So you’ve heard about the whole GameStop thing, right? The denizens of a stock trading subreddit have collectively levitated the stock price of troubled game retailer GameStop up roughly a kajillion percent since last fall, screwing over several hedge funds that were betting on the company’s stock going down the toilet. (You can get all the gory details of what’s going on here.)
While most outside observers seem to find the entire situation pretty fucking funny — rooting for the retail investors getting one over the hedge fund assholes for once — others saw it as a symptom of the “unruly mob” taking over trading. (Never mind that traders have always been an unruly mob.)
One of those most concerned about the GameStop story — and its possible future ramifications — is Scott Galloway, a tech/business guru who teaches marketing at New York University and who, judging from the pictures of him I’ve seen online, could probably beat up your dad.
Anyway, this Chadly professor blames the whole GameStock thing on … incels.
He elaborates a little more in several followup tweets:
Now, there are a few problems with this, er, analysis. One is that we don’t actually know the demographics of those promoting and/or buying GameStop stock. Indeed, when the New York Times spoke with several recent GameStop buyers they ranged from a 16-year-old high school student (incel status: unknown) to a married couple in their late twenties (incel status: highly unlikely).
But a columnist for the GuardianUS had a more pointed critique:
I can’t help but be reminded of the creepy talk about “sexual redistribution” we saw back in 2018 after the Toronto van attack brought the issue of incels to the fore. I wrote a piece for Vice at the time detailing some of the darker implications of the idea that sex could be redistributed like government cheese:
George Mason University economist Robin Hanson suggested in a now-infamous blog post that “involuntary celibacy” and “sexual inequality” in general could be fixed, and violence reduced, if we as a society set out to “redistribute” sex more equally.
How, exactly, Hanson thinks this could be done isn’t clear, though his post vaguely referenced the idea that “[s]ex could be directly redistributed, or cash might be redistributed in compensation.” After some critics pointed out that this “direct redistribution” of sex sounded an awful lot like government-sponsored sex slavery, Hanson added a defensive update to his original post. “Sex choices are influenced by a great many factors and each such factor offers a possible lever for influencing sex inequality,” he wrote, suggesting “promoting monogamy and discouraging promiscuity” as two options. “Rape and slavery are far from the only possible levers!” …
Just over a week after the van attack, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat entered the fray, piggybacking off of Hanson’s bad ideas in a column arguing that “the sexual revolution created new winners and losers, new hierarchies to replace the old ones, privileging the beautiful and rich and socially adept in new ways and relegating others to new forms of loneliness and frustration.”
If society doesn’t clamp down on this kind of “promiscuity,” Douthat ominously warned, the inexorable “logic of late-modern sexual life” would inevitably lead to a Hanson-esque “sexual redistribution” that today’s casual-sex-havers might find a tad horrifying. Either that or everyone would turn to sex robots; Douthat was a little vague about it all. In the Spectator, a few days later, columnist Toby Young seconded the sexbot solution, arguing that “robot girlfriends” could be a “workable” cure for “sexual inequality” and incel mass murders.
Feminists responded to the “redistribution of sex” talk with a mixture of horror and wonder: horror at the real-world implications of this strangely abstract and antiseptic discussion, wonder at the sheer obtuseness of those pushing the idea. “We can’t redistribute women’s bodies as if they are a natural resource,” Jia Tolentino wrote in the New Yorker, “they are the bodies we live in.”
If Scott Galloway has a better way in mind to redistribute sex to allegedly sexless stock traders on Reddit, I’d like to hear it, because as of right now — with sex robots more than a few years into the future — Hanson and Douthat’s terrible ideas are the best we’ve got, and they are breathtakingly bad.
The real problem isn’t that some stock traders aren’t having sex; it’s that we rely so heavily on what is basically a lightly regulated casino to take care of financing businesses — and providing for our retirements. Let’s get to work on reforming that and leave Redditors to take care of their sex lives without any form of public assistance.
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Meanwhile, I’m just laughing at the hypocrisy of the people who have treated the economy as their personal casino for years complaining about the plebians beating them at their own crooked game. Isn’t the whole point of a hedge fund supposed to be about managing risks?
… maybe this actually IS the way for us to finally get those financial regulations on trading that are so badly needed. Just start flipping tables by toppling hedge funds, one by one. Abuse the system worse than they do, chip away until all its worst weaknesses are exposed. Eventually they’ll HAVE to regulate.
I’ve only marginally been following the stock story, but I did see Galloway’s shit takes. I haven’t had sex since before the pandemic, yet somehow I’m not busy screwing with the stock market.
That said, I do think we need more regulation, and I don’t feel sorry for the hedge funds. They’re rich, they need a taste of their own medicine once in a while.
