Botond173
1yr ago
People who end up rejecting the system and seeing the establishment right for what it is – fake opposition – end up where we are now called something like ‘dissident right’.
This quoted part pretty much answers your question. The one political factor that was sorely missing in German in 1933, in Italy in 1922, in Spain in 1936, in Chile in 1973 etc., was a decisively large establishment right-wing party capable of drawing widespread support, even attracting large numbers of hardliner rightists, and persuasively presenting itself as a political force curbing the influence of the far left.
Botond173
1yr ago
The war will only end when enough Russian soldiers have been killed that it becomes politically or militarily impossible for the Russian regime to continue the war.
This statement is, very obviously, factually untrue, as the war will also end if enough Ukrainian soldiers die, or if Ukraine sues for peace, or of any combination of outside actors forces both sides to enter a ceasefire, or if Ukraine is destroyed with nuclear weapons etc. And since his entire "argument" hinges on that statement, if we disregard the issue of war guilt for a moment (I'm getting Versailles vibes), it's difficult to take it seriously.
But anyway, since this new story reminds me of the news story about a similar service in Israel, which gave Israeli schoolchildren a chance to write messages on artillery shells intended for targets in Lebanon and Gaza (yes, that actually happened), I have to wonder: is this writer and this politician Zionist? Have they ever expressed any opinion on Israel's foreign policy? I'm curious.
Botond173
3d ago
The simple truth is that nobody, either man or woman, should ever go hiking in the woods alone, with or without bears inhabiting those woods, period.
Botond173
1yr ago
If I owned Twitter, I wouldn’t let feminists, trans activists, or socialists post. Why should I? They’re wrong about everything and bad for society.
Huh? Them being wrong about everything is precisely the reason you shouldn't try silencing them. The only way to give them the rope to hang themselves with is to let them talk in from of common people, and reveal what they truly believe and want.
Botond173
1yr ago
Let's keep the trivializing within limits.
The Roman myth is from antiquity. I need not say more.
Eagles, snakes and cactuses are mundane creatures that very obviously exist in Mexico.
The blood of the Congolese boils at statues of Leopold II and Indians resent seeing Churchill being hailed as a the hero of the west in the same manner that Jews forth at the mouth when someone begins praising Hitler.
I'll not comment on Belgium, but I assume Indians could admit to themselves that, as the victory in WW2 remains the sole politically correct outlet of Western* (implicitly White) pride, the sole reason Churchill's assessment is still largely positive in the West is that he didn't practice 'appeasement' (whatever that means in context), unlike the dunce Chamberlain.
*technically this is incorrect as the USSR played the main role, of course, but it's also no coincidence that negating, questioning, delegitimizing and outright denying the Soviet role in final victory, especially since the beginning of the Ukrainian war, has become increasingly normalized in the West since a couple of years (I remember when Bush II explicitly condemned the Yalta Treaty)
Botond173
1yr ago
I think a minimal level of nuance is warranted here. Let's look at the following statements:
A. Ukrainian national identity and culture are real, distinct and legitimate i.e. those who belong to it have the right to maintain and defend it.
B. Ukraine is a real nation, and has a right to its own state.
C. Ukraine is a real nation, and has a right to exist as an ethnostate within the post-1954 borders of the former Ukrainian SSR.
D. This ethnostate should be a NATO member, permit American bases and weapon systems on its soil if it sees fit, and take Sevastopol away from the Russian Navy if it sees fit.
Based on past Ukrainian events and their timeline, it seems clear to me that Russian government, and the majority or Russians, object to C and D, not A and B, and even C would not have warranted military action in their eyes.
Russia is objectively a multicultural state, and ethnonationalism was never practiced there by the state. To accuse them of "embracing full-fledged cultural genocide of neighboring nations, intending to wipe any non-Russian identities that might exist there" is laughable.
Botond173
1mo ago
As someone who sort of developed a moderate interest in true crime discussions, I was surprised to later find out that apparently the consumers of true crime literature, videos and other media are overwhelmingly middle-class suburban women / cat ladies. Then it occurred to me that my surprise isn't warranted, as it's natural that the people most likely to fantasize about true crime are the ones most secluded from its reality. This view of mine was confirmed when I've heard the argument that, supposedly, this sort of true crime media is much less popular in Latin America, the reason being that crime is much more of a daily reality there, so people are less prone to fantasize about it.
Is this argument correct in your view?
Botond173
6mo ago
I'm aware that it was a local decision, a product of a political milieu that, as far as I know, was one of the long-term consequences of a large and recent demographic shift in Northern Virginia, namely that a great number of white liberals have settled in the region after getting jobs in the enormously expanded federal bureaucracy in the capital.
