I once read a quote from an American supreme court judge: “The rule of law comes not from the pen, but from the heart”
What he meant was that it doesn’t matter how many laws you write down – they will only work in so far as people are willing to listen to them.
To my observation the most chilling thing about the Tate saga is that it shows how flimsy the rule of law is becoming, precisely because it shows how both sides of the political isle are willing to abandon legal process when it suits their tribal affiliation.
On the left we have a faction of people who think that “all women should be believed” when they make accusations of rape, and who believe that accusation alone should be proof of guilt. In the case of Harvey Weinstein, had he been found not guilty, this would have been taken as proof of a corrupt system rather than proof that the evidence against him was insufficient.
The same people want to release their chosen victim groups from prison to meet their preconceived notions of equality of outcome. This faction believes in the rule of their mob and not in the rule of law. They decide innocence or guilt on the basis of group affiliation, completely dismantling the idea of individual accountability and agency that the legal process depends on.
On the other side, we have people who have decided that Andrew Tate is innocent of all charges against him, and who see any investigation into his conduct as proof of conspiracy against their tribe.
In both cases, due process is thrown under the bus to advance identity politics. And this is a scary direction to be going in.
As I’ve long believed, and warned, you can have rule by identity politics, or you can have rule by law based on individual agency, but you cannot have both simultaneously. We are either individuals, or we are blind instantiations of our group behaving like automata responding to Newtonian forces, The more we are one, the less we are the other.
I think you’re right about most of that. But in between isn’t there a much larger group who by their sheer numbers keep some balance? These people, probably most of us, make very little noise, by and large live by an established morality and support the rule of law. These are the people who doggedly work towards a balanced society without really being conscious of it, and they do carry the idea of individuality balanced with group dynamics. But, while they can absorb the insanity of the two extremes they cannot keep it going when those they vote for and those institutions they support ignore them, or undermine them, or simply sneer at them. If they drop the load, and they might when tough times wear them down, then that stability is gone.
I agree with you – the core body of sane people allow the rule of law to exist, but this only occurs in so far as we can put individual accountability above tribal loyalties. I do hope this middle body prevails under the constant onslaught of identitarians from both sides of the political spectrum.
I often repeat this comment as the analogy is sound IMO: Human history post divine /direct monarchic rule shows a series of bar brawls that get so bad the sane core feel revolted, sober up and call the cops. WW2 and the excesses of the proxy US- USSR war 1945-1991 are good examples: The grown ups re-assert themselves, trials and forgiveness follow. Then the memories fade and we repeat. If Messrs Pinker, Dawkins etc are right – i think they may well be – the sane core gets larger with each cycle with the odd backward lurch.
Good points. On a perhaps slightly pedantic but I think still important point, the alternative ruling in the Weinstein case would have been been that he would have found ‘not guilty’ rather than ‘innocent’.
I’m also tempted to add that parts of the Left think we should ‘believe all women’, except those allegedly raped by ‘transwomen’!
I just looked at your link and was gob-smacked; to deliberately inflict such harm on oneself is crazy. It’s hard to discern a motive; there dosn’t seem to be a financial or revenge motive as the men were picked at random (according to the report). The fact that the real and fictitious names were all Asian tends toward a racial motive, though – would this make it a “hate-crime”. Over-all, it appears that the woman is somewhat unhinged.
I had an involvement in a case where a woman had purchased a burner (untraceable mobile phone) on which she made calls to herself over a couple of weeks and then posted through a former boyfriend’s letter box and then making allegations to the police of harassment and assault.
This kind of thing does happen
Some of the men she falsely accused were white, they weren’t all Asian.
What is most disgraceful is that people like this will only be charged with perverting the course of justice and not with any crime against the people whose lives they have destroyed. Falsely accusing someone of rape is only a crime against the state; the human victim appears to be irrelevant, in law at least.
The motive is a need for SIGNIFICANCE. We all have an innate need to be significant,to matter. Lucky people can live happily obscure lives if they,for instance,my own sister are the lynch pin of their family,holding it all together,not by force,but by love. If you’re not that another good way is to believe Jesus (or Krishna) or someone like that loves you and cares about you. Even if is delusional,it’s a happy place,and it stops you needing to invade Poland. Or the Ukraine. Sadly a lot of people mistake their need as for fame and wealth. With talent this is just about acceptable but if it means you have to be a participant on Love Island,well the number of suicides shows how empty that is.
You are ignoring the decline of manners. The left has ridiculed chivalry and gallantry while boxing and rugby has been take out of schools. Those attending public and grammar schools until 1960 would have played rugby and PT would have been 25 minutes of circuit training ad 3, 3 minute boxing rounds. Consequently , Britain produced an eductd, well mannered and tough middle and upper class. Just look at the officers who served in Commados, SOE, SAS, SBS , Parachute regiment in WW2. Prior to the organised sports of the 1850s developed by Arnold of Rugby,schools main games were bare knuckle boxing, cudgel fighting, fencing, rowing and free for all rugby type game. Public schools produced tough gentlmen.
The decline in manners can be seen in the rise of foootball hooliganism in the late 1960s, by unskilled and uneducated office and factory workers. There was was no hooliganism in Rugby Union or League. League was largely played by tougher men from heavy industry and trawling. There was once ome trouble at Ruby Union match where Willie John McBride was playing. He said put them on the pitch and let’s see how tough they are? Trouble stopped.
The bad manners of actors such as Richard Harris were encouraged. Harris came to maturity in the 1950s. Those actors who were officers such as Todd who served in Parachute Regiment at Normandy and B Travers who served in the Gurkhas, Chindits and SOE were not drunken oiks.
In the 1960s Motown taught etiquette to it’s performers, we now have rap glorifying sex and violence.
Much of American culture considers that to be tough a person must be coarse, crude and vulgar.
Most of human history is brutal and nasty. Britain created a nation of honest, tough gentlemen and ladies which was ridiculed by effete left wing middle class since the late 1930s.
Tate is the result of what happens when the middle and upper class men lose the toughness to enforce gentility, chivalry and good manners. When the middle and upper class no longer produce gentlemen who can defend a lady’s honour?
I love watching you tube of the old Motown hits because those performers were smart and even the ones that did the synchronised movements came across as cool and together.
Gentlemen were expected to protect ladies. Ibn Khaldun said when men are protected by walls and and garrisons they lose their manliness and uprightness.
Railway stations used to have rooms reserved for ladies. Historically many station masters were ex NCOs from the Armed Forces as were ticket collectors who provided protection for ladies.
Britain’s population went from 10M, 80% rural to 40M, 80% urban in 1900. The squalid slums resulted in all sorts of problems.
Villages were police by the village constable who raised the hue and cry . All males between the ages of 15 and 60 who did not come to The Constables help in arresting the criminal, were fined. The 19th century slums had no village constable which was why the Metropolitan Police Force was created
Many men do not want to take on the responsibility of protecting women because they are afraid of being hurt in a fight.
Men are afraid of female power before authority. Upper class might have thought they were tough, but they steered clear of the blue collar working class in all sorts of sports. That is how Rugby League came about. They kept flogging the softy genteel class teams.
Read Arthur Bryant. The landed gentry were brought up bare knuckle boxing ( included throwing) cudgel fighting, fencing, rowing, hunting, shooting. The squire’s son fought the blacksmiths son and then played cricket with him in the summer. In the 1820s, some 30% of MPs were being taught bare knuckle boxing. Poets, Byon, Keats etc all boxed. The aristocracy and landed gentry were the knights of the Middle Ages. Post 1485 and up to the 1850s, the landed gentry raised the Militia and then up to WW2, the County Yeomanry.
The gentry went to sea as midshipmen from the age of 12 years of age.
League came about because men worked on Saturday morning and wanted payment when they played because of lost wages. For unknown reasons Welsh miners played Union not League. Carlisle and the M62 belt played League whereas, the more rural North Lancashire and Yorkshire played Union as did the Cornish Tin Miners and the Free Miners of the Forest of Dean. The East Midlands produced Leicester and Northampton while the West Midlands played football. Liverpool and Glasgow played football. As soon as one is East of Liverpool, In Lncashire, one is in League territory.
Men worked Saturday morning and wanted to be paid for lost wages. This would make them professional. Consequently League was formed. For some reason South Wales, Cornwall( tin miners) and Forest opf Dean remained union and not did not become league. North Lancashire, North Yorkshire, Gloucestershire and Eastern Midlands became Union while the M62 and crlisle belt played League
How flimsy a law is doesn’t depends on one thing and one thing only – whether that law is applied, and applied consistently.
Which is why the perennial “both sides at fault” is nonsense and misleading.
It’s isn’t conservatives going around burning American cities with impunity, demanding guilty until proven innocent when college princesses decide they have been raped, allow people to jump over borders illegally or allowing blatantly illegal quotas for favoured victim groups.
And there is good reason why conservatives smell something fishy in cases like Tate. It’s a consequence of lawlessness (fostered by their political opponents), not the cause.
Remember the fracas over Rittenhouse? Nick Sandnann?
We are talking about people who got Milo Yiannopoulos cancelled for #comments# about children, while supporting mutilation of “trans” children.
People who lost their minds about Kavanaugh, while voting for the likes of Ted Kennedy, Clinton, Biden and the party of Rotherham and Rochdale over here.
And you are surprised we are sceptical about these Tate allegations?
Yes, I had a similar thought – that Tate may actually be a monster of some sort, but is also a beneficiary of the current distrust in all allegations where politics like this gets involved
Excellent comment, thank you. I think you have got to the crux of the matter. I thought at the time that basing Harvey Weinstein’s conviction on the sheer numbers of his accusers rather than hard evidence was a mistake in terms of the rule of law. And I’ll go back further and say I thought the convictions in the Stephen Lawrence case in the UK, after reforming the law in order to convict again after an aquittal, could be disastrous.
Weinstein, Dobson and Norris were probably guilty but the law was . . WAS the law. By overiding the need for hard evidence in the case of Weinstein and changing the law in the Stephen Lawrence case, in order to get the result the public wanted, means essentially we are in retreat from high civilisation and the Rule of Law back to barbarism.
Tate sounds very like a barbarian to me, but his success is as a result of liberal democracy. That is hard to face, but true I think.
I probably shouldn’t say this but all those women,who were WAY OVER the age of consent and were SMART enough to be actors,you have to learn a lot of lines etc,they went to his Hotel room. Ok so they guessed if they didn’t go they might not get a role,but I should feel sympathy for them for that.
The irony is that most of those women in the film roles they were going to act had to suggest through the camera lens sexuality,I mean just enough attractiveness to engage the attention and I don’t even mean naked scenes or romantic kissy-kissy type scenes. I mean more how Nigellas shows were all about cooking,and excellent too,but most viewers (male viewers) engaged more with her innate attraction. I just cannnot in my mind match the words these victims were saying,their pure ice maiden disgust and nun like wish not to be touched or besmirched with the films they would be in. I don’t watch movies but occasionally in someone’s else’s house and its hard to equate the tough talking,wise cracking,pouting,flirting houri on screen with the timid shy mouse who entered Mr Weinstein’s room.
I agree with you, the decline in good manners seems to run parallel with the fight for Equality.
Refined behaviours like chivalry and gallantry are associated with the nobility. To influence the middle and working classes that nobilty needs to be respected and admired. The beginning of the end came in the 19th century with industrialisation and the fight for ‘women’s rights’.
Nevertheless, the habit of good manners lasted generally (it still lasts amongst some people) until, as you say, the late 1960s and beyond, as Equality became the ultimate social good to aim for (instead of goodness itself).
What is ignored is that the man who has grown up boxing and playing rugby , even if they have not been in the armed forces, has the confidence and self- control not to be provoked but has the ability to fight if needed. ” Well if you feel so strongly about this matter, lets step outside* said by someone in a calm, level manner with broad shoulders( product of manual work and physical training in the gym) often removes the heat of aggression and introduces the light of reason.
I agree with most of your balanced remarks, until the weighted dichotomy at the end: individualism vs. blind determinism/groupthink. In an equally unfair way, I could alter your terms to Pure Selfishness vs. Consideration for Community, thus inverting a seemingly obvious choice.
There’s quite a gulf between unfettered individualism and robotic conformity. Even radical freethinkers are influenced by others, admittedly or not, and not all group belonging is mere tribalism.
I think it’s fun to note that your vigorous defense of independent-mindedness–which I agree with in essence though not always degree–earned dozens of easy-click upvotes.
Nice opening quote, which calls to mind an ancient idea of the spirit vs. the letter of the law.
I just recently read a chapter long discussion of various definitions of the Rule of Law in Fukuyama’s “Origins of Political Order”. The way he ends up using the term is “understood as rules that are binding even on the most politically powerful actors in a given society” and maintains that in whatever (few) societies it has arisen, it has always had “its origins in religion.” It is quite an interesting discussion. And I suspect the religious among us will jump to say that the violations that seem evident in our own Rule of Law today have their roots in the death of God. I would have it not so but don’t think I am competent to argue it.
He goes on to say that in virtually all cases, societal decay comes about when the agencies which carry it out become “repatrimonialized”, that is, they become corrupted by agents who pervert their function to the benefit of their own tribe. This seems to me to be very close to what you are saying above.
Why did not some father, brother, cousin, husband, boyfriend teach Weinstein some manners and demand he apologised to the offended lady? Weinstein is a fat slob. The only gentleman appears to be Brad Pitt who threatened Weinstein after his comments made to Gwyneth Paltrow.
This goes to show there are Fathers who are incapable of protecting their daughters and husbands their wives.
No doubt there would be some willing women who worked for Tate without coercion or threats, and some who would have been abused.
We should bear in mind that we have independent evidence from Andrew Tate himself of his methods and motivations. He recommends engaging in threats of physical violence in order to coerce women into doing what he wants. He recommended going to Romania because the law regarding rape is less strict than other countries. He has a stash of knives and weapons at his home.
This may not be sufficient evidence to convict him in a court of law but you would have to be a bit soft in the head (or maybe a wannabe misogynist like Tate) to think he must be innocent if not convicted.
The American judge was drawing on a long line of constitutional thought (Montesquieu, de Maistre, Madison, etc). The debate being whether the true constitution is in the culture (mores of the people) or the written document.
Both. The first laws in England were drawn up in England under Aethlebert in about 650AD where Anglo Saxon traditions were combined with the first five books of The Bible. Subsequent codes were drawn by Sine of Wessex in 700, Offa of Mercia in 750, Alfred about 890 , Edward the Confessor 1050, Henry 1 1100 , John 1215, Henry II 1160s onwards and Edward III in 1285 and 1295.
It is not as you stated Identity politics vs individual agency (which the first is originally created by the western interference of the world during colonization of divide and conquer which we are still dealing with today) but about the nature of socialization at large.
The individual agency you speak of is real but it is not as we think often in the west a tangible thing – it is state of mind, a way of thinking, not a way of behaving or doing. The identity politics is the collective, the culture, the mere fact we are all here typing in the comments and following the rules set for the collective. This idea that individual is tangible is western mindset that is coming to its great fruitions in era of information revolution – it does not have legs to stand on. What you think is your business. What you do impacts everybody. This is where individual ends and collective starts. This is what the rest of the world that lives collectively learned. We are all centipedes, and the individual is the legs – cut one off and we keep continue, kill the centre, and we are all dead. Only your mind is individual but your body which you share with others is collective – if you have a car accident we do not wait until you can speak to help you out!
Tate is a bad leg on any centipede. He is letting his mind think that he is the collective and forgets he is a person.
Unfortunately, the crux of this article is men react to trauma retaliatory and women react to trauma fearfully…this is to me why men like Tate exploit women as if they are the enemy and women seek safety in men. It is all trauma activated different in genders but feminisms do not want to hear this.
Richard Abbot
2 months ago
Bearing in mind that Tate has many female fans I suspect something else is going on here. Namely that people are so sick to the back teeth of politically correct speech that they will embrace almost anyone who speaks without a filter, regardless of what they say or who they are.
Dislike him as we might (and I do) the truth is that Andrew Tate represents as much of what it is to be human as Greta Thunberg does. The willingness with which people demonise and glorify says a great deal about the terminal sickness of our society
I’ve always found this dynamic to be fascinating – Tate is by all accounts very successful in attracting women. On some level, men are attracted to this because they want to be like him and learn his secrets to achieve his level of self-confidence. But what attracts so many women to this type of man? Some deep seated fantasy that they will be the ones to tame him (like the biblical Delilah cutting Samson’s hair)? Some biological imperative to have the children of the apparent ‘alpha’, even if he’s unlikely to stick around and raise them? Ultimately I expect everyone following this man will be disappointed with what he really has to offer them.
From the conversations I’ve had its less an attraction for Tate, but a revulsion toward the absolute state of the average British (Western) beta-soy-fed-male.
Probably all of the above, plus the lifestyle he offers if he decides to keep you around, instagram likes..? Bragging rights? He’s very charming and kind to women (until they disobey…) and he has principles which he genuinely lives by (even if we don’t necessarily agree with them). There must be more? Plus I think women are just instinctively attracted to competent men and he’s very good at signalling his competence.
It’s as old as apes. The big dominant male, top of the local status hierarchy with his harem of females. Its the essence of tribal order. Its what drives celebrity. I find it so very amusing that something so very regressive is also considered so very romantic.
“Tate is by all accounts very successful in attracting women”
Bastards and sociopaths have some key advantages in feeling free to lie and manipulate – this also may have something to do with above statement. There are also legions of insecure, abused women out there who are dysfunctionally drawn to them.
Taking that seriously, I think it’s true much of the time. Mind you I think “boys” is the important distinction, bad men say 23+ yrs become less and less appealing.
So it’s probably girlish inexperience coupled with the “insecure, abused” bit that causes their downfall. And the sexual revolution of the 1960s has increased the danger and likelihood of girls succumbing to the attraction of bad boys (all that reckless, dare-devil confidence) as protective, strong-minded and loving fathers become less and less present.
There is a good reason for the prevalence of patriarchal societies across the world.
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Jake Prior
2 months ago
I think you miss the point of the appeal of Andrew Tate. He says absolutely what he wants, in days when social control of narratives is more pervasive than it has been for a very long time. I find his persona and consumerism disgusting, but even so I can’t help finding it refreshing to hear someone say things in direct opposition to firmly established cultural norms on issues like mental health, Covid controls and climate change. The fact it takes someone quite pathological, in the ways described above, to challenge these dogmas is a sign of the tight control of the narrative, where having a different opinion has you damned as a ‘denier’, not so tacitly suggesting you should be locked up as a criminal for your views, and certainly rejecting any idea that your views deserve discussion. In this climate it’s easy to see your enemy’s enemy as your friend.
