The Charlie Kirk assassination was rather obvious culture war fuel. A Middle Eastern shooting war, while obviously a rather serious development, does not necessarily prove to be culture war fuel. What exactly would the culture-warring be about anyway?
The one thing I can surely say is that in my native Hungary the local Blue Tribe, which supports the main opposition party almost without exception and is otherwise heavily influenced by the US Blue Tribe in every other thing, is, due to the historic legacy of WW2 and the Cold War, largely supporting not only Zionism as such but also the project of Greater Israel (i.e. Israeli control over the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and Southern Lebanon, if not more), and in this they are not a bit different from the government that they otherwise hate with a burning passion. And for this reason I rather doubt this will be fodder for any local culture-warring.
Botond173
16hr ago
On a related note, what position did or will the Iraqi government assume in all of this?
Botond173
2d ago
Yeah, true in the case of rather negligent enemy OPSEC, which apparently did apply to Yamamoto's flight.
Botond173
2d ago
I'm assuming this type was meant to be operated in the airspace of enemies without efficient anti-aircraft defenses.
Botond173
2d ago
I guess normies correctly assume that a woman has to be a severely wretched creature in one way or another in order to become homeless due to society according them innate biological value. After all, a woman can normally avoid homelessness by, I dunno, just sucking cocks or something.
Botond173
2d ago
Bob Woodward didn't graduate from college either, if Wikipedia is to be believed. He did serve in the Navy though.
Botond173
2d ago
I guess trying to explain the benefits of networking to a Boomer is like trying to explain to a fish why it benefits from being underwater. The idea of scrutinizing stuff that works is not something that even occurs to most people.
I think Millennial and GenX people share cultural memory of a prosperous, cozy, modern society in wide consensus about social rewards and obligations. The message was: study hard, conform to social norms, don’t have a criminal record, don’t have children out of wedlock, don’t be an addicted lout, take care of yourself, make sure you graduate in time and look for a job. In return, society pretty much guarantees you a relatively good job worthy of your degree. This has fallen apart around the time of the financial crisis of 2008. It’s dead and gone, but again, people still remember it as something that was the norm for decades.
Botond173
3d ago
I guess the hope of most of them is a future Red return to cucks like McCain and Romney.
Botond173
4d ago
Guys at the bottom defect by not making an effort to turn into eligible husband candidates, because it's only marginally rewarded or even feasible. This is not a bit less of a social defection than that of certain elite males but it only has social consequences long-term and invites less attention, so it's easy to assume that it doesn't matter or that it's not happening at all. Indeed it's the men in the middle who have the least reasons to defect.
Botond173
4d ago
Calling it a 'strategy' is rather far-fetched considering that no other Japanese, Italian or German general or admiral was ever a target of US assassination throughout the war, as far as I know.
Botond173
4d ago
Its fascinating, because many people in the gen-z bracket were told to got to college, get a degree, and you'd have a nice cushy office job lined up.
I'm not sure if that has generally been the case since 2008 or so. For those who graduated from college until 2006 or so, maybe. But those people are GenX and Millennials, not GenZ.
Botond173
5d ago
I assumed a big factor in all of this was the prevention of crabs / pubic lice infestation? Anyway, I as just another dudebro can assert that I find the Brazilian wax rather cringe, whatever aesthetic value skimpy thongs may or may not provide. On the other hand, I find the argument regarding signals of sexual maturity to mostly just be motivated reasoning from lipstick feminists.
Botond173
6d ago
I think there's a reason you're missing in your list, that at least explains why young men would support / go along with prohibitions. Older men taking younger women is fishing in their pond. I think there is some inherent disgust to it, that from an evopsych perspective comes from resource protection.
That's a good point. I think two factors are at play.
One: in earlier times, an older guy unashamedly, routinely pursuing younger women simply ended up getting beaten up by younger men sooner or later. But in an age of online dating, social atomization and the death of clubbing, this risk disappeared.
