Armin
7mo ago
Vibe shift?
I lost count of how many anglos, jews and anglo-jews on the center-left/left that, in the past days, had a "Conversion on the road to Damascus", openly admitting on Twitter that their views on the Left were utterly wrong and that they had no idea their side was so full of apologists for jew-slaughter. And I am talking about big figures, including some of the loudest neoliberal mouths, admitting grudgingly that the Right-wing view of academia had some points.
Let's say that this reckoning mood last more than two weeks and the inevitable Israeli reaction on Gaza; It is possible that we are beginning to see a realignement from the upper middle class on immigration in general and on inclusion and diversity in particular?
In my view, there are still some enormous obstacle to shift like these, primarly the enormous influence of academia on journalism and èlites policy and opinion-making in the west, and the machine of the anglo-left working in case of another menace from Trump, that can rapidly rebuild the ranks. Another interesting side of the discourse is what will happen in Europe, where it is true that there are way less Jews, but the Right has way more influence between young and important people. By tasting the environment, almost everyone apart from the aggravated minorities and feminists groups are very, very angry about all of this.
I do not know if it is ok to post this here or in the Gaza thread, if it is wrong I will move it there.
Armin
1yr ago
How many men do you know that would answer differently? I realise this is one of your weaker assertions regarding gender differences (with the stronger one being "It is not possible for them that something contemporary can be worse than something present in the past"), but to my eyes answering earnestly with anything other than "now" is a mark of edginess: you must either be so dramatic that you refuse to let yourself consider the less-glamorous parts of your value function, or so psychologically deviant from the grillpilled median that you genuinely would trade off arguable spiritual benefits of past societies for all our material advances in technology, medicine, peace et cetera. Ironically, the only people over the age of 18 I know irl who would answer differently from "now" are women in my family: my mother who would return to the Soviet Union per the "dramatic" exception, and her mother who would choose some point in time before 1900 for being a religious extremist.
Notice that these discussions were not serious intellectual inquiries about the past, they were more of light topics when you shot out random questions. And men almost always answered with any epoch that you can think of. Obviously anyone put always first the "but the medicine", but that was logical and assured from the beginning, I still have not met someone that likes to die because of the lacks of antibiotics.
If you have come to be known as the "actually arguing to retvrn to the past" guy in your social circles, consider that your arguments about more detailed pros and cons of past societies might no longer actually be received on their own merits either. People might not be willing to entertain an "isn't it curious how quickly they could build a bridge or train station in the late 1800s compared to now?" in the spirit of intellectual inquiry if the expectation is that it will be used as ammo for "...and therefore we should restore the hereditary monarchy", and if you are a woman in $current_year, pointing out that the hereditary monarchy entailed wrongs against your gender that are nowadays treated as blasphemous is as convenient a way to shut down the discussion as any. In other words, your problem may not actually be that women are politically qualitatively different, but rather that you haven't found a social circle that agrees with your politics, and it is merely a downstream annoyance that women have a particularly quick and easy way to weaponise the disagreement.
This is a weird assumption from your side: I am not the "retvrn guy" neither in my circles nor personally speaking, and my social circle is radically diverse in terms of ideologies and nationalities. And again, it happens also when I met people that do not know me well or very well.
Armin
1yr ago
More than the macho nationalism, which was very present also in the past, is the Libertarianism that probably makes the women flee.
There is nothing more repelling imho of the freedom-loving men who claim to be the only ones free in our society. Women cares about community, the problem is that the global/left communities appear more stable and welcoming and normal that the libertarian community.
Armin
11hr ago
I completely agree with you.
What i was saying is that indeed there have been a replacement of the moral framework, and in order to change ideas, you need to change the moral framework of women again, making the "persuade them on the market of ideas" less useful.
And I am talking from a country where, still last election at least, women still vote right as the men.
Armin
14d ago
Much of Europe? I think is something that is common only in the most lib part of Berlin where all the americanized women and foreign expats gathers. Here vegetarianism is almost unknown, and also in big cities like Bruxelles I have seen meat everywhere, also in èlites institutions canteens.
Armin
4mo ago
Regarding your last period, I agree, and I think it is noteworthy to say that the "no enemies to the Right" works way less for the Right than the Marcusian "no enemies to the Left" works for the Left. No amount of red terrorism, entrenching with Stalinism and Maoism, online furry and trans communities and femcel feminism has been enough to damage the left-brand among the western upper-class.
Armin
5mo ago
I am searching for non-fiction books about industrial production and manpower mobilization in modern wars. Something like the Wages of War by Tooze (very good book, despite the awful politics of the author), but I am having problems in searching them.
Any idea?
Armin
5mo ago
All of this let us assume that "political violence" is a good tactic when you need to move women's opinion.
