Aaron said that delivering on responsibilities is a big part of what it means to be a man, but that's very incomplete. I agree, and I would add that masculinity means being a mover and shaker in the world, whether what you're moving is a crop of corn, a set of equations that need solving, or putting a capsule on Mars. A big part of the problem that men have today is that we've let feminists influence our image of ourselves. That yoke needs to be thrown off. It's time to get back to the classical view of masculinity. Does anyone think Alexander, Caesar, or George Washington cared what the cat ladies of their day were screeching about?
By the way – mentioning Big reminded me, you were talking a while back about how adjusted for inflation people are actually earning more now than back in the day, despite sentiments to the contrary – if I understood you correctly. Well, Matt Stoller made a pretty good argument some time ago that we've been undermeasuring inflation, and in some of the key areas it matters (and that people complain about): cost of housing. Here's the original scoop:
There's been some followups, and some articles on other cost-of-housing issues. Here's a smattering of what I happened to find when searching for that one…
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/its-the-land-stupid-how-the-homebuilder (whole lot of things going on in this one, but the gist is, homes aren't being built because of financial shenanigans and middlemen who buy up land to sell it to builders/developers – or to not sell most of it so what they do sell goes for a higher price; there's side stories about the state of banking, which is a very interesting topic for me in the tech industry with its narratives about startups versus the reality of most tech startups' lifecycle / company path.)
Elon Musk has always been big in libertarian tech nerd circles, but aside from libertarianism being considered a flavor of right-wing (not so sure about the tech nerd part frankly; I say this as someone who's seen the field up close / from the inside), I'd have to say overall he's a pretty good example of "the enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend."
Sure, the man took over Twitter because its leadership had gone censorious left; but whereas old-fashioned people with a sense of human nature want _less_ big tech (firstly, less reliance on tech, and secondly, less centralization in the tech we do use), Musk actually wanted everyone onto this centralized app/platform. Now, he's helping tear down the "deep"/administrative state, for better or for worse (I think any functioning government probably either has to be explicitly hierarchical or else to have an administrative bureaucracy to put law into practice, but I'll admit I get the distinct impression since Clinton "reinvented" government there's not a lot of law behind the people actually running the show anymore); but in the process, he's also repeatedly protected big tech, which needs a tearing down of its own.
For example, DOGE cut funding to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which would regulate the attempts of Google and Apple to get into the payments/finance space, and (whereas at least one of those companies has an actual history of deplatforming folks for wrongthink) after the CFPB had put out a rule forbidding banks from, well, debanking people over their political views. Or for example, some of those laws that – before Trump even took office – Musk managed to get removed from the (admittedly dumb) "funding" omni-bill (which removals didn't actually make notably less expensive), were targeted at business in China that companies such as Musk's do. Pretty sure there's been at least one other example I've run across, but I'd have to dig through Matt Stoller's "Big" Substack and find it again.
Anyhow. I appreciate that Musk dissents from progressives' idea of what "progress" is, which has long passed a point where they're pretty much at war on reality itself. And he's not stupid like his political enemies think (a silly belief, held for silly reasons). But we conservatives, and religious folks in particular, must not fall into the trap of thinking that that alone makes a figure like Musk conservative.
God is reality and He always triumphs. Women innately look for a man to prove and provide for her and a potential family. What appears to be the determining factor today is a college education. I will submit that in the foreseeable future a college degree will not have the cache it has now for a variety of reasons. First, because of its expense and second and most importantly men are seeing a college degree (rightfully so) as a waste of their time. As more women get college degrees, the more men will stop going. Colleges have become overpriced and irrelevant to normal life in America. Most of these pieces are written by women (or neutered men) taking it as an article of faith that a college degree is essential. It is not.
I like to quote my father who was a lawyer (earning his law degree and passing the bar in the early 1930s when a college degree really meant something), marrying my mother who was a doctor (getting her degree and starting her practice in the late 1940s when women were supposedly mistreated) - “Rectal thermometers have degrees and you know where they put them.”
This part sounded familiar: "When Ephesians 5 is read in its short form, the congregation hears only about the husband laying down his life for his wife, giving the impression that husbands have duties toward their wives but wives have no corresponding duties toward their husbands. Young traditional-leaning Catholics see this for the scam that it is."