Yes, Andrew Tate is the Muppets’ Muppet. He openly boasts about coercing women into doing what he wants and then acts surprised when his home is raided and there are accusations of manipulation.
He believes that his money can buy him immunity from the law, which it probably can to a certain degree, but not when you boast about it on social media.
Young men are FED UP with being demonised. Not in their families or even neighbourhoods but in “the media,” that sets the cultural agenda. Even though a lot of us have turned our backs on msm it’s still very influential is setting the cultural ideas we are “supposed ,” to accept.
Christopher Chantrill
2 months ago
The thing about Mary Harrington is that she clearly believes all she has been carefully taught.
As a racist-sexist-homophobe I believe that this is normal for educated women.
As for myself, I count it a point of pride to disbelieve almost all ruling-class Narrative. It makes life more interesting.
Mary Harrington very clearly DOESN’T ‘believe ‘everything she was taught’ as this article and a passing familiarity with her writings, which we could loosely put into the category of ‘post-liberal’, demonstrates. Simply believing the opposite of some other (ill-defined) group such as the ‘ruling class’ believes is as stupid as accepting everything you are told at face value. (Of course, we tend to be tribal and accept the views we want to while rejecting others. But we can learn to be more discerning).
Racism specifically, however counter-cultural and ‘daring’ it may be, is a moronic set of beliefs, with absolutely no scientific basis. This is hardly surprising given that all modern human beings are so closely related to each other. The adoption, very late on, by colonial countries of a pseudo-Darwinian view that white people were intrinsically superior was a disastrous conceit which has indirectly led to the huge overreach of the current ‘woke’ reaction.
“By colonial countries” is unnecessary and misleading. First let me suggest that very similar attitudes are present in non-white empires (China, for a start). Or as the attitude of the nobility towards the peasants. Reading the ‘boys’ books’ of a century ago you find similar feelings of supriority of e.g. the English towards other (equally white) European nations. I’d put this as a tribal-based feeling of the superiority of your own kind over outgroups. And note that this is something that is built into us and that we need to find a way to deal with.
Yes, in-group favouritism is often confused for out-group hostility. Communities often want their members to be reliably similar as demonstrated by in-group signalling. Their reluctance to embrace outsiders is neither directly xenophobic nor explicitly racist, but conversely is an indirect consequence of in-group preference.
Surely it is a good thing to favour one’s own group and doesn’t necessarily imply a desire to dominate other groups. When he was about eight or nine, my son told me he pitied other children because they didn’t have me as a mother. I responded by telling him it would be wonderful if all children felt that way about their mothers but sadly they don’t.
It seems to me that tribalism has come back,it’s here but not fully emerged yet from the wreck of our society. Wait till the state pension or UC or other doesn’t appear in the bank account ( cos they’ve sent all the money to Ukraine.
Disebelieving something out of tribal opposition to a perceived oppressive group over and above evaluating multiple streams of evidence to support a hypothesis, strikes me as a sure way to hold incorrect views.
Would you believe that the Earth is flat simply because Mary Harrington has said it is round?
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Jeff Cunningham
2 months ago
Trivers is certainly right and I’m impressed to see him mentioned here. If you want to read about a truly odd character look up the Wikipedia entry on Robert Trivers. I’ve only read two of his books. “The Folly of Fools – The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life” is extraordinary. The second is a very thin 88 page “Anatomy of a Fraud: Symmetry and Dance” that I ran across in a used bookstore. It appears there was a paper published in 2005, titled, “Dance reveals symmetry especially in young men” which caught his eye. He reanalyzed their data and discovered impossible statistical anomalies. Digging further he figured out exactly how the data had been manipulated to produce a fraudulent result. It’s a fascinating read.
Plus, I don’t think it is called Sociobiology anymore. The correct term is Evolutionary Psychology.
Steve Murray
2 months ago
As an overview of the dynamics of exploitative male behaviour, this article follows on from the specifics of the exploitation highlighted in Julie Bindel’s article yesterday.
Amongst other things, what i find interesting is the aspect of female agency which JS Mill wrote about in the mid-Victorian era, and how this plays out today. Clearly, both Harrington and Bindel have established agency in their lives, and i couldn’t help but wonder if, just as JS Mill and his wife still have agency into the 21st century, whether the two contemporary writers are more or less likely to still have greater agency in 160 years time than Andrew Tate. Somehow, i suspect the chances are that they’re far more likely to do so.
If the ultimate purpose of agency is to pass one’s genes on through the generations, and also to influence the culture which surrounds us and our descendents, i’d put my money on Mary & Julie. While Andrew seeks to exploit, they seek to nurture and enhance. Tate will be forgotten as just another user.
Sorry to query again, but, genes don’t carry morals. They may carry ethics but not morals. All it takes for the continuation of Tate’s genes is an available woman who can carry a child through to birth. It doesn’t have to be the case that the genes of JSMill and his wife would influence society in, presumably in a positive way, because we cannot know the future and the passage of genes having an effect depends on how they fit into that moment in time. If they don’t then goodbye forever. Even if Tate is exploitive it doesn’t have any effect on the future, nor does the good intentions Mills. And even if it were possible the right fit for the future may very well be Tate’s exploitive genes.
I take your point, but mine involved agency; not just genetics but cultural influence. The influence that JS Mill still exerts wasn’t dependent on the number of his offspring.
The apparent success of this gaudy jester baffles me. One look at him and I can see he’s a total b*llend. Exactly what kind of loving relationship was on offer from a cretin like that that fooled (he claims) so many women? I suspect it had more to do with him offering some ridiculous fantasy lifestyle rather than actual love.
No one deserves to be taken advantage of and he and his associates must be brought to justice but to a great extent we all, male and female, create our own problems with foolish choices.
I’m reminded of the people who joined communes. By and large there was nothing illegal going on, though in some instances there was. These people were reasonably intelligent people but there was something on offer that appealed. Up until now Tate doesn’t seem to have broken the law any more than the communes did. As much as we may disagree with what he’s done, up until he’s convicted the most he’s done is challenged social norms, much as the trans movement has done, or the gay community. An argument could be made that ultimately this behaviour ends up breaking the law. But my point is that we can’t frown on one man challenging those norms and then make allowances for others. Who’s to decide which norms should be challenged?
He’s boasting of deliberately and strategically committing sexual and psychological abuse so I’d say that he’s got something to answer for. I’d say that’s a justifiable social norm that we want to uphold.
Sure, but until he breaks the law (not saying he hasn’t), then he can be accused of only challenging social norms. Making money from pornography is not crime, but child pornography is.
You wrote that we can’t frown on his doings because he hasn’t broken the law, I strongely disagree with this This attitude has led to enormous problems, such as the number of single parent families were we have been told that we can’t judge a woman who keeps having children without support of their father(s). Things can be legal, put unethical or immoral, and I reserve the right to frown on such things.
Agree, and of course we must frown on it. Stigma for certain behaviour is crucial to the functioning of society.
The line on what we stigmatise does change, and often necessarily so, but some things are likely to always be ‘beyond the pale’ and the manipulative abuse of young girls for sexual kicks will hopefully always be one.
I think the point is that it’s okay with Romania. Were he to take up with 14 year old girls in most countries it would be a punishable crime. It seems to be okay with Thailand too, from what I hear. Mores the shame that both these countries should face.
“I think the point is that it’s okay with Romania. Were he to take up with 14 year old girls in most countries it would be a punishable crime.”
See how quickly misinformation is passed on as fact. It’s not okay in Rumania because the age of consent is not 14. And I’m not aware of any accusations that he was involved with underage girls, which the reference to 14 suggests.
I took the age limit from the post I was responding to. I had no knowledge of it, nor was it relevant to my point. I think you and I agree here. It’s a matter of whether or not he broke the law in the country which has the laws in question. That’s one kind of thing he could conceivably be gone after. There’s this other thing, this cultural thing involving morals and shame – which I also largely agree with – which is also okay. My problem is when people confuse the two. You can’t legally go after him until he’s broken an actual law and someone can reasonably prove it. He can say he did anything he wants, that’s not against the law (yet). Anyone can try to shame him all they want – but that just seems to give him publicity and probably increases his porn profits somehow. You are me pointing this out doesn’t remotely imply we like the guy or approve of anything he’s said or maybe done. It’s just insisting that there be laws that apply equally to everybody and a process for enforcing them that’s applied equally to everybody. In other words, a rule of law.
The age of consent in Rumania seems to be 18 years. My question is not implying anything. It’s a question. Were you implying that Tate was involved with “young girls”. You seem to be suggesting that by saying the age of consent was 14 and Tate new it. Of course you don’t know what he knows, you can only guess. Why don’t you just wait for the process of justice to play out?
“You wrote that we can’t frown on his doings because he hasn’t broken the law,”
What I meant wasn’t that simple. What I wrote was “we can’t frown on one man challenging those norms and then make allowances for others.”
Of course you can reserve the right to frown on his behaviour. But that’s it. But there’s probably a lot of other things you frown on that don’t challenge social norms. You just find those things personally offensive. The suffragettes challenged social norms, so did gays. Social norms are like a benchmark that we assess things around, but they’re not fixed, People may object to his influence, but that’s not a crime. Unfortunately we do have to wait for him to commit a crime before we step in. If he was drawing underage girls in then he’s broken the law, but otherwise he’s just a creep. You can judge single mothers who keep having children, but that’s it. We don’t know why they do, maybe they want money, I don’t know. But if you’re going to coerce these people into behaviour you approve of then be prepared for people to coerce you over your behaviour they don’t like.
I don’t think there is any equivalence between women’s right to vote, Gay people not being persecuted, and the exploitation of young vulnerable girls, and I’m surprised you continue to imply that. I strongly suspect you don’t actually think there is a equivalence but dug yourself a bit of an inadvertent hole here. We all do that occasionally.
I think Tate was the wrong cultural warrior for anyone decent to be nailing their colours to. To underpin your points, which have some validity, you could have found someone much better.
“the exploitation of young vulnerable girls”
Would you like to define “young vulnerable girls”, just so we’re clear about what we’re discussing?
Youre correct, I don’t actually think there’s an equivalence between suffragettes, gays and Tate. That’s what you take from it. I was referring to historical challenges to social norms.
I don’t think he’s at all saying we can’t frown upon him. Just that we should not pervert the Law in order to follow up with punishment unless he has actually broken it.
not sure on Romanian law, but Tate claims to favour young women aged 18-19 as they’ve had less partners which implies a degree of cleanliness. i suspect many of his Hustler Uni sign ups are of a similar age. All are old enough to have agency and yet young enough to still be naive enough to be easily exploited. However, I agree, the exploitation of adults, while in poor taste, not illegal last time I checked.
He isn’t much of a looker, I suspect his physique and multi million pound fortune is what attracts the ladies and so i struggle to be particularly sympathetic towards his alleged victims. It’s not as if he keeps his questionable views to himself.
Come on LS, he’s going to say 18-19 and not 14 isn’t he. He’s stupid but not that stupid. But he’ll have look he probably wanted – pre-pubescent – for a certain fee paying customer. And Rumania’s lower age of consent v handy for that. Sorry to be specific but this one reason why it’s so horrid this guy has become, or almost, a cause celeb.
How old were the alleged victims at the time of the exploitation? If they were children then surely the media would’ve been all over it like a rash.
I would also question whether he is stupid, arrogant certainly not sure about stupid.
I know mid-twenty year olds that have less “agency” as I think you mean it than some fourteen year olds. I cringe when I think how they vote. It’s a hard metric to judge. Most jurisdictions define rather arbitrarily some age of consent to protect young women from their being so exploited. Would that they could be so protected from the medical system that wants to transition similar bad choices to phantasmical “genders”.
I agree although I also cringe at the idea that we have to shift the age of adulthood to people in their thirties to protect stupid people from themselves
I’ve been saying for years ,(joke) that the age of consent should be raised to 32 so most people would,lol,get fed up of waiting and give up on it. It’s only a joke,a sour joke really but what if our to new bosses really did that. Ha ha. The thing is,one learns that for a lot of females the first and even subsequent experiences of sex are traumatic and unpleasant. Marianne Faithful had to get drunk and stoned to make sex with the Stones tolerable. It’s not what,in particular,us girlies are indoctrinated with from infancy practically. I love golden oldies but don’t listen to most of the lyrics too carefully or you realise they were written by randy young men saying the same thing Andrew Marvells was saying to his Coy Mistress.
I found it VERY puzzling in the Mrs Giraffe case that the ‘ legal age of consent” issue seemed to be infinitely flexible.. I always understood the age to be 16. Then found out in USA it varies from 16 – 18 by state. But then people were suggesting that aged 19 20,mid 20s even,the bad experience they had,and not what they were EXPECTING ,(it rarely is,),sort of meant they were REALLY in some paralegal way “under the age of consent’.
In the U.K. we have an age of consent for s3x and one for exploitation, this means if a girl is 16 or 17 and is being given gifts or payments in exchange for s3x, then the payee is breaking the law as they’re exploiting the youth involved. In the Guiffre case, she argued that PA knew that Epstein had trafficked her into the U.K. and paid her to have s3x with him. The argument was based on her exploitation under the age of 18.
Do we want to rebuke the abuse itself or merely the boasting of it? Exploiting…er, “leveraging,” the gap between the two is the “arbitrage” Mary’s writing about here. And what a delightful (rhetorical) use of the word “arbitrage”!
Very interesting point. In the seventies I knew quite a number of people in commune movements and was a guest at several. What I noticed in the eighties (and probably related to your point) was how desolate and destitute many of the women were by then. I remember one woman in particular who had a child by a man who subsequently went off to Mexico with a high school girl, how she struggled to reconcile the primal indignity of it with the communal value system she had embraced. I talked to others who were rendered sterile by the series of STDs that rolled inevitably through these people, who would never even experience her indignity. As a young male I had been attracted to the life and what it looked like it promised. But I really could not look away from what it seemed to cost the women.
Maybe they’ve all read 50 shades or any of the similar veined fan fic the internet is teeming with connected to hot millionaires/billionaires that have questionable practises but give it all up (said practises) for her because she is so special.
I once went to a philosophy lecture given by Bernard Williams. At the end of the lecture a militant feminist started ranting at him claiming women were being subjugated by romantic fiction and it was the fault of men (I guess now the patriarchy would be blamed). He replied that the question was ‘Why do women read it? ‘
It’s actually patronising to see all his women sex workers as deluded innocent victims. I heard one of these women on the radio. She was a very down to earth sounding Ukranian lady.
She was very annoyed at having her business disrupted. She spoke with pride about how much money she had in the bank and she seemed perfectly understanding what she was doing.
Yes,I think she was wrong to prioritize money making, especially in unethical ways,but she did not sound like a victim to me
But there is the idiocracy factor. How many children to Julie and Mary have? How many can they have? How many has Andrew Tate and another like him had? Do they / would they even know?
I’m not sure the genetic argument holds up. Reminds me of something Nietzsche said in one of his books, to the effect that intelligence is a form of conceit – it prizes itself above all other things – but that it is not yet clear that it will survive in the end or that it is necessary at all.
So. Why does anyone have to be remembered. That’s a vain notion. So what if you live and then you die and no one notices. That gives you a lot of freedom. There is far too much pressure put on people to be a)creative ,b) and /or an economically active unit. Both can drive people nuts and cause intense mental harm. The man in the hammock on an island. The visitor wants to teach him how to work hard. Why? So that in 40 years time you’ll have enough money to lie in a hammock in the sun all day. But that’s what I’m doing now!
AJ Mac
2 months ago
Tangential to the article itself (I hope that’s allowed on this website!): Is there some way to reduce the amount of porn we produce and consume as a species?
Not talking about putting the twerking genie all the way back in the bottle, just a partial reduction in global sleaziness and lurid titillation. It’s not merely a matter a consenting adults who choose to make and view this “content” when much of it is produced under coercive, exploitative, sometimes outright criminal conditions.
It’s not rare for this “adult content” to show people getting abused and humiliated–however voluntarily–so others can watch with enjoyment, or maybe horrified fascination that morphs into a type of pleasure. Some of these “stars” are very young adults that should be better protected from this level of exposure, if that’s possible. And millions of viewers (putting aside probable underage performers) are in the 12-17 age range.
Is it possible to rein in our overall pornografication, this lewd version of freedom? This is both a rhetorical appeal and a genuine question directed at the many thoughtful and intelligent people who post here.
Last edited 2 months ago by AJ Mac
Brett H
2 months ago
“It’s an inability to see anyone else as such. In other words, treating every human vulnerability as an opportunity for arbitrage, and everyone other than oneself as at best a customer, and otherwise merely a thing to buy, sell, or consume.”
One of the reasons put forward for the success of Capitalism is that it fed directly into a human need and in the process produces a system that creates development and growth, which feeds back into this need.
But ultimately it reaches the point Mary makes because it’s a beast that cannot be satisfied. Big corporations are run by directors who appoint CEOs, the CEOs and Directors come and go, but the corporation keeps going, constantly fed year in and year out from the outside. The human need eventually turned to consuming its own vulnerabilities: shallow, fragile, vulnerable aspects of who and what we are ( there’s a limitless supply, and the same society went on to create more vulnerabilities) It’s a form of cannibalism, a diet of all the worst and confusing aspects of who we are. Maybe that explains so many of our problems and our incredulity at the outcomes.
Most of not all of the most extreme exploitation is actually illegal in most capitalist countries, which shows that the economic system per se is not the main issue. Although it is quite possibly to conceive that the porn industry, say, could subborn and corrupt politicians, I’m not aware of any significant case where this has happened. (It may have with drugs in some narco-states).
The problem with saying ‘capitalism’ is the problem is that the alternative path requires in every case a huge increase in state control and overt monitoring of every aspect of human life, as we saw with Marxist-Leninism. (That isn’t even to mention the generally huge numbers of people who are ‘controlled’ by the sophisticated expedient of killing them!)
There may be no easy answers, but the market must has limits and the power of corporations should certainly be limited. Perhaps disbar former political leaders from joining the boards of major corporations for an extended period. (I suppose they do need to find jobs, so the regulations need to be designed with care).
