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FiveHourMarathon

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joined 2022 September 04 22:02:26 UTC

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace: where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy. O divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console, to be understood as to understand, to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive, it is in pardoning that we are pardoned, and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen.


				
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FiveHourMarathon


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				
You can get anything here except red ink

				
				
				

				

					13 followers  

					follows 6 users  

					joined 2022 September 04 22:02:26 UTC
				


				
					

					
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace:
where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
where there is sadness, joy.
O divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled as to console,
to be understood as to understand,
to be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive,
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.
Amen.



				

				

				

				

				

					

					

					
					
					

					
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				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 18, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I agree with your points, and also with @2rafa about the course of the sexual revolution. But also:


-- If you're interested in the topic, I recommend the podcast You Must Remember This which did a long series on erotic films of the 80s and 90s, placing them in context and talking about the social movements around them. Karina Longworth always does a good job with the material, trigger warning for occasional performative woke acknowledgement if that kind of thing bothers you overly much. One of the things she highlights is the way that rating systems, censorship, the rise of home video, and pornography interacted to place different meanings on ratings. There was a time when X and NC-17 were legitimate ratings that indicated a real film intended for adults, both slowly succumbed to being viewed as porn. It used to be that a film (often a sexual thriller from overseas) marketed as NC17 would be a hit, all the adults would go see it. Now that is hard to imagine.


-- I theorize the rise of internet pornography has made viewing sexually arousing material outside of privately hunched over a laptop seem perverted, even homosexual, to a modern audience. Even as barely-pubescent teen I caught the tail end of the "finding a foreign movie my parent's didn't know had tits on video" cultural moment. I remember watching stuff like Y Tu Mama Tambien with my buddies because there were naked girls in it, I don't think we understood anything about the movie. Once internet porn became practical with DSL, I don't think anyone did that, watching something became a purely private endeavor. Decades earlier, porn theatres existed, where men would congregate to watch porn. The idea of going to a theater to see a movie with a heavily arousing tilt strikes me as strange, if I went to the movies without my wife it might even feel kind of gay to be in a theater full of other dudes also getting aroused. Everyone is a goon-er now, but everyone hides it, that's for your home, not for the big screen, or even for watching with family.


-- Don't underestimate the degree to which one work can ruin an entire genre convention. Don Quixote killed the chivalrous romance. The Daniel Craig Bond Films were so dark and serious because Austin Powers was absolutely huge right before they were made, and everyone on set was conscious of the fact that they couldn't do a sex scene without the entire audience giggling and someone shouting "Do I make you horny baby? Yeah! Shag now or shag later?" at the screen. Today Austin Powers is almost forgotten, but in 2006 it was totally unavoidable if you were making a spy film. An effective parody can kill a genre. So can self-parody. Game of Thrones did the whole obligatory sex-scene thing to death, and then completely self-immolated in the final season. The final season was so bad that, like the Three Eyed Raven traveling back to make things seem retarded, it actually retrospectively killed the rest of the series, people talked about GoT constantly up until the finale, and after it aired the show disappeared from popular discourse. Some of the pullback from obligatory breasts and "here's a scene of sexual perversion explaining what's wrong with [character]" likely stems from a desire to avoid being seen as derivative of GoT or a revulsion at GoT's aesthetic after the fiasco that was the finale. RE: Dune upthread; GRRM ripped Herbert off pretty directly in using scenes like "bring me a child prostitute to torture" as establishing bad guy credentials, but GRRM abused it and HBO beat it to death on camera, so while in the novel having Vlad torture-fuck-murder child slaves seemed edgy, in the film it would seem derivative (of the thing that was itself Derivative from the book). As with how the Bond films are still working in the shadow of Austin Powers long after we've forgotten Austin Powers, GoT has now been lame for five years, we forget just how bad the Finale was, and just how much prestige and power was lent to the show leading into the finale, how excited everyone was for what the Extended Universe would produce next, and what a complete fucking letdown the whole thing was. But in 2020 when the first Dune film came out, they had to avoid all association with GoT it was overplayed and toxic. That kind of influence can really carry, and can make a scene unshootable for decades at a time.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 20, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Forrest Gump is the most extensive and obvious on the topic, giving us Forrest as Thesis, Jenny as Antithesis, and Forrest Jr. as literal Synthesis. Forrest is basically ok throughout American history (it’s telling that the avatar of the Boomer generation is a savant-retard too stupid to know what’s going on but too talented to be prevented from succeeding). Jenny is the failure of Thesis-society, molested as a child and seeking freedom through various ultimately unsatisfactory rebellions (the abusive SDS boyf at the Black Panther Party). Ultimately, they finally come together, Jenny dies representing the passing of the 1960s Antithesis, while Forrest takes Forrest Jr. to raise him to preserve the spirit of the 1960s in a way that will lead to a better world.


That synthesis is what we aim for if we wish to preserve mid-century American culture. A world where the young move against a repressive world order. But the synthesis is always itself unsatisfactory, and we cannot raise kids with the value of rebellion as a basic aspect of coming of age, raise them on the Stones and Minor Threat, and expect them not to push further than we want them to. Permanent revolution means every generation is of necessity wrong, and at some point the system must fall under the endless pressure.


The solution I see is that parents and teachers need to assume a morality they do not necessarily agree with. Kids should all be raised religious, even if the parents themselves have doubts, if the kids wish to be atheists they should come by it honestly not default to it for lack of any religious background. Kids should experiment with sexuality away from the prescriptions of “sex positive” parents and teachers, they should come by their horniness naturally not be informed that they should be horny by annoying parents. That is how we produce a generation that looks like the great eras of American history, by producing the full conditions, the complete circle of circles, that produced those men.


2/2


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 26, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Where does power, or the personal perception of power, come into all this? It seems to me like what you call out as hypocrisy could just as easily be explained by a belief that in one's own power/helplessness to implement one's beliefs. That the people you identify as either not holding beliefs, or as hypocrites, are instead rationally biding their time until they can implement their ideas en masse to greater benefit.




The inspiration for this came about partly through conversations I've had with friends and family members, and I've noticed that people sincerely say and profess to believe shit all the time while simultaneously failing to exhibit most or all of the conventional features we'd expect in cases of genuine belief. Consider my sister, who is a staunch activist in the domain of climate change, yet recently bought a new gas guzzling car, has never given any serious thought to reducing her meat consumption, and takes 12+ international flights a year. Or consider my dad, who says extremely negative things about Muslims (not just Islam), yet who has a large number of Muslim friends who he'd never dream of saying a bad word about. Or consider me, who claims to believe that AI risk is a deep existential threat to humanity, yet gets very excited and happy whenever a shiny new AI model is released.




I'd like to take a moment to appreciate that you provided one Blue Tribe, one Red Tribe, and one Grey Tribe example; so that we all will tend to see one "moral" take, one "immoral" take, and one neutral-weird one.