Armin
6mo ago
To add on Wikipedia, his founder will be in the Web Summit in Lisbon next week, at the same list of panel of one of the Black Lives Matter founders? Why? Because the organisers are an Irish left-wing tech organisation.
Armin
8mo ago
Btw, as in Italy, another example of how any right-wing party in the West is going to adopt liberal policies at the end.
Armin
1yr ago
As first post here, i was reflecting especially on the role of the State in a progressive/socialist society.
We can start from some axiom that, I think, cannot be disputed:
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In a state, in order to pursue policy, you need state capacity, the capacity of the state of "doing things"
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State capacity varies for a lot of reasons, but generally good states with a lot of capacity are the ones with an high trust society, small internal friction, a not polarized political system, and all these things, together with a smooth system that permit the state to actually control things and move them.
Now, the theoretical goals of progressivism, as said by the ideological granparents of them (the French group, the german one, David and the antiracism american group, you know what I am talking about) are still about the destruction or the surpassing of Capitalism as an economic system.
But the point is; in order to do it you need the state, as Lenin correctly theorized! You cannot destroy the capitalistic system in a country if you do not have the men, the tanks, the followers and in general the power to impose things with will and force, and also this is state capacity.
This is outside the capacity of the single individual or the group or whatever, you need the State.
The problem is, I see progressivism as a continuous tentative of - degrading - state capacity (less thrust and less homogenity, polarized systems, destruction of meritocracy)
How in the hell are they supposed to destroy capitalism if the states that are supposedly created by liberal progressivism are weaker every day? In the West we begin to have difficulties in enforcing Basic law or fixing bridges!
My answer, at the end, bring always to the same point, and is that we need to understand if progressivism is bolschevism under the cloat of liberal capitalism or viceversa.
Because if they are the first category, they are terrible at doing their political project.
Armin
8mo ago
I have the exact same problem with Baldur's Gate 3. Tried to modify the intensity of the fans, but to no avail. It pisses me off that I need to rebuild a computer from the ground because of temperature control. Never seen a problem like this in all my life.
Armin
1yr ago
A question; it is possible to know the statistics of the motte? Regarding user growth, number of users and comments and excetera.
Armin
1yr ago
The "blame colonialism and the supreme capitalist whiteness" looks like it is more diffused in certain particular demographics (left-wing above all, but especially academics and women) than between the lower-middle classes natives of these countries.
All the above I have seen in my life came always from upper-middle class women, often daughters of immigrants themselves, and almost never from the proletariat
Especially when I saw the influencer daughter of Africans complaining about the last oppression, and immediately after that hearing the congolese taxy workers saying "this place (Belgium) is amazing and the people are even better.
Armin
1yr ago
Inspired by a comment from Twitter;
Everyone is talking about the US relative decline, but they are really flexing his power in a way that we have not seen from Iraq
In one year they;
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Destroyed every possible reconciliation between Europe and Russia
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Became a next exporter of natural resources and the ones from who a lot of allies depend
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They basically sent a fuck off to Germany, and the Germans not only are not complaining, but are applauding
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They strongly limited the military of power of Russia with few money.
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China is slowing her growth, and they created a ring of allies in the Pacific
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The cultural grip on the West is becoming stronger, and the US successfully fused Neoliberalism and Leftism in a zombie ideology who is, against all odds, successfully working
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The pro-Atlantist view have never been so strong.
I doubt that these strategies will work or be healthy in the long term, but it is incredible to see how an ill and polarized country can still do whatever it wants without any reaction.
Armin
2mo ago
Bryan Caplan complaining on X that Mason U is introducing mandatory Just Society courses; https://twitter.com/bryan_caplan/status/1760048714847064146
It looks Conquest's Second Law is still strong as ever. And I guess Caplan's libertarianism will ask for some intervention against it that will never work.
Armin
1yr ago
I was reflecting on how western politicians today use terms and words that have double meaning with the media and the electorate, with one meaning the one that people usually understand, while the other is academia-made and is often a true example of Motte-and-Bailey.
For example, terms like minority;
Minority for the common man (and the electorate!) means a group that is inferior in numbers in comparison to a majority. So, if you survey with a poll the opinion of the people, it appears that the majority (!) is in favour of helping minorities (because it is the right thing to do!).
Meanwhile, the de facto academic term for minority is "a group that is ontologically oppressed, and so it needs social justice in order to destroy the oppressive hierarchy of the majority"
This has as a consequence;
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That politicians and their class of activists have the second definition in their minds, and do policies that follow it.
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Meanwhile you (an individual in a debate, a party, a media organization) cannot dispute the effect and the reasoning of the former set of policies because, if you do, everyone and your mom assume that you are against the minorities as affirmed by the common sense definition, and so you are a political extremist!