Yeah, my husband and I spend a lot of time playing games together and we still have plenty of sex and a strong relationship.
Another thing that I’ve seen to be a problem with men my age as to why they have trouble getting long lasting relationships or they are not happy with causal sex they do have is because they blow up their expectations with porn. They expect it to be like the porn they spend hours watching and then when it’s not they are disappointed, frustrated, all of that and of course no woman wants to be in the relationship with the guy who disconnected himself to how physical relationships actually are.
It’s kind of like all those studies that show that being on instagram and all of that leads to decrease in mental health because you see people living an “ideal” life and you feel bad for not having what is show on the screen.
So at the end of the day, it’s not actually women’s fault for not sleeping with the creepy or lonely dudes. It’s the fact the creepy or lonely dude have made their expectations ungodly high and put sex/ relationships on such a pedestal that when they get confronted with the fact that humans are human and are flawed individuals they don’t want it and destroys any connections they could have made.
Frankly, the only news story I want to read about GameStop is when they file for bankruptcy.
Personally, I think the sex robots can’t arrive fast enough.
What? Does this Jia person know what she’s talking about? Does she actually live in a body?
Reminds me of when Porsche bught out VW Group in a surprise move some years back. Hedge fund managers crying into their beer then too. What amounts to a game of chance will always give pro players bad days now and then.
Capitalism is just grown-up gender conforming exploitative bullshit. I’m glad elites are getting screwed over here.
I can sort of, by squinting a lot, see a vague point in that the root cause for both inceldom and highly speculative move is a deep insatisfaction from life. But both the form and the small print here are absolutely horrifying and that guy frighten me.
Note : among the redditors who did that, a bunch will lose money. Possibly a lot of money. That kind of scheme is illegal for a reason. The fact theses schemes have been outlawed after ruining way too many people isn’t communicated enough.
While the loss from the hedge funds are as funny as they are warranted, I would say that betting that GameStop is a dumpster fire who won’t be in business for terribly long is pretty rational. It’s “amusing” that the robin hood here are the one who do the most speculative move. But at least, they bet their own money, not the one from their country like bank are wont to do.
@Elaine The Witch
Coming from a Catholic background, I would not be expected to have sex at all unless it’s to make babies. Many from my background would take this more seriously. I find this quite infuriating too although nonconsensual sex is always worse.
Personally I’m someone who doesn’t believe they deserve to have sex with anyone for a variety of personal reasons unrelated to faith. If someone ends up having sex with someone they discover ends up being a terrible person, it’s not great.
I’d second someone’s comment that sex bots can’t come soon enough; in fact, it’s never too soon to have them at this rate.
Another, more subtle, fuckery in his theory is that it equate sex and relationship, as well as sex and having long term goals. People who are asexual and want companionship do exist. People who separate sexual life and companionship exists. People who are loner but want to have a nice house or a big collection of whatever exist.
It’s normative in a lot of way, including heteronormative.
I don’t get why this is bad but Musk fan boys inflating Tesla’s stock to ridiculous levels just generates glowing headlines about how rich Musk is now.
@Elaine
Exactly, and this is a societal issue relating to how boys are often taught. But acknowledging that would require men shouldering the blame, so they don’t want to do it.
If it actually were sexlessness that caused people to do stuff like this, we’d expect similar numbers of women and LGBTQ+ people to do this, but it is only ever cishet men.
@Naglfar
Something like two thirds of people in the USA would refuse to date a trans person last I knew. If it was sexlessness that caused shitty behavior, there’d definitely be a lot of trans people doing incel shit instead of hardly any.
I like that in practical terms they’ve just pulled the move from Trading Places.
Men with wives and families and responsibilities have been causing widespread societal damage since time immemorial. Look at who’s in charge of starting wars and ramming regressive judges and tax bills through Congress. Well-connected Chads, presumably having sex on the regular, run the hedge funds and corporations and think tanks that destabilize the system and profit from chaos. They think nothing of taking risks, as long as it’s other people who bear the losses. But somehow when regular people play the same game, suddenly it’s all about not getting laid?
I will say, though, taking down capitalism is a step up from the usual threat of mass shootings.
The story that “a subreddit broke hedge funds” sounds cute and cool, but the real story is more complicated than that. There aren’t enough redditors in that sub to make that kind of movement on any stock. It would be nice if this led to some kind of regulation of the stock market, but it won’t, because it wasn’t small-time investors who were actually responsible.
I really can’t get my head around how our financial systems (which, ultimately, should be about facilitating the simple movement of goods and services) are so divorced from reality that this is even possible. And yet, still, 99% of leaders in government and industry will look us all in the eye and say “this is the best and most efficient system that has ever been and we must never consider changing it”.