The unifying factor across these beliefs doesn't seem to be hypocrisy, but a perception of a lack of power to implement change. Your sister sees no point in limiting her own consumption of carbon-intensive goods/services when her individual actions will mean little without regulatory change to enforce mass movement towards those goals.* The real win is governments implementing industrial carbon limits, not limiting your own flights to achieve nothing. Your father might see no point in being cruel to Muslims who are here and who he has no power to expel, but if I were a Muslim I certainly wouldn't count on his good will. I would imagine that he might choose to ban Muslim immigration or deport already present Muslims given the power to do so, even though he functions the way he does when lacking power. There's no benefit to him from excluding Muslims personally or being mean, there might be a benefit from ultimately removing all Muslims or Islam from the world.**


Thus a lot of what you identify as hypocrisy, is better seen as a rejection of the Guidance Counselor Office Poster advice about "Be The Change You Wish to See in the World." Instead, they might hold a belief closer to Big Yud's "Be Nice, Until You Can Coordinate Meanness." Perhaps "Be selfish in the circumstances you find yourself, but be willing to advocate for coordinated actions that might go against your selfish goals; don't be selfless unilaterally." This is a fairly common set of circumstances, a liberal billionaire might advocate higher taxes on himself politically, while also not overpaying the taxes he owes; Reagan believed strongly in Nuclear disarmament while also continuing to invest in and maintain the USA's nuclear arsenal to protect MAD and pressure the Soviets; or one might believe a gun-free society would be superior, but own a gun because you want to defend yourself against others with guns who you have no power to disarm.


Another example, a lot of people who conspicuously complain about the modern dating/romance/marriage/sex scene still participate in it for their own selfish gain, but if we had a big Constitutional Convention of Sex to decide how we were going to do things going forward they might choose a different system altogether. Saying that one can't date if one doesn't approve of the entire social system veers dangerously close to the meme about "Oh you critique society while participating in society!" One must do what one must do to live in society, and then seek to implement change by obtaining and exercising power over the collective. Your system requires all dissidents to Benedict Option themselves (at a minimum!) or be called hypocrites or non-believers.


Friedman feels relevant here, to view it in a more systematic way:




“Only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.”




So I might hold a genuine belief, but have no interest in marginalizing myself by advocating it or implementing it in a useless way, while having an ultimate interest in implementing the idea in an effective way.


That feels much less organized than I'd like, maybe I need to chew on this idea more.


*For what it is worth, I tend to believe that most climate change activists seem to operate based on banning things they didn't like anyway. Climate change is at core about restricting people, and obviously some things will be justifiable and some things will not be justifiable under a carbon framework. People who get woke to the climate issues tend to restrict things that they/their class didn't want to do anyway: drive pickup trucks, run industrial concerns, have American children. They tend to ignore or justify the climate impacts of things that they did want to do anyway: fly to foreign countries, import fancy food from abroad, living/allowing people to live in places that are more carbon intensive. Right wing malthusian overpopulation types similarly tend to be most conspicuously concerned about preventing the birth of too many of the kinds of people they didn't like to begin with.


**I feel like your AI thing can be mapped to that as well, but it didn't write out well so I omitted it. But there are reasons for a grey-tribe individual to be selfishly excited at each new AI advancement even if they are frightened of AGI apocalypse. Empowering tech people, or confirming beliefs so people will take them seriously, or just the joy of saying I Told You So. Idk, I'm not one of y'all.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Not fleeing when his country was invaded by a superior military power, which very clearly intended to at least imprison and probably kill him, is almost definitionally heroic. I speak not of righteousness or wickedness, it doesn't really matter whether the cause underlying the conflict favors one side or the other or neither, there were heroic actions on both sides of WWI and in WWII and the Crimean war and Waterloo. I've no doubt that there are thousands of Russians who have behaved heroically in this war; I'm impressed that Russia's equivalents to neocons at least occasionally put their money where their mouth was.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 1, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think this is 80% of the way there, but doesn't properly consider the actors involved. Which isn't that surprising, neither the newlywed OP nor a devout Catholic should be expected to understand sluts.


I agree with you that the goal of Aella et al's definition is to convince people that polyamory is "nice," but the target isn't self-deception (sluts fundamentally do not care about that, making love is self-justifying), nor is it the broader public (who will never be convinced). The target of deception is the cuckolded partner at home. They are the audience, and as long as they are persuaded, the system works. One is able to be a slut in a partner-approved way. This is why Aella's definition makes a lot more sense than @ymeshkout's: the difference between polyamory and cheating is the cuckolded partner's reaction.


For reference, here is an old SA




Many of the people I know in successful polyamorous relationships are sexual, sometimes even highly sexual. But I also know a disproportionate number of asexual polyamorous people – including myself – and the combination seems to work really, really well. Part of it is the ability for asexual people to date sexual people without having to worry about the partner having no way of satisfying their higher sex drive.




[Note: I'm going to engage in some unwarranted psychoanalysis of our man Scott based on his decade old work. I don't know if SA still defines himself as Asexual, or if it was a passing-phase or a temporary side effect of pharmaceuticals. I don't recall him mentioning it recently, the article is a decade old, and more recently my man got married and has been more socially conservative in general]


Now, compare SA's writing at the time, how he situates himself. At the time, at any rate, much of his schtick was nice nerdy guy who can't talk to girls. Many of his early bangers are explicitly situated around a failure to get girls. At the same time, he defined himself as asexual, as lacking libido. Let's flatten that character into a type within the poly discourse: your nerdy, nebbish, herbivore. Not particularly libidinous, not particularly attractive. He doesn't really desire multiple partners, he barely desires one partner. But, he can be convinced to allow his partner to pursue multiple partners.


Aella, taken as a type, does not require the intellectualizing exercise of creating polyamory. She can just fuck. Fucking is self-justifying: it is pleasant and therefore it is good.


The high libido, attractive partner doesn't need a justification for having multiple partners, any more than the rich capitalist needs a justification for owning multiple large houses while the poor patch up their hovels. The capitalist doesn't need capitalism, indeed he will continue to have his beautiful mansion even if he goes to church and prays "Blessed are the poor" or even if he participates in a communist government. The person who needs to be convinced is the poor. Capitalist propaganda isn't designed to get capitalists to buy things, they will do that on their own. It is designed to get the prole to feel that it is right that the capitalist has much and he has little, it is designed to keep the proletariat from taking action to equalize things. Polyamory is the natural concomitant of Capitalism: to each according to their ability. Monogamy is the natural concomitant of Socialism and Democracy: to each according to their need.


Poly propaganda isn't designed to convince hot, horny people to have more sex, they will do that on their own. It is designed to persuade nebbish, nerdy, borderline asexuals to let them do it, without doing anything about it. Hence the naturalization (Sex at Dawn, everyone wants to do it, things can be no other way we're just being honest about it), hence the moralization, hence the justification of everything. The only party that matters is the SA's of the world, the meek partners who accept; the Aellas of the world will act on their own.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				ISRAEL GAZA MEGATHREAD IV
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Whether they find a torture chamber/military base combo pack, or they turn the stone over and all it says is "Peace on Earth;" I predict that IDF will claim the former while Hamas will claim the latter, no one supporting either side will care regardless.


Israel has already been caught faking evidence on official channels, repeatedly and blatantly. No one who supported Israel beforehand cared, nor should they. IDF forces will claim there were military installations under the hospital, they will fake it as aggressively as they need to. The people who want to believe the IDF will believe the IDF; and if they are presented with clear and convincing evidence that the IDF is lying they will say it doesn't matter.


Hamas' track record of honesty is...are we even going to try to address that point? No one who feels that the deaths of [x] number of innocent civilians isn't worth it is going to change their mind, regardless of what they find under there. Nothing they find under there will justify the murder of babies to get it, so therefore they probably won't find it anyway. It's a kind of ethos argumentation: any group bloodthirsty enough to kill children to achieve their military objective is untrustworthy enough to lie about why they killed the children.


