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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@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?