Women marrying down/lack of men at HBCUs are related subjects. Although broadly women are more likely to attend college than men, the gap is biggest with blacks, then Latinos, then whites, then Asians (the same order in a variety of racial metrics). The real question is if this difference means people are marrying outside of their class, and on this score my gut says not so much, especially with blacks and Latinos. It's quite easy to get a degree if you want to thanks to plentiful mediocre schools and federal financial aid, so I wouldn't be surprised if a large share of these couplings - as noted by Aaron - are women with education or social work degrees married to guys that work a trade or decent unskilled labor jobs. It's not white lawyer lady marrying the UPS man.
This is also why a lot of black female graduates from top colleges end up dating interracially, even though it's pretty rare for black women to date interracially otherwise.
Does anyone know a lawyer married to a UPS man story in real life? I just don't think it happens. Or if it does, it looks like that woman having a mid-life crisis and going insane. Like that female FBI agent that turned Turk and married her jihadist (unclear if he had a degree).
A high school friend, a girl from a good home with a BA moved in with her pot dealer (not sure if he even had his GED). He ended up cheating on her, giving her an STD, stealing all her money, and disappearing into the ether. But with a mere trip to the courthouse, they could have been legally married, and it wouldn't have made the story much dumber.
But back in the real world, I have two cousins that went to college and married non-college guys. One is a daycare worker that married a plumber. The other is a schoolteacher that married a prison guard. This is the normal pattern. Both men outearn their wives.
I remember being part of a conversational circle a few months ago where one woman (who was a Yale graduate) told another woman she was going to have a child through a sperm donor because she couldn't find anyone to marry. She was good looking, so it wasn't that. I assume that she basically priced herself out of the market by going to Yale, because now it was hard to find a man that could actually live up to her standards. I wonder if that's going to be a common pattern in the future: Highly successful women having kids by themselves by choice because they can't find someone that can match them. Since women usually select sperm donors based on IQ, height, hair/eye color, etc. we may be seeing a wave of genetically engineered kids from these women.
I do know women married to men that earn less than her, but the man always has some kind of social prestige, like writing for a famous magazine.
Aaron said that delivering on responsibilities is a big part of what it means to be a man, but that's very incomplete. I agree, and I would add that masculinity means being a mover and shaker in the world, whether what you're moving is a crop of corn, a set of equations that need solving, or putting a capsule on Mars. A big part of the problem that men have today is that we've let feminists influence our image of ourselves. That yoke needs to be thrown off. It's time to get back to the classical view of masculinity. Does anyone think Alexander, Caesar, or George Washington cared what the cat ladies of their day were screeching about?
By the way – mentioning Big reminded me, you were talking a while back about how adjusted for inflation people are actually earning more now than back in the day, despite sentiments to the contrary – if I understood you correctly. Well, Matt Stoller made a pretty good argument some time ago that we've been undermeasuring inflation, and in some of the key areas it matters (and that people complain about): cost of housing. Here's the original scoop:
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/strikes-and-bidenomics
There's been some followups, and some articles on other cost-of-housing issues. Here's a smattering of what I happened to find when searching for that one…
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/the-25b-kroger-albertsons-merger links to https://www.nber.org/papers/w32163 (it's also got a link somewhere in there to Stoller's article on problems with Obamacare, but that's another story).
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/how-to-hide-a-2-trillion-antitrust links to https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/22/opinion/inflation-interest-rates-cpi.html and to https://twitter.com/boes_/status/1704167010819612833
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/up-to-a-quarter-of-rental-inflation
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/its-the-land-stupid-how-the-homebuilder (whole lot of things going on in this one, but the gist is, homes aren't being built because of financial shenanigans and middlemen who buy up land to sell it to builders/developers – or to not sell most of it so what they do sell goes for a higher price; there's side stories about the state of banking, which is a very interesting topic for me in the tech industry with its narratives about startups versus the reality of most tech startups' lifecycle / company path.)
Elon Musk has always been big in libertarian tech nerd circles, but aside from libertarianism being considered a flavor of right-wing (not so sure about the tech nerd part frankly; I say this as someone who's seen the field up close / from the inside), I'd have to say overall he's a pretty good example of "the enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend."
Sure, the man took over Twitter because its leadership had gone censorious left; but whereas old-fashioned people with a sense of human nature want _less_ big tech (firstly, less reliance on tech, and secondly, less centralization in the tech we do use), Musk actually wanted everyone onto this centralized app/platform. Now, he's helping tear down the "deep"/administrative state, for better or for worse (I think any functioning government probably either has to be explicitly hierarchical or else to have an administrative bureaucracy to put law into practice, but I'll admit I get the distinct impression since Clinton "reinvented" government there's not a lot of law behind the people actually running the show anymore); but in the process, he's also repeatedly protected big tech, which needs a tearing down of its own.