Two: few young women are signalling a willingness to settle down with equally young men and thus practice assortative mating. This erodes young men's willingness to mate-guard.
Botond173
6d ago
It's funny that you mentioned that. When the subject of mainstream discussion is old people, their declining quality of life, social isolation, solitude and the health risks that entails, people inevitably make the argument that it's harmful for different demographic cohorts to self-segregate, that it's important for your overall well-being to interact regularly with people of different ages, that it's important to open yourself up to the lived experience and perspective of people that are either younger or older than you etc.
Botond173
6d ago
This is understandable and has been discussed to death on this site as well, but we should consider that female attractiveness equals female fecundity, the maintenance of which is rather taxing on the body. I imagine most women would not prefer a life of being fertile for multiple decades.
Botond173
6d ago
The only attitudes I see going in the opposite direction are those related to hedonism (legalization of weed, porn, psychedelics, gay marriage, etc.).
What I'm noticing is that these attitudes are almost exclusive to the U.S., and I'd assume the main motivation behind them is to throw ragebait at the Christian Right out of spite, even though I don't think most of the people doing this ever notice that they're about 20 years late because the Christian Right has been a spent force for a long time.
Two additional points.
One: middle-class, urban, college-educated, office-working single women generally agree that a) society should be OK with them waiting until the age of 31-33 to settle down b) when that happens, 33-37-year-old well-paid, high-status, successful, ambitious, good-fashioned male managers should be lining up to propose to them because, as far as they're concerned, these are the men that are their own equals. It should be just self-evident. When these men refuse to do so and, moreover, decide to jiggle / pair up with 22-25-year-old hot women instead, it generates a considerable level of resentment. That wouldn't normally spill over to other social circles, but the people who write blogs, articles, books etc. about, and generally appear in the media to comment on, the human marketplace are either such women themselves, or are in social circles where most of the women are such women as these. This then has a larger social effect as a result.
Two: the notion of a man openly, unashamedly making selfish and hedonistic use of whatever advantage he has in life is generally not something society is OK with. It's seen as unbecoming behavior. Like taking a long vacation in the Philippines and making local impoverished young women engage in all sorts of disgusting sexual acts with you in exchange for a sum of money that's almost considered a pittance at home.
regarding (2a) and (4), it's not just abuse but also another form of disadvantage. Due to the mismatch in male and female average life expectancy, a woman who marries a significantly older man will be condemned to the lot of a widow with children for many years, someone who's basically an unmarriageable, invisible creature.
Botond173
6d ago
There’s also another aspect to this. Today there is broad consensus among most single men that dating as such is a big pain in the neck. In the old days, however, when the word ‘dating’ had a slightly different meaning and was generally understood not to entail sexual acts, it was specifically meant to be fun.
Botond173
6d ago
One of the most common memes among men online is that women have it insanely easy.
It has also been happening the other way around for decades. This phenomenon is not without social context.
Botond173
10d ago
Relevant news report from San Antonio, Texas from 2010 or so:
Botond173
10d ago
Maybe I just missed it, but I'm a bit surprised that nobody seems to have mentioned the demographic collapse of Sparta, which was a significant driving force behind her demise.
https://spartareconsidered.blogspot.com/2014/05/missing-mothers-cause-of-spartas-decline.html
https://heartiste.org/2014/01/09/the-want-of-men-was-their-ruin/
During the Cold War the Soviet Bloc countries took the official stance of anti-Zionism after the Six Day War of 1967 and openly lent support to the PLO, Syria, Iraq and (until 1973) Egypt (the Arab side in the Arab-Israeli conflict, essentially), all in the name of anti-imperialism and national liberation. This had a couple of cultural consequences. One was a general anti-Arab sentiment under the surface among oppositional/dissident social groups. Another phenomenon connected to the latter was that groups of the democratic opposition took on an attitude that was at least not anti-Zionist or even sympathetic to Zionism, considering Israel to be a member of the Western liberal democratic global alliance that they were hoping to transition their countries to. This is a sort of Randian narrative about Israel being part of Western enlightened civilization and her Arab enemies being against it.