But Mary Harrington is correct; it is ultimately liberal ideology that acts as an acid, eroding more and more social norms over the years. Some of this can be experienced as liberating and beneficial by some, but there is no doubt that many become victims of the removal of societal norms based on ‘consent’ because the actors involved have vastly different levels of power.
“the alternative path requires in every case a huge increase in state control and overt monitoring of every aspect of human life”
Completely agree. But even if Capitalism is the best, which it undoubtedly is, Mary’s article has made me consider how Capitalism has created new markets (because all others are saturated) by exploiting our vulnerabilities and fears, then packaging them and selling them back to us . Facebook would be an sample, transitioning in youth, climate change, even freedom of speech. This is what erodes social norms. And the way it’s sold to us means we don’t even understand what’s happening and as I said it means we look at our problems with incomprehension.
Have they not always exploited vulnerabilities and fears? Look at the adverts. on TV – if you want to attract a mate wear this perfume/after-shave; if you want the envy of your friends for your good taste then buy this wine, wear this suit; if you don’t want your children to die a horrible death use this disinfectant and so on. There are very few products that are advertised by just telling you what it does and how much it costs; even the slogan “does exactly what it says on the tin” was exploiting our feeling that perhaps these adverts. are using us and being dishonest. Producers rely on getting us to buy things we don’t need and often never even wanted, so to get us to buy these products they have to create a need, and that is very often using our vulnerabilities and fears. I will concede that this is not always the case, but it is one of the main models used.
“so to get us to buy these products they have to create a need”
No they don’t do that. They target people who already perceive themselves in a certain light. Coca Cola don’t create a need, they target people who like to drink sugary, fizzy drinks. If someone doesn’t like Coke you’ll never get them to need it. Yes, they target such vulnerabilities as vanity, but in the end that’s about making people feel good. That’s not the same as actually commodifying fear, like climate change, or Covid. We’re not actually getting anything, like a bottle of perfume. Instead we’re getting anxiety and doubt, ideas about sex and gender, racism, free speech, extinction rebellion, things that don’t even make sense, things you can’t make sense of until in the end you just shut down.
Neither Romania or Thailand or any of the other “sexual tourism” destinations strike me as particularly capitalistic in the large sense – most of their economies are highly controlled and strangled by the State. In fact, I wonder just how much “capital” is involved at all. Don’t confuse capitalism with what is more probably just commerce. Are there “corporations” with publically traded “shareholders” who are being paid dividends in Tate’s stock?
Capitalism seeks to create appetite. Capitalism feeds on envy, lust, greed and every other vice – not need. It is a beast which is completely out of control and is devouring everything in its path, eventually it will devour itself (Erysichthon, or Ourubus in which case something else will emerge from the carcass – on a more positive note). Those who have internalised a traditional moral code have some defence against the monster. Moral codes evolved out of experience to contain and control the negative aspects of human nature and enhance the survival prospects of the group.
“Capitalism seeks to create appetite.”
You make it sound like Capitalism was introduced to this planet by alien life to somehow gain control of the planet by creating some sort of appetite in us for … what? Capitalism has grown organically from society and continued to thrive because it does a number of things that satisfies people. Capitalism didn’t create the appetite, it responded to it.
I guess you object to my writing style. Effective imagery can be used to help communicate a complex idea. Originally Coca Cola contained cocaine which is addictive. That is one way of creating appetite. The whole point of advertising is to create an appetite for things people don’t need. Most societies taught moral codes through myth and religion. Aesop’s fables contain both moral warnings and advice. I recommend you listen to Jordan Peterson’s brilliant lectures on the Old Testament. I strongly suspect, the reason for the resilience and success of the Jews is linked to Old Testament dictats and wisdom. Even Richard Dawkins believes schoolchildren would benefit from being taught or studying the Bible.
Sorry, your babbling. I can’t understand what you’re getting at.
”The whole point of advertising is to create an appetite for things people don’t need.”
You already said that and I addressed it, you don’t have to agree with me but repeating it doesn’t make it anymore persuasive.
I elaborated pointing out Coca Cola contained cocaine. My point is capitalism exploits the defects of human nature and possession of a moral code, a framework for recognising temptation and potential exploitation, is some defence. A character who seduces women with expensive gifts and declarations of love and then exploits them is nothing new. You say I am babbling, I prefer to keep a discourse civil, but I shall make an exception for you as I suspect you enjoy a brawl. Educate yourself in the classics, the great works, you may find your life enriched and your understanding deepened if you do, as many others have over time – there is a reason why these works have stood the test of time. You come across as profoundly ignorant in this area.
While I agree with your point, you are abusing the concept of capitalism. What you are describing is commerce and trade and the fact that those who want to sell something will use every means they can come up with to increase their sales and its value. Capitalism is something different. It is the system which allows one to invest ones “capital” with legal rights attached to organizations which are supposed to use it to produce something that will generate a return on the invested capital. It is the most efficient system yet developed for producing returns for the largest number of people. (Banditry has a higher return in general but only for a few).
Some might say it is the most exploitative system. The separation of investment and product makes it much easier to ignore the suffering involved in production. Hence the tendency to locate manufacturing in countries where workers have fewer if any rights.
Coca Cola no longer contained cocaine from 1929. Since then people have been drinking it by choice, not because they’re addicted. I would hardly call a desire to drink Coke a human defect, unless you think thirst, or pleasure, is a defect. Your post suggests that these defects can only be offset with a moral code. Your reference to the Old Testament seems to confirm that. Though, of course, you’d be aware that moral codes vary across the world.
As for brawling, as you call it. why should I acquiesce to a vague understanding of advertising and the manipulative use of facts from the past to bolster your point of view and dismantle mine. You may not like it but you’re babbling.
It’s true Coca Cola no longer contains cocaine but that is how it initially gained popularity. If it still contained cocaine, I have no doubt it would be far more popular than it is. Coca Cola now relies on caffeine and sugar. It is possible to buy Coca Cola without caffeine or sugar but it is rarely stocked because people don’t buy it. I think your choice of the word babble is apt. Babies babble in the language they are destined to speak. It is the precursor to language. My comments are a precursor to what I intend to write. When I was young, I was intimidated and silenced by your kind. If told my ideas were babble, I would have believed it, and I was frequently told I had no idea what I was talking about. Then I didn’t realise it was because people just disagreed with or disliked what I was saying and wanted to shut me up. I guess that is why it became so incredibly important to me to be able to back up my ideas.
“It is possible to buy Coca Cola without caffeine or sugar but it is rarely stocked because people don’t buy it”
This is where you can expose your ignorance of Capitalism, and consequently leads me to question your point if view.
If people didn’t buy Coke without caffeine or sugar then the company wouldn’t produce it. No one is going to manufacture a product people don’t want. But according to your theory the Coca Cola Corporation should be able to create a need for it and then the shelves would be stacked with it because people would be seeking the product to assuage the desperate need that’s been created in them by tge Coke corporation. But according to you they don’t because the shelves are empty.
Coca-Cola without caffeine or sugar is advertised as the guilt-free version which I think rather proves my point. The government were going to introduce legislation to limit sugar content, I don’t know if it was actually implemented, and so companies were producing lower sugar version of products but they didn’t sell.
The word Capitalism is a creation of marxism. People buy and sell.
Farmers sell food, they do not create appetites. hedging started with Greek farmers over 2500 years ago .There have been laws concerning property and sale of goods since civilisation began in order to prevent fraud.
There is great confusion between wants and needs highlighted by Shakespeare in King Lear – O reason not the need! Our basest beggar is in the poorest thing superfluous.
You know, quoting Shakespeare doesn’t make you smarter than others. There is no confusion between wants and needs. People make choices. If they like to think a want is a need then that’s up to them. Who’s to decide what people need? Though we do know of a movement in history that did “know” what people needed that ended up in mass starvation. It’s always interesting to find in people who live by a moral code how they have such a low opinion of humanity.
Just google confusing wants and needs. It is a topic in psychology. It is an issue addressed by psychotherapists. Advertisers are in the game of confounding the two.
Smart is an odd word.
In the past, pretty much every child in the country studied at least one Shakespeare play. I quoted Shakespeare to demonstrate the confusion between wants and needs is a feature of human nature. Shakespeare is generally recognised to be the greatest playwright of all time and King Lear to be the greatest of his plays; the confusion between wants and needs is one of the themes in the play. I believe in consulting the greats and I thought you might prefer reading up on Shakespeare’s exposition rather than reading mine.
You think I have a negative opinion of human nature. I know I am a realist. Are you familiar with Milgram’s experiments? Do you ever wonder at the silence and cooperation of the majority of Germans between 1933 and 1944? Do you think those people were essentially different from you?
I truly believe if anyone wants to write anything of genuine worth then they must study the greats first. When I was young, I had the idea that one day I would write philosophy. I used Plato as my mentor. He said anyone who wanted to be a philosopher had to study maths first (so I did) and should not start writing until they were at least 50. Plato despaired of human nature.
I believe in redemption but there is no redemption without acknowledging one’s darker side, in Jungian terms – incorporating the shadow into consciousness. There is the most beautiful poem – The fullness of time by James Stephens – which fits in with my ideas and the incredibly beautiful poem – The Judas Tree by Ruth Etchells.
As we’ve now reached the point of name checking: Shakespeare, Plato, Jung, et al, and how educated we are it might be a good time to mention that I did a unit on Shakespeare’s The Tempest. You may know of it. It’s an interesting play, that among other things, includes the subject of emerging Capitalism. If you don’t know it I recommend it.
I am interested in alternative interpretations of the Tempest. I didn’t know capitalism is a theme. I shall look into it to see if I agree. As I said, I am well read not educated which means I frequently see things in completely different way to the educated.
By the way, you have it wrong about that line of Lear. Lear is talking about how existing on needs only reduces us to nothing more than animals. A bit like Communism.
I am not wrong. The speech is in response to his daughters taking away everything on the basis he doesn’t actually need any of it. The play is about his transformation through suffering. Initially he believes Reagan and Goneril’s flattery and is offended by Cordelia’s honesty. The embellished false language that convinces him Regan and Goneril love him mirrors his belief he needs all the things Regan and Goneril take from him. At the end of the play, he realises that Cordelia’s plain language was true, her love real and that he doesn’t need what he had believed he needed.
From my limited education and experience, it appears that the seven deadly sins to which you refer are, and have been, central features of every recorded human society. To decry capitalism because it fits with reality is without substance. At least capitalism is the best mechanism for the production of wealth in a society, with the ancillary benefits of better health, less hunger, and time for activities beyond bare survival. A meaningful condemnation of capitalism, in my opinion, requires the definition of a superior alternative.
I completely agree. I am actually working of an alternative (hopefully superior). Obviously, I cannot relate it in a comment. It has been a lifetime’s work and elements of it appear in my comments. If you consider your education limited, why don’t you do something about it. There are incredible lectures on YouTube. It is easier now than it has ever been to learn as long as you don’t limit yourself to a single perspective. I am fortunate in that my formal education was mostly mathematics and computing as I suspect it is harder to teach oneself the hard sciences and my knowledge and experience of maths and computing means I understand physics to a certain extent. I studied psychology as well and discovered cognitive psychology is effectively psychology written in terms of the C programming language.
You call it babble. I have tried to understand Plato’s Timaeus many times. It would be incredibly easy to dismiss it as babble, and I have no doubt you would dismiss it as such if I presented it to you and pretended I had written it. I have been trying to understand it for 30 years and have only recently begun to understand some of it.
Plato was a warrior before being a philosopher. He believed it was necessary to have lived a life before becoming a philosopher. The closest thing there has been to a philosopher king was Alexander the Great who was taught by Aristotle (Plato’s pupil) and was one of the greatest warriors of all time.
“would you say the path to improvement involves abandoning a free-market system”
No, I wouldn’t agree to that. I grapple with the idea of Capitalism constantly, swinging back and forward from anger to realistic acceptance. In the end I have to accept that having, as I said, grown organically in human society, then I have to accept it being flawed just as we are. It’s interesting how so many judge the likes of Trump for avoiding taxes but have no trouble with tradesman doing cash jobs. How do we place limits on Capitalism and how do we implement them without interfering in what seems to be a natural process? Generally I think the world does pretty well out of Capitalism. I think it does more good than harm. The problem isn’t really Capitalism but human behaviour. That’s not going away, whatever system we live under. I don’t like it that people murder others, but they do and always have. People do that, but not most people. We live with that.
Fair enough. As a former tradesman, I judge Trump for stiffing contractors and their workers more than for being a tax evader. I would note that just something being common, say among tradespeople or common business folk, doesn’t make it totally okay in a president. A national leader should be above average, and not merely in net worth or famousness.
Tribalism and even monarchy seem more “organic” to me than capitalism. though I’d rather have even this runaway version of a market economy than one the other two systems. I suppose one could claim that anything that occurs is organic, but not therefore good or unchangeable. For example: murder will always exist, but the number of murders in America is unacceptable. Agreed? We can, I would hope, face things without throwing up our hands or retiring into a form of “‘acceptance” that call the worst things natural or organic, as though they are therefore unchangeable in any way.
Julian Farrows
2 months ago
As the sexual and societal differences between men and women erode, men become more boorish and women become more hardened.
I very much doubt that your claim is true. Men are becoming more boorish? Than when, exactly?
Strong women have always existed. Were the suffragettes timid wallflowers?
What you’re describing is simply a product of increased media reportage. Just as some think the world is a more violent place nowadays, due to increased exposure to events that would previously have gone unnoticed, it’s a myth.
I went to the beach today and was surrounded by parents and children, men and women enjoying each other’s company and both playing with their children.
In defence of Julian’s point, personally I think it’s quite reasonable to say that social mores and manners have clearly both hardened and coarsened since the sexual revolution: which lets face it, was sort of the point of the sexual revolution. You can’t really have a sexual revolution and still have widespread chivalry: the manners and actions that make up chivalry are not ubiquitous to human societies; they are the product, in the West, of several centuries of Christianity which we have now overthrown.
Our children today have direct access at 15 to contraception, direct access (as soon as they can type) to hardcore pornography – including perversions – all within a prevailing normative sexual ethic that views sex as essentially transactional and ‘Consent’ as the only moral benchmark. This reality clearly has an effect on our manners and behaviour; all of us. The fact that the suffragettes were clearly strong women and families still have plenty of fun at the beach doesn’t address this sea change in human behaviour.
Given the utter vacuum of sexual morality presented to young people today, and the Andrew Tates (et al) who have rushed to fill this void, it is perfectly fair to say that – although the Andrew Tates have ALWAYS existed – our daughters at the school disco are more at danger from them today than they were thirty years ago: let alone at the ‘leavers ball’ or ‘country dance’ eighty years ago.
Don’t think there has been any change in sexual differences!
Stephen Quilley
2 months ago
I’m glad you wrote this Mary. Viz discussion in the comments and ‘the rush to judgement’, legal and moral judgement are not the same thing. It’s quite possible he was set up in some way.There is certainly a double standard at play (no great rush to get those on Epstein’s client list).
But to see conservatives/right wing people defending him and liberals full of righteous outrage is rather galling.
He’s a terrible man. Nothing to do with conservatism. He’s the end product of Enlightenment hyper-individualism and the sexual revolution. The end state of progressivism. Conservatives ….I’m struggling with vocabulary….non-woke people, post-liberals,Christians….should not let liberals disown one of their own. Tate and GretaThunberg are two ends of the same spectrum: atavistic market individualism/liberalism versus cosmopolitan progressive liberalism. They are both liberal in the sense of: (i) being tied to a vision of sovereign individual agents – disembedded, abstract and increasingly unhinged (Tate’s libertine depravity mirrors the narcissism of transgender activists); (ii) a default globalism: she as an advocate and puppet of the eco-modernist, transhumanist project of the UN/WEF (Kingsnorth’s ‘Machine’); he because he’s a rich playboy, who has zero allegiance to any particular place or community and treats the world as his personal playpen; (iii) they are post-Christian secularists who have lost any transcendent meaning framework but benefit from the residue of Christian virtue in the wider society (Tate in so far as he claims equal treatment under the law – a legal sentiment that derives from the Imago Dei).
In alt-right trash speak, Greta and the WEF are ‘communists’. For progressives, everyone on the right is a ‘neo-liberal’. The odd thing is that contemporary communists and neo-liberals are pretty much on the same side. This is not some strange logic of real politic. It is because, on this left right spectrum, the statist-left and the market-right both share an anti-relational vision of atomised, Cartesian, individuals – disembedded from each other and from God. Thunberg and Tate represent secularism on steroids. Communists take those atomised individuals and their gig is to collectivise them; corporatists use the market to aggregate them; debauched libertarians just celebrate them as they are – to be used, abused and exploited. They are all on the same side because they start from these disembodied, disembodied individuals who owe nothing to anyone or anything. This same logic underpins the rush to transhumanism, which is the diabolical end game. The UN will licence it. The WEF will create the technologies. Progressives will use it to smash what remains of the family, liberate women from their bodies, edit the human genome to rid us of troubling diversity (irony much) and create a society of motherless monsters. The ‘communists’ will use it to control the masses on an unprecedented scale and in hitherto undreamt of ways. And the libertarians and rich degenerates like Andrew Tate will use it to exploit people.. floating like shit in the resulting cess pool….always on the top, but always destined for a darker place of their own making.
The opposite of the Market is not the State. The Market-State is rather the antithesis of Livelihood, which is to say the nested web of family, friend, community relations into which we are born. It starts with marriage and motherhood. This is why both Andrew Tate and his progressive/feminist detractors are on the same side. They dismiss relational bonds, hate marriage and have no time for Love. They are against natural law and against God. They deny the human condition which is to be born into dependency and in to relation with our mother, our father, our families, our neighbours, our communities and with God. If there is a hell, I was going to say Greta and Tate should be stuck in an elevator for eternity. But I wouldn’t wish that on any woman, and she’s just a child. So I guess Tate get’s his own elevator and company.
Sorry to break it to you, but Tate was an Orthodox Christian for many years and has recently converted to Islam… I’m only 98% convinced that it’s a genuine conversion. A part of me thinks it might be one of his moves in the great chess game of life.
I suggest you go and watch some of his long form interviews from the last 6 months… perhaps the one with Zuby. I think you may be more on the same page than you initially think.
He seems to have matured a little since the videos the media are pushing we’re made (back in the day when he was very extreme in order to get views).