It's the law of merited impossibility all the way around. One side says: it's worth killing those kids to get at that military installation, so there must be a military installation there. The other says, it's not worth killing those kids to get at any military installation, so there can't be a military installation there.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 31, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
To add complications, the 30 something millennial woman is the target audience Mattel was missing when selling Barbies, because they might refuse to buy Barbies for their daughter.


Turning Barbie into a vaguely feminist hobby horse, and neutralizing the old knocks on her, helps sell the dolls to parents who want to buy them for their kids. Barbie was in danger of becoming low status.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 8, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'm going to throw out a theory, which is wild speculation but I feel the need to include because it strikes me as obvious.


The fifteen minutes duration increases the odds that this is drug related. Daniel Penny almost certainly did not intend to murder Neely, from the video Neely is still struggling minutes into being choked. Instead it seems likely that Penny attempted to choke Neely unconscious so as to avoid violence, failed to properly execute the maneuver, and instead had Neely in a restricted breathe restraint for several minutes. You can tell because the hold should knock out anyone, if properly applied, within seconds; Neely continued to struggle against three men holding him down for minutes. If Neely had stopped struggling, even if Penny wanted to kill him, it seems unlikely that the other two strangers would have continued to restrain him. Under the stress of the incident, combined with likely drugs or other underlying issues and the restricted breathe, Neely had some kind of heart attack etc.


Penny was not intentionally setting out to kill Neely, instead he was negligent in applying a less-than-lethal restraint and Neely died as a result. So the legal (and moral) question becomes twofold: Was Penny entitled to use less-than-lethal restraints against Neely? And was Penny Negligent or Reckless in how he applied those restraints?


Unfortunately, every detail of this will end up in the public sphere. A few points I am very curious to see:


-- How much did Neely actually know about applying a Rear Naked Choke to a resisting opponent? Was he an active BJJ enthusiast? Was this something he learned briefly ten years ago but never really used? Or perhaps he had never received actual training, but watched MMA videos on youtube sometimes and though it looked easy enough? If he was a purple belt, it increases the probability he intentionally killed Neely because negligence is less likely; but it also makes his choice to try seem more appropriate, because it is something he knew how to do. If he saw it once on Youtube and thought he could pull it off irl, it makes negligence more likely, but also makes the decision to try it seem more reckless.


-- How long, exactly, was Neely struggling for? When did he cease to struggle? How long after he ceased to struggle was the hold released?


-- Unfortunately for Penny, if he is like 90%+ of people his age, his diary that he places in the hands of third party corporations that will hand it over at the first problem is going to come into this. As Hoffmeister noted in his post on the topic, if Penny has posts like many on here indicating that he thinks the homeless are subhuman scum that need to be cleared off the streets, we will know soon. This is quite likely where the story will hinge. Prosecution will aim to portray him as "looking for a fight" and looking for an excuse to hurt or kill someone.


-- The prosecution was smart to charge him with a lower homicide felony rather than Murder 1, that's why Rittenhouse got off. While I think Rittenhouse was more or less entirely justified in what he did, he probably could have been convicted of negligent manslaughter on the theory that he made some procedural mistake in going somewhere he shouldn't have, but he was never going to get convicted of premeditated murder. Penny's case will push the idea that he responded appropriately to what Neely did/said, and that he never intended to kill him, but other causes (drugs) lead to Neely's death.


-- Whether Neely was a capital A Addict I have no idea, but if they don't find signs of drug use in his system, I'll be shocked.


-- The various Death Wish style masturbatory fantasies that are floating around the internet are totally inappropriate to what happened. This has nothing to do with whether homeless people ought to be murdered, because that was not what anyone intended to do. It has to do with whether one has the right to use reasonable less-than-lethal force to protect oneself and others, and remain protected if the egg-shell-victim happens to die.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 1, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Replying to both you and @Tarnstellung here.


I'm not particularly anti-trans, but I am very anti-Bud Light, and very pro people exercising their power.


Bud Light is a piss-colored metaphor for the kind of corporate slop culture that I hate in all its forms. I hate that they put flags on the cans and advertise as America's beer while being owned by the Belgians. I hate the "out of touch bro" advertising themes they used for my childhood the way they glorify a male ideal of lazy stupidity, I hate the obligatory lukewarm "current thing" woke fakery even more. I hate the beer itself, it factually isn't very good, Yuengling and Lion's Head are both better, or very cheap, Lion's Head is modestly cheaper at my local beer distributor and has games under the bottle cap, its best attribute is that it is available. I hate the corporation slicing and dicing consumer groups to create market segments to convince that their piss-beer is a necessary accoutrement to their newly invented lifestyle. I hate that anyone cares enough about Bud fucking Light that they feel that their marketing is "claiming territory" in their identity.


I think the world would be a better place if people, rather than choking down the slop that ubiquitous and milquetoast corporations like AB Inbev serves, choose to actually try to get things they want. If the local brewery a mile from my house did pro LGBTQERTY_>?+} cans because the owner has a trans friend, I'd probably buy them if they made a porter. That's a real person expressing a real feeling. Bud Light marketing to trans fans is trying to redefine a lifestyle segment of the marketplace on a spreadsheet. Fuck em. I'd rather see the people stick it to the corporation.


In general, I don't think "Cancel Culture" as a concept can be applied unless you already had a legitimate claim on fame. Influencers, for example, have no claim on being canceled because they have no talent beyond people liking them. If your talent is people liking you, and people stop liking you, well sounds like you're shit out of luck, like a baseball player with the yips. Cancel Culture is more about someone like Woody Allen, where people will often say they love his work but hate him. Or people who want Kaepernick run out of the NFL, or people who want Deshaun Watson run out of the NFL. Being canceled means having talent and being banned from exercising that talent, not merely being disliked.


Bud Light has no legitimate claim on the being the best selling beer in the country. Its dominance is based purely on marketing and branding. Well, fuck up your marketing, fuck up your branding, fuck em. A world where Bud Light's customers do at least a little critical examination of what they consume will probably improve the world.


Bud Light Delenda Est.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Only when this core truth is understood - that trans identification is in many or even most cases about what feels (to the child) like a rational reaction to perceived but mostly real low social status*




This is the personal memory I think of every time Trans Kids come up. Sitting in seventh grade biology learning chromosomes, XX and XY. The teacher talks about, as a curiosity, a throwaway fun fact, that some men have two Y chromosomes, XYY, and that they are disproportionately found on death row, and that it is theorized the extra Y makes them extra aggressive and leads them to a life of violence. And some men are XXY, and correspondingly maybe a little more feminine. I remember feeling, with a deep sense of dread, that I must be XXY. That's why I was such a pussy! That's why I wasn't as good at sports as I wished I was! That's why girls I liked didn't like me! That's why I wasn't as tough as the blue collar farm kids I worked with who threw hay bails all day and never cried, why I couldn't make heads or tails of a small engine, why I liked books and old movies rather than manly things*, why my dad was always yelling at me to harden up and be a man and work harder, it explained everything!


Thank God I didn't have this shit around at the time, I might have said something to someone, and been on the path. Instead I just needed to wait five more years to grow into myself, and learn how broad the definition of Man can be, and reach a time when girls liked things that I was good at rather than things I wasn't and when socialization changed a little. I'd like to say I've grown into a decent man, fairly masculine, still an Iced-Coffee-All-Year bitch but that's hardly grounds to transition. Still, I remember that fear so distinctly, that sense of certainty that this was everything that was wrong with me, and I can't shake the sense that transmodernity can open like a trap door from one moment like that.


