminated, but it still was a new, semi-detached part of Russia.
2) It was also an uneasy fit with Russia, because its logistics all pointed to the Ukraine (e.g. its water supply). Khrushchev and Malenkov transferred it because it would make life easier for the people of Crimea. No other reason. And on the one occasion it had a democratic vote on the subject, it voted to stay with Ukraine.
3) Those saying it no longer has strategic importance for Russia because the Black Sea Fleet has been removed and it can be hit by HIMARS are also missing the point. That's not why Russia wants it. It controls access to numerous potentially very rich oil and gas fields in the Black Sea. If Ukraine were able to exploit those, it would be perfectly placed to replace Russia as the supplier of choice for Europe. After all, the pipeline's already there. And of course nobody now trusts Russia an inch, and is looking for alternative suppliers. Its loss would therefore be a colossal medium-term setback for Russia's economy. At the same time, regaining it would be potentially a colossal boost to Ukraine.
Therefore
(1) it isn't 'historically part of Russia.' That is a false narrative from Moscow swallowed by their propagandists in the West.
(2) Although it has a large population that thinks of itself as Russian, it has voted on the one occasion it was actually asked, to stay with Ukraine.
(3) it is being held by Russia illegally for purely selfish reasons, and for the same reasons Ukraine needs it back.
I do not think there will be negotiations over it as a result.
I am the father of daughters, btw, so I'm not talking my book. It astounds me: the misanthrophy on here. "These men are stupid dim misogynist layabouts who deserve to have no sex"
No, a lot of them are perfectly pleasant and would really like a nice girlfriend - just one - but technology and society have evolved in a pernicious way that really harms their chances. How is this difficult to understand, and why is sympathy so limited?!
I don't particularly believe the Tufton St conspiracy stuff, but sometimes you have to wonder.
If this was deliberate, a strategy saying that ultra low interest rates had become part of the problem rather than a necessary support, I might have had some sympathy.
If he had argued that this is what it was going to take to get the genie of inflation back in the bottle I might even have agreed.
But what it seems to have been was pig ignorance ( I apologise to any pigs insulted by this analogy) and arrogance combined with a complete inability to foresee even the most basic and obvious consequences of his actions.
I despair, I really do.
Black Wednesday led to the Tories being in opposition for 13 years. I can see the Trussterfuck doing the same, or worse. Depending on how PM Starmer negotiates the economic rapids
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-63111763
How quaint
Also, I said "my last 38 girlfriends". It wasn't a total. The total is larger. I shall refrain from further vainglorious comments lest Fate smack me upside the head
https://twitter.com/ZelenskyyUa/status/1577006943499350016
Her initial instinct - that raising taxes just as the UK was headed into a recession - was not wrong.
Even borrowing for tax cuts is not necessarily wrong if you can make a coherent case that doing so will deliver economic growth.
What seems to have happened is that she then announced the mother of all energy bungs, got high on her supply and decided that borrowing didn’t matter at all - who cares what idiots like Tom Scholar and the OBR might say! - and then foolishly made a totem of the most egregiously unfair tax cuts in political history.
She simply didn’t notice that even as she was as promising tax cuts, energy prices were spiralling out of control, and the BoE was lifting interest rates.
What a nitwit.
https://twitter.com/NOELreports/status/1577006669606707200
I also cannot quite believe just how terrible Truss is under media pressure. I knew she was awkward and suffered from a charisma bypass but there really does feel like there is something… odd about her. A politician that doesn’t appear to have the slightest clue what the public want, doesn’t seem to be interested in finding out, and seems utterly incapable of speaking to them on any kind of level.
It is almost as if the two have deliberately set out to destroy Tory poll ratings. I cannot think of anything more they could have done to appear out of touch and destroy their popularity or credibility. A nationwide puppy cull, perhaps.
With tinder, you can theoretically keep swiping forever until you meet your perfect match, the right match is only ever another swipe away. So people keep swiping.
Furthermore, for attractive people, easy access to unlimited matches disincentivises them settling down in the first place. So it may well be the case that the top 20% of people are having far more frequent casual sex, while the bottom 80% or so is hardly getting laid at all.
The raw data from the dating apps backs this up, as discussed here - https://archive.ph/JqVOC
The findings from Tinder, Hinge and OkCupid are summarised as thus:
"The great majority of women are only willing to communicate romantically with a small minority of men while most men are willing to communicate romantically with most women... It seems hard to avoid a basic conclusion: that the majority of women find the majority of men unattractive and not worth engaging with romantically, while the reverse is not true. Stated in another way, it seems that men collectively create a “dating economy” for women with relatively low inequality, while women collectively create a “dating economy” for men with very high inequality.