FYI, I suspect his arrest is a set up and designed to scare him into shutting up (which he won’t do), but time will tell. He’s almost certainly done very dodgy stuff in the past which is inevitably coming back to bite him.
What is the point of these references to his being “an Orthodox Christian” or a convert to Islam? And how do you know, or so strongly (98%) believe that he actually genuinely practiced either of these religious faiths?
I have seen no actual evidence that he was ever the former, and what little I have learned about him – courtesy almost entirely of these comments – suggests that at best if he practiced any religious faith it was or is performative.
Paying tax, giving away some of his ill gotten gains and respecting the integrity and humanity of young women – and also saying sorry, would indicate some kind of maturing and contrition. Anything else is just social-media performance…..like Meghan Markle saying sorry, or Kim Kardashian giving away an old thong for charity.
Funny example on Kardashian, didn’t know that. I suspect he’ll do (may have done) the equivalent of those things yet in an Islamic context, so we may not get to hear much of them.
This is by far my favorite comment to this essay. It’s too bad it’s so far down the stack.
I’ll add only that Tate strikes me like I think Hugh Hefner probably struck people back in his heyday.
Tate is just Jack Murphy playing a gopniks idea of what a cool guy is. Jack Murphy was a failed academic turned pornographer turned e grifter guru rw commentator, Tate is the same except he’s a failed kickboxer. Tate’s fake persona is a copy of his Bosnian/ Eastern European kickboxing coach and training partners. Hasan Piker is another one, minus the porno. Before being the cool not dysgenic weakling leftist character he tried the pua grift
I had the bad luck to become a young adult in the early 1970s when Germaine Greer and all the other lying toads were in their pomp. The BBC loved GG (they were pretty fond of a certain Mr Saville too) because she could be guaranteed to say something outrageous. It took a couple of decades but men learned to be restrained and diffident and caring. And what happened the women dumped them for that violent dangerous guy. Because dodgy dangerous guys are exciting and alluring. Sorry but it’s true. It’s worth Holding Out For A Hero which means of course that it’s worth being a “Hero” as the hottest chicks will give it up to you.
I’m speaking from the viewpoint of being a female but not a hot chick,never was,but I still get how the psychology works. It’s SO not true that men and women are THE SAME and the obvious physical differences are just biology and behavioral differences cultural.
I think we know he’s a human trafficking pornographer who is facing a long time in a Romanian jail. We also know that he yells and swears a lot in his hideous accent. He dresses like a nightmare. He lives in a Bucharest housing estate with his equally odious brother. He gets mocked by slightly odd Swedish teenagers and then lots of people laugh at him.
What else is there?
>I think we know
So “we” have a surface level knowledge, exactly what the Stoater D said. Let me enlighten you. He blew up on social media within a year with his claims to fame being a kickboxing world champion (he has a belt from a very low tier organization) and a guru millionaire. Apart from his e-girl business he offered courses and mentorship at “Hustlers University”. Recently he became muslim and moved to Dubai, after very actively promoting Romania and Eastern Europe
Last edited 2 months ago by Tony Testosteroni
Warren Trees
2 months ago
I don’t know what makes this Tate character any different than a long line of powerful and abusive people over the last 5,000 years. Wasn’t having what you want the main purpose of just about every conquering tribe?
The more succesful (and thus also rich) you were the more women you had access to so I totally believe that 95% of mongolians have genes from GK. Some people dont believe this but having done my family history I’ve seen how descendants multiply
the internet has further de-territorialised the ways in which one may misbehave.
Really? The CCP has used the internet to reach around the globe to intimidate and control their diaspora.
Blame J S Mill? Really? As he noted, jerks like Tate are indeed a small, very very small minority. And we have laws that constrain him.
Tate is a jerk who should be ignored and ridiculed unless he has done something illegal in which case he should be prosecuted.
Perry de Havilland
2 months ago
“I don’t really care how men speak about women when we aren’t around, for example.”
Well gosh, that is frightfully good of you, but I suppose by modern collectivist standards that makes you a paragon of tolerance. But I am still resolved to never allow Alexa or its like in my home in case you have a change of heart.
Never heard of him two weeks ago and since then have encountered his name in half-a-dozen places. Very, very, light skinned African-American-Briton. Father was an international chess master and Andrew was very good also. He turned to learning kickboxing when he was 19 (born 1986) and by his mid-twenties he was one of the best in the world in his weight categories. Turned his hand to various dubious businesses and today is worth 300 million dollars. Currently in jail in Romania (where he lives) for a short time.
Apparently he was never in jail. The police questioned him, searched his house, found no evidence, and decided there was no case to answer.
A young women at one of his parties was seen online by her boyfriend. As an excuse for attending she told her boyfriend she had been forced to attend and wasn’t allowed to leave. The boyfriend (a true believer in the BelieveAllWomen nonsense) called the police and reported that she was being held captive.
The police responded but dismissed the case since CCTV images showed she had communicated with him while alone outside the gates of the property taking delivery of pizza for the group.
Apparently the police didn’t find anyone being held captive on the property, no drugs, and nothing illegal.
Tate isn’t stupid and he isn’t what the left paint him as. Many men and women agree with his views. I suspect most of the people condemning him here have only ever read or heard the biased feminist reports. Check out his YouTube interview on JustPearlyThings if you want to know the real person.
By the same logic Kim Jong Un is Erasmus’ monster. Write about Tate if you like but what he has to do with JS Mill or indeed any philosopher is beyond me. It’d be a lot easier to show the link between Marx brothers comedy and Schopenhauer. I have read Unherd since early 2018 and responded with $s to the begging emails for 3 yrs straight. NGL this is probably the last time. I hope Unherd don’t follow the Guardian and take from any card no they find without asking….if so it will be reported to the card issuer as fraud.
Odd. I’ve always thought of Hitler as Nietzsche’s monster, kind of like a final still abstract stop after following the likes of Hegel, and before the final solution when things get physical.
Maybe read some. It will disabused you of that notion. Kaufman translations are reliable.
Stephen Wright
2 months ago
Spot on Mary. Thanks for writing the big brained version of what I was thinking. Now I have some more meaty ammunition to fire off at those who seem to think this guy is ‘cool’…
William Shaw
2 months ago
Hacking persistent patterns in human nature for profit is exactly what many large companies do on a consistent and regular basic. In fact it is the core function of a many diverse and successful businesses, covering everything from technology to cosmetics. To single out Andrew Tate is ludicrous in the extreme and shows just how badly Mary Harrington has be blinded by her own implicit bias.
The other accusation that Tate and his associates are guilty of: “misrepresenting their intention to enter into a marriage/cohabitation relationship” is equally ridiculous, which is obvious to anyone who takes a moment to consider how common this is in interactions between men and women. Indeed, both sexes are guilty of this on a regular basis.
In the ongoing war between the sexes no man with any survival instinct will find fault with Tate for exploiting the gap between liberal feminist theory and actual real-world differences between the sexes.
She creates an ideological framework and then presents her case within that framework. Inevitably her arguments appear rational and reasonable. If you recognise the framework and step outside its constrictions then her arguments fall apart. Men agreeing with and supporting women are the “useful idiots” of today. Like sheep helping the hungry wolf find its next meal.
So it’s in your best interest to thwart and antagonize all women, except to satisfy your own hunger and thirst?
If so, or even anything close to that, I wouldn’t call that an unbiassed view on your part, whatever “framework” it’s situated in.
When you start out regarding someone as your enemy because of their physical characteristics or presumed views, you’re not headed toward a fair assessment of what they have to say.
Their views are hardly “presumed,” they are documented in numerous books, of which I have read several dozen. My “fair assessment” is based on what they have written.
I think you’re talking about women or feminists as a group. Harrington is hardly some parrot of a single ideology and deserves to be read for her own views despite her admitted feminism and seeming fault in having been born female. I wouldn’t automatically associate you with the view of every man, or even every misogynist, that’s ever lived.
Check out her interview with Freddie deBoer on this website if you have the time and patience.
“Prosecutors allege that the six potential victims in this case were subject to “physical violence and mental coercion through intimidation, constant surveillance, control and invoking alleged debts”, which Tate denies.”
What about this accusation? Is this also common in interactions between men and women? Are both sexes really guilty if this on a regular basis?? Also, he admitted he wanted to move to Romania because laws against rape are more lenient. Or, put another way, rape is more difficult to prove there. It seems like you left out a couple important details while dismissing Mary’s article as ‘ridiculous’,.
It seems like you left out a couple important details while dismissing Mary’s article as ‘ridiculous’,.
CHARLES STANHOPE
2 months ago
How on earth can this piece of human detritus be worth 118 comments! *
(As at 17.55 hrs GMT.)
Karl Juhnke
2 months ago
Tate is a piece of dirt for sure. He confuses masculinity with self centred savagery.
Arild Brock
2 months ago
Like Tate is exploiting young women sexually, he is seducing young men morally.
Rocky Martiano
2 months ago
“On Liberty argues that the proper role of government is acting as a backstop, imposing a minimum level of coercive authority when personal freedom threatens to harm another. It’s a pared-down approach to social and moral order that has defined a great deal of public social policy since, across both Left and Right.”
Really Mary? I would argue that every aspect of social and moral order has become so hyper-regulated that there is not a single dark corner of our lives that is not subject to some kind of government surveillance and control. Just wait till we implement the Chinese social credit system (coming to a country near you). The very opposite of a ‘pared down approach’ in my view.
Marty 0
2 months ago
I’ve long thought the clearest example we have of ‘persistent sexed differences’ is the sexual and mating behavior of lesbians vs. gay men. We lesbians are well known for quick emotional attachment, hence the ‘second date Uhaul’ trope. The gay men I’ve known, on the other hand, have mostly been in sexually open relationships even when coupled. Lesbians value intimacy; gay men prize looks and anonymous sex. These are stereotypes, of course, and like all stereotypes they erase complexity, but they also have an absolute cultural truth. And this is what sexed behavior looks like in humans when it’s unmitigated by having to accommodate the opposite sex.
Karl Juhnke
2 months ago
Noticed Mills as the father of hyperindividualism about 5 years ago. He liked individuals who were like him and happy to push them under if he could. 2 votes for people like him and 1 vote for the rest is a good example.
Yet his defense of women’s rights, private non-violent strangeness, and freedom of conscience made him an important thinker well ahead of his time, often in a good way. Like many dead white males (or even living black females) I think his work is a mixed bag that doesn’t deserve a slam-dunk dismissal.
Graff von Frankenheim
2 months ago
The first thing that pops into my mind reading about this bloke is not JS Mill but Bronze Age Pervert.
Arjun D
2 months ago
Lots of excellent comments.
I will add one thing that seems to have been missed.
At some point we stopped holding ourselves accountable to bad behavior. We stopped calling people out for doing incorrect things abd bad behavior. Young people stopped being scolded, everyone started tolerating indisciplined insensitive sociopathic behavior with a shrug and an uttering of “it is what it is” and “it’s not personal”.
This was partly because we’ve become conflict averse and only take a stand when part of a(n online) mob. Partly because we’ve become lazy. Partly because we associate any sense of order and protocol, any sense and values with right wingery and Nazism. Partly because by lowering everyone’s standards we feel life is easier to live.
Over time, gradually, this evolves into tolerance for outright criminality, which even then is tolerated as some sort of entrepreneurial achievement – “It’s only business”.
Tate has happened because we stopped scolding someone for being a little s*it back in the day.
Gabriel Mills
2 months ago
Tate sounds like a psychopath: with his view — put profitably into practice — that all relationships are transactional, and deceit and exploitation of women for his own profit, is perfectly OK.
Last edited 2 months ago by Gabriel Mills
Antony Hirst
2 months ago
“The misogynist hustler has pursued the logic of individualism”
Hmmm, you forgot to mention he converted to Islam.
Anyway, Tate is an idiot and a fool. Why even bother writing about such a warbling vacuum?
“Anyway, Tate is an idiot aand a fool.”
And has achieved far more than you ever will.
You really don’t know the man.
Stop virtue signalling.
Nona Yubiz
2 months ago
Can’t blame J.S. Mills for ‘free-market’ global capitalism… or can you?
Dominic A
2 months ago
Tate is a Beta male pretending to be an Alpha; Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons are his marks.
Kurt Keefner
2 months ago
I don’t know whether Mary is strictly a conservative, but she does share the conservatives’ tiresome complaint that exploitation for sex and money is the logical conclusion of individualism. Individualism has a deeper meaning that just laissez-faire. Philosophers from Immanuel Kant to Ayn Rand would agree that the individual is an end in himself and not merely a means for others’ ends. Individualism elevates the person. Tate, if he’s guilty as charged, is not an individualist because he does not treat women as human beings to be reasoned with, but rather as vulnerable girl-women to be manipulated.
Emre S
2 months ago
Nice article. Also works once again to highlight the hypocrisy of the Right-wing in UK showing adulation to a groomer such as Tate, simultaneously decrying the same behaviour from grooming gangs as a supposedly unique foreign cultural influence.
We don’t know if he is a ‘groomer’. There has clearly been more enthusiasm to investigate Tate than the gangs around Britain. The problem with the ‘ethnic gangs’ is that their ethnic group seems to be vastly over represented AND that the Establishment wasn’t willing, due to their ethnicity, to investigate/condemn/punish them.
Once we know more about what Tate did then we/the Right/everyone will be able to decide if he deserves condemnation and punishment.
“My job was to meet a girl, go on a few dates, sleep with her, test if she’s quality, get her to fall in love with me to where she’d do anything I say, and then get her on webcam so we could become rich together.”
You take him at his word? I have zero facts myself and don’t like the image he presents, but clearly it is possible he is being misleadingly provocative for clicks.
If this is meant as a retort to my complaint on Right-wing hypocrisy, my answer is that I find it hard to believe you nodded your head in agreement when news in the past were sayings things like: “a man shouted Allahu Akbar and then detonated himself killing civilians, we don’t know the motive yet”
Not a retort, just pointing out that a bomb detonation is an act in the world that everyone can agree happened or not. Doesn’t really matter what the detonator said. But in Tate’s case all we have that I know of is words, and people lie all the time for any number of reasons.
Anyone who paid attention knew his wealth came from webcam pornography. Whilst I daresay some women who do this retain control you don’t need to be Einstein to immediately think I might want to be more circumspect about this fella before I support him as a Cultural warrior. It is a big red alarm bell for me. I think elements of the Right jumped too soon onto this without engaging brain first and were suffering from acute myopia.
I find it hilarious we have a near perfect complement to what happened with grooming gangs here. The problem was never about supporting confirmed grooming cases, it’s about turning a blind eye to it until it becomes impossible to ignore for your preferred perpetrators. In that case, the prosecutors/police ignored ongoing grooming for fear of being labelled racist etc. In this case here, the man has pretty much publicly said he’s a groomer, but people are going out of their way to give him benefit of the doubt for fear of disgracing a Right-wing celebrity.
This is the problem that arises if a person chooses a tribe and then insists on defending said tribe to the “death”. All that is needed is consistency and asking oneself the question “is it the behaviour that I disapprove of or the person/tribe exhibiting that behaviour?”. A similar instance was the number of people who approved of the Canadian truck drivers’ blockade but disapproved of Extinction Rebellion’s blockade (and the other way round, but that was not voiced on this site). Here it seems to be a case of it’s ok to do something if I approve of you position, but not if I don’t approve; either blockading is acceptable to make your point or it’s not.
You bring up a good point. Privately, while I didn’t agree with XR’s blockades, but did sympathize with the Canadian truckers, I did think that both groups had a right to protest. However, my impression of most commentators here wasn’t so much that they were hypocritical in their judgement of either group, but that they were condemning the uneven treatment of various groups by government institutions. We saw this during COVID lockdown times when BLM riots and gay parades were tacitly permitted, but anti-vaccine and trucker protests were harshly dealt with via bank freezes and heavy-handed police treatment.
That’s because the Canadian truckers were standing up for freedom,and if you dont get it now you will when.that microchip in your wrist stops you entering Tesco. The ERs are stupid people who wish theyd been alive in the 1960s and their grandparents who were alive and at 60s demos but then got jobs,got married,bought.a house,joined the village gardening club. They all live in west Dorset.
They are actually pushing the Great Reset agenda. There is a huge difference.
I once read a quote from an American supreme court judge: “The rule of law comes not from the pen, but from the heart”
What he meant was that it doesn’t matter how many laws you write down – they will only work in so far as people are willing to listen to them.
To my observation the most chilling thing about the Tate saga is that it shows how flimsy the rule of law is becoming, precisely because it shows how both sides of the political isle are willing to abandon legal process when it suits their tribal affiliation.
On the left we have a faction of people who think that “all women should be believed” when they make accusations of rape, and who believe that accusation alone should be proof of guilt. In the case of Harvey Weinstein, had he been found not guilty, this would have been taken as proof of a corrupt system rather than proof that the evidence against him was insufficient.
The same people want to release their chosen victim groups from prison to meet their preconceived notions of equality of outcome. This faction believes in the rule of their mob and not in the rule of law. They decide innocence or guilt on the basis of group affiliation, completely dismantling the idea of individual accountability and agency that the legal process depends on.
On the other side, we have people who have decided that Andrew Tate is innocent of all charges against him, and who see any investigation into his conduct as proof of conspiracy against their tribe.
In both cases, due process is thrown under the bus to advance identity politics. And this is a scary direction to be going in.
As I’ve long believed, and warned, you can have rule by identity politics, or you can have rule by law based on individual agency, but you cannot have both simultaneously. We are either individuals, or we are blind instantiations of our group behaving like automata responding to Newtonian forces, The more we are one, the less we are the other.
I think you’re right about most of that. But in between isn’t there a much larger group who by their sheer numbers keep some balance? These people, probably most of us, make very little noise, by and large live by an established morality and support the rule of law. These are the people who doggedly work towards a balanced society without really being conscious of it, and they do carry the idea of individuality balanced with group dynamics. But, while they can absorb the insanity of the two extremes they cannot keep it going when those they vote for and those institutions they support ignore them, or undermine them, or simply sneer at them. If they drop the load, and they might when tough times wear them down, then that stability is gone.
I agree with you – the core body of sane people allow the rule of law to exist, but this only occurs in so far as we can put individual accountability above tribal loyalties. I do hope this middle body prevails under the constant onslaught of identitarians from both sides of the political spectrum.