*Yeah, that's a long list, my expectations at 13 were basically to be Heinlein's Competent Man. Which is still my goal today, but I have enough achievements under my belt to understand what I can and can't do. A man's got to know his limitations. Which I think is another problem with status concerns for teenagers: they're based on expectations. The Apex Fallacy, looking at only the best and assuming that is normal, is so easy and so tempting. Truth is, I was probably >50th percentile at sports, I just picked the wrong ones back then. I've never been tough and I've never been graceful, so basketball and baseball and football were never for me. Today, I'd gamble I could beat anyone in town at a certain combination of skills, and that's good enough for me to feel good about myself. But I still can't shoot a basketball for shit.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 11, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
My great uncle Carl fought in Korea, came back (leaving his brother my grandfather behind in a PoW camp, but that's neither here nor there), and started working as a bricklayer for his first years back. For the first decade he was back until he married my Aunt Irma, working as a union bricklayer, he never showed up on Mondays. My grandfather came back from the camp, married my grandmother almost immediately, and had my mother (maybe a little less than) nine months later, and got a job at a factory. My mother attended Parochial school, and walking to school with my grandmother would see Uncle Carl stumbling home drunk in the morning from the Hungarian Club, and ask my grandmother what was wrong with Uncle Carl, my grandmother would tell her that Uncle Carl and his friends were up late drinking "juice" and playing polka.


One day, he used to love to tell this story, his foreman called him in to talk to him. Laid out the time cards, no show Monday, no show Monday, no show Monday...Carl if you weren't such a good worker you'd be out on your ass. YOU NEED TO SHOW UP ON MONDAY EVERY NOW AND THEN, JUST TO SEE WHAT IT'S LIKE! IT'S JUST LIKE TUESDAY!


Then, after some years of drinking so much over the weekend that he never made it to work on Monday, he married Irma. After that he straightened out, and lived a successful (if ultimately, for unrelated reasons, tragic) life, always jovial at family functions, a normal enough Republican. Maybe today we'd say he had PTSD from the war stories he used to tell about Korea, or had substance abuse issues from the alcohol, or any number of other diagnosable issues. But the thing I'm questioning is whether the life script today has room for "spent a decade fucking around at work while drinking too much on the weekends" before getting back on track. I don't know that it has that same flexibility. I think it would be tougher to pull off today. I think today the proper life path is more on rails, and if derailed is tougher to get back on, with deep ditches to either side. People need more flexibility, they are complicated.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 29, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I wanted to write something about this, but old dickie Hanania beat me to it.




Conservatives are losing the "don't be weirdos” contest






I can’t resist commenting on how the ongoing freakout over the Kansas City Chiefs making the Super Bowl perfectly encapsulates everything that has gone wrong. Taylor Swift may have endorsed Biden in 2020, but as Max Meyer pointed out after attending one of her concerts, everything about her aesthetic and place in the culture is implicitly conservative. Her fans want to be attractive and meet men. They’re not interested in changing their sex or cheering for urban mobs looting the local supermarket. If you simply give them some semblance of normalcy, they’ll be on your side and vote in opposition to the left and what it has become. But instead of that, they get conspiracy theories about the Super Bowl being rigged so Swift can then endorse Biden.






We can understand Taylor Swift Democrats as men and women comfortable with their birth sex, eager to play the roles traditionally assigned to it, not racist but not feeling particularly guilty about the sins of their country, and who will naturally gravitate towards whichever political coalition comes across as the most normal, willing to let them go about their lives watching football or buying makeup from Sephora. People like this used to be natural conservatives, and especially given the Great Awokening, they still should today. They’re not, mostly because Republicans were able to overturn Roe and went out and created a cult of personality around perhaps the least normal politician the country has ever had.






There’s something deeply poetic about this freakout centering around football, the sport that has always served as a symbol of wholesome American normalcy. The old mantra of “the personal is political” always reflected a major electoral weakness of the left. It revealed an inability to have any thoughts or passions that aren’t part of an ideological agenda. Most people don’t care about politics all that much, and feel more positively inclined towards whichever tribe doesn’t try to make them feel guilty about that fact. If you’re watching the AFC Championship game and try to steer the conversation to which players are vaxxed, most sports fans aren’t going to want to talk to you anymore. For a while, liberals were “that guy,” and many of their activists still have this flaw, but conservatives have increasingly neutralized what should be a natural advantage for them, and the way right-wing media is covering the NFL playoffs indicates that if anything the left can now win the contest over who’s more able to just sit back and watch a football game.




As a Republican, I’m amused and horrified. One common reaction was summed up by a tweet reading simply “We don’t deserve to win.” Just, what the fuck guys? Can’t we just be the normal ones? It shouldn’t be hard by comparison. But instead we’re attacking normality. We’re doing goofball shit.


Vivek, so recently a Republican candidate for President widely taken seriously, added to this genre tweeting out:




I wonder who’s going to win the Super Bowl next month. And I wonder if there’s a major presidential endorsement coming from an artificially culturally propped-up couple this fall. Just some wild speculation over here, let’s see how it ages over the next 8 months.




Such Texas Sharpshooter energy. I predict that the team that won last year’s Super Bowl will win this year’s super bowl, and that Taylor Swift will endorse the same person she endorsed in 2020 in the same race. But if the obvious happens, it’s a CONSPIRACY!


The problem is that even if you believe that Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce are artificially propped up, that Taylor is the result of media coverage and that the whole NFL is WWE with end zones, saying it doesn’t actually help you capture the millions of people who are fans of them. “Media Influence” is nearly always a Russell Conjugation: other people’s tastes are the result of media bias, my tastes are pure and formed entirely individually. People will almost never change their tastes as a result of being informed that they were “influenced” by the media, they will get angry. People will easily be convinced that other people are sheeple, they will almost never be convinced that they are. “Pop singers” Swifties will react angrily to this accusation, as will Chiefs fans. Neither will react kindly to the insinuation that their favorite thing is bullshit.


I can’t go through a week without hearing about Kelce from my mother or Swift from my wife. My wife is deep into the swiftie Gaylor conspiracy universe and asks my opinion on them when we’re stoned. My mother listens to every episode of the Kelce Brothers’ podcast, and gives me the highlights. Both are wealthy married white women, who own homes and cars, who value family and capitalism. My mother is not going to be convinced that she likes Travis Kelce because of the deep state and not because he is really good at getting open and he’s funny on mic. My wife is not going to be convinced that she doesn’t really like singing along to I Can See You. It’s a losing strategy to try to convince them that it’s all fake: most people start from the emotional opinion that everything is fake, they aren’t rationally convinced. Just as most atheists turn against the church for personal reasons and then become aware of all the rational arguments and contradictions involved.


The far better strategy by DR types would be to try to unwillingly recruit Swift and Kelce. The old “Aryan Princess” meme. Make them an icon of your side, and you make them problematic. Even when the inevitable Swift endorsement comes, it will feel hollow. Swift will be put in an uncomfortable position, weakened by being forced to deny being a white supremacist. Her fans will be offended by being called racists for liking the music they like, and start to turn against those calling them racists.


Of course, this isn’t happening because I doubt that Trump is declaring “Holy War” on Swift. That’s just a little unsourced TDS tidbit the liberal media couldn’t resist. This is just various hustling influencers seizing on a big name. But if you want to be an insurgent party, discipline is key, and this isn’t it.