@PoM : also the leaders of that movement are the most likely to gain money, and the followeers, especially the later one, the most likely to take a loss. Coupled with how the subreddit and especially the discord look like a big cesspool of toxic masculinity, I believe it’s a feature.
That’s coupled to the fact that the “losses” they inflicted are very much extremely minor. It’s like 0.3% if we take a very, very optimistic view of the thing. More likely, a specific hedge fund will have lost money and other will have gained even more.
Call me naive, but I am still trying to wrap my head around the idea that it is legal to sell shares of stock that you don’t actually own. Anywhere else in life if you sold something you didn’t own, it would be considered fraud. Anywhere else in life if you deliberately tried to tank someone’s business or reputation, it would be a crime. Seriously, how is this even possible?
It is the most efficient method for transferring money from other people to fund managers that has ever been devised.
@Threp : dunno. Slavery transferred riches from slaves to owner just as efficiently.
I don’t find the events particulary hard to follow or to understand. It’s just that inside stock markets there’s a gambling ring who use big words to disguise it’s a gambling ring. In addition to that, the stock market also (more or less) function as a stock market. The two activity don’t even collide all that often, as shown here by how Gamestop have 0 positive or negative repercussion from the gambling.
I am going to assume that Professor Chad was completely fine with companies running things in such a way that decent jobs for twenty-somethings were scarce, as long as it boosted stock prices. But now that those folks are affecting stock prices he is suddenly very concerned.
@Ohlmann
True, but a microscopically piddling amount compared to the money from every person with a pension fund.
@LollyPop
Meanwhile, every time the market goes down, the same people who claim they never want the system to change demand that we bail out their businesses and save capitalism from itself.
Capitalism itself is a vague form of slavery and I can’t wait for the time when money has no meaning over our lives, not just the 1% but the 99% too.
Gamestop … what’s all this fuss? <googles> Huh, looks like one bunch of people rich enough to be playing around with stocks and bonds has gotten into some sort of food fight with another bunch of people rich enough to be playing around with stocks and bonds.
OK, now tell me why I should care? Whoever wins, the ordinary working-class person loses …
@Surplus : not even a loss for the average guy. Really, it’s two groups of people who are gambling big virtual money and see who “win” the most money. With one of the groups trying to wrap itself as a bunch of activist or savior even tho they don’t exactly do anything revolutionary.
Virtual money in the sense that the figures thrown around aren’t real even in a capitalistic sense (there’s probably not enough buyers if they sell all their stocks). And the sums in questions are actually pretty low at the scale of that trading, too.
The silver lining is that people taking risk here aren’t collateral damage. A bunch of them are probably too stupid to understand the risks they take (and how likely it is they will be scammed out of it), but it’s on them.
Now Robinhood have disabled trading in Gamestop, apparently shocked to find that gambling is going on here, and redditors are predictably angry about this. Meanwhile, the price of Dogecoin has seen a big rise.
My friend who lerks on this blog and other places sent me a screen shot of that blog from that kid Eric we had. Apparently the kid is really obsessed with me. Kid keeps writing post “replying” to me every time I post here and apparently wrote one recently about how me changing my handle from “Lainy” to “Elaine the witch” is a manipulation tactic. It’s really weird guys. Now my friend, he just thought it was funny, I think it’s weird the kid hasn’t moved on yet.
“Disturbing” might be a better term for it. Perhaps his parents need to stage another intervention.
Meantime what happened to his slightly older buddy Acid Indigestion, or whatever he was calling himself? Flounced again?
@surplus
I don’t know, I think the kid said he had his own blog or something. I think he just got bored and went on to do something else.
So you’re saying the guys who started this whole GameStop mess did so over a $1 bet? 😀
@Moggie : another hypothesis is that they lost the ability to trade theses stocks.
See, Robinhood don’t buy and sell shares directly. They use the service of another firm to do the trade for them, similar to how a supermarket don’t directly buy products at the farm but buy them in bulk to intermediates.
So, if theses resellers refuse to take orders for gamestop shares, robinhood cannot trade them. And the current owners of gamestop shares are stuck, unable to either buy more or sell to recoup their losses.
If that’s confirmed, then the robinhood users were fooled in thinking they could trade however they want ; robinhood was deceitful since they did not clearly indicate that they could be shunted out of trading ; and the order resellers are rather clearly manipulating the market by refusing some orders. The last one is very against the spirit of the law, if perhaps technically legal.