I often repeat this comment as the analogy is sound IMO: Human history post divine /direct monarchic rule shows a series of bar brawls that get so bad the sane core feel revolted, sober up and call the cops. WW2 and the excesses of the proxy US- USSR war 1945-1991 are good examples: The grown ups re-assert themselves, trials and forgiveness follow. Then the memories fade and we repeat. If Messrs Pinker, Dawkins etc are right – i think they may well be – the sane core gets larger with each cycle with the odd backward lurch.
Good points. On a perhaps slightly pedantic but I think still important point, the alternative ruling in the Weinstein case would have been been that he would have found ‘not guilty’ rather than ‘innocent’.
I’m also tempted to add that parts of the Left think we should ‘believe all women’, except those allegedly raped by ‘transwomen’!
Yes, fair point, being found “not guilty” is different from “proven innocence”, I will update comment accordingly.
Unfortunately, cases such as this, of false allegations still surface:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cumbria-64151441
The “victim” even hit herself with a hammer to simulate being abused. What’s clear is that due legal process should always be followed.
I just looked at your link and was gob-smacked; to deliberately inflict such harm on oneself is crazy. It’s hard to discern a motive; there dosn’t seem to be a financial or revenge motive as the men were picked at random (according to the report). The fact that the real and fictitious names were all Asian tends toward a racial motive, though – would this make it a “hate-crime”. Over-all, it appears that the woman is somewhat unhinged.
I had an involvement in a case where a woman had purchased a burner (untraceable mobile phone) on which she made calls to herself over a couple of weeks and then posted through a former boyfriend’s letter box and then making allegations to the police of harassment and assault.
This kind of thing does happen
Some of the men she falsely accused were white, they weren’t all Asian.
What is most disgraceful is that people like this will only be charged with perverting the course of justice and not with any crime against the people whose lives they have destroyed. Falsely accusing someone of rape is only a crime against the state; the human victim appears to be irrelevant, in law at least.
Especially so in family law where even less evidence is required.
The motive is a need for SIGNIFICANCE. We all have an innate need to be significant,to matter. Lucky people can live happily obscure lives if they,for instance,my own sister are the lynch pin of their family,holding it all together,not by force,but by love. If you’re not that another good way is to believe Jesus (or Krishna) or someone like that loves you and cares about you. Even if is delusional,it’s a happy place,and it stops you needing to invade Poland. Or the Ukraine. Sadly a lot of people mistake their need as for fame and wealth. With talent this is just about acceptable but if it means you have to be a participant on Love Island,well the number of suicides shows how empty that is.
Self harm has been getting more and more popular and ‘ believing all women’ has increased it’s popularity.
… and Joe Biden
and Bill Clinton
You are ignoring the decline of manners. The left has ridiculed chivalry and gallantry while boxing and rugby has been take out of schools. Those attending public and grammar schools until 1960 would have played rugby and PT would have been 25 minutes of circuit training ad 3, 3 minute boxing rounds. Consequently , Britain produced an eductd, well mannered and tough middle and upper class. Just look at the officers who served in Commados, SOE, SAS, SBS , Parachute regiment in WW2. Prior to the organised sports of the 1850s developed by Arnold of Rugby,schools main games were bare knuckle boxing, cudgel fighting, fencing, rowing and free for all rugby type game. Public schools produced tough gentlmen.
The decline in manners can be seen in the rise of foootball hooliganism in the late 1960s, by unskilled and uneducated office and factory workers. There was was no hooliganism in Rugby Union or League. League was largely played by tougher men from heavy industry and trawling. There was once ome trouble at Ruby Union match where Willie John McBride was playing. He said put them on the pitch and let’s see how tough they are? Trouble stopped.
The bad manners of actors such as Richard Harris were encouraged. Harris came to maturity in the 1950s. Those actors who were officers such as Todd who served in Parachute Regiment at Normandy and B Travers who served in the Gurkhas, Chindits and SOE were not drunken oiks.
In the 1960s Motown taught etiquette to it’s performers, we now have rap glorifying sex and violence.
Much of American culture considers that to be tough a person must be coarse, crude and vulgar.
Most of human history is brutal and nasty. Britain created a nation of honest, tough gentlemen and ladies which was ridiculed by effete left wing middle class since the late 1930s.
Tate is the result of what happens when the middle and upper class men lose the toughness to enforce gentility, chivalry and good manners. When the middle and upper class no longer produce gentlemen who can defend a lady’s honour?
Very good point, I agree wholeheartedly.
Thank you.
True or false: Andrew Tate is the personification of “Grand Theft Auto.”
I love watching you tube of the old Motown hits because those performers were smart and even the ones that did the synchronised movements came across as cool and together.
Oh, I so long for those days, when chivalrous upper class-men protected women from the depredations of lower-class fiends… https://theconversation.com/the-journalist-who-exposed-the-jeffrey-epsteins-of-victorian-london-121409 … plus ca change, plus c’est le meme chose, as they say.
Gentlemen were expected to protect ladies. Ibn Khaldun said when men are protected by walls and and garrisons they lose their manliness and uprightness.
Railway stations used to have rooms reserved for ladies. Historically many station masters were ex NCOs from the Armed Forces as were ticket collectors who provided protection for ladies.
Britain’s population went from 10M, 80% rural to 40M, 80% urban in 1900. The squalid slums resulted in all sorts of problems.
Villages were police by the village constable who raised the hue and cry . All males between the ages of 15 and 60 who did not come to The Constables help in arresting the criminal, were fined. The 19th century slums had no village constable which was why the Metropolitan Police Force was created
Many men do not want to take on the responsibility of protecting women because they are afraid of being hurt in a fight.
Men are afraid of female power before authority. Upper class might have thought they were tough, but they steered clear of the blue collar working class in all sorts of sports. That is how Rugby League came about. They kept flogging the softy genteel class teams.
Read Arthur Bryant. The landed gentry were brought up bare knuckle boxing ( included throwing) cudgel fighting, fencing, rowing, hunting, shooting. The squire’s son fought the blacksmiths son and then played cricket with him in the summer. In the 1820s, some 30% of MPs were being taught bare knuckle boxing. Poets, Byon, Keats etc all boxed. The aristocracy and landed gentry were the knights of the Middle Ages. Post 1485 and up to the 1850s, the landed gentry raised the Militia and then up to WW2, the County Yeomanry.
The gentry went to sea as midshipmen from the age of 12 years of age.
League came about because men worked on Saturday morning and wanted payment when they played because of lost wages. For unknown reasons Welsh miners played Union not League. Carlisle and the M62 belt played League whereas, the more rural North Lancashire and Yorkshire played Union as did the Cornish Tin Miners and the Free Miners of the Forest of Dean. The East Midlands produced Leicester and Northampton while the West Midlands played football. Liverpool and Glasgow played football. As soon as one is East of Liverpool, In Lncashire, one is in League territory.
Men worked Saturday morning and wanted to be paid for lost wages. This would make them professional. Consequently League was formed. For some reason South Wales, Cornwall( tin miners) and Forest opf Dean remained union and not did not become league. North Lancashire, North Yorkshire, Gloucestershire and Eastern Midlands became Union while the M62 and crlisle belt played League
Thank you Nona.
Couldn’t agree with you more
How flimsy a law is doesn’t depends on one thing and one thing only – whether that law is applied, and applied consistently.
Which is why the perennial “both sides at fault” is nonsense and misleading.
It’s isn’t conservatives going around burning American cities with impunity, demanding guilty until proven innocent when college princesses decide they have been raped, allow people to jump over borders illegally or allowing blatantly illegal quotas for favoured victim groups.
And there is good reason why conservatives smell something fishy in cases like Tate. It’s a consequence of lawlessness (fostered by their political opponents), not the cause.
Remember the fracas over Rittenhouse? Nick Sandnann?
We are talking about people who got Milo Yiannopoulos cancelled for #comments# about children, while supporting mutilation of “trans” children.
People who lost their minds about Kavanaugh, while voting for the likes of Ted Kennedy, Clinton, Biden and the party of Rotherham and Rochdale over here.
And you are surprised we are sceptical about these Tate allegations?
Yes, I had a similar thought – that Tate may actually be a monster of some sort, but is also a beneficiary of the current distrust in all allegations where politics like this gets involved
Excellent comment, thank you. I think you have got to the crux of the matter. I thought at the time that basing Harvey Weinstein’s conviction on the sheer numbers of his accusers rather than hard evidence was a mistake in terms of the rule of law. And I’ll go back further and say I thought the convictions in the Stephen Lawrence case in the UK, after reforming the law in order to convict again after an aquittal, could be disastrous.
Weinstein, Dobson and Norris were probably guilty but the law was . . WAS the law. By overiding the need for hard evidence in the case of Weinstein and changing the law in the Stephen Lawrence case, in order to get the result the public wanted, means essentially we are in retreat from high civilisation and the Rule of Law back to barbarism.
Tate sounds very like a barbarian to me, but his success is as a result of liberal democracy. That is hard to face, but true I think.
Exactly. The rule of any means to the end is barbarism explicit.
I probably shouldn’t say this but all those women,who were WAY OVER the age of consent and were SMART enough to be actors,you have to learn a lot of lines etc,they went to his Hotel room. Ok so they guessed if they didn’t go they might not get a role,but I should feel sympathy for them for that.
The irony is that most of those women in the film roles they were going to act had to suggest through the camera lens sexuality,I mean just enough attractiveness to engage the attention and I don’t even mean naked scenes or romantic kissy-kissy type scenes. I mean more how Nigellas shows were all about cooking,and excellent too,but most viewers (male viewers) engaged more with her innate attraction. I just cannnot in my mind match the words these victims were saying,their pure ice maiden disgust and nun like wish not to be touched or besmirched with the films they would be in. I don’t watch movies but occasionally in someone’s else’s house and its hard to equate the tough talking,wise cracking,pouting,flirting houri on screen with the timid shy mouse who entered Mr Weinstein’s room.
Keep it coming, Jane.
There is the Law and good manners.The Democrats and the post 1960s middle class left wing labour Party have ridiculed good manners.
I agree with you, the decline in good manners seems to run parallel with the fight for Equality.
Refined behaviours like chivalry and gallantry are associated with the nobility. To influence the middle and working classes that nobilty needs to be respected and admired. The beginning of the end came in the 19th century with industrialisation and the fight for ‘women’s rights’.
Nevertheless, the habit of good manners lasted generally (it still lasts amongst some people) until, as you say, the late 1960s and beyond, as Equality became the ultimate social good to aim for (instead of goodness itself).
What is ignored is that the man who has grown up boxing and playing rugby , even if they have not been in the armed forces, has the confidence and self- control not to be provoked but has the ability to fight if needed. ” Well if you feel so strongly about this matter, lets step outside* said by someone in a calm, level manner with broad shoulders( product of manual work and physical training in the gym) often removes the heat of aggression and introduces the light of reason.
I agree with most of your balanced remarks, until the weighted dichotomy at the end: individualism vs. blind determinism/groupthink. In an equally unfair way, I could alter your terms to Pure Selfishness vs. Consideration for Community, thus inverting a seemingly obvious choice.
There’s quite a gulf between unfettered individualism and robotic conformity. Even radical freethinkers are influenced by others, admittedly or not, and not all group belonging is mere tribalism.
I think it’s fun to note that your vigorous defense of independent-mindedness–which I agree with in essence though not always degree–earned dozens of easy-click upvotes.
Nice opening quote, which calls to mind an ancient idea of the spirit vs. the letter of the law.
I just recently read a chapter long discussion of various definitions of the Rule of Law in Fukuyama’s “Origins of Political Order”. The way he ends up using the term is “understood as rules that are binding even on the most politically powerful actors in a given society” and maintains that in whatever (few) societies it has arisen, it has always had “its origins in religion.” It is quite an interesting discussion. And I suspect the religious among us will jump to say that the violations that seem evident in our own Rule of Law today have their roots in the death of God. I would have it not so but don’t think I am competent to argue it.
He goes on to say that in virtually all cases, societal decay comes about when the agencies which carry it out become “repatrimonialized”, that is, they become corrupted by agents who pervert their function to the benefit of their own tribe. This seems to me to be very close to what you are saying above.
Why did not some father, brother, cousin, husband, boyfriend teach Weinstein some manners and demand he apologised to the offended lady? Weinstein is a fat slob. The only gentleman appears to be Brad Pitt who threatened Weinstein after his comments made to Gwyneth Paltrow.
This goes to show there are Fathers who are incapable of protecting their daughters and husbands their wives.
Indeed – it would never happen in Saudi Arabia!
No doubt there would be some willing women who worked for Tate without coercion or threats, and some who would have been abused.
We should bear in mind that we have independent evidence from Andrew Tate himself of his methods and motivations. He recommends engaging in threats of physical violence in order to coerce women into doing what he wants. He recommended going to Romania because the law regarding rape is less strict than other countries. He has a stash of knives and weapons at his home.
This may not be sufficient evidence to convict him in a court of law but you would have to be a bit soft in the head (or maybe a wannabe misogynist like Tate) to think he must be innocent if not convicted.
The American judge was drawing on a long line of constitutional thought (Montesquieu, de Maistre, Madison, etc). The debate being whether the true constitution is in the culture (mores of the people) or the written document.
Both. The first laws in England were drawn up in England under Aethlebert in about 650AD where Anglo Saxon traditions were combined with the first five books of The Bible. Subsequent codes were drawn by Sine of Wessex in 700, Offa of Mercia in 750, Alfred about 890 , Edward the Confessor 1050, Henry 1 1100 , John 1215, Henry II 1160s onwards and Edward III in 1285 and 1295.
It is not as you stated Identity politics vs individual agency (which the first is originally created by the western interference of the world during colonization of divide and conquer which we are still dealing with today) but about the nature of socialization at large.
The individual agency you speak of is real but it is not as we think often in the west a tangible thing – it is state of mind, a way of thinking, not a way of behaving or doing. The identity politics is the collective, the culture, the mere fact we are all here typing in the comments and following the rules set for the collective. This idea that individual is tangible is western mindset that is coming to its great fruitions in era of information revolution – it does not have legs to stand on. What you think is your business. What you do impacts everybody. This is where individual ends and collective starts. This is what the rest of the world that lives collectively learned. We are all centipedes, and the individual is the legs – cut one off and we keep continue, kill the centre, and we are all dead. Only your mind is individual but your body which you share with others is collective – if you have a car accident we do not wait until you can speak to help you out!
Tate is a bad leg on any centipede. He is letting his mind think that he is the collective and forgets he is a person.
Unfortunately, the crux of this article is men react to trauma retaliatory and women react to trauma fearfully…this is to me why men like Tate exploit women as if they are the enemy and women seek safety in men. It is all trauma activated different in genders but feminisms do not want to hear this.
Bearing in mind that Tate has many female fans I suspect something else is going on here. Namely that people are so sick to the back teeth of politically correct speech that they will embrace almost anyone who speaks without a filter, regardless of what they say or who they are.
Dislike him as we might (and I do) the truth is that Andrew Tate represents as much of what it is to be human as Greta Thunberg does. The willingness with which people demonise and glorify says a great deal about the terminal sickness of our society
I’ve always found this dynamic to be fascinating – Tate is by all accounts very successful in attracting women. On some level, men are attracted to this because they want to be like him and learn his secrets to achieve his level of self-confidence. But what attracts so many women to this type of man? Some deep seated fantasy that they will be the ones to tame him (like the biblical Delilah cutting Samson’s hair)? Some biological imperative to have the children of the apparent ‘alpha’, even if he’s unlikely to stick around and raise them? Ultimately I expect everyone following this man will be disappointed with what he really has to offer them.
From the conversations I’ve had its less an attraction for Tate, but a revulsion toward the absolute state of the average British (Western) beta-soy-fed-male.
Are these conversations carried out in full clown gear?
Such wit, insight and intelligence. You must be so proud.
It’s easy when the clowns come out talking about soya-fed beta males
Probably all of the above, plus the lifestyle he offers if he decides to keep you around, instagram likes..? Bragging rights? He’s very charming and kind to women (until they disobey…) and he has principles which he genuinely lives by (even if we don’t necessarily agree with them). There must be more? Plus I think women are just instinctively attracted to competent men and he’s very good at signalling his competence.
It’s as old as apes. The big dominant male, top of the local status hierarchy with his harem of females. Its the essence of tribal order. Its what drives celebrity. I find it so very amusing that something so very regressive is also considered so very romantic.
“Tate is by all accounts very successful in attracting women”
Bastards and sociopaths have some key advantages in feeling free to lie and manipulate – this also may have something to do with above statement. There are also legions of insecure, abused women out there who are dysfunctionally drawn to them.
“Tate is by his own account very successful in attracting women”
There, fixed it for you.
You got me drawn there!
Women like Bad Boys. Oh,just me!
Taking that seriously, I think it’s true much of the time. Mind you I think “boys” is the important distinction, bad men say 23+ yrs become less and less appealing.
So it’s probably girlish inexperience coupled with the “insecure, abused” bit that causes their downfall. And the sexual revolution of the 1960s has increased the danger and likelihood of girls succumbing to the attraction of bad boys (all that reckless, dare-devil confidence) as protective, strong-minded and loving fathers become less and less present.
There is a good reason for the prevalence of patriarchal societies across the world.
I think you miss the point of the appeal of Andrew Tate. He says absolutely what he wants, in days when social control of narratives is more pervasive than it has been for a very long time. I find his persona and consumerism disgusting, but even so I can’t help finding it refreshing to hear someone say things in direct opposition to firmly established cultural norms on issues like mental health, Covid controls and climate change. The fact it takes someone quite pathological, in the ways described above, to challenge these dogmas is a sign of the tight control of the narrative, where having a different opinion has you damned as a ‘denier’, not so tacitly suggesting you should be locked up as a criminal for your views, and certainly rejecting any idea that your views deserve discussion. In this climate it’s easy to see your enemy’s enemy as your friend.
Yes, this is major virtual signalling, ironically from the right, but also very confusing for both left and right.
Well, you probably shouldn’t bring the public spotlight on yourself when you have engaged in various activities of doubtful legality.
Yes, Andrew Tate is the Muppets’ Muppet. He openly boasts about coercing women into doing what he wants and then acts surprised when his home is raided and there are accusations of manipulation.
He believes that his money can buy him immunity from the law, which it probably can to a certain degree, but not when you boast about it on social media.
So he’s ‘disgusting’, except of course when he says something you agree with!