AND YET


I find Hanania is being very uncharitable to the right, and buying into an essentially progressive framing of the world. The captured version of the NFL that we watch every week, with “STOP RACISM” written on helmets and in the end zones, with required interviews for minority coaching candidates*, with the mildly absurd farce of wildly-celebrated female coaches in minor functionary roles buried on the staff, with every ad break featuring female athletes (and especially the hypothetical female high school football player featured over and over). Equally, I saw the Eras Tour movie with my wife, and friends of ours went to the concert. It was clear that comparing what was on camera to the crowd at the actual concerts, they went out of their way to make it seem less white than it was. Prominent romantic roles were given to Black Male dancers on stage, despite Taylor herself dating only white men historically, prominent roles were given to flamboyantly gay and trans dancers. Taylor put in the effort in advance to make it a comfortable experience for liberals.


So when Richard says:




For a while, liberals were “that guy,” and many of their activists still have this flaw, but conservatives have increasingly neutralized what should be a natural advantage for them, and the way right-wing media is covering the NFL playoffs indicates that if anything the left can now win the contest over who’s more able to just sit back and watch a football game.




He’s ignoring the context. Liberals were “that guy” for years, and they were loudly whiny, and they succeeded. The NFL and pop culture and ordinary speech changed to accommodate liberals. And it seems to be working, with ratings rebounding from 2016 downtrends. But Hanania is praising liberals for being able to watch a football game telecast that has been designed to soothe them, while blaming Conservatives for being unable to watch a telecast that has been designed to soothe their enemies. It’s a trap Conservatives have fallen into, and they should be shamed for it! But it’s also the fruit of the Long March Through the Institutions.


*The Rooney Rule originally struck me as fairly decent, fairly fair: teams must interview one minority candidate for coaching positions. No requirement to hire, but you have to interview. The results have become increasingly absurd. The Eagles had black Offensive and Defensive Coordinators who had a terrible embarrassing end to the season, but had done well before. Both got a few token Head Coach interviews, to satisfy the Rooney Rule, and as a result the Eagles did not fire them, hanging onto them for way longer than anyone believed the Eagles would bring them back. Because if you get a black coach hired away, you get a compensatory draft pick for it. It was a silly spectacle to watch.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Puberty is one of those critical development windows after which, if certain physical changes haven't happened, they're unlikely to happen at all. It affects the entire body, including the brain and skeletal system, not only the sex organs and secondary sex characteristics.




To say nothing of the vicious logic of delaying it.


Take a kid, maybe he's trans, maybe he's just having some trouble seeing himself as a young man when the other boys are bigger/stronger/rougher than him. Now prevent him from experiencing puberty normally, as the rest of his cohort starts growing beards and joking about hiding erections he will have nothing in common with them. They will be bigger and stronger, he will be smaller and weaker; how is that going to help him return to masculinity? How, exactly, is he going to come back to identifying with his cohort as it leaves him behind? As he becomes more and more different from his cohort, he will sink further and further into the trans identity.


Few desist off of blockers because they don't stand a chance, the slope here is very slippery.


*This can of course be gender reversed quite easily. A 12 year old girl who isn't feeling like one of the girls, isn't going to feel any more feminine when she never grows tits while all her friends do.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
In support of you, and contra @Rex and @Walterodim: Citing back to my informal survey of Mottizens on the topic* the norm seems to be about 1-3 strong marriage prospects across one's youth. When I think of my own response when thinking of the question, out of the 4 (I'm dropping one in this context), three of them I met under circumstances that were highly luck based and contingent, they could easily not have happened if I were "sick that day" or whatever. I can very easily imagine having gotten to 28 or so having met with only one strong marriage candidate, and failing to bag 1/1 is a pretty tough standard. It's not hard to imagine being in a position where contingent facts leave someone with few, or even no, real opportunities to get married across a lifetime.


On the other hand, in support of Rex and Walter's points, I gave this example to our friend GettingRadicalised before.


Deciding to propose is like deciding to go all-in during a night of poker. You get a good hand, you can judge the situation based on what you see around you and on the hands you've been dealt in the past, and your knowledge of what a good hand looks like. But you can't know what hands you'd be dealt in the future. Maybe if you fold 10-10 now you might get dealt Q-Q next hand! And you can't KNOW what anyone else is holding, you might go all in on A-A and some dipshit who went against you with 9-10 offsuit and got 9-10-2 on the flop beats you.


Going all-in is scary, you never know, you could lose everything. But Kipling tells us (by implication) that if you can't "make one heap of all your winnings, And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss," then you will never be a man. That's what commitment is, going all-in on a gamble, and fearing commitment is thinking that you just want to see one more hand, another hand, one more hand, and maybe you'll get A-A or A-K on suit, then, THEN you'll bet. But if you never commit, if you're never willing to gamble on a good hand, you'll likely-as-not play all night, folding constantly, losing little bets and blinds and antes, and leave the table with your pockets lighter than when you came in.


So at age, let's say 35, you're judging a group of men on marriage choices, it's like judging guys coming out of a little poker tournament. Guys who never really gambled, who just lost small bets folding all night, will say they had weak hands all night. Maybe they really did just get crap pocket cards all night, and the great RNG in the sky was against them, and any second now they'll get the cards and be ready to gamble intelligently. But maybe when you see a guy who never gambled, he got the same hands everyone else did more-or-less, but he was too timid to gamble, always hoping that he'd get an even better hand, not willing to go all-in until he was absolutely mathematically certain he had the nuts at the table. That might not be a guy you judge highly, he needs more courage, more commitment.


And to carry the poker metaphor, you are highly unlikely to highly judge anyone positively if they walk out with their pockets emptied, the result if you go all-in and lose. Now, part of that might be luck, some might have gotten rivered on a great hand; but on a big enough average the ones who go broke probably gambled too aggressively on a bad hand, or folded too often and got themselves behind and had to go all-in on a mediocre hand to try to get back in the game and failed. These are your divorces and your patently-unhappy marriages. Society judges them, I think, more harshly than those never married at all. So you really are taking a social gamble when you get married, it's not all roses after you propose.


TLDR: To summarize all three points, marriage status indicates whether a man knows when to hold-em, when to fold-em, when to walk away, and when to run.


*Shoutout to @ZorbaTHut for making this easy for me to find, it only had two upvotes but a ton of children


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Quality Contributions Report for October 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Other motte cheat codes (can probably be accused of most of these, I kid because I love)


-- Cite and link throughout to academic articles with titles and abstracts that seem related. Don't worry if the text of the article supports your thesis, very few people will actually read it, or even ctrl-f it. If possible, cite to non English sources, most of us are monolingual self hating Americans who will instantly give it extra cred, but we won't ever try to read it.


-- Accuse your opponents of LARPing their beliefs because they haven't martyred themselves yet. If anyone asks what you do about your beliefs in real life, refuse to talk about it and accuse them of being a narc trying to catch you admitting to something illegal.


-- Claim to have vague personal experiences that support all your points and dispute your opponents'.


-- Blame everything wrong with your life and the world in general on a mysterious cabal of humans so different from the average mttizen that we can barely understand them, who seem to hold mysterious power over us despite their lack of physical strength: Women.


-- work the refs. We all want to think we're fair minded, if you hop on right after a lib gets fucking buried you'll get the makeup call. See! We upvoted @thedag we ain't prejudiced!