For example, DOGE cut funding to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which would regulate the attempts of Google and Apple to get into the payments/finance space, and (whereas at least one of those companies has an actual history of deplatforming folks for wrongthink) after the CFPB had put out a rule forbidding banks from, well, debanking people over their political views. Or for example, some of those laws that – before Trump even took office – Musk managed to get removed from the (admittedly dumb) "funding" omni-bill (which removals didn't actually make notably less expensive), were targeted at business in China that companies such as Musk's do. Pretty sure there's been at least one other example I've run across, but I'd have to dig through Matt Stoller's "Big" Substack and find it again.
Anyhow. I appreciate that Musk dissents from progressives' idea of what "progress" is, which has long passed a point where they're pretty much at war on reality itself. And he's not stupid like his political enemies think (a silly belief, held for silly reasons). But we conservatives, and religious folks in particular, must not fall into the trap of thinking that that alone makes a figure like Musk conservative.
God is reality and He always triumphs. Women innately look for a man to prove and provide for her and a potential family. What appears to be the determining factor today is a college education. I will submit that in the foreseeable future a college degree will not have the cache it has now for a variety of reasons. First, because of its expense and second and most importantly men are seeing a college degree (rightfully so) as a waste of their time. As more women get college degrees, the more men will stop going. Colleges have become overpriced and irrelevant to normal life in America. Most of these pieces are written by women (or neutered men) taking it as an article of faith that a college degree is essential. It is not.
I like to quote my father who was a lawyer (earning his law degree and passing the bar in the early 1930s when a college degree really meant something), marrying my mother who was a doctor (getting her degree and starting her practice in the late 1940s when women were supposedly mistreated) - “Rectal thermometers have degrees and you know where they put them.”
Off-topic: Thomas Mirus on "Why Young Catholics Are Rejecting Feminism" in two parts, in response to Erika Bachiochi:
https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/why-young-catholics-are-rejecting-feminism-pt-1/
https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/why-young-catholics-are-rejecting-feminism-pt-2/
This part sounded familiar: "When Ephesians 5 is read in its short form, the congregation hears only about the husband laying down his life for his wife, giving the impression that husbands have duties toward their wives but wives have no corresponding duties toward their husbands. Young traditional-leaning Catholics see this for the scam that it is."
Women marrying down/lack of men at HBCUs are related subjects. Although broadly women are more likely to attend college than men, the gap is biggest with blacks, then Latinos, then whites, then Asians (the same order in a variety of racial metrics). The real question is if this difference means people are marrying outside of their class, and on this score my gut says not so much, especially with blacks and Latinos. It's quite easy to get a degree if you want to thanks to plentiful mediocre schools and federal financial aid, so I wouldn't be surprised if a large share of these couplings - as noted by Aaron - are women with education or social work degrees married to guys that work a trade or decent unskilled labor jobs. It's not white lawyer lady marrying the UPS man.
This is also why a lot of black female graduates from top colleges end up dating interracially, even though it's pretty rare for black women to date interracially otherwise.
An example (she was a Harvard Law grad): https://www.npr.org/2025/02/20/g-s1-49853/dc-plane-crash-american-airlines
Yes, all rings true.
Does anyone know a lawyer married to a UPS man story in real life? I just don't think it happens. Or if it does, it looks like that woman having a mid-life crisis and going insane. Like that female FBI agent that turned Turk and married her jihadist (unclear if he had a degree).
A high school friend, a girl from a good home with a BA moved in with her pot dealer (not sure if he even had his GED). He ended up cheating on her, giving her an STD, stealing all her money, and disappearing into the ether. But with a mere trip to the courthouse, they could have been legally married, and it wouldn't have made the story much dumber.
But back in the real world, I have two cousins that went to college and married non-college guys. One is a daycare worker that married a plumber. The other is a schoolteacher that married a prison guard. This is the normal pattern. Both men outearn their wives.
I remember being part of a conversational circle a few months ago where one woman (who was a Yale graduate) told another woman she was going to have a child through a sperm donor because she couldn't find anyone to marry. She was good looking, so it wasn't that. I assume that she basically priced herself out of the market by going to Yale, because now it was hard to find a man that could actually live up to her standards. I wonder if that's going to be a common pattern in the future: Highly successful women having kids by themselves by choice because they can't find someone that can match them. Since women usually select sperm donors based on IQ, height, hair/eye color, etc. we may be seeing a wave of genetically engineered kids from these women.
I do know women married to men that earn less than her, but the man always has some kind of social prestige, like writing for a famous magazine.