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Comment by recuter | Hacker News Reader

  Men are increasingly dropping out of work during their prime working years, overdosing, drinking themselves to death, and generally dying earlier, including by suicide. 

  ..And men are powering the new brand of reactionary Republican politics.

  ..Yet, for all the strides that women have made since gaining the right to vote, the highest echelons of power remain lopsidedly male. The detoxification of masculinity, progressives say, is a messy and necessary process; sore losers of undeserved privilege don’t merit much sympathy.

-- I mean, wow. This is like some Chinese cultural revolution shit.

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To be clear, the article isn't endorsing the statement that "sore losers of undeserved privilege don't merit much sympathy." It takes seriously the idea that men are facing real problems.

The beatings will continue until morale improves.

It sounds like the author is getting exactly what she wants, not sure why she's complaining.

I do not understand why you think this, why do you think the author wants the downfall of men?

"The detoxification of masculinity, progressives say, is a messy and necessary process; sore losers of undeserved privilege don’t merit much sympathy."

That was the author, briefly stating, what some progressives think. The author neither endorses or condemns said viewpoint. Before this sentence the author writes briefly what some conservatives think. Right after the sentence the author quotes an expert on the topic whose scholarly work tries to avoid moralizing about the causes of the problem and discuss what is going on. This is all obvious if you actually read the article and can understand that a reporter can write about the views of some people without endorsing those views.

Besides, if our model of gender politics is zero-sum, the educational and economic decline of men may even be welcome.

For lack of pronouns, the author is a man: https://twitter.com/imkahloon

> The detoxification of masculinity, progressives say, is a messy and necessary process; sore losers of undeserved privilege don’t merit much sympathy.

That's a really aggressively nasty take on progressives.

I think it is indisputable that the Republican party of today is vastly different than it was in 1980. It is a historical fact that marginalized men are prone to radicalization. It is bad for a society to have so many young men who are not finding sexual partners, or who are not participating in society in normative ways. The radicalization appears to be more on the right leaning side of things than on the left leaning side in terms of absolute numbers in the United States.

You got to break a few eggs to make an omelette you know?

The detoxification of masculinity is a messy and necessary process after all. Some may die but that is a sacrifice I am willing to make as the ends justify the means. Do not pity them, they deserve it. They are reactionary radicals.

..Cool and normal.

I have no idea what you wrote means and it certainly does not pertain to what I wrote. There is a very real crisis going on with men in the U.S. (and the world according to the article). It needs to be addressed. One consequence of marginalization of men is their tendency to radicalize politically. Amongst white men in the U.S. this radicalization is far more likely to be right leaning than left leaning. Regardless of the political direction this radicalization leans toward it is an issue and one should not let ideology blind us to reality. Wars, civil strife, etc. often times lead to totalitarianism (both left and right leaning) and all of its accompanying evils.

I'm simply repeating to you mostly verbatim the article from The New Yorker espousing current progressive views. Forgive me but the radicalization appears to be every which way you look, marginalized men and women, just presenting itself differently.

What some progressives say. In the U.S. no dispassionate person can believe that the radicalization of white men isn’t overwhelming right leaning.

Right after the quotes you have is written:

Richard V. Reeves, a British American scholar of inequality and social mobility, and a self-described “conscientious objector in the culture wars,” would like to skip past the moralizing and analyze men in the state that he finds them in.

> In the U.S. no dispassionate person can believe that the radicalization of white men isn’t overwhelming right leaning.

I suppose it fundamentally has to be that way? My understanding is that this radicalization stems from the "they took er jerbs"-type belief about economic struggle, which only applies if you believe in capitalism in the first place. Those on the left believe in the government (or similar model of shared ownership of capital) providing them a living and would be happy to see their job go to someone else. Any economic struggle they face is naturally blamed on that shared ownership model not being realized.

Hi recuter. You wrote: "Some may die but that is a sacrifice I am willing to make". That is super weird: in what way would some person dying involve you making a sacrifice? - Do you include yourself in the list of the persons that would die? - Is it a sacrifice because you own these persons? - or is it something else I can't understand?

That's a quote from Lord Farquad, the villain in the first Shrek film.

> The radicalization appears to be more on the right

Do you have data to support this? And how do you define 'radicalization'? Remember, there was an entire summer of violence in cities across the US after George Floyd. If by radicalization you mean extreme political views, you'll find that those on the left are less likely to date and socialize with people on the right than vice versa.

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/04/24/most-democr...

The paradox of tolerance is worth reading about.

The center of American politics have very much moved to the right the past 50 years. As such, a small rightward shift from the mean has the appearance of being moderate. What is considered radical left in the U.S. is left of center in European countries.

By quite a large margin more women lean leftward in the U.S. than rightward. Women are more discriminating when than men when looking for partners so it is expected to see the outcome in the link you posted. Tied to the paradox of tolerance, and the definite rightward shift of the center in American politics, we see that it is expected that left leaning people are less likely to associate with right leaning people than vice versa.

We had an insurrection 3 years ago that most people on the right fail to acknowledge as such. It doesn’t get much more radical than that. Far more people think Biden was illegitimately elected than that Trump was illegitimately elected. I could go on with more examples but I think it won’t be productive. Try reading about the historical political trends in the country dispassionately.

> What is considered radical left in the U.S. is left of center in European countries.

Can we just put this lie to rest. Economically maybe, socially very much not, for example abortion is much more restrictive in many parts of the EU than even Roe v Wade allowed. Or immigration, it is much harder to immigrate into Euorpe than it is to get into the US. There are dozens of other social issues Europe is far more conservative on than the US.

Universal healthcare, paid parenting leave, much more subsidized higher education, more investments made into social programs, higher investment in infrastructure, much better environmental programs, much less militaristic, much lower incarceration rate, jails that are more humane, mandatory paid time off, much better worker protections, much better union participation and protections for unions, better consumer protections, much more sane regulations and laws regarding funding of elections. Should I write more?

In terms of what the purpose and role of government is, Europe is far more classically liberal minded than the U.S.

EDIT: Now that Roe has been gutted by the very conservative Supreme Court your point about abortion is very much wrong. Outside of Poland and Malta, I think Europe has much more liberal views on abortion. Especially when you consider that healthcare is generally free at the point of service there.

https://www.politico.eu/article/abortion-chart-world-map-eur...

> The radicalization appears to be more on the right leaning side of things than on the left leaning side in terms of absolute numbers in the United States.

Holding mostly centrist views from my childhood makes me "radical left" now as politics have swung hard to the right. I don't believe your notion of what radicalization means to be correct.

We are in agreement then. What typical Americans label radical left is not at all radical in most other rich nations and what we call right wing is considered extreme right wing in most other nations. You haven’t been radicalized, what has changed is the views of the average voter. When I talk about radicalization of white men I mean in terms of where they are in absolute terms, not how far from the center they are.

My impression is that at least some part of that vitriol is a sort of "dominance" baiting by woman dissatisfied with the current situation.

At the bitter bottles bottom waits the truths for those who seek. Socrates the greek.

All situation stakeholders involved want to escalate, thinking themselves the winner ones the smoke clears. Romantic narratives replace situational awareness, as the generation who experienced a similar escalation leaves the stage.

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