Disgusting was the wrong word. Distasteful. But yes, I can dislike someone and agree with what they say.
Young men are FED UP with being demonised. Not in their families or even neighbourhoods but in “the media,” that sets the cultural agenda. Even though a lot of us have turned our backs on msm it’s still very influential is setting the cultural ideas we are “supposed ,” to accept.
The thing about Mary Harrington is that she clearly believes all she has been carefully taught.
As a racist-sexist-homophobe I believe that this is normal for educated women.
As for myself, I count it a point of pride to disbelieve almost all ruling-class Narrative. It makes life more interesting.
And that, sir, makes you interesting.
“disbelieve almost all ruling-class Narrative. It makes life more interesting.”
Not only more interesting but more real.
Mary Harrington very clearly DOESN’T ‘believe ‘everything she was taught’ as this article and a passing familiarity with her writings, which we could loosely put into the category of ‘post-liberal’, demonstrates. Simply believing the opposite of some other (ill-defined) group such as the ‘ruling class’ believes is as stupid as accepting everything you are told at face value. (Of course, we tend to be tribal and accept the views we want to while rejecting others. But we can learn to be more discerning).
Racism specifically, however counter-cultural and ‘daring’ it may be, is a moronic set of beliefs, with absolutely no scientific basis. This is hardly surprising given that all modern human beings are so closely related to each other. The adoption, very late on, by colonial countries of a pseudo-Darwinian view that white people were intrinsically superior was a disastrous conceit which has indirectly led to the huge overreach of the current ‘woke’ reaction.
“By colonial countries” is unnecessary and misleading. First let me suggest that very similar attitudes are present in non-white empires (China, for a start). Or as the attitude of the nobility towards the peasants. Reading the ‘boys’ books’ of a century ago you find similar feelings of supriority of e.g. the English towards other (equally white) European nations. I’d put this as a tribal-based feeling of the superiority of your own kind over outgroups. And note that this is something that is built into us and that we need to find a way to deal with.
Yes, in-group favouritism is often confused for out-group hostility. Communities often want their members to be reliably similar as demonstrated by in-group signalling. Their reluctance to embrace outsiders is neither directly xenophobic nor explicitly racist, but conversely is an indirect consequence of in-group preference.
Surely it is a good thing to favour one’s own group and doesn’t necessarily imply a desire to dominate other groups. When he was about eight or nine, my son told me he pitied other children because they didn’t have me as a mother. I responded by telling him it would be wonderful if all children felt that way about their mothers but sadly they don’t.
It seems to me that tribalism has come back,it’s here but not fully emerged yet from the wreck of our society. Wait till the state pension or UC or other doesn’t appear in the bank account ( cos they’ve sent all the money to Ukraine.
He said “almost all”.
Disebelieving something out of tribal opposition to a perceived oppressive group over and above evaluating multiple streams of evidence to support a hypothesis, strikes me as a sure way to hold incorrect views.
Would you believe that the Earth is flat simply because Mary Harrington has said it is round?
Trivers is certainly right and I’m impressed to see him mentioned here. If you want to read about a truly odd character look up the Wikipedia entry on Robert Trivers. I’ve only read two of his books. “The Folly of Fools – The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life” is extraordinary. The second is a very thin 88 page “Anatomy of a Fraud: Symmetry and Dance” that I ran across in a used bookstore. It appears there was a paper published in 2005, titled, “Dance reveals symmetry especially in young men” which caught his eye. He reanalyzed their data and discovered impossible statistical anomalies. Digging further he figured out exactly how the data had been manipulated to produce a fraudulent result. It’s a fascinating read.
Plus, I don’t think it is called Sociobiology anymore. The correct term is Evolutionary Psychology.
As an overview of the dynamics of exploitative male behaviour, this article follows on from the specifics of the exploitation highlighted in Julie Bindel’s article yesterday.
Amongst other things, what i find interesting is the aspect of female agency which JS Mill wrote about in the mid-Victorian era, and how this plays out today. Clearly, both Harrington and Bindel have established agency in their lives, and i couldn’t help but wonder if, just as JS Mill and his wife still have agency into the 21st century, whether the two contemporary writers are more or less likely to still have greater agency in 160 years time than Andrew Tate. Somehow, i suspect the chances are that they’re far more likely to do so.
If the ultimate purpose of agency is to pass one’s genes on through the generations, and also to influence the culture which surrounds us and our descendents, i’d put my money on Mary & Julie. While Andrew seeks to exploit, they seek to nurture and enhance. Tate will be forgotten as just another user.
Sorry to query again, but, genes don’t carry morals. They may carry ethics but not morals. All it takes for the continuation of Tate’s genes is an available woman who can carry a child through to birth. It doesn’t have to be the case that the genes of JSMill and his wife would influence society in, presumably in a positive way, because we cannot know the future and the passage of genes having an effect depends on how they fit into that moment in time. If they don’t then goodbye forever. Even if Tate is exploitive it doesn’t have any effect on the future, nor does the good intentions Mills. And even if it were possible the right fit for the future may very well be Tate’s exploitive genes.
I take your point, but mine involved agency; not just genetics but cultural influence. The influence that JS Mill still exerts wasn’t dependent on the number of his offspring.
Perhaps i might’ve made that clearer.
Cultural influence: I get that.
I’ve now edited to clarify it.
The apparent success of this gaudy jester baffles me. One look at him and I can see he’s a total b*llend. Exactly what kind of loving relationship was on offer from a cretin like that that fooled (he claims) so many women? I suspect it had more to do with him offering some ridiculous fantasy lifestyle rather than actual love.
No one deserves to be taken advantage of and he and his associates must be brought to justice but to a great extent we all, male and female, create our own problems with foolish choices.
I’m reminded of the people who joined communes. By and large there was nothing illegal going on, though in some instances there was. These people were reasonably intelligent people but there was something on offer that appealed. Up until now Tate doesn’t seem to have broken the law any more than the communes did. As much as we may disagree with what he’s done, up until he’s convicted the most he’s done is challenged social norms, much as the trans movement has done, or the gay community. An argument could be made that ultimately this behaviour ends up breaking the law. But my point is that we can’t frown on one man challenging those norms and then make allowances for others. Who’s to decide which norms should be challenged?
He’s boasting of deliberately and strategically committing sexual and psychological abuse so I’d say that he’s got something to answer for. I’d say that’s a justifiable social norm that we want to uphold.
Sure, but until he breaks the law (not saying he hasn’t), then he can be accused of only challenging social norms. Making money from pornography is not crime, but child pornography is.
You wrote that we can’t frown on his doings because he hasn’t broken the law, I strongely disagree with this This attitude has led to enormous problems, such as the number of single parent families were we have been told that we can’t judge a woman who keeps having children without support of their father(s). Things can be legal, put unethical or immoral, and I reserve the right to frown on such things.
Agree, and of course we must frown on it. Stigma for certain behaviour is crucial to the functioning of society.
The line on what we stigmatise does change, and often necessarily so, but some things are likely to always be ‘beyond the pale’ and the manipulative abuse of young girls for sexual kicks will hopefully always be one.
“young girls”
What do you mean by that?
Tate was aware the age of consent in Rumania is 14. Are you implying that therefore that’s ok with you?
I think the point is that it’s okay with Romania. Were he to take up with 14 year old girls in most countries it would be a punishable crime. It seems to be okay with Thailand too, from what I hear. Mores the shame that both these countries should face.
“I think the point is that it’s okay with Romania. Were he to take up with 14 year old girls in most countries it would be a punishable crime.”
See how quickly misinformation is passed on as fact. It’s not okay in Rumania because the age of consent is not 14. And I’m not aware of any accusations that he was involved with underage girls, which the reference to 14 suggests.
I took the age limit from the post I was responding to. I had no knowledge of it, nor was it relevant to my point. I think you and I agree here. It’s a matter of whether or not he broke the law in the country which has the laws in question. That’s one kind of thing he could conceivably be gone after. There’s this other thing, this cultural thing involving morals and shame – which I also largely agree with – which is also okay. My problem is when people confuse the two. You can’t legally go after him until he’s broken an actual law and someone can reasonably prove it. He can say he did anything he wants, that’s not against the law (yet). Anyone can try to shame him all they want – but that just seems to give him publicity and probably increases his porn profits somehow. You are me pointing this out doesn’t remotely imply we like the guy or approve of anything he’s said or maybe done. It’s just insisting that there be laws that apply equally to everybody and a process for enforcing them that’s applied equally to everybody. In other words, a rule of law.
The age of consent in Rumania seems to be 18 years. My question is not implying anything. It’s a question. Were you implying that Tate was involved with “young girls”. You seem to be suggesting that by saying the age of consent was 14 and Tate new it. Of course you don’t know what he knows, you can only guess. Why don’t you just wait for the process of justice to play out?
“You wrote that we can’t frown on his doings because he hasn’t broken the law,”
What I meant wasn’t that simple. What I wrote was “we can’t frown on one man challenging those norms and then make allowances for others.”
Of course you can reserve the right to frown on his behaviour. But that’s it. But there’s probably a lot of other things you frown on that don’t challenge social norms. You just find those things personally offensive. The suffragettes challenged social norms, so did gays. Social norms are like a benchmark that we assess things around, but they’re not fixed, People may object to his influence, but that’s not a crime. Unfortunately we do have to wait for him to commit a crime before we step in. If he was drawing underage girls in then he’s broken the law, but otherwise he’s just a creep. You can judge single mothers who keep having children, but that’s it. We don’t know why they do, maybe they want money, I don’t know. But if you’re going to coerce these people into behaviour you approve of then be prepared for people to coerce you over your behaviour they don’t like.
I don’t think there is any equivalence between women’s right to vote, Gay people not being persecuted, and the exploitation of young vulnerable girls, and I’m surprised you continue to imply that. I strongly suspect you don’t actually think there is a equivalence but dug yourself a bit of an inadvertent hole here. We all do that occasionally.
I think Tate was the wrong cultural warrior for anyone decent to be nailing their colours to. To underpin your points, which have some validity, you could have found someone much better.
“the exploitation of young vulnerable girls”
Would you like to define “young vulnerable girls”, just so we’re clear about what we’re discussing?
Youre correct, I don’t actually think there’s an equivalence between suffragettes, gays and Tate. That’s what you take from it. I was referring to historical challenges to social norms.
I don’t think he’s at all saying we can’t frown upon him. Just that we should not pervert the Law in order to follow up with punishment unless he has actually broken it.
And get told we are nasty and uncompassionate,and bitter and twisted
not sure on Romanian law, but Tate claims to favour young women aged 18-19 as they’ve had less partners which implies a degree of cleanliness. i suspect many of his Hustler Uni sign ups are of a similar age. All are old enough to have agency and yet young enough to still be naive enough to be easily exploited. However, I agree, the exploitation of adults, while in poor taste, not illegal last time I checked.
He isn’t much of a looker, I suspect his physique and multi million pound fortune is what attracts the ladies and so i struggle to be particularly sympathetic towards his alleged victims. It’s not as if he keeps his questionable views to himself.
Come on LS, he’s going to say 18-19 and not 14 isn’t he. He’s stupid but not that stupid. But he’ll have look he probably wanted – pre-pubescent – for a certain fee paying customer. And Rumania’s lower age of consent v handy for that. Sorry to be specific but this one reason why it’s so horrid this guy has become, or almost, a cause celeb.
How old were the alleged victims at the time of the exploitation? If they were children then surely the media would’ve been all over it like a rash.
I would also question whether he is stupid, arrogant certainly not sure about stupid.
“ pre-pubescent”
So now it’s pre- pubescent. It went from adults, to 14, to pre-pubescent.
I know mid-twenty year olds that have less “agency” as I think you mean it than some fourteen year olds. I cringe when I think how they vote. It’s a hard metric to judge. Most jurisdictions define rather arbitrarily some age of consent to protect young women from their being so exploited. Would that they could be so protected from the medical system that wants to transition similar bad choices to phantasmical “genders”.
I agree although I also cringe at the idea that we have to shift the age of adulthood to people in their thirties to protect stupid people from themselves
I’ve been saying for years ,(joke) that the age of consent should be raised to 32 so most people would,lol,get fed up of waiting and give up on it. It’s only a joke,a sour joke really but what if our to new bosses really did that. Ha ha. The thing is,one learns that for a lot of females the first and even subsequent experiences of sex are traumatic and unpleasant. Marianne Faithful had to get drunk and stoned to make sex with the Stones tolerable. It’s not what,in particular,us girlies are indoctrinated with from infancy practically. I love golden oldies but don’t listen to most of the lyrics too carefully or you realise they were written by randy young men saying the same thing Andrew Marvells was saying to his Coy Mistress.
I found it VERY puzzling in the Mrs Giraffe case that the ‘ legal age of consent” issue seemed to be infinitely flexible.. I always understood the age to be 16. Then found out in USA it varies from 16 – 18 by state. But then people were suggesting that aged 19 20,mid 20s even,the bad experience they had,and not what they were EXPECTING ,(it rarely is,),sort of meant they were REALLY in some paralegal way “under the age of consent’.
In the U.K. we have an age of consent for s3x and one for exploitation, this means if a girl is 16 or 17 and is being given gifts or payments in exchange for s3x, then the payee is breaking the law as they’re exploiting the youth involved. In the Guiffre case, she argued that PA knew that Epstein had trafficked her into the U.K. and paid her to have s3x with him. The argument was based on her exploitation under the age of 18.
Do we want to rebuke the abuse itself or merely the boasting of it? Exploiting…er, “leveraging,” the gap between the two is the “arbitrage” Mary’s writing about here. And what a delightful (rhetorical) use of the word “arbitrage”!
Boo Hoo nasty words.
Very interesting point. In the seventies I knew quite a number of people in commune movements and was a guest at several. What I noticed in the eighties (and probably related to your point) was how desolate and destitute many of the women were by then. I remember one woman in particular who had a child by a man who subsequently went off to Mexico with a high school girl, how she struggled to reconcile the primal indignity of it with the communal value system she had embraced. I talked to others who were rendered sterile by the series of STDs that rolled inevitably through these people, who would never even experience her indignity. As a young male I had been attracted to the life and what it looked like it promised. But I really could not look away from what it seemed to cost the women.
I guess they expected to live the life of a WAG.
Maybe they’ve all read 50 shades or any of the similar veined fan fic the internet is teeming with connected to hot millionaires/billionaires that have questionable practises but give it all up (said practises) for her because she is so special.
I once went to a philosophy lecture given by Bernard Williams. At the end of the lecture a militant feminist started ranting at him claiming women were being subjugated by romantic fiction and it was the fault of men (I guess now the patriarchy would be blamed). He replied that the question was ‘Why do women read it? ‘
Ha. That’s amusing. But I’ve been under the impression for a long time that modern romantic fiction is predominantly written by women.
I know but conspiracy theorists aren’t known for rationally debating topics.
It’s mostly women who write it too!
It’s actually patronising to see all his women sex workers as deluded innocent victims. I heard one of these women on the radio. She was a very down to earth sounding Ukranian lady.
She was very annoyed at having her business disrupted. She spoke with pride about how much money she had in the bank and she seemed perfectly understanding what she was doing.
Yes,I think she was wrong to prioritize money making, especially in unethical ways,but she did not sound like a victim to me
But there is the idiocracy factor. How many children to Julie and Mary have? How many can they have? How many has Andrew Tate and another like him had? Do they / would they even know?
I’m not sure the genetic argument holds up. Reminds me of something Nietzsche said in one of his books, to the effect that intelligence is a form of conceit – it prizes itself above all other things – but that it is not yet clear that it will survive in the end or that it is necessary at all.
So. Why does anyone have to be remembered. That’s a vain notion. So what if you live and then you die and no one notices. That gives you a lot of freedom. There is far too much pressure put on people to be a)creative ,b) and /or an economically active unit. Both can drive people nuts and cause intense mental harm. The man in the hammock on an island. The visitor wants to teach him how to work hard. Why? So that in 40 years time you’ll have enough money to lie in a hammock in the sun all day. But that’s what I’m doing now!
Tangential to the article itself (I hope that’s allowed on this website!): Is there some way to reduce the amount of porn we produce and consume as a species?
Not talking about putting the twerking genie all the way back in the bottle, just a partial reduction in global sleaziness and lurid titillation. It’s not merely a matter a consenting adults who choose to make and view this “content” when much of it is produced under coercive, exploitative, sometimes outright criminal conditions.
It’s not rare for this “adult content” to show people getting abused and humiliated–however voluntarily–so others can watch with enjoyment, or maybe horrified fascination that morphs into a type of pleasure. Some of these “stars” are very young adults that should be better protected from this level of exposure, if that’s possible. And millions of viewers (putting aside probable underage performers) are in the 12-17 age range.
Is it possible to rein in our overall pornografication, this lewd version of freedom? This is both a rhetorical appeal and a genuine question directed at the many thoughtful and intelligent people who post here.
“It’s an inability to see anyone else as such. In other words, treating every human vulnerability as an opportunity for arbitrage, and everyone other than oneself as at best a customer, and otherwise merely a thing to buy, sell, or consume.”
One of the reasons put forward for the success of Capitalism is that it fed directly into a human need and in the process produces a system that creates development and growth, which feeds back into this need.
But ultimately it reaches the point Mary makes because it’s a beast that cannot be satisfied. Big corporations are run by directors who appoint CEOs, the CEOs and Directors come and go, but the corporation keeps going, constantly fed year in and year out from the outside. The human need eventually turned to consuming its own vulnerabilities: shallow, fragile, vulnerable aspects of who and what we are ( there’s a limitless supply, and the same society went on to create more vulnerabilities) It’s a form of cannibalism, a diet of all the worst and confusing aspects of who we are. Maybe that explains so many of our problems and our incredulity at the outcomes.
Capitalism is the worst system except for all the other ones that have been tried. (apologies to Churchill).
Most of not all of the most extreme exploitation is actually illegal in most capitalist countries, which shows that the economic system per se is not the main issue. Although it is quite possibly to conceive that the porn industry, say, could subborn and corrupt politicians, I’m not aware of any significant case where this has happened. (It may have with drugs in some narco-states).
The problem with saying ‘capitalism’ is the problem is that the alternative path requires in every case a huge increase in state control and overt monitoring of every aspect of human life, as we saw with Marxist-Leninism. (That isn’t even to mention the generally huge numbers of people who are ‘controlled’ by the sophisticated expedient of killing them!)