I'm not surprised they don't want Lee around.
Regarding "myths", I'm not aware of any, I've only read that Lee was regarded as a true Southern gentleman his whole life. I don't see that as a myth.
Botond173
6mo ago
Thanks for the detailed reply. Actually I did consider all that; that's what I was referring to when mentioning "cynical and mundane interpretations". No offense meant, but that's what they are.
I'll only nitpick on two issues. As far as I know, it's indeed true that 'in the last three years violent crime has surged upward in major cities', but this trend didn't start in 2020 (although it did escalate after that) but much earlier, before the Trump presidency, in fact, around 2012-15. And the same applies to the problems with the mentally ill homeless, I'm sure.
Botond173
8mo ago
This doesn’t necessarily mean those mental health and addiction aren’t highly important here are as well, but that there may be a demographic of fairly low functioning people who are able to take care of themselves, just barely, at low costs, but are simply unable to under heavier financial burdens.
So I suppose they're also low-functioning to the extent that they're unable to, you know, move to another state with a much lower average cost of living for whatever reason.
Marry young(ish) to someone of good temperament, have a reasonable number of children (three or more), work a job you can somewhat stand, have some kind of spiritual life. Above all, tend to a dense circle of friends and family who you trust and who trust you, who live nearby and who you see often. Save a little money if you can. Try to do good by those who care about you.
Do you apply this to women as well?
EDIT: based on 2rafa's past comments about gender differences and the Red Pill that I've read here and on the old subreddit, I'm not convinced that she actually thinks that marrying young and having 3-4 children* is the recipe for fulfilment and happiness for young single women. On the other hand, I can totally see why she'd give that advice to this online community here, which is mostly composed of men. In other words, I can understand why she'd argue that this is sound advice for single men who want to fulfill their male sexual imperative in a way that benefits them long-term.
*Just to point out one thing: having three or more healthy children as a woman implies in the context of current society that you enter a long-term relationship with your future husband at 18-20 years of age and have your first child 2-4 years later, when you're convinced that the relationship is stable enough. Who would actually even give teenage girls such advice openly these days?
Botond173
19d ago
So I read the "The Metapolitics..." article that is linked and while I can agree with its arguments largely, I found this part:
But when a white person has kids with a black person the kids will almost always see themselves as black. This isn’t “the cultural legacy of the One Drop Rule,” it’s the obvious fact that black people have much more dominant genes than everyone else.
...which strikes me as kind of pseudo-scientific nonsense.
The obvious reason those kids will see themselves as black is that the Spanish/Hispanic (and, I guess, French/Francophone) cultural sphere, unlike the North American Anglo-Saxon one, includes the concepts of mestizo and mulatto, and accordingly lacks the legal concept of the white race as the separate and dominant racial group, which originates from Virginia in the late 17th Century, as far as I know. It has everything to do with the cultural legacy of the One Drop Rule. Those kids, if born in Britain, France or Spain etc., will not see themselves as nonwhite, because their societies lack the concept of whiteness as an identity.
Botond173
4mo ago
You're right, it's pretty much dead, partially as a result of suppression by the mainstream.
Another aspect is that most of the PUA material the curious are familiar with was written before smartphone use became common among Western women, before Instagram, Facebook, TikTok etc. even existed, and as such, it is by now largely useless.
But I'd say the main factor responsible for the decline of PU Artistry is the combined effect of stringent laws around "enthusiastic consent", the #MeToo and #KillAllMen campaigns, plus (and I don't care how offensive this sounds) the general decline in the human quality of Western women, due to the spread of radfem views, the opioid epidemic, rising rates of alcoholism and prescription pill addiction, the normalization of fat acceptance and mental illness etc. In other words, the overall risk of engaging in PUA is rapidly rising, whereas the potential return on your investment is ever more marginal. Social reality cannot be ignored.
Botond173
4mo ago
I'm glad that some posters mentioned Romney in all of this. The unbelievable leftist smear campaign against him in the 2012 campaign season, which was clearly motivated by nothing else but the sense of urgency to prevent the nation's first glorious African-American leader from going down in history as a one-term disappointment, was an obvious wake-up call to many otherwise moderate rightists, and convinced them that, unlike in 2008 and 2012, the GOP should actually try running a candidate who stands a chance and isn't a cuck. This had an obvious galvanizing effect on dissident right-wing politics, I think.
Botond173
10d ago
Yeah...lol. The current narrative, as far as I can tell, is that the next target of the orcs is Moldova of all places, because reasons.
In last week’s thread Cirrus addressed the gerontocracy that is due to characterize the upcoming presidential elections (and characterized the two latest ones) in the US, and drew obvious parallels with the late history of the USSR. This reminded me of a comment by phoneosaur on the old subreddit 4 years ago, which I found fascinating enough in order to save it. Either way, this generated a bunch of replies last week, but I think some relevant points were not made.
First I’d bring up the following argument from the old comment:
My hunch is that the "establishment" in each era resorted to increasingly elderly candidates because the pipeline of ideologically reliable young people stopped flowing. The establishment become reluctant to hand power to a new generation when that generation has ceased believing in the legitimacy of the power structure.
Cirrus mentions something that might first read like the opposite, but pretty much seems to point out the same problem:
I don’t think it’s a stretch to compare those Accords with modern-day Wokism currently afflicting Western European culture. The older generation of leaders will roll their eyes. But they signed on to it. The next batch of younger idealist leaders—the Gorbachevs of our future—will take Wokism seriously to the detriment of our national integrity.
I think both of them are definitely onto something, so I’d draw a different parallel to illustrate what I think is going on. In the USSR, what Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko all had in common was that they lived through Stalin’s terror as youths, and the Great Patriotic War as young adults. They had multiple common points of reference, which all made them politically cautious. They remembered the horrors of the past, and had understanding of the limitations and problems of the regime they served. Sure, they repeated the usual platitudes about the final victory of socialism, the supremacy of Marxist-Leninist thought, proletarian solidarity etc., but they didn’t take most of this seriously, and were wary of appointing younger cadres – after all, they, not sharing the common understanding and experience of the elders, not being humbled by terrible past events, and potentially being real believers or, alternatively, heretics, may end up enacting reforms that destroy the system, doing things that just don’t work out, being naïve idiots, or hotheaded, or just selling everything out to the enemy. This is just speculation on my part, admittedly – anyway, we know that the gerontocratic party leadership did eventually appoint a younger reformer of “merely” 54 years of age, when the economic and social crisis of the system became obvious.
In the US, the people in the highest political positions are mostly Boomers who lived through the political upheaval of the Johnson and Nixon years and the pre-1973 era of prosperity as young adults. (The Senate’s median age is above 65 years, and has been steadily rising for a while.) For them, these years, the good times, are basically a point of reference as a period of normalcy, and they remember the activities of revolutionary leftist movement as something to be avoided. And they are probably nostalgic for the Reagan/Clinton years. They will, of course, repeat platitudes about civil rights, restorative justice, empowering minorities, the future being female and whatnot, but they won’t tolerate anything that directly disturbs the peace of middle-class suburban normalcy, and won’t give power to true believers of social revolution. After all, they don’t want to rock the boat.
This reminds me of a different observation I’ve seen here from a Gen X-er (I can’t find the comment), namely that X-er voters are reluctant to vote fellow X-ers into political power, because there’s too high a chance that they’ll turn out to be dangerous radicals and true believers. So this isn’t a sentiment limited to just Boomers, probably.
All in all, it seems that in periods of political and economic uncertainty and stagnation, the elderly can remain in power easily, because people will want to stick with the Devil they know, and not risk future upheaval and collapse by giving power to politicians that are untried and untested.
Botond173
1yr ago
I reckon there was a lengthy discussion here about Elevatorgate a couple of weeks ago. I don’t remember if anyone raised this issue and frankly I can’t be bothered to look it up, but surely I’m not the only one who finds it suspicious that the harasser / sex-seeker man in the story was never identified, am I?
Supposedly, he initially approached Rebecca Watson at the hotel bar after an atheist conference held there; he then followed her to the elevator. On one hand, I’m sure this wasn’t a really huge event, on the other hand, I find it unlikely that no other attendees who could or would have later confirmed her story were at the bar. Was there really nobody who confirmed her story and/or gave any information about the man? Because as far as I know, there wasn’t. There were no eyewitnesses at all who even saw them together, and no CCTV footage of the incident or the hotel bar, as far as I know. And I didn’t find any evidence anywhere that his man was ever doxxed, or even attempted to be doxxed. Nobody ever even tried identifying him. Right? I know doxxing wasn’t really as popular a method of culture-warring in 2011 as in later years, but still. And he never came forward to apologize or to explain/excuse himself, even though what he did wasn’t a crime by any means. (Maybe he was married?)
I think there’s a strong possibility that he never existed, and that the entire incident was fabricated as prime culture war fodder.
Botond173
1yr ago
Well the results for 2022 have just been released and people who answered "not at all" for trust in mass media is at 38%.