-- Just keep typing. The longer your post the lower the odds anyone actually reads or argues with most of your points. The haters will reply to the first point, and you can just say that was addressed in paragraph 15. Your fans will also reply praising the first point, and just assume that paragraphs 20-25 support it.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


So I donno, am I operating somewhere out on the fringes with this notion? Is there anybody here who fully believes Biden is every bit the President in full possession of the authority of his office that Obama or George Bush (either) were? Can you tell me why?




I think it's a little more nuanced than a dichotomy between "Biden is President Grandpa, and his handlers give him a warm glass of milk and his pills and send him off to bed before the real meeting" and "Biden is dictator and gets whatever he wants whenever he wants it (within the confines of the imperial presidency)." Most presidents exist somewhere between those two.


There were tons of doubts that Dubya was in charge. See here for pre 9/11 and [here for in the twilight of the Bush years)(https://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/04/opinion/04sat1.html). Obama was thwarted in many of his personal goals by "the generals" or by his elders in the government over and over. And we don't ever need to get into Trump, whose lack of fluency in bureaucrat cost the country a lot of initiatives that could have been great.


So in all cases the president has limited ability to give orders and have them perfectly obeyed. It is likely that Biden has the ability to prevent any major policy that he opposed, but he can't get all the details right any more than presidents before him could, and he probably couldn't deal with a mutiny from employees/democrats more broadly.


I do think there are reasons to believe Biden exercises less power than his predecessors, but marginally not completely. His general mediocrity across a long career, his vulnerability to being overshadowed by his old boss opposing his policies in a way reminiscent of Taft, his age, his party's precarious hold on relevancy.


But the same things were said about Dubya, that he was controlled by Cheney and a coterie of former advisors to his father, and you now in retrospect cite him as a very powerful president. So either that's less true than was common wisdom at the time, or it's not really that important historically.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 8, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The Dawn of Everything, The Pop-Tarts Bowl Mascot, Joseph Campbell, and the Importance of Play


The Pop Tarts Bowl was played between North Carolina State and Kansas State. From my limited understanding, it is a second or third tier bowl game, well below stuff like the Orange Bowl and Rose Bowl, on the fringes of something that makes national TV. The colleges are relatively unimportant schools. But it took over my Twitter for a while, because of the edible mascot. And dammit, they delivered didn’t they Canonically (I have been informed) within the advertising universe personified Pop-Tarts want desperately to be eaten, it is their favorite thing. Tweets exploded at the sheer absurdity of the spectacle. It produced absurd quantities of earned media and was the most watched bowl game to that point. Other Mascots got in on it. There were infinite comparisons to Christ and the birth of Christianity: "This my body, that is being given up for you, and for many."  And I can’t find the tweet anymore because I rarely save them, but I saw one in the midst of this onslaught of content that went something like “Archaeologists will unearth this and say that Americans engaged in mass sacrifice in college football stadiums. What if the Aztec temples and the Roman Coliseum weren’t sites of brutal slaughter, but intense silliness and play acting?” I don’t endorse those interpretations of Roman and Aztec history, and certainly not of Christianity…but let’s consider another possibility.


The Dawn of Everything (hereafter DoE) is a magisterial work. It endeavors to cover a great deal of ground, from meta-critique of European historiography and ethnography to straight historical storytelling, from absurd theorizing about Rousseau secretly plagiarizing indigenous authors to interesting interpretations of obscure cultural and historical forms.


((A brief aside on that Rousseau bit: ACX featured an extensive review of the book. The reviewer criticizes the idea of indigenous thought influencing European political thought as absurd then compares the Dawn of Everything view of power to the film Mean Girls…without realizing that he is himself participating in exactly the dynamic that the authors of DoE are talking about. Mean Girls quite explicitly compares the tribalism of High School cliques to a silly view of African wildlife and native life. The main character of the film is explicitly created as an outsider to American middle class norms, by way of making her the child of researching professors raised abroad in darkest Africa. The entire plot is, at some level, deeply influenced by and in conversation with the Western view of indigenous African cultures. To turn around and offer it as a pure and naive example of what hunter-gatherer tribal culture would have looked like is precisely what the Daves are talking about in DoE.))


But the real focus of DoE is in my view twofold. The first goal is recapturing the idea of humans as universally self-aware political actors, even in primitive societies. The second is an examination of how political forms radically different than our own interact with human freedom, and the authors view of the “Three Fundamental Freedoms” and how to measure them. I have no interest in going over the many examples offered in DoE to support the first point. They offer numerous examples of humans engaging in political thought, debate, and reorganization. They make what I find to be persuasive arguments that rather than a straight line from a pure state of nature, through intermediate steps growing progressively more complex and controlled, to the modern capitalist surveillance state, itself an intermediate step leading towards the singularity/the Federation of Planets/True Communism/Whatever. DoE makes a compelling argument that in many places over time, peoples have gotten something resembling early civilization and soundly and consciously rejected it. That through the resulting institutions and traditions primitive successor nations specifically built strategies to prevent the formation of tyrannies. This is obvious, if only by evolutionary means: only societies that have formed strong traditions against the formation of more strictly organized control and tyranny will remain free. We can examine societies that built cities and monuments in Cahokia, then abandoned them, to see how a society can be built to resist such further authoritarianism.


DoE frames this view of anti-authoritarianism in the Three Freedoms. The freedom to move away, the freedom to disobey, and the freedom to reorganize social relationships along new lines. The first is the most fundamental, underlying such post-modern futurist visions of freedom as the Archipelago and the Patchwork. As long as people are free to flee, building a new tyranny is impossible, people will simply leave. What if they had a pogrom and nobody showed up? The second is obvious, can people disobey orders given to them? What are the consequences of doing so? Interacting with the first freedom, can you just leave town if you don’t want to listen to orders, or will you be restrained? The third is more subtle: how can people change the organization of their social relationships? Are the hierarchies handed down to me, or can I build my own? Are we allowed to form our own religion, our own secret society, our own fan club, freedom of association? Can I marry who I choose, and structure that marriage how I choose? While the other freedoms are purely the freedom to assert oneself (to move under one’s own will, to act as one chooses) this freedom also involves a strange freedom: the freedom to submit. Am I free to bind myself to religious doctrines? Am I free to structure a covenant marriage? Am I free to run my family how I choose? Am I free to sign contracts to work as I see fit? By the very act of granting rights to parties that are irrevocable, modern governments impinge on the right to transform social relations: I have the freedom of association, but not to bind myself or others to promises beyond what the government chooses to recognize. Beyond that limit, all can escape.


Much of the work is devoted to examination of different bases of power, and how they interact in primitive societies. But one of the interesting insights is how, looking at societies that are seemingly on-the-verge of developing into more complex polities, there seem to be play-powers, carnival-kings whose power is temporary or farcical, and are obeyed with a giggle but have no real power. DoE compares this to play-farming, typical of hunter-gatherer cultures, who will often cultivate a plot for fun but not as a primary means of subsistence. The authors theorize that play-kings develop into real kings over time. But they also assert the importance of play-relations as a way to model, to experiment, to grow into new forms of real relations, an assertion of the third freedom. Play can be an important means of building civil society, of creating new forms.