There may be no easy answers, but the market must has limits and the power of corporations should certainly be limited. Perhaps disbar former political leaders from joining the boards of major corporations for an extended period. (I suppose they do need to find jobs, so the regulations need to be designed with care).
But Mary Harrington is correct; it is ultimately liberal ideology that acts as an acid, eroding more and more social norms over the years. Some of this can be experienced as liberating and beneficial by some, but there is no doubt that many become victims of the removal of societal norms based on ‘consent’ because the actors involved have vastly different levels of power.
“the alternative path requires in every case a huge increase in state control and overt monitoring of every aspect of human life”
Completely agree. But even if Capitalism is the best, which it undoubtedly is, Mary’s article has made me consider how Capitalism has created new markets (because all others are saturated) by exploiting our vulnerabilities and fears, then packaging them and selling them back to us . Facebook would be an sample, transitioning in youth, climate change, even freedom of speech. This is what erodes social norms. And the way it’s sold to us means we don’t even understand what’s happening and as I said it means we look at our problems with incomprehension.
Have they not always exploited vulnerabilities and fears? Look at the adverts. on TV – if you want to attract a mate wear this perfume/after-shave; if you want the envy of your friends for your good taste then buy this wine, wear this suit; if you don’t want your children to die a horrible death use this disinfectant and so on. There are very few products that are advertised by just telling you what it does and how much it costs; even the slogan “does exactly what it says on the tin” was exploiting our feeling that perhaps these adverts. are using us and being dishonest. Producers rely on getting us to buy things we don’t need and often never even wanted, so to get us to buy these products they have to create a need, and that is very often using our vulnerabilities and fears. I will concede that this is not always the case, but it is one of the main models used.
“so to get us to buy these products they have to create a need”
No they don’t do that. They target people who already perceive themselves in a certain light. Coca Cola don’t create a need, they target people who like to drink sugary, fizzy drinks. If someone doesn’t like Coke you’ll never get them to need it. Yes, they target such vulnerabilities as vanity, but in the end that’s about making people feel good. That’s not the same as actually commodifying fear, like climate change, or Covid. We’re not actually getting anything, like a bottle of perfume. Instead we’re getting anxiety and doubt, ideas about sex and gender, racism, free speech, extinction rebellion, things that don’t even make sense, things you can’t make sense of until in the end you just shut down.
Exactly. They exploit peer pressure, they don’t create it. They look for opinion leaders. Or what do they call them on social media?…influencers?
Neither Romania or Thailand or any of the other “sexual tourism” destinations strike me as particularly capitalistic in the large sense – most of their economies are highly controlled and strangled by the State. In fact, I wonder just how much “capital” is involved at all. Don’t confuse capitalism with what is more probably just commerce. Are there “corporations” with publically traded “shareholders” who are being paid dividends in Tate’s stock?
Capitalism seeks to create appetite. Capitalism feeds on envy, lust, greed and every other vice – not need. It is a beast which is completely out of control and is devouring everything in its path, eventually it will devour itself (Erysichthon, or Ourubus in which case something else will emerge from the carcass – on a more positive note). Those who have internalised a traditional moral code have some defence against the monster. Moral codes evolved out of experience to contain and control the negative aspects of human nature and enhance the survival prospects of the group.
“Capitalism seeks to create appetite.”
You make it sound like Capitalism was introduced to this planet by alien life to somehow gain control of the planet by creating some sort of appetite in us for … what? Capitalism has grown organically from society and continued to thrive because it does a number of things that satisfies people. Capitalism didn’t create the appetite, it responded to it.
I guess you object to my writing style. Effective imagery can be used to help communicate a complex idea. Originally Coca Cola contained cocaine which is addictive. That is one way of creating appetite. The whole point of advertising is to create an appetite for things people don’t need. Most societies taught moral codes through myth and religion. Aesop’s fables contain both moral warnings and advice. I recommend you listen to Jordan Peterson’s brilliant lectures on the Old Testament. I strongly suspect, the reason for the resilience and success of the Jews is linked to Old Testament dictats and wisdom. Even Richard Dawkins believes schoolchildren would benefit from being taught or studying the Bible.
Sorry, your babbling. I can’t understand what you’re getting at.
”The whole point of advertising is to create an appetite for things people don’t need.”
You already said that and I addressed it, you don’t have to agree with me but repeating it doesn’t make it anymore persuasive.
I elaborated pointing out Coca Cola contained cocaine. My point is capitalism exploits the defects of human nature and possession of a moral code, a framework for recognising temptation and potential exploitation, is some defence. A character who seduces women with expensive gifts and declarations of love and then exploits them is nothing new. You say I am babbling, I prefer to keep a discourse civil, but I shall make an exception for you as I suspect you enjoy a brawl. Educate yourself in the classics, the great works, you may find your life enriched and your understanding deepened if you do, as many others have over time – there is a reason why these works have stood the test of time. You come across as profoundly ignorant in this area.
While I agree with your point, you are abusing the concept of capitalism. What you are describing is commerce and trade and the fact that those who want to sell something will use every means they can come up with to increase their sales and its value. Capitalism is something different. It is the system which allows one to invest ones “capital” with legal rights attached to organizations which are supposed to use it to produce something that will generate a return on the invested capital. It is the most efficient system yet developed for producing returns for the largest number of people. (Banditry has a higher return in general but only for a few).
Some might say it is the most exploitative system. The separation of investment and product makes it much easier to ignore the suffering involved in production. Hence the tendency to locate manufacturing in countries where workers have fewer if any rights.
Coca Cola no longer contained cocaine from 1929. Since then people have been drinking it by choice, not because they’re addicted. I would hardly call a desire to drink Coke a human defect, unless you think thirst, or pleasure, is a defect. Your post suggests that these defects can only be offset with a moral code. Your reference to the Old Testament seems to confirm that. Though, of course, you’d be aware that moral codes vary across the world.
As for brawling, as you call it. why should I acquiesce to a vague understanding of advertising and the manipulative use of facts from the past to bolster your point of view and dismantle mine. You may not like it but you’re babbling.
It’s true Coca Cola no longer contains cocaine but that is how it initially gained popularity. If it still contained cocaine, I have no doubt it would be far more popular than it is. Coca Cola now relies on caffeine and sugar. It is possible to buy Coca Cola without caffeine or sugar but it is rarely stocked because people don’t buy it. I think your choice of the word babble is apt. Babies babble in the language they are destined to speak. It is the precursor to language. My comments are a precursor to what I intend to write. When I was young, I was intimidated and silenced by your kind. If told my ideas were babble, I would have believed it, and I was frequently told I had no idea what I was talking about. Then I didn’t realise it was because people just disagreed with or disliked what I was saying and wanted to shut me up. I guess that is why it became so incredibly important to me to be able to back up my ideas.
“It is possible to buy Coca Cola without caffeine or sugar but it is rarely stocked because people don’t buy it”
This is where you can expose your ignorance of Capitalism, and consequently leads me to question your point if view.
If people didn’t buy Coke without caffeine or sugar then the company wouldn’t produce it. No one is going to manufacture a product people don’t want. But according to your theory the Coca Cola Corporation should be able to create a need for it and then the shelves would be stacked with it because people would be seeking the product to assuage the desperate need that’s been created in them by tge Coke corporation. But according to you they don’t because the shelves are empty.
Coca-Cola without caffeine or sugar is advertised as the guilt-free version which I think rather proves my point. The government were going to introduce legislation to limit sugar content, I don’t know if it was actually implemented, and so companies were producing lower sugar version of products but they didn’t sell.
I don’t mind disagreement but please stop trying to sell me factoids. Zero sugar or low sugar Coke makes up 43% of their sales.
low sugar haS caffeine in it. What percentage of the sales has neither caffeine nor sugar?
The word Capitalism is a creation of marxism. People buy and sell.
Farmers sell food, they do not create appetites. hedging started with Greek farmers over 2500 years ago .There have been laws concerning property and sale of goods since civilisation began in order to prevent fraud.
Mostly to collect taxes and prevent tax fraud
There is great confusion between wants and needs highlighted by Shakespeare in King Lear – O reason not the need! Our basest beggar is in the poorest thing superfluous.
You know, quoting Shakespeare doesn’t make you smarter than others. There is no confusion between wants and needs. People make choices. If they like to think a want is a need then that’s up to them. Who’s to decide what people need? Though we do know of a movement in history that did “know” what people needed that ended up in mass starvation. It’s always interesting to find in people who live by a moral code how they have such a low opinion of humanity.
Just google confusing wants and needs. It is a topic in psychology. It is an issue addressed by psychotherapists. Advertisers are in the game of confounding the two.
Smart is an odd word.
In the past, pretty much every child in the country studied at least one Shakespeare play. I quoted Shakespeare to demonstrate the confusion between wants and needs is a feature of human nature. Shakespeare is generally recognised to be the greatest playwright of all time and King Lear to be the greatest of his plays; the confusion between wants and needs is one of the themes in the play. I believe in consulting the greats and I thought you might prefer reading up on Shakespeare’s exposition rather than reading mine.
You think I have a negative opinion of human nature. I know I am a realist. Are you familiar with Milgram’s experiments? Do you ever wonder at the silence and cooperation of the majority of Germans between 1933 and 1944? Do you think those people were essentially different from you?
I truly believe if anyone wants to write anything of genuine worth then they must study the greats first. When I was young, I had the idea that one day I would write philosophy. I used Plato as my mentor. He said anyone who wanted to be a philosopher had to study maths first (so I did) and should not start writing until they were at least 50. Plato despaired of human nature.
I believe in redemption but there is no redemption without acknowledging one’s darker side, in Jungian terms – incorporating the shadow into consciousness. There is the most beautiful poem – The fullness of time by James Stephens – which fits in with my ideas and the incredibly beautiful poem – The Judas Tree by Ruth Etchells.
As we’ve now reached the point of name checking: Shakespeare, Plato, Jung, et al, and how educated we are it might be a good time to mention that I did a unit on Shakespeare’s The Tempest. You may know of it. It’s an interesting play, that among other things, includes the subject of emerging Capitalism. If you don’t know it I recommend it.
The Tempest is brilliant but my interpretation would be babble to you. I would say I am well read not educated. Anyone who can read can be well read.
I am interested in alternative interpretations of the Tempest. I didn’t know capitalism is a theme. I shall look into it to see if I agree. As I said, I am well read not educated which means I frequently see things in completely different way to the educated.
Though I often find myself disagreeing with things you say, you sound like an interesting person.
By the way, you have it wrong about that line of Lear. Lear is talking about how existing on needs only reduces us to nothing more than animals. A bit like Communism.
I am not wrong. The speech is in response to his daughters taking away everything on the basis he doesn’t actually need any of it. The play is about his transformation through suffering. Initially he believes Reagan and Goneril’s flattery and is offended by Cordelia’s honesty. The embellished false language that convinces him Regan and Goneril love him mirrors his belief he needs all the things Regan and Goneril take from him. At the end of the play, he realises that Cordelia’s plain language was true, her love real and that he doesn’t need what he had believed he needed.
Fair enough, Taking a line out of context is never wise.
From my limited education and experience, it appears that the seven deadly sins to which you refer are, and have been, central features of every recorded human society. To decry capitalism because it fits with reality is without substance. At least capitalism is the best mechanism for the production of wealth in a society, with the ancillary benefits of better health, less hunger, and time for activities beyond bare survival. A meaningful condemnation of capitalism, in my opinion, requires the definition of a superior alternative.
I completely agree. I am actually working of an alternative (hopefully superior). Obviously, I cannot relate it in a comment. It has been a lifetime’s work and elements of it appear in my comments. If you consider your education limited, why don’t you do something about it. There are incredible lectures on YouTube. It is easier now than it has ever been to learn as long as you don’t limit yourself to a single perspective. I am fortunate in that my formal education was mostly mathematics and computing as I suspect it is harder to teach oneself the hard sciences and my knowledge and experience of maths and computing means I understand physics to a certain extent. I studied psychology as well and discovered cognitive psychology is effectively psychology written in terms of the C programming language.
“elements of it appear in my comments”
I having trouble finding those, could you highlight them for me?
You call it babble. I have tried to understand Plato’s Timaeus many times. It would be incredibly easy to dismiss it as babble, and I have no doubt you would dismiss it as such if I presented it to you and pretended I had written it. I have been trying to understand it for 30 years and have only recently begun to understand some of it.
Slow reader, eh?
How about you go and read it then explain it to me.
Over the years I’ve decided I prefer the warrior-king to the philosopher-king. But that probably doesn’t surprise you.
Plato was a warrior before being a philosopher. He believed it was necessary to have lived a life before becoming a philosopher. The closest thing there has been to a philosopher king was Alexander the Great who was taught by Aristotle (Plato’s pupil) and was one of the greatest warriors of all time.
So would you say the path to improvement involves abandoning a free-market system, or placing more limits on the worst excesses of a market economy?
“would you say the path to improvement involves abandoning a free-market system”
No, I wouldn’t agree to that. I grapple with the idea of Capitalism constantly, swinging back and forward from anger to realistic acceptance. In the end I have to accept that having, as I said, grown organically in human society, then I have to accept it being flawed just as we are. It’s interesting how so many judge the likes of Trump for avoiding taxes but have no trouble with tradesman doing cash jobs. How do we place limits on Capitalism and how do we implement them without interfering in what seems to be a natural process? Generally I think the world does pretty well out of Capitalism. I think it does more good than harm. The problem isn’t really Capitalism but human behaviour. That’s not going away, whatever system we live under. I don’t like it that people murder others, but they do and always have. People do that, but not most people. We live with that.
Fair enough. As a former tradesman, I judge Trump for stiffing contractors and their workers more than for being a tax evader. I would note that just something being common, say among tradespeople or common business folk, doesn’t make it totally okay in a president. A national leader should be above average, and not merely in net worth or famousness.
Tribalism and even monarchy seem more “organic” to me than capitalism. though I’d rather have even this runaway version of a market economy than one the other two systems. I suppose one could claim that anything that occurs is organic, but not therefore good or unchangeable. For example: murder will always exist, but the number of murders in America is unacceptable. Agreed? We can, I would hope, face things without throwing up our hands or retiring into a form of “‘acceptance” that call the worst things natural or organic, as though they are therefore unchangeable in any way.
As the sexual and societal differences between men and women erode, men become more boorish and women become more hardened.
I very much doubt that your claim is true. Men are becoming more boorish? Than when, exactly?
Strong women have always existed. Were the suffragettes timid wallflowers?
What you’re describing is simply a product of increased media reportage. Just as some think the world is a more violent place nowadays, due to increased exposure to events that would previously have gone unnoticed, it’s a myth.
‘More hardened’, not ‘stronger’.
I would’ve written “hardened women” but was being careful not to confuse with trans women…
Seems like men are becoming more sullen and withdrawn.
I went to the beach today and was surrounded by parents and children, men and women enjoying each other’s company and both playing with their children.
And the orchestra played on.
Is our figurative ship sinking faster in recent years?
In defence of Julian’s point, personally I think it’s quite reasonable to say that social mores and manners have clearly both hardened and coarsened since the sexual revolution: which lets face it, was sort of the point of the sexual revolution. You can’t really have a sexual revolution and still have widespread chivalry: the manners and actions that make up chivalry are not ubiquitous to human societies; they are the product, in the West, of several centuries of Christianity which we have now overthrown.
Our children today have direct access at 15 to contraception, direct access (as soon as they can type) to hardcore pornography – including perversions – all within a prevailing normative sexual ethic that views sex as essentially transactional and ‘Consent’ as the only moral benchmark. This reality clearly has an effect on our manners and behaviour; all of us. The fact that the suffragettes were clearly strong women and families still have plenty of fun at the beach doesn’t address this sea change in human behaviour.
Given the utter vacuum of sexual morality presented to young people today, and the Andrew Tates (et al) who have rushed to fill this void, it is perfectly fair to say that – although the Andrew Tates have ALWAYS existed – our daughters at the school disco are more at danger from them today than they were thirty years ago: let alone at the ‘leavers ball’ or ‘country dance’ eighty years ago.
Don’t think there has been any change in sexual differences!
I’m glad you wrote this Mary. Viz discussion in the comments and ‘the rush to judgement’, legal and moral judgement are not the same thing. It’s quite possible he was set up in some way.There is certainly a double standard at play (no great rush to get those on Epstein’s client list).
But to see conservatives/right wing people defending him and liberals full of righteous outrage is rather galling.
He’s a terrible man. Nothing to do with conservatism. He’s the end product of Enlightenment hyper-individualism and the sexual revolution. The end state of progressivism. Conservatives ….I’m struggling with vocabulary….non-woke people, post-liberals,Christians….should not let liberals disown one of their own. Tate and GretaThunberg are two ends of the same spectrum: atavistic market individualism/liberalism versus cosmopolitan progressive liberalism. They are both liberal in the sense of: (i) being tied to a vision of sovereign individual agents – disembedded, abstract and increasingly unhinged (Tate’s libertine depravity mirrors the narcissism of transgender activists); (ii) a default globalism: she as an advocate and puppet of the eco-modernist, transhumanist project of the UN/WEF (Kingsnorth’s ‘Machine’); he because he’s a rich playboy, who has zero allegiance to any particular place or community and treats the world as his personal playpen; (iii) they are post-Christian secularists who have lost any transcendent meaning framework but benefit from the residue of Christian virtue in the wider society (Tate in so far as he claims equal treatment under the law – a legal sentiment that derives from the Imago Dei).
In alt-right trash speak, Greta and the WEF are ‘communists’. For progressives, everyone on the right is a ‘neo-liberal’. The odd thing is that contemporary communists and neo-liberals are pretty much on the same side. This is not some strange logic of real politic. It is because, on this left right spectrum, the statist-left and the market-right both share an anti-relational vision of atomised, Cartesian, individuals – disembedded from each other and from God. Thunberg and Tate represent secularism on steroids. Communists take those atomised individuals and their gig is to collectivise them; corporatists use the market to aggregate them; debauched libertarians just celebrate them as they are – to be used, abused and exploited. They are all on the same side because they start from these disembodied, disembodied individuals who owe nothing to anyone or anything. This same logic underpins the rush to transhumanism, which is the diabolical end game. The UN will licence it. The WEF will create the technologies. Progressives will use it to smash what remains of the family, liberate women from their bodies, edit the human genome to rid us of troubling diversity (irony much) and create a society of motherless monsters. The ‘communists’ will use it to control the masses on an unprecedented scale and in hitherto undreamt of ways. And the libertarians and rich degenerates like Andrew Tate will use it to exploit people.. floating like shit in the resulting cess pool….always on the top, but always destined for a darker place of their own making.