In terms of inequalities between attractive people (by times swiped) vs unattractive people, the gini coefficient for women is fairly average (men will swipe on most things, including average women) but the gini coefficient for men is equivalent to the 8th most unequal country in the world (women will only swipe on the very most attractive men).
The great thing about stats like those provided by the above article is they cut out all the *personal experience* of what it was like "in my day" or "for my lad, who's average looking" etc, and looks at the raw data of hundreds of thousands of users and millions of swipes.
And the data doesn't lie, here. The dating game is harder than it has ever been (for men at least) and the brutal truth is most men aren't getting sex, because most women simply don't find them attractive.
The study OKCupid publised using their own stats sets this out in absolutely brutal terms - women find very few men attractive, and rate almost all men as below average in attractiveness:
https://archive.ph/LDVFm
Some of my best times have been utterly bleak in their emotionless lust. Glorious
"And so to one last rather overlooked point. As our economic troubles pile up, there is talk of renewed austerity: in her interview with Kuenssberg, Truss pointedly declined to rule out public spending cuts. She and her colleagues ought to bear in mind the words of the writer and academic Ross McKibbin, written in 1999 but every bit as relevant to 2022: “The middle classes make more use of the NHS, public transport, public libraries, local swimming pools, public parks and their right to state welfare than anyone else.” Therein we see one key aspect of the Tories’ snowballing crisis, and further proof of this surreal period’s defining political fact: that if Conservatives only seem able to bring to their own heartlands worry and despair, the game is surely up."
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/oct/02/tories-liz-truss-plan-hit-middle-classes-betrayal
NYT ($) - Tillerson, Ex-Secretary of State, Expected to Testify in Foreign Influence Trial
Prosecutors are calling on him to testify in the case of Thomas Barrack, who is accused of acting as an agent for the United Arab Emirates during the Trump administration.
Rex Tillerson, the former Exxon Mobil chief executive who served as former President Donald J. Trump’s first secretary of state, is expected to testify on Monday in the trial of one of Mr. Trump’s closest allies.
Prosecutors are calling Mr. Tillerson as a witness in the case of Thomas J. Barrack Jr., a private-equity investor accused of acting as an illegal agent of the United Arab Emirates while seeking to influence the Trump campaign and administration on behalf of the Emiratis.
. . . . Mr. Barrack was a vocal supporter of Mr. Trump’s presidential candidacy, served as the chairman of his inaugural committee and helped guide his transition into office; Mr. Tillerson was Mr. Trump’s secretary of state and clashed with the president often until he was fired, via Twitter, in March 2018. . . .
Prosecutors have said that Mr. Barrack sought to advance the Gulf nation’s interests in the United States at the direction of Emirati officials; evidence so far shows a frenzy of correspondence about media appearances and policy positions. Mr. Barrack’s lawyers have called the accusations “ridiculous” and have said he was acting on his own accord, not as a secret agent.
Mr. Tillerson would be the first witness who could offer a firsthand account of the early days of Mr. Trump’s administration, including the impact of Mr. Barrack’s efforts.
During his brief and tumultuous tenure as the secretary of state, Mr. Tillerson was often at odds with the president over a range of issues, including Middle East policy. . . .
Prosecutors have accused Mr. Barrack of using his sway with Mr. Trump to advance the interests of the Emiratis, serving as a secret back channel for communications without disclosing his efforts to the attorney general, as the government contends he should have.
U.S. law requires anybody “operating under the control of foreign governments or foreign officials,” other than diplomats, to notify the U.S. attorney general. Mr. Barrack faces a charge that the Justice Department has described as “espionage lite,” because it typically involves “espionage-like or clandestine behavior.”
He faces nine counts in all, including counts of acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign government, obstruction of justice and making false statements. Prosecutors say Mr. Barrack repeatedly lied to Federal Bureau of Investigation agents when questioned in 2019 about his dealings with the Emiratis. . . .
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/03/nyregion/rex-tillerson-testify-foreign-influence-trial.html
But my single mates look at bit bloody lonely and desperate now, and when they come to my house it’s like some kind of sexual Scrooge has come to visit the chaste but contentedly happy Cratchit family.
It reminds me a bit of the Falklands war where professionally trained troops ran a much larger force of conscripts ragged and defeated them.
How on earth did the Russians get this bad?
Labour is 19% ahead and is predicted to have an overall majority of 224 under the new boundaries.
The odd thing is that Labour is predicted to get six extra seats under the new boundaries.