In talking about the first freedom, DoE talks about the Clan system of Amerindian tribes. Each tribe contained a cross cutting system of Clans, within the Algonquin there were Bear, Wolf, Hawk clans and then among the Haudenausee there would equally be Bear, Wolf, Hawk clans, and so on in tribes across the plains to the canyons. The clan members were putatively all relatives of each, clan descent was matrilineal, and clan members must marry someone from another clan. Clan members owe each other hospitality, travel was facilitated across long distances. The authors note that much of the long distance travel and trade seems to be for fairly frivolous purposes, minor luxuries or curiosities rather than necessities. Much of the long distance trade and travel was itself play, a frivolous means of achieving status. But at the same time, the preservation of these networks of trade and travel enabled the freedom to move. It was impossible to tyrannize citizens when they have the option to move from place to place easily and freely. So while the networks may be frivolous in application, they have a serious impact. It's these kinds of cross-cutting identities that can offer freedom against the polity. The combination of all identities into a single coinciding nation-state is the opposite of this, a totalizing identity: an ethnic identity that coincides with a political monopoly on violence which coincides (often) with religious identities which coincides with linguistic identities. Maybe we need to disentangle the identities from each-other.


Think of all the ways that frivolous things can become serious. Everything I learned about leadership, I learned from either youth sports or the Boy Scouts. My wife and I use joking ironic pet names for each other, that slowly become the only names we refer to each other by, the sappy irony becomes sappy reality. We have seen “meme-magic” turn an ironic joke into a president, and then into a number of people who may or may not have been in on the jokes going to prison. On this very forum, I learned about the Doge system, and I really would consider implementing it in other organizations I am a part of in the future. The Nika riots are a great example of play civil society coming to the fore, albeit to a tragic conclusion. Much of the glue of civil society is in ball leagues, in reading clubs, in sewing circles.


This all  reminded me of a quote from a Joseph Campbell lecture that has stuck with me for a long time:




There is a curious, extremely interesting term in Japanese that refers to a very special manner of polite, aristocratic speech known as “play language,” asobase kotoba, whereby, instead of saying to a person, for example, “I see that you have come to Tokyo,” one would express the observation by saying, “I see that you are playing at being in Tokyo”— the idea being that the person addressed is in such control of his life and his powers that for him everything is a play, a game, freely and with ease. And this idea is carried even so far that instead of saying to a person, “I hear that your father has died,” you would say, rather, “I hear that your father has played at dying.” And now, I submit that this is truly a noble, really glorious way to approach life…That is the attitude designated by Nietzche as Amor fati, love of one’s fate.




The field of play can encompass everything in life, all the world’s a stage and whatnot, but it is also important to create fields of play to experiment, to create spaces of mastery in which to learn.


Which brings us back to the Pop Tarts Bowl. It’s comical, it is silly, it is a corporate goofball advertisement. But it can also be the start of a tradition. Maybe this is how traditions start, with something so ridiculously stupid that it captures the imagination. These kinds of imaginary games, ceremonies, meanings, can be used to start to build to cross-cutting identities that will help us imagine and reproduce a new universe of freedom, outside the modern totalizing worldview.


It’s important not to take things so seriously. Treat life as a game, and you’ll build something real.


Note: DoE dislikes the use of terms like “primitive.” For all the typical reasons of judgment etc. I still find it a useful conceptual anchor, and for lack of a better term that isn’t dripping with euphemistic political correctness I will use it here. I do not indicate, in general, that these are not sophisticated societies, or that they are not organized. The whole point of this is that they have political thought! But they don’t have the maxim gun, as it were.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 23, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It's especially insane to me in that, if one were going to be racist against any group, Aboriginal Australians have the weakest arguments to make of maybe any ethnic group in the world. They have made virtually zero scientific, economic, cultural, sporting, artistic, political, military, domestic contributions to global culture.


I literally can't think of any other ethnicity, outside of super specific small groups, that I can't make a better argument for. Gypsy culture might be made up of criminals, but Django Reinhardt. We've seen the arguments against Jews and American Blacks rehashed a million times, but vast swathes of modern physics and literature and music and sport argues in their favor. Serbians can't have an independent country for thirty years without starting a war, but there's plenty of great Serbians. Even little Arab Palestine has given us the odd poet, or emigrant businessman or model.


What have Aboriginal Australians ever contributed? The digiridoo?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for September 22, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
My wife asked one of her typical "Long drive stuck in traffic" questions the other day, and I want to pose it to theMotte: What pop song written this century would you propose as the new national anthem for the United States of America?


I settled on Taylor Swift's You Belong With Me. It perfectly captures the modern American middle-class self-conceit. It's got a little twang to it without being Morgan Wallen, a dash of country but not too much, reflecting a people that still thinks of themselves as descendants of frontier farmers but really drive a lawn tractor around a suburban three-quarters of an acre; a driving rock beat but not heavy metal, a cultural artifact that honors rock music's past but neither pushes it forward into avant garde strangeness nor slavishly imitates what went before.


The femcel narrator's view of herself as the putative underdog ("She wears short-skirts I wear T Shirts, she's cheer captain and I'm on the bleachers") is the kind of self-view every American takes of themselves. We Americans all think of ourselves like that, we're all middle-class or working class underdogs striving against the "system" and its head honchos. We think that about ourselves, even when we're billionaires who have been elected president, superstar athletes who pushed other superstar athletes out of the sport that we already dominated, or the literal richest man in the world. Americans picture themselves as the underdog when they fight wars against impoverished tribesmen across the globe, when they play sports  we barely care about against tiny countries. How better to capture that than a song by a thin, young, rich blonde about how she just can't get a guy to notice her. The video presentation adds to the hilarity: she's the only one who really understands the (checks notes) star wide receiver on the football team, they're the most conventionally attractive high school couple imaginable, but they're so unique because she unlike his current girlfriend "listen[s] to the kind of music she doesn't like, And she'll never know your story like I do."


The conclusion of the song ("Dreaming about the day when you wake up and find, That what you're looking for has been here the whole time, If you could see that I'm the one, Who understands you, Been here all along, So, why can't you see?, You belong with me") reflects America's inherent hopefulness and future-orientation. We all think that one day the world will wake up and realize what we have. If we just stay in Iraq long enough, if we just really make the case for democracy in China, if we get antidiscrimination right this time, if we create a path to good jobs for the working class...Americans believe in so many impossible plans it is hard to keep track.


What's your pick and your justification?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 29, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
One of my favorite hobby horses: Start the "Colonialism" clock in 1492 to claim European colonization of the Americas was wrong, but start it in 1452 and Istanbul should be part of Greece (or rather Greece should be ruled from Constantinople).


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 24, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It's Not a Glass House, It's a Glass Home


What makes Reddit most unique is that nobody has a positive opinion of it, least of all Reddittors. The more negative your opinion of Reddit, the more likely you fall into that very demographic you decry. Reddit's self hatred, and the collective reflex of Redditors to decry their enemies by declaring them to be the essence of Reddit, has remained persistent from the ShitRedditSays days to /r/drama and their rivals at /r/Subredditdrama to the commenters on r4r subs. I come to bury Reddit not to praise it, but I do want to drop a spoonful of sugar into the Haterade we're all drinking in this thread. Reddit remains unmatched for certain uses, or at least I have not yet figured out how to use Twitter or TikTok to achieve these goals.


-- Reddit presence and content remains stubbornly un-monetizable. Outside of edge cases like Aella and her friends in the sex work end of Reddit, or forum celebrities like Unidan, Reddit still isn't making anybody any money. ((Which is far more problematic than the userbase for ownership)) Where on Twitter, TikTok, Youtube, Instagram, even absolute Space Monkeys like our own @KulakRevolt are trying to monetize their online presence; Reddit stubbornly persists in being basically useless for capitalism. I'm sure on the margins some powermods are corrupt and direct traffic on /r/RedDevils to one blog over another in exchange for cash under the table, or people find ways to promote their own substack under different sock puppets, but for the most part Reddit is unique in that it still feels like everyone is there for the love of the game. Sometimes I hate the team they play for, sometimes I hate how they play, sometimes I just flat out hate them, but they are there because they have nothing better to do.