The opposite of the Market is not the State. The Market-State is rather the antithesis of Livelihood, which is to say the nested web of family, friend, community relations into which we are born. It starts with marriage and motherhood. This is why both Andrew Tate and his progressive/feminist detractors are on the same side. They dismiss relational bonds, hate marriage and have no time for Love. They are against natural law and against God. They deny the human condition which is to be born into dependency and in to relation with our mother, our father, our families, our neighbours, our communities and with God. If there is a hell, I was going to say Greta and Tate should be stuck in an elevator for eternity. But I wouldn’t wish that on any woman, and she’s just a child. So I guess Tate get’s his own elevator and company.
Sorry to break it to you, but Tate was an Orthodox Christian for many years and has recently converted to Islam… I’m only 98% convinced that it’s a genuine conversion. A part of me thinks it might be one of his moves in the great chess game of life.
I suggest you go and watch some of his long form interviews from the last 6 months… perhaps the one with Zuby. I think you may be more on the same page than you initially think.
He seems to have matured a little since the videos the media are pushing we’re made (back in the day when he was very extreme in order to get views).
FYI, I suspect his arrest is a set up and designed to scare him into shutting up (which he won’t do), but time will tell. He’s almost certainly done very dodgy stuff in the past which is inevitably coming back to bite him.
What is the point of these references to his being “an Orthodox Christian” or a convert to Islam? And how do you know, or so strongly (98%) believe that he actually genuinely practiced either of these religious faiths?
I have seen no actual evidence that he was ever the former, and what little I have learned about him – courtesy almost entirely of these comments – suggests that at best if he practiced any religious faith it was or is performative.
I don’t care what he says he is or has been. His actions are of a pagan libertine….Atheism is just another kind of paganism, different Gods
Interesting back story thanks – I’d agree that the conversion to Islam probably does point out to some kind of maturing and perhaps contrition.
Paying tax, giving away some of his ill gotten gains and respecting the integrity and humanity of young women – and also saying sorry, would indicate some kind of maturing and contrition. Anything else is just social-media performance…..like Meghan Markle saying sorry, or Kim Kardashian giving away an old thong for charity.
Funny example on Kardashian, didn’t know that. I suspect he’ll do (may have done) the equivalent of those things yet in an Islamic context, so we may not get to hear much of them.
This is by far my favorite comment to this essay. It’s too bad it’s so far down the stack.
I’ll add only that Tate strikes me like I think Hugh Hefner probably struck people back in his heyday.
Tate is just Jack Murphy playing a gopniks idea of what a cool guy is. Jack Murphy was a failed academic turned pornographer turned e grifter guru rw commentator, Tate is the same except he’s a failed kickboxer. Tate’s fake persona is a copy of his Bosnian/ Eastern European kickboxing coach and training partners. Hasan Piker is another one, minus the porno. Before being the cool not dysgenic weakling leftist character he tried the pua grift
“hell-evator” pairings! funny notion.
I had the bad luck to become a young adult in the early 1970s when Germaine Greer and all the other lying toads were in their pomp. The BBC loved GG (they were pretty fond of a certain Mr Saville too) because she could be guaranteed to say something outrageous. It took a couple of decades but men learned to be restrained and diffident and caring. And what happened the women dumped them for that violent dangerous guy. Because dodgy dangerous guys are exciting and alluring. Sorry but it’s true. It’s worth Holding Out For A Hero which means of course that it’s worth being a “Hero” as the hottest chicks will give it up to you.
I’m speaking from the viewpoint of being a female but not a hot chick,never was,but I still get how the psychology works. It’s SO not true that men and women are THE SAME and the obvious physical differences are just biology and behavioral differences cultural.
And here we have the intellectual might of the conservative movement on display!!! With a Bonnie Tyler reference, no less!!
Remember Culloden!
All true.
It’s amusing to see all these commentators
falling over themselves to condemn Tate.
A man that these woke prigs know nothing about.
I think we know he’s a human trafficking pornographer who is facing a long time in a Romanian jail. We also know that he yells and swears a lot in his hideous accent. He dresses like a nightmare. He lives in a Bucharest housing estate with his equally odious brother. He gets mocked by slightly odd Swedish teenagers and then lots of people laugh at him.
What else is there?
>I think we know
So “we” have a surface level knowledge, exactly what the Stoater D said. Let me enlighten you. He blew up on social media within a year with his claims to fame being a kickboxing world champion (he has a belt from a very low tier organization) and a guru millionaire. Apart from his e-girl business he offered courses and mentorship at “Hustlers University”. Recently he became muslim and moved to Dubai, after very actively promoting Romania and Eastern Europe
I don’t know what makes this Tate character any different than a long line of powerful and abusive people over the last 5,000 years. Wasn’t having what you want the main purpose of just about every conquering tribe?
That’s why something like 8 percent of Central and East Asian people share some genes that trace back to Genghis Khan.
The more succesful (and thus also rich) you were the more women you had access to so I totally believe that 95% of mongolians have genes from GK. Some people dont believe this but having done my family history I’ve seen how descendants multiply
So he’s like an internet Attila?
the internet has further de-territorialised the ways in which one may misbehave.
Really? The CCP has used the internet to reach around the globe to intimidate and control their diaspora.
Blame J S Mill? Really? As he noted, jerks like Tate are indeed a small, very very small minority. And we have laws that constrain him.
Tate is a jerk who should be ignored and ridiculed unless he has done something illegal in which case he should be prosecuted.
“I don’t really care how men speak about women when we aren’t around, for example.”
Well gosh, that is frightfully good of you, but I suppose by modern collectivist standards that makes you a paragon of tolerance. But I am still resolved to never allow Alexa or its like in my home in case you have a change of heart.
Am I alone in asking who is Andrew Tate?
Never heard of him two weeks ago and since then have encountered his name in half-a-dozen places. Very, very, light skinned African-American-Briton. Father was an international chess master and Andrew was very good also. He turned to learning kickboxing when he was 19 (born 1986) and by his mid-twenties he was one of the best in the world in his weight categories. Turned his hand to various dubious businesses and today is worth 300 million dollars. Currently in jail in Romania (where he lives) for a short time.
Apparently he was never in jail. The police questioned him, searched his house, found no evidence, and decided there was no case to answer.
A young women at one of his parties was seen online by her boyfriend. As an excuse for attending she told her boyfriend she had been forced to attend and wasn’t allowed to leave. The boyfriend (a true believer in the BelieveAllWomen nonsense) called the police and reported that she was being held captive.
The police responded but dismissed the case since CCTV images showed she had communicated with him while alone outside the gates of the property taking delivery of pizza for the group.
Apparently the police didn’t find anyone being held captive on the property, no drugs, and nothing illegal.
Tate isn’t stupid and he isn’t what the left paint him as. Many men and women agree with his views. I suspect most of the people condemning him here have only ever read or heard the biased feminist reports. Check out his YouTube interview on JustPearlyThings if you want to know the real person.
A good and fair post.
If you believe that this putz is worth 300 million dollars then I have a bridge you may be interested in looking at…
Not at all – I didn’t know who he was until this erupted. But then I don’t do social media (other than comments sections like this).
No.
By the same logic Kim Jong Un is Erasmus’ monster. Write about Tate if you like but what he has to do with JS Mill or indeed any philosopher is beyond me. It’d be a lot easier to show the link between Marx brothers comedy and Schopenhauer. I have read Unherd since early 2018 and responded with $s to the begging emails for 3 yrs straight. NGL this is probably the last time. I hope Unherd don’t follow the Guardian and take from any card no they find without asking….if so it will be reported to the card issuer as fraud.
I was going to offer up “then Hitler was Nietzsche’s monster” but upon reflection decided too many people would ignorantly agree.
Odd. I’ve always thought of Hitler as Nietzsche’s monster, kind of like a final still abstract stop after following the likes of Hegel, and before the final solution when things get physical.
Maybe read some. It will disabused you of that notion. Kaufman translations are reliable.
Spot on Mary. Thanks for writing the big brained version of what I was thinking. Now I have some more meaty ammunition to fire off at those who seem to think this guy is ‘cool’…
Hacking persistent patterns in human nature for profit is exactly what many large companies do on a consistent and regular basic. In fact it is the core function of a many diverse and successful businesses, covering everything from technology to cosmetics. To single out Andrew Tate is ludicrous in the extreme and shows just how badly Mary Harrington has be blinded by her own implicit bias.
The other accusation that Tate and his associates are guilty of: “misrepresenting their intention to enter into a marriage/cohabitation relationship” is equally ridiculous, which is obvious to anyone who takes a moment to consider how common this is in interactions between men and women. Indeed, both sexes are guilty of this on a regular basis.
In the ongoing war between the sexes no man with any survival instinct will find fault with Tate for exploiting the gap between liberal feminist theory and actual real-world differences between the sexes.
Talk of “implicit bias” is for squishes. Her bias (and “survival instinct”) is admirably explicit. She is your adversary!
She creates an ideological framework and then presents her case within that framework. Inevitably her arguments appear rational and reasonable. If you recognise the framework and step outside its constrictions then her arguments fall apart. Men agreeing with and supporting women are the “useful idiots” of today. Like sheep helping the hungry wolf find its next meal.
So it’s in your best interest to thwart and antagonize all women, except to satisfy your own hunger and thirst?
If so, or even anything close to that, I wouldn’t call that an unbiassed view on your part, whatever “framework” it’s situated in.
When you start out regarding someone as your enemy because of their physical characteristics or presumed views, you’re not headed toward a fair assessment of what they have to say.
Their views are hardly “presumed,” they are documented in numerous books, of which I have read several dozen. My “fair assessment” is based on what they have written.
I think you’re talking about women or feminists as a group. Harrington is hardly some parrot of a single ideology and deserves to be read for her own views despite her admitted feminism and seeming fault in having been born female. I wouldn’t automatically associate you with the view of every man, or even every misogynist, that’s ever lived.
Check out her interview with Freddie deBoer on this website if you have the time and patience.
“Prosecutors allege that the six potential victims in this case were subject to “physical violence and mental coercion through intimidation, constant surveillance, control and invoking alleged debts”, which Tate denies.”
What about this accusation? Is this also common in interactions between men and women? Are both sexes really guilty if this on a regular basis?? Also, he admitted he wanted to move to Romania because laws against rape are more lenient. Or, put another way, rape is more difficult to prove there. It seems like you left out a couple important details while dismissing Mary’s article as ‘ridiculous’,.
“What about this accusation?”
At this point that’s all it is.
It seems like you left out a couple important details while dismissing Mary’s article as ‘ridiculous’,.
How on earth can this piece of human detritus be worth 118 comments! *
(As at 17.55 hrs GMT.)
Tate is a piece of dirt for sure. He confuses masculinity with self centred savagery.
Like Tate is exploiting young women sexually, he is seducing young men morally.
“On Liberty argues that the proper role of government is acting as a backstop, imposing a minimum level of coercive authority when personal freedom threatens to harm another. It’s a pared-down approach to social and moral order that has defined a great deal of public social policy since, across both Left and Right.”
Really Mary? I would argue that every aspect of social and moral order has become so hyper-regulated that there is not a single dark corner of our lives that is not subject to some kind of government surveillance and control. Just wait till we implement the Chinese social credit system (coming to a country near you). The very opposite of a ‘pared down approach’ in my view.
I’ve long thought the clearest example we have of ‘persistent sexed differences’ is the sexual and mating behavior of lesbians vs. gay men. We lesbians are well known for quick emotional attachment, hence the ‘second date Uhaul’ trope. The gay men I’ve known, on the other hand, have mostly been in sexually open relationships even when coupled. Lesbians value intimacy; gay men prize looks and anonymous sex. These are stereotypes, of course, and like all stereotypes they erase complexity, but they also have an absolute cultural truth. And this is what sexed behavior looks like in humans when it’s unmitigated by having to accommodate the opposite sex.
Noticed Mills as the father of hyperindividualism about 5 years ago. He liked individuals who were like him and happy to push them under if he could. 2 votes for people like him and 1 vote for the rest is a good example.
Yet his defense of women’s rights, private non-violent strangeness, and freedom of conscience made him an important thinker well ahead of his time, often in a good way. Like many dead white males (or even living black females) I think his work is a mixed bag that doesn’t deserve a slam-dunk dismissal.
The first thing that pops into my mind reading about this bloke is not JS Mill but Bronze Age Pervert.
Lots of excellent comments.
I will add one thing that seems to have been missed.
At some point we stopped holding ourselves accountable to bad behavior. We stopped calling people out for doing incorrect things abd bad behavior. Young people stopped being scolded, everyone started tolerating indisciplined insensitive sociopathic behavior with a shrug and an uttering of “it is what it is” and “it’s not personal”.
This was partly because we’ve become conflict averse and only take a stand when part of a(n online) mob. Partly because we’ve become lazy. Partly because we associate any sense of order and protocol, any sense and values with right wingery and Nazism. Partly because by lowering everyone’s standards we feel life is easier to live.
Over time, gradually, this evolves into tolerance for outright criminality, which even then is tolerated as some sort of entrepreneurial achievement – “It’s only business”.
Tate has happened because we stopped scolding someone for being a little s*it back in the day.
Tate sounds like a psychopath: with his view — put profitably into practice — that all relationships are transactional, and deceit and exploitation of women for his own profit, is perfectly OK.
“The misogynist hustler has pursued the logic of individualism”
Hmmm, you forgot to mention he converted to Islam.
Anyway, Tate is an idiot and a fool. Why even bother writing about such a warbling vacuum?
“Anyway, Tate is an idiot aand a fool.”
And has achieved far more than you ever will.
You really don’t know the man.
Stop virtue signalling.
Can’t blame J.S. Mills for ‘free-market’ global capitalism… or can you?
Tate is a Beta male pretending to be an Alpha; Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons are his marks.
I don’t know whether Mary is strictly a conservative, but she does share the conservatives’ tiresome complaint that exploitation for sex and money is the logical conclusion of individualism. Individualism has a deeper meaning that just laissez-faire. Philosophers from Immanuel Kant to Ayn Rand would agree that the individual is an end in himself and not merely a means for others’ ends. Individualism elevates the person. Tate, if he’s guilty as charged, is not an individualist because he does not treat women as human beings to be reasoned with, but rather as vulnerable girl-women to be manipulated.
Nice article. Also works once again to highlight the hypocrisy of the Right-wing in UK showing adulation to a groomer such as Tate, simultaneously decrying the same behaviour from grooming gangs as a supposedly unique foreign cultural influence.
We don’t know if he is a ‘groomer’. There has clearly been more enthusiasm to investigate Tate than the gangs around Britain. The problem with the ‘ethnic gangs’ is that their ethnic group seems to be vastly over represented AND that the Establishment wasn’t willing, due to their ethnicity, to investigate/condemn/punish them.
Once we know more about what Tate did then we/the Right/everyone will be able to decide if he deserves condemnation and punishment.
Have you read the article above?
You take him at his word? I have zero facts myself and don’t like the image he presents, but clearly it is possible he is being misleadingly provocative for clicks.
If this is meant as a retort to my complaint on Right-wing hypocrisy, my answer is that I find it hard to believe you nodded your head in agreement when news in the past were sayings things like: “a man shouted Allahu Akbar and then detonated himself killing civilians, we don’t know the motive yet”
Not a retort, just pointing out that a bomb detonation is an act in the world that everyone can agree happened or not. Doesn’t really matter what the detonator said. But in Tate’s case all we have that I know of is words, and people lie all the time for any number of reasons.
Anyone who paid attention knew his wealth came from webcam pornography. Whilst I daresay some women who do this retain control you don’t need to be Einstein to immediately think I might want to be more circumspect about this fella before I support him as a Cultural warrior. It is a big red alarm bell for me. I think elements of the Right jumped too soon onto this without engaging brain first and were suffering from acute myopia.
I find it hilarious we have a near perfect complement to what happened with grooming gangs here. The problem was never about supporting confirmed grooming cases, it’s about turning a blind eye to it until it becomes impossible to ignore for your preferred perpetrators. In that case, the prosecutors/police ignored ongoing grooming for fear of being labelled racist etc. In this case here, the man has pretty much publicly said he’s a groomer, but people are going out of their way to give him benefit of the doubt for fear of disgracing a Right-wing celebrity.
Absolutely. The rush to judgement is surprising. No one has to like him but let’s see how things pan out before leaping in,
Exactly right.
Last time I checked, Tate’s alleged victims are adults, not children. Not quite as comparable as you seem to think.
But seems now you can choose to ‘self identify ” as a child unable to consent.
Maybe you can even “self identify” as a virgin!
Or a “victim”.
This is the problem that arises if a person chooses a tribe and then insists on defending said tribe to the “death”. All that is needed is consistency and asking oneself the question “is it the behaviour that I disapprove of or the person/tribe exhibiting that behaviour?”. A similar instance was the number of people who approved of the Canadian truck drivers’ blockade but disapproved of Extinction Rebellion’s blockade (and the other way round, but that was not voiced on this site). Here it seems to be a case of it’s ok to do something if I approve of you position, but not if I don’t approve; either blockading is acceptable to make your point or it’s not.
You bring up a good point. Privately, while I didn’t agree with XR’s blockades, but did sympathize with the Canadian truckers, I did think that both groups had a right to protest. However, my impression of most commentators here wasn’t so much that they were hypocritical in their judgement of either group, but that they were condemning the uneven treatment of various groups by government institutions. We saw this during COVID lockdown times when BLM riots and gay parades were tacitly permitted, but anti-vaccine and trucker protests were harshly dealt with via bank freezes and heavy-handed police treatment.
Agree. That’s why what this issue comes down to is the problem of our time: Go Tribal or Rule of Law?
That’s because the Canadian truckers were standing up for freedom,and if you dont get it now you will when.that microchip in your wrist stops you entering Tesco. The ERs are stupid people who wish theyd been alive in the 1960s and their grandparents who were alive and at 60s demos but then got jobs,got married,bought.a house,joined the village gardening club. They all live in west Dorset.
They are actually pushing the Great Reset agenda. There is a huge difference.