I've also looked at the Greens passing 50% of their share to Labour.
This leaves the Tories with just 84 seats.
@visegrad24
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2h
BREAKING:
Swedish authorities report that the gas leak from the Nord Stream 2 hole in the Swedish Economic Zone is increasing in strength.
It seems as if the Russians are pumping gas into the pipeline.
As long as there is gas, it won’t be possible to get close to investigate.
NYT ($) - Democrats’ Troubles in Nevada Are a Microcosm of Nationwide Headwinds
Inflation and a rocky economy are bolstering Republicans in their races against incumbent Democrats, motivating “an electorate that simply wants change,” as one G.O.P. consultant says.
LAS VEGAS — The Culinary Workers Union members who are knocking on doors to get out the vote are on the cursed-at front lines of the Democratic Party’s midterm battle.
Most voters do not open their doors. And when some do answer, the canvassers might wish they hadn’t.
“You think I am going to vote for those Democrats after all they’ve done to ruin the economy?” a voter shouted one evening last week from her entryway in a working-class neighborhood of East Las Vegas.
Miguel Gonzalez, a 55-year-old chef who described himself as a conservative Christian who has voted for Republicans for most of his life, was more polite but no more convinced. “I don’t agree with anything Democrats are doing at all,” he said after taking a fistful of fliers from the union canvassers. . . .
Democrats in Nevada are facing potential losses up and down the ballot in November and bracing for a seismic shift that could help Republicans win control of both houses of Congress. Senator Catherine Cortez Masto remains one of the most vulnerable Democratic incumbents in the country. Gov. Steve Sisolak is fighting his most formidable challenger yet. And the state’s three House Democrats could all lose their seats.
The Democratic juggernaut built by former Senator Harry M. Reid is on its heels, staring down the most significant spate of losses in more than a decade.
The party had in recent years relied on the state’s changing demographics, capitalizing on the workers who flocked there in search of an attainable path to middle-class dreams. But Nevada Democrats are learning that demographics alone are not destiny. The state’s transient population has made building a reliable base of voters difficult, with would-be voters leaving in search of work elsewhere, as more children of immigrants in the state reach voting age. And with Mr. Reid’s death last year, Democrats are missing the veteran leader who never hesitated to twist arms to get donors and activists on board.
The vulnerabilities in Nevada reflect Democrats’ challenges nationwide, most acutely in the West. Worries over inflation and the economy overshadow nearly every other concern, particularly for the working-class and Latino voters the party has long counted on. And Republicans believe that voters blame the Democrats in power for the dour economic outlook. . .
SSI - Democratic electoral difficulties in the Silver State in 2022 being exacerbated by cack-handed congressional gerrymander engineered by . . . wait for it . . . the Democrats.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/03/us/politics/nevada-elections-democrats-republicans.html
But they are no more representative of the entire possible cohort than saying "all Tories are scum" or "all Labour voters are lefty wokists" or whatever lazy broad brush statements folk make. There's much more nuance to the debate than that.
"You are assuming that I wish to be popular. I don’t care.
I do care that millions of people may die needlessly for an essentially identical outcome."
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1576995429094285313?s=20&t=8q2aHOiRH-4ik2jI-GJZew
More power to him, I say, We need to take the threat of Armageddon a lot more seriously. We are close
I'm kinda praying it's "just" biological or chemical, or a test explosion over water
*a problem for a long time for women, but increasingly now so with men.
Which means that however long it takes to settle - and growing up seems a lengthy process these day - there is available roughly one female at a time for one male and roughly one male at a time for one female. Which is exactly right.
If there is an increase in non voluntary incels that seems to me to be due to social factors and bad influences not the unavailability of the opposite sex.
@Cokedupoptions
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31m
Elon Musk weighing in on Russia/Ukraine since he is an expert in failed takeover attempts
...someone who REALLY suits you...
Hmm...
General Boles
@GeneralBoles
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11m
Who runs Britain?
Whichever 36 Tory MPs feel like it on the day I guess
Can we trust anything that they say?
According to the write-up in the Times, a train has been spotted in Central Russia. The headline says "Putin orders nuclear military train to Ukraine front line" (!)
Because gas is lighter than water, it will travel to the surface and dissipate.
Rubbish for global warming, but doesn't fuck up the ocean.
Just global warming.
Realising this was a breakthrough moment for me. ie Not every woman had to be potentially The One, and maybe the girl isn't looking for The One either!
Instead you get an affable companion, some agreeable sex, no one falls in love, then you move on. It is pleasant, and the internet enables you to do this because you can find partners seeking the same