If I go on Twitter for NBA news, every tweet from a rando seems to be threaded to two more comments about buying NFTs or fake Jerseys or whatever. And every tweet from a journalist is trying to build their presence. If I go on Reddit for NBA news, the takes are just as terrible, but at least I know that's what these morons genuinely think. If I go on /r/weightroom, the opinions may be good and they may be bad, but they aren't followed by a link to buy supplements from the poster; on every other social media site they will be. Money makes the hot takes hotter, the politics more politically correct in the mainstream; but once you step out of the mainstream the politics must always get MORE EXTREEEEME to draw in views and cash, endless recursion from "I think the politicians might be lying to us" to "I think the politicians are alien pedophile vampires."


As long as this is the case, I will find Reddit more useful for reading NFL draft news or finding opinions on workout plans than I will find any other social media page.


-- Reddit is easier to segregate and navigate. Searching hashtags or particular users on TikTok or Twitter doesn't achieve nearly the topic specificity that going to a subreddit does. I can go on /r/nfl and be sure I'm getting nfl information, on /r/kettlebell and be sure I'm getting kettlebells. The information might not be good, but at least it is there. I can eventually curate a feed on another site so that I only get information on certain topics, but Reddit offers a superior method to segregate information by topic. The search feature has been notoriously bad forever, but google can pretty much find me what I'm looking for in a review of Super Squats or common problems with the e46 bmw 3 series in seconds.


-- Because Reddit remains stubbornly hated and unmonetizable, the conversation on Reddit remains a touch more authentic on a given topic than the conversation on Twitter which tends to be about striking a pose. Journalists use Twitter as their patsy to say "Fans are talking about X"; they tend to decry any conversation on Reddit as the CHUDs grunting at each other.


-- If your objection to Reddit is that all Redditors are losers, and the average insta or twitter user is better, you are using the wrong subreddits. /r/weightroom is full of verified strong motherfuckers, ditto /r/climbharder; go on the right subreddit and there really are hot MILFs in your area who want to meet; /r/classics has given me excellent recommendations and cogent responses to questions about translations; /r/askhistorians is full of people with fascinating degrees of domain knowledge and a deep searchable archive. Moderation standards are possible on Reddit in a way that they aren't possible on Twitter or TikTok. Private Discord or Telegram channels are superior, but one has to get into those, subreddits are viewable to everyone. Reddit retains a huge searchable back archive of content, as long as it remains searchable Reddit will remain somewhat useful even if it ultimately becomes pointless to comment on things. Every forum will ultimately suffer from users being losers, or alternatively from users presenting only their best traits, you're getting one or the other.


-- At the end of the day, I've listed a ton of non-political subreddits, and that's how most people use not just SM but everything. At core, the very marginal politics of /r/nfl , stuff like Deshaun Watson or whatever, are things I don't really care about. A minority of people will be driven away from the hordes of bad draft takes by a smidge of leftist political lean.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 4, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
This whole analysis is off-base, because it fails to examine the reason why content warnings, and most other identity-based lobbying, are effective or not effective.


Thesis/TLDR: Content warnings aren't effective because they prevent exposure to a "triggering" stimulus, they are effective because by giving them society is acknowledging the power and importance of the individual/group that could be thus triggered. This is a salve to the wounds of most identity based issues, such as racism or sexual assault, because the primary harm of those issues is the feeling of the individual lacking power.


Imagine the following personal scenario by analogy. Albert has recently gone through a viciously bad breakup, his girlfriend publicly cheated on him, and has left him for the other man. Their mutual social circle is aware, his friends at work know and have probably gossiped to the rest of the office. Everywhere he goes, everyone he knows talks about it, he can't escape it, even if people don't bring it up, he suspects that they are talking behind his back. He goes fishing with his father Brian, Brian asks him how he's handling the breakup, Albert says hey dad, I'm tired of it, let's talk about literally anything else. But Brian wants to know about the breakup, he's curious, he keeps asking, says hey come on I'm your father you can talk about this with me. Albert snaps, says it is my life and I don't have to talk about it if I don't want to. Brian says you don't want to listen to me because you don't respect me. Albert says you don't respect me or else you wouldn't insist on talking about something I don't want to talk about. Both become angry, both feel that the other doesn't respect him.


Now is Albert primarily angry at the thought of talking to his father, or his he primarily angry at the loss of power, that he has been robbed of the power to choose what to talk about? Is his father primarily angry that he isn't hearing about the breakup, or is he angry that his son doesn't respect him enough to confide in him? After this struggle has become about power and respect, is Albert going to be happier to talk about the breakup, or will it feel worse than ever to talk about it?


Trigger warnings are the same. Who are the groups who advocate for trigger warnings? Subaltern ethnic groups, and rape victims. What is the psychologically harmful experience of being a member of a subaltern ethnic group or of rape? It is the experience of lacking power, the feeling that one lacks importance, that others can abuse or instrumentalize your existence towards their own ends. Trigger warnings are an effective salve, not because they prevent exposure to the bad thing, but because by giving a trigger warning society is saying to them: you matter, you are important, you have power, we will allow you to decide what we talk about. This improves things for such a person, because they feel that someone cares about their feelings, about what they think. This is a normal psychological dynamic.


At the same time, the majority or historically dominant groups will experience this loss of power and agency as a psychological harm. This is a normal psychological dynamic. Worse, they will experience the loss more keenly than they experience any gain. That's a natural flaw in human minds.


This is also why the concept of trigger warnings is such a mind-virus: the dynamic this creates makes viewing the purportedly harmful content more harmful, not less, because now being "forced" to view the content will seem like a greater loss of power than providing the trigger warning originally seemed like a gain.


So to zoom back out to the whole concept of "The Tolerable Level of Permanent Unhappiness" as you put it. The question isn't so much about unhappiness, it is about power and agency. Increasing the power and agency of subaltern groups, and concomitantly decreasing the power and agency of everyone else to determine their own lives.


I am, for the most part, the picture they put next to privilege in the SJWebster's Dictionary of Woke Terminology: blond, male, heterosexual, reasonably comfortable. Ceteris paribus, in the current system, left to my own devices I am capable of living a happy life pursuing my own interests. At some level of proximity and severity of unhappiness, that would be widely seen as inappropriate. If my mother was dying in the hospital, going on a climbing trip that weekend would widely be seen as wrong. If my sister and my nieces were out on the street, it would widely be seen as heartless for me to buy myself a new car. That balance of severity and proximity extends outward to some point, where it is inappropriate for me to do [X] while [Y] is experiencing [Z]. While someone close to me is miserable, I should not be left to my own devices to pursue my own happiness, I should be caring for them, to help them.


The argument here seems to be for a vast expansion of both the proximity at which I should be constrained in my actions, and the level of misery at which I should be constrained in my actions. To say I don't have the right to go on vacation the week my best friend's house burns down strikes me as a reasonable constraint on my freedom and agency, indeed helping him is an exercise of my agency and power as a person. Telling me that I don't have the right to have a comfortable life until everyone does, is to totally restrain my freedom and agency, it's to say I'm not allowed to do anything. Telling me I can't have an honest conversation about difficult topics in a college course until Black people are all happy, or until no one ever gets raped, is to totally restrain my ