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
4mo ago
In last week’s thread, @greyenlightenment made the following observation regarding the evergreen subject of the sex recession:
It's interesting how some on the right has shifted from decrying how there is too much promiscuity (pre-2021 or so), to now from a trad-perspective decrying how young people are not having enough sex and lowered fertility rates.
As far as I can tell, this almost counts as a recurring theme among online leftists (not that I consider @greyenlightenment to be one in particular), one that serves as an ideological cudgel and also as a short cautionary tale with a “careful what you wish for” message. But I certainly don’t think it’s baseless, which is the other reason I think it merits more discussion here.
I happen to have vague memories of various conservative arguments I encountered after discovering Townhall and other similar right-wing sites in the early 2000s, and one thing they definitely liked to address regarding sexual mores was the embarrassingly high teenage pregnancy rate in the US. Well, I’m no sociologist but I suspect this statistical anomaly was and is(?) largely explained by the presence of large African-American and Latino ethnic minorities, plus the presence of large numbers of Scots-Irish with low impulse control, but of course mainstream conservatives were not going to point that out, opting instead to use this as a lame argument against encroaching sexual licentiousness or something.
Other than this, I’d not say it was too much promiscuity as such that conservatives decried, to the extent they even bothered, but the apparent push to normalize and sanitize female promiscuity in pop culture. I specifically remember the 2004 romantic comedy The Girl Next Door, for example, because multiple conservative commentators pointed out that its depiction of a supposedly average porn actress living the dream without suffering any social or psychological consequences of her career choice is misleading at best. There was also Sex in the City as well, obviously.
Anyway, this was all a long time ago, and I only brought up these two off the top of my head to encourage others here to bring up similar memories of their own.
On a different note, I don’t think it’s difficult to see how and why poking fun at old conservative fogeys this way is rather dishonest. After all, yes, surely they are happy to see teenage pregnancy rates and STD rates falling, for example, but they also surely never wanted any of this to happen as a consequence of social atomization and the overall atrophy of socializing itself, which is something that clearly contradicts conservative ideals.
Also, let’s not forget that teenage delinquency in general was generally seen as a big problem back in the ‘80s and ‘90s, and not just by conservatives. Back then it was obviously very difficult to foresee a future where average parents actually wished that their teenage children went outside and hanged out at the park, the mall or the arcade.
Botond173
6mo ago
A week ago, in the context of a discussion on some NYT article, @2rafa commented that “there is an unstated (on the progressive side) premise among all people that casual sex is a bad deal for women and devalues or dishonors them in some way”. It generated a few replies but basically no further discussion, even though I’m sure it’s worthy of further discussion, and here’s why: as far as I’m aware, it’s certainly not the case that progressives had this attitude from the beginning of the Sexual Revolution, which is what the context is here. Obviously they used to have a different view in general, but sometime along the way, they changed their minds, because things turned sour, essentially.
Before continuing I think it’s important to qualify, as 2rafa also did, that other ideological groups also share this basic view, but the two main differences are that right-wingers tend to state this view openly, whereas progs are usually reluctant to do so, and that they do so on religious and moralistic grounds, whereas progs concentrate on women’s individual long-term interests, not on any other considerations.
So anyway, I said to myself: surely these people, being progressives, believe that the Sexual Revolution, while a laudable event, went haywire at some point, and didn’t bear the fruits it was supposed to. And I can tell that this is a relatively widespread view, because I can see it expressed in various online venues all the time, not just this forum.
What went wrong then? What did the Sexual Revolution basically promise to average progressive women, and why did that turn out to be a lie?
I’d argue that the more or less unstated promise of the Sexual Revolution to young single women was that: a) they will be sexually free without inviting social shame i.e. normalized sexual experimentation and promiscuity on their part will not have an unfavorable long-term effect on men’s attitudes towards them, and women will not sexually shame one another anymore b) they will be able to leave their constrictive gender roles to the extent they see fit, but this will not lead to social issues and anomie because men will be willing to fill those roles instead i.e. men will have no problem becoming stay-at-home dads, nurses, kindergarteners, doing housework etc.
And none of that turned out to be true.
Am I correct in this assessment?
Botond173
1mo ago
I'll also chime in by utilizing the Akshually... meme unironically, by pointing out that Japan was also under de facto, and is under practical US occupation, and yet mass acceptance of immigrants and refugees never became the norm there. More or less the same applies to South Korea and Taiwan.
Botond173
6mo ago
I've read the discussion on the destruction of General Lee's statue in Charlottesville in last week's thread. I got the impression that many commenters here are prone to come up with explanations why the official removal of the statue was at least unsurprising or objectively justified from a culture war perspective, and I get that. But it seems they aren't focusing on the palpable difference between legally removing a statue and destroying it in a furnace. Because as far as I'm concerned, it's a big step from one to the other.
I'm reminded of the political transitions that happened in Central Europe in 1989-91, because many local monuments to either Soviet politicians/soldiers or local Communists or Marx/Engels were officially removed as a result. Anyone can correct me if they can, but I think all those new political systems were content with just removing the statues and putting them in "museums", which in most cases basically meant that these statues were put in open-air storage in remote and mostly abandoned memorial parks to just wither away, but not destroying them, cutting them up, melting them down etc. This hasn't even happened to Stalin statues in the Baltic states, for example, even though local anti-Soviet sentiment was definitely the strongest in the entire region, not something to understate. You can still find and visit those statues today.
And in this case, even this relatively close parallel doesn't really work, because it's not like there was a fundamental regime change in Virginia since the statue was erected.
And what happened to Lee's statue certainly cannot be explained by financial considerations either, as I'm sure that whatever arrangement that was on the table for putting it away as a museum piece was cheaper than melting it down in a furnace.
The only fitting parallel that comes to mind is Napoleon ordering captured cannons to be melted down to build a gigantic iron monument in Paris dedicated to the victory at Austerlitz. But again, I'm sure I won't have to explain in detail how that political context was completely different from this, even though I'm aware there are many hardline leftists today who would've preferred the evil Confederacy to be publicly humiliated in such ways back in 1865.
In the end, the only sufficient explanation I can come up with is that local authorities were afraid that Lee's statue, no matter where it were to be placed, was likely to become a site of pilgrimage for right-winger heretics opposed to the culture-warring leftist interpretation of race relations in the US, hence the statue's destruction.
Plus, and this is just pure speculation on my part, I think General Lee was such a perfect personification of the Southern patriarchal ideal of gentlemanliness that he invites leftist hostility like no other figure in US history. Plus, he had the cheek to candidly express views on slavery and the innate characteristics of Africans that are, from a leftist perspective, uniquely horrible, just too painful, and cutting too close to the bone, as they say.
Botond173
4mo ago
These people fundamentally see Hamas' attack as legitimate and Israel's response as illegitimate, because they see Israel itself as illegitimate, and they see Israel as illegitimate because it's a Jewish country. It's as clear and simple as that.
No, not at all. It's because it's a colonizer country created by Western imperialists. These same protestors have the same attitude towards any colonial or post-colonial system. I guess you did notice that earlier, it's just that it didn't bother you maybe, as the target of their protests were white gentiles, not Jews, I don't know.
I've posted this before here, and it bears reposting here, with some edits meant as improvement:
This whole thing reminds me of the news stories about the children's mass grave in Tuam, Ireland, and of supposed mass graves in Tulsa, Oklahoma where racist mass-murdering demons buried the victims of the 1921 "race massacre", or so we're told.
When I try looking at these affairs without bias and prejudice, I try putting myself in the shoes of the average Western middle-class suburban white normie NPC, and frankly I realize that, unless some heretic specifically makes an effort to educate me on this, I'll probably have zero understanding of the following hard facts about the bygone days of the West:
1/ It was normal to bury people in unmarked individual paupers' graves, or even in unmarked mass paupers' graves (in the case of, say, an epidemic or some similar catastrophe) if nobody claimed the corpse, or if the relatives were too poor to, or unwilling to, afford a proper burial. This, in fact, was not rare.
2/ Back when national economies were yet too undeveloped to produce a surplus to be spent on, frankly, luxuries, there was exactly zero public support for spending tax money* to improve the material conditions of single mothers so that they have the same prospects in life as married wives**.
*Keep in mind, please, that, unlike today, milking the impregnators for child support under the threat of imprisonment wasn't an option either in most cases, because they were either dead, or already in prison/workhouse, or too poor to be milked for money.
**Again, let's be clear about this: back in the days of benighted Papist Ireland, or in any similar patriarchal society, I can assure you there were probably zero housewives willing to tolerate the spectre of the government basically confiscating a given % of her husband's income and giving it to unwed mothers in the form of state handouts. The extent to which Christian societies in such economic conditions were willing to go to look after the downtrodden was basically to shove them onto the Church and leave them to hold the bag. In the same way, the Church was basically expected to sweep up a portion of single men and women that were unmarriageable for whatever reason and train them to be monks, priests and nuns, so that they were no longer a problematic pain in the butt to their own families.
3/ Also, a society that poor is also unable to pay for lavishly equipped, professional, extensive police forces. This means extrajudicial punishment, communal vigilantism and mob justice was seen as normal and necessary by most people, at least to a certain extent.
4/ Stray dogs were normally slaughtered and their cadavers/bones were used for producing animal glue and other similar products, because you could be sure absolutely nobody was going to contribute material resources to founding and running comfy dog shelters. (I know this has nothing to do with these manufactured scandals, but I included it because we know that white liberals just love dogs.)
Botond173
1mo ago
Honest question:
let's suppose you're an average internet user who was either too young to comprehend what Gamergate was when it was happening, or you're just unaware of it all for any other reason, you just weren't following it etc. You fire up your browser and start looking up information.
Is there any realistic chance that you'll find any description, interpretation or commentary that is not written by the ideological allies and sympathizers of Anita Sarkeesian and Brianna Wu?
Botond173
3mo ago
The issue of modern divorce was discussed here last week in the context of yet another round of wider discussion about the Sexual Revolution. (It's pretty much becoming tiresome at this point, but anyway.) Everyone who bothered to chime in seemed to agree with the notion that divorce is usually a net negative for the wife, both romantically and economically. It appeared to me that there's mostly a consensus about that here.
Fair enough. However, I've seen online data indicating that a) roughly 40% of all marriages end in divorce b) roughly 80% of divorces are initiated by the wives c) in cases where the wife is college-educated, that figure is 90%. In other words, in cases of marriages that fail, modern women are more likely than not to voluntarily put themselves in a disadvantageous life situation.
So...what gives? Are modern women just that impulsive when feeling unhappy in a marriage? Or misled? Do they have illusions about singlehood?
Botond173
7mo ago
the little lie-by-omission of "First Ukrainian Division"
I'm glad someone pointed this out. That he was introduced to the parliament as the veteran of the "First Ukrainian Division" was a calculated and blatant lie. The 14th Waffen-SS division was named Galizien specifically to avoid any official mention of "Ukraine", as the Nazis did not view it as a legitimate nation, and certainly not as a polity worthy of sovereignty. Then in the last stage of the war when defeat was imminent, the Ukrainian collaborators in Germany started to self-organize as control over them collapsed, and one of their actions was apparently renaming the 14th, which was at that point stationed on Austrian soil, to the "First Ukrainian Division". The Waffen-SS headquarters never sanctioned this, so the change was never official, and thus does not appear in official documents.
Another calculated lie that at least some members of the Ukrainian diaspora in Canada committed was erecting monuments to their military veterans which carry the insignia of the 14th on them, but are nominally dedicated to the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), which is a completely different organization and was not founded by the Germans.
Botond173
7mo ago
To quote a Swedish white nationalist from the old subreddit who made the same argument 3 years ago:
The big problem in the long term for the alt right is that America is so suburban. Suburbs are very blue pilling. When whites left cities in the 60s after being forced out by race riots they moved to suburbs and their views on race did a 180. We see similar trends in Europe where suburbia is the one place where nationalist groups can't make progress at all. In Sweden the weakest results for the Sweden democrats in every election has been suburban areas around Stockholm. Those areas are solidly neoliberal. Unfortunately for American nationalists urban areas are small, rural areas are too spread out and the suburban population dominates white people. The suburban demographic is naturally materialistic, rootless, individualist and globalist.
Botond173
7mo ago
The former Canadian ambassador to Israel came on to chastise people who accused her of dual loyalty during her tenure and demands for anyone who believes that to speak up.
Technically speaking, I'm sure she's right. It seems very obvious that her loyalty is not dual indeed.
Botond173
5d ago
except his wife and daughters
Well, yes. That's the point. "Men had authority over women in return, similar to how parents protect their children but expect their children to obey them."
Botond173
5d ago
So now Reuters is stating that Russia is a "larger, better-equipped enemy"? Really? This is where we're at, after more than 2 years? They actually have the cheek to say this? Every single liberal leftist normie-oriented talking head I ever encountered kept repeating for months that the orc invasion force is completely undersized for the task, their rapist orc cannon fodder is deserting en masse and running from their positions like rabbits, they ran out of artillery shells and missiles, have no food, no gear, no body armor, no tanks, what equipment they have is all a piece of crap etc.
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
4mo ago
A couple of months ago @2rafa made the following observation:
MeToo represents an organic rebellion by a lot of women against the excesses of the sexual revolution, whether they consciously realise it or not (and most, as you suggest, do not). Is it often misguided, does it often harm innocents, does it broadly fail to present viable alternatives, is it still trapped inside liberal ideology? Of course - it represents a dynamic rage, it is largely impotent, those supporting it have little understanding of the real material causes of their suffering.
Young women raised in a climate of total sexual liberalism are rebelling with the only words they have, in the only way they can. They’re not going to become “trad” overnight, they have no understanding of what that is, they were raised without religion, they are surrounded by a media environment that means they don’t have any real understanding of what reversing it would mean. Still, they know the present situation is untenable.
This got stuck in my mind, as it reminded me of that memorable scene from the original Conan movie ("Crom, I have never prayed to you before. I have no tongue for it."). Still, it appears to me the issue isn't that the women pushing the #MeToo message (although this whole trend appears to be pretty much over) don't have the words to express their dynamic rage, it's that they're terrified of being branded as losers by other women. What is the implication here, after all? It's that what these women actually want to shout out is "I was duped into have crappy sex multiple times even though I didn't even want it". Or, in other words, "it's unfair that we women have to pretend that men are free to have technically consensual casual sex with us without offering anything in exchange". I'm reminded of laws in many Western countries, I guess most of them still officially on the books, specifically punishing false promises of marriage made for the purpose of sex. I guess these women would prefer some sort of this law to still be enforced.
In other words, while modern Western society claims to empower women and girls in various ways, it seems to actually disempower them completely in a crucial aspect.
Am I correct about this?
Botond173
8mo ago
The farce that was the Trayvon Martin scandal and the media circus that accompanied it was definitely a sign of things to come. In retrospect, that is obvious, and the trend isn't abating. That was in early 2012. And I'm sure one thing fueling it was culture warriors following the story on their smartphones all the time and triggering themselves.
I find it a bit odd that while John Hajnal has a (concise but detailed) Wikipedia entry, but the Hajnal Line as a concept, in fact, does not, and instead redirects to an entry seemingly arbitrarily entitled "Western European marriage pattern", which appears to have been put together by leftist activists. This applies even more to the entry on Werner Conze, which it links to.
I also find it very odd that Hajnal has no entries in either German, Hungarian or Hebrew on Wikipedia, even though he was the son of Hungarian Jews who moved to Weimar Germany.
On a related note, I find it odd that nuptiality as such has no Wikipedia entry at all, and only has a very short and imprecise entry in online dictionaries. I'm no scholar, but as far as I know, the scientific definition of nuptiality as a concept in demographic studies is the rate of fertile women within a population. As such, the nuptiality rate and its projected change is absolutely crucial to the demographic future of any society.
Botond173
3mo ago
Good point. We might as well argue that "everybody wants clean, safe and efficient public transportation", "everybody wants mentally ill homeless violent drug addicts off the streets", and yet we know what the reality is on the ground.
Botond173
3mo ago
And the biggest lie told about all of this is that slut shaming is something done by men, especially bitter single men, although this has never been the case anywhere in the world.
Botond173
4mo ago
One can observe post-Soviet republics to see the long-term consequences of rather lopsided sex ratios which stem from the carnage of World War Two and endure to this day, although to a more limited extent. To give an overall picture, according to the Soviet census of 1959, the female:male ratio in the 35-50-yrs-old cohort was a whopping 7:4. (I’ve read this in a study of war economics during WW2, I can dig up the source if you want to but right now I can’t be bothered.)