This is maybe something many normies didn't notice either inside or outside Central Europe, but sometimes it appears on the surface. (In 2003 for example, when the governments of these former Soviet Bloc countries seemed to be rather keen on supporting the Iraqi adventure in service of the US neocons and the Israel Lobby.) The democratic opposition included both liberals and nationalists but this difference didn't become obvious until years after the transitions of 1989. The liberals generally held onto their Zionist sympathies with increasing resolve as they observed the nationalists parting ways with them in this regard. This is not to say that Western pro-Palestinian leftist activism has no cultural influence in Central Europe at all, especially not after Oct 7, but their relevance appears to be rather marginal even within leftist social spheres. They can only gain small traction against decades-long trends.
This is in short the Cold War legacy I mentioned.
With respect to the Holocaust, it's rather the opposite of guilt, if that makes any sense. The short story is that Hungary was allied to Germany in WW2 as a member of the Tripartite Pact (while having a relatively large Jewish minority). We can draw a parallel with the Italians here, who also allied with the Germans because both wanted to undo the perceived shame and injustice their nations suffered at the end of WW1. The Italians defected from the pact and agreed to a ceasefire when the Allied forces reached their shores in 1943 and eventual German defeat seemed inevitable.
The Germans understandably assumed that the Hungarians are likely to follow suit when the Red Army reaches their borders, and at one point it became clear that this is just a matter of time, so they occupied Hungary in a swift preventive operation in March 1944 and forced the government to step down. (Unlike Finland, Romania and Bulgaria, Hungary was thus unable to switch sides in WW2.) The deportation of Hungarian Jews, who did face legal discrimination but not genocide up until that point, was started a few weeks later and it was only the swift degradation of the Axis situation on the Eastern Front (as well) in summer 1944 that prevented it from being completed. The official figures say roughly half of Hungarian Jewry (400 thousand) fell victim.
All this later generated the right-wing nationalist interpretation that this particular aspect of the Holocaust was the sole responsibility of the Nazis and the Hungarian nation is blameless, because without the German occupation it was never going to happen. This is more or less the official line of the current right-wing government as well. The dissenting liberal leftist narrative is that the authoritarian rightist regime that made an alliance with Hitler was itself virulently anti-Semitic, passing anti-Semitic laws that were becoming ever more extreme after 1938 but also date back all the way to 1920, tolerated anti-Semitic propaganda, generally normalized the hatred of Jews, made Jewish conscripts do forced labor in the army and operated state agencies that were so full of Jew haters that they swiftly and efficiently carried out the deportations the German occupiers ordered them to without saying a word. And when the nation had her first and last free elections under Soviet occupation in November 1945, the results made it clear that the majority of voters support parties that have also been in parliament during the deposed regime. In other words, they displayed no willingness to clearly part with the shameful past.
I won't go into even more detail about this, suffice it is to say that this is a local culture war dispute that has been done to death, people have been repeating the same narratives for decades, nobody is giving one inch, the whole tiresome subject gets creatively brought up over and over in different contexts, and culture warriors are feeding off one another's outrage. The legacy of the Holocaust is that every Jew who's politically active is a liberal leftist, and everyone who's of the Blue Tribe in general (in US terms) promotes the narrative that anti-Semitism has been a huge cultural problem with a terrible legacy, the country is full of Jew-hating shithead goyim unwilling to face their sordid national past, not taking any responsibility, not coming to terms with the Holocaust etc. I guess it's akin to US Blue Tribe beliefs about anti-Black racism and the legacy of slavery. And since these people generally disbelieve that anti-Israel tendencies can stem from anything but ignorant anti-Jewish prejudice, they are generally more likely to be pro-Israel.
More options
Context Copy link