@naglfar
I had a conversation with an acquaintance that was probably the deepest conversation we had had was about his trouble with maintain relationships because he couldn’t get an erection with “normal girls”. that he at 20 years old was trying to get a doctor to give him Viagra so he can have sex with his girlfriend. this was a long conversation, I had asked him if he was attracted to women at all and if that might be a problem. He made it clear he was straight. He just found real sex was different then how porn made it be. I told him I’m not a therapist, but after I got attacked, I had to retrain my brain with how I was with things sexually. He needed to do the same thing. I recommended to him that he stop touching himself and stop watching porn for a year, if he abstained from the things that were causing him harm and messing with his brain like this, then it will help him reconnect with reality of things again. Needless to say, he didn’t want to do that. He wanted a quick fix that required little to no work on his part and I was just like…. I can’t help you buddy if you don’t want to help yourself.
Trust me, it’s sad and I really wish it wasn’t this way. But like I can’t do the work to for them for someone to get better. When people have a problem they have to be the ones to admit it and say that they want to get better. There were a whole mess of problems that had lead me to a drug problem when I was younger but I had to say to myself “i have a problem, this behavior and addiction is destroying me, I have to be the one to fix it and make the changes”.
A couple of OT things to cheer up anyone having an off day today. The first thing was a poster showing the proposed cast of the Sandman movie on Netflix.
The second is, well, technically a NSFW Tumbler post, since it involves talk of bouncing boobies and great tits, and a cock.
https://petermorwood.tumblr.com/post/641569837981777920/theoneandonlyredrobin-tiny-goddess-of-chaos
In a manner of speaking.
>:)
@ redsilkphoenix
🙂
On a related note, the chair of the Senate Banking Committee has announced he will hold a hearing as a result of this. Not sure what, if anything, will change.
@Surplus
He keeps disappearing for a few days, then returning to promise a list of LGBTQ+ MRAs as if that proves something.
Re: the 12 year old
I am somewhat worried if he’s still this obsessed, but I’m not sure what more to do. I don’t go near his blog, because I have better things to do, but that sounds worrying.
@Elaine
I think a lot of men have the problem your acquaintance had. As for why he wouldn’t take a year off, I think societal conditioning may have played a role as well. Society tells men they are weak if they admit to flaws, which is the first step in fixing them. As a result, he didn’t want to admit he had this issue and wanted an easier out, which doesn’t exist.
@naglfar
Yeah, I think there are probably a lot more factures into it about why else. masturbation isn’t like a drug, but I’d say it’s more like cutting out sugar from your diet when you try to lose weight or something like that. It makes you feel good. Your brain gets some happy chemical from it. If you have something wrong in your life you want to keep getting that. He was unhappy in his life. Very unhappy, I hope he’s doing better now, that was about 3 years ago. But he was right miserable and it seemed to me that he was caught in a vicious cycle of depression.
@naglfar
Yeah, it’s a bit creepy. My friend thought it was funny because of the stupidity of it, but I was just like….this kid got banned a while ago. and my friend was like “he’s got a lot of post about you as the titled” and yeah…. it’s just weird. Probably because I was unware of it until he told me.
All I can tell is that I challenged him on his alleged expertise on feminism and he vanished.
@Elaine
He may have also been experiencing desensitization from repeated stimulation, sometimes referred to as death grip syndrome, which would have made it hard for him to enjoy sex with a partner.
@PoM
Ah yes, the “branches of feminism” incident. I don’t think he ever responded to that.
@Naglfar
I’m not saying there’s a cause and effect there. Acid might be super busy with important teenaged stuff. Who knows. But I will wager that if he returns, it’s on a different post without acknowledging that he couldn’t even be bothered to consult wikipedia on what feminism is.
Eh, yon kid’ll keep showing up as long as they’re getting attention.
@PoM
Sounds about right. I also expect that he will still be talking up his “list.”
I know that the “GameStonk” situation has been very popular on several 4chan boards, including /biz/… and /pol/. I know it must be popular other places too, to just get enough retail traders to successfully perform a short squeeze. But considering how many of the posts I’ve seen about this have something to say about The International Jew, I would guess good old rage and racism are bigger factors than anyone being an incel.
Firstly – as you note he has zero idea of the demographic that was involved so he philosophising is moot.
Secondly…I have heard variations on this theme many times. Essentially arguing that women “civilise” men. That young, single men are a threat to a nation whereas young single women are not.
They always jump to the solution which is women need to f*ck men more. None of them ever stop to ask why these men aren’t taking more responsibility for their own lives? Why do they need a relationship to be a productive citizen whereas seem to be able to do this irrespective of marital status.
ALSO
>Sandman
>Gwendoline Christie is Lucifer
I liked the 2005 Constantine movie too
https://lithub.com/why-middle-aged-men-have-trouble-sustaining-friendships/
Toward the end of that are rather gender-essentialist-sounding observations about men and women. If those observations reflect an underlying reality, and not someone’s confirmation bias, one presumes the differences in question result from different upbringing and socialization, rather than actually being genetic. But then, what are those upbringing differences, precisely? And should we get rid of them, in favor of raising everyone the way we currently raise girls?