What are those 38% going to do about this though? Vote for a dissident candidate in the presidential election? That was already tried before, with zero results. If they voice their views openly, they'll get dismissed as QAnon cultists, potential terrorists, Nazis etc. They may get doxxed, their bank account frozen etc., and they know it. This is what it means to be ruled over by your enemies. And yet you claim that "progressives are running scared"?
Botond173
1mo ago
Nobody is lining up to tell you the low time preference alternative is how you get girls, money, family, respect, etc. Everyone can plainly see that is not allowed to work anymore. They're all telling you you should do the hard work and be happy to be a loser on top of it, you uppity bastard.
I'd argue that liberal leftists usually couldn't even give useful dating/relationship/lifestyle advice to single heterosexual men even if they wanted to, which the mostly don't, or it's something they don't consider relevant/necessary.
Botond173
2mo ago
Is there a specific name and definition for the culture war tactic of accusation mirroring i.e. when you appropriate one of the usual accusations your main political rivals are throwing at you (or some different near-group) all the time and throw it back at them, or at someone in your outgroup in general, even though you've never believed in the validity of the accusation at all? I'm thinking of something similar to the DR3 ('Democrats are the real racists') narrative, or when Republicans are accused of milking the government for subsidies etc. I'm asking because I'm seeing a current example, namely in the context of the ongoing Hungarian presidential pardon scandal, where liberal leftist influencers have pretty much reinvented the Pizzagate conspiracy theory - which is something they otherwise write off and ridicule as right-wing tinfoil hat nonsense, as they are themselves acculturated in US liberal online circles - and are hurling it at the government, pushing the narrative that a pedophile ring is ruling the entire country from the shadows with an iron fist.
Botond173
8mo ago
Am I wrong and maybe sort of paranoid, or is there a concentrated and obvious effort in the Western public discourse by Zelensky's foreign supporters to retcon (if that's the correct expression) their own past narrative about the Russian military and Ukraine's prospects? My memory isn't that great and I can't be arsed to start digging up social media rubbish from months ago, but I distinctly remember the narrative of Atlanticist culture warriors, which was practically flooding both legacy media and social media for months, especially after the much-publicised counteroffensives in the Kharkov and Kherson regions. It was basically all the same: the orcs are looting local stores because they have no food, they have no vests and other basic infantry equipment, they have no ammunition nor warm uniforms for the winter, abandoning their vehicles and fleeing en masse, freezing to death, Putler has run out of guided missiles, tanks, artillery shells, aircraft etc., the Moskal never had an effective military antd their shitty state was always a paper tiger etc. To reiterate, I distinctly remember countless Twitter/Facebook/Substack posts, YT videos etc. pushing this.
And then, in the last few months, when, according to this narrative, the glorious great counteroffensive should have already brought about a decisive victory, these same people are stating, as if they were all seasoned military historians, with a straight face that duh, of course it's terribly difficult to break through prepared defensive lines and fortifications (even those put together by the fucking orcs, it seems), of course it'd be vitally important to have air superiority (even agains dumbass orcs, I guess, that are even capable of losing a cruiser against people without a navy), of course combat drones have, like, completely revolutionised modern warfare (as if that weren't clear as day to anyone involvind in planning the counteroffensive), of course it's just all so damn hard!
As a dissident rightist, my view is that all this gaslighting has the obvious purpose of preparing the masses for the next narrative down the line, namely that it all could have actually worked out well, if not for the evil appeasers, wreckers, saboteurs, demagogues, opportunists, deplorables and toxic shitheads who've sadly infiltrated important positions in the political affairs of NATO member nations, and prevented all efforts to give all the resources and equipment necessary for the final and total Ukrainian victory. And this is just a variant of the narrative pushed by the Kiev government to their people, namely that, in a nutshell, "NATO promised to help/intervene, but betrayed us, especially in the end".
So I think I understand why this narrative is being pushed, and how it makes sense, from their own point of view. But still, the brazenness of it all is still a bit surprising. Is my observation correct, or should I not believe my own eyes and ears?
Botond173
1yr ago
I find it entirely normal that journalists try to come up with all sorts of explanations for an election outcome that was relatively surprising. So the arguments in these articles don't strike me as anything extraordinary. But they aren't the equivalent of the revisionist narrative, to the extent that it even exists, that "Trump was going to win anyway".
All deride Hillary's supposedly obvious and massive flaws as a candidate, while ignoring that she was inches from winning. Massively flawed candidates don't end up there.
Yes, inches from winning against someone universally derided as a laughingstock! That's hardly an argument against her being deeply flawed.
Were those conditions more awful than the usual condition of native children in their own communities? Was their average death rate lower?
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