It goes without saying that this leaves an advantageous mating market for men in general, but this has wide-ranging repercussions of its own. In such an environment, the usual life paths of men become relatively easy to follow: you finish your studies and then find a relatively OK job without difficulty (after all, employable men are scarce), you’ll also find a wife of your liking easily unless you’re physically/mentally disabled or affected by some rare illness.
Life becomes a routine more or less, and pathological male behaviors such as drunkenness, sloth, gambling etc., which have dire consequences in a society with a normal sex ratio, have more limited penalties in yours. This will mean many men, especially midwits, basically letting themselves go and turning into alcoholic morons, sloths, bums. It’s not wonder that complaining about men being drunkards, cheaters, couch potatoes, bad fucks etc. is a favorite pastime of Slavic women. Of course, one reason many of their men behave in such ways is because even in that state, women are willing to fuck them, for the simple reasons described above.
Botond173
5mo ago
Evo psych offers a simple explanation for this. For men with little or no status, engaging in high-risk, high-reward activities makes objective sense. For women in general, it's the opposite that make sense.
Botond173
7mo ago
Of course they lost every possible tactical battle (no recount, no trump, were shot to death on tv, persecuted, humiliated, brutalized)
It's actually even worse than that. Sometime not a long time ago, I think on the 20th anniversary of 9/11, George Bush Jr. gave a speech at the memorial site of the Flight 93 crash, and used that occasion to specifically condemn Ashli Babbit as a dangerous right-wing extremist terrorist, and with that she condemned and dishonored a woman who volunteered to the army after 9/11 because she wanted to answer his patriotic call to action. This means she was duped by, and driven into debt bondage by, and eventually shot dead by the Deep State, and she did all this in the belief that she was a patriot. This is where we're at. (I've heard this on a right-wing dissident podcast.)
Botond173
4mo ago
The last top-level comment (if that's the correct description) in last week's thread was a self-declared screed by @BahRamYou, which coincidentally reminded me of a short observation about the Ukraine made by @qqqq almost a year ago, which unfortunately generated no further discussion at all:
From a demographic point of view, it is much more interesting how a country with one of the lowest fertility in the world and a population of less than 40 million people will exist after at least 10 million people left it. (Most of which are women and most of them will not return). This will probably be the biggest gender imbalance in history. Will Ukraine declare itself the first incel state? Will it provoke insanely high levels of crime and suicide? It will be interesting to watch.
I thought about this a bit, and it occurs to me that the Ukrainian War is unlike other wars seen around the world since the beginning of this century because it indeed represents a sort of unfortunate perfect demographic storm, namely that 1) it affects a population that is relatively well acculturated into general Western norms of modernity 2) it is relatively close enough to Western welfare states to trigger a massive refugee wave 3) pretty much no control authority anywhere is trying to curb the flight of women, as opposed to the flight of men 4) the region affected is characterized by low fertility, even by European standards.
Based on what I know about the reality of sex differences, I'm sure the presence of large numbers of Ukrainian refugee women, I imagine a large portion of them young and single, in the EU has already generated high levels of resentment among local women, even if this is not visible in media reports. On the other hand, if the Ukraine, or at least large regions of it, has indeed become de facto incel land, which I imagine is indeed the case, I find it hilarious that, objectively speaking, this probably represents the first social realization of the scenario that average Western online feminists love to loudly complain about as a nightmarish dystopia to be avoided, namely a society plagued by enormous numbers of single, sexless and, one can imagine, bitter and traumatized, violent young men - and yet I'm sure you'll not see much or any discussion of this in feminist circles.
Everybody always brings up the Charlottesville rally in this context, but nobody ever brings up the Pikeville rally, which happened a few months earlier, with pretty much the same political groups present on both sides. Which is understandable, because nobody remembers it. Down the memory hole it went, because there were no deaths, no altercations, no incidents at all. You know why? Because the riot police was deployed, and was actually ordered to do the one job they have, which is separating groups of violent protesters from one another. Which pretty much tells you all you need to know about the political reality of the Charlottesville rally.
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