This manipulation of language at a core level create a situation where extremists do policies that are extreme and unpopular while being elevated as sympathetic moderates, and the moderates that try to oppose them for whatever reasons are labeled as political extremists.
I have no idea if this kind of method to do politics was common in the pre- internet or pre-neoliberal era or whatever, but it creates an insurmountable situation where, unless the people "begin to notice", it is impossible to oppose the manipulators, starting from the point that the manipulators have probably the majority of media and capital behind them.
Armin
1yr ago
The German Deep State is non existent, and if it exist, it is pro-american
Germany is more of a giant factory firm who needs to sell cars than a nation. In front of challenges their èlites will back down.
Armin
7mo ago
A bit unrelated, but this give credence to the Fisted By Foucault theory on how Anglo-Saxon Academia is still an anti-systemic force. The Biden administration was quick to condemn and give support in any case. The Marcusian strategy "no enemy to the left" still holds strong, but at this point not many people are going to support the most extreme left-wing cause.
Btw, probably the most important point for the right that came from all of this is the fact that "decolonization", as all Marxian jargon like Anti-Imperialism, is only an academic term to justify whetever happens to the enemy.
Armin
1yr ago
I do not understand why young leftist activists do politics at all, when all they need is to wait for the trillionaires doing the exactly same thing
Armin
1yr ago
I need to correct you on one point:
Progressives definitely hate the all Czech cast in Czech media, if they notice that;
The progressive influence on these regards is, apart from the UK, very weak, but they sometimes make the point that they really do not like the native cast.
Armin
1yr ago
If you do not consider the UK Europe, Germany is probably the wokest country in the continent.
Armin
1yr ago
I do not think that the European Green movement will collapse.
Apart from total collapse, the core of the Greens are insulated middle-upper class, academics and feminists. They were not massively popular from the beginning, but they can decide on policy thanks to the support of Washington and of media-friendly popular culture.
For instance, from the beginning of the war, the popularity of the Greens in Germany only grew.
I mentioned here many times that I consider the gender (sex) divide the greatest factor in our model of understanding modern political thought and action.
Background; middle-class male, young, Catholic family, Mediterranean, living in a big, poor city. Moved to Central Europe to work in a big èlite public institution with many young people, especially females. History of belonging to Marxist organisations in the past btw.
As a passionate about history, I normally talk about it, especially in a highly-educated environment where discussions about complex topics are the norm.
What I noticed in the past year it is astounding and moulded a lot of my thought. Every time I talk with women about history, and the topics fall on some past event/political regime/ideology/whatever, there is a lot of disinterest towards it from the women's side. Not disinterest in the sense of "I do not care", because as I said it is a highly-educated environment where being uncaring about this kind of thing is uncool, but disinterest in the sense of:
"I understand that in the past things worked a certain way, but the past is always worse than now because women had it worse".
From there, after it happened dozens of times with dozens of different women, I elaborated:
Women are the true accelerationist.
I could not elaborate or argue about past political or moral issues or ideologies or sovrastructures, because, from the other side, the argument is always that every behaviour or ideology of the past is ontologically evil because it discriminated against women.
I will never forget how when I was arguing about how 19th-century European states had probably a higher state-capacity than contemporary European states, I was accused of sexism because I expressed a preference for a non-contemporary political structure. The same happened when I mentioned how I admire Charles De Gaulle (because Macron, while being bad, is better than him because he is more feminist).
The most amazing moment was when I said to a group of women (yes, a lot of weird moments this year) that the loss of Church participation alienated a lot of people and diminished the sense of belonging and social participation of the community in the public thing. They agreed with me (!) but still for them, it is better now because they prefer a more isolated society but with more feminism.
Women are true accelerationist because the consequence of feminism has been a weirdo para-futurism philosophy but without fascism. Everything that can be conducted to the past is suspected as part of a reactionary plot to be judged on moral grounds. No detached interests in History per se, but only moral condemnation of everything that is not the "current year".
For me, it was fascinating to discover how males and females consider history, especially when the topic of "in which historical epoch would you like to live?" and every woman answer "now".
The biggest consequence of this sex divide is, imho, that a feminist liberal society has a huge gap in understanding the context when society begins to decline after drifting from some past ideology or structure. It is not possible for them that something contemporary can be worse than something present in the past.
I would like to receive some input on my "theory" from the residents of the motte, expressed in the English language which is better than mine.
PS: for people who are curious, I never received any sort of cancellation or consequence for my brazen rhetorical behaviour. Europe is not as woke as the US, and I am a kinda of "high-status male" for several reason, so I noticed that women tolerate way more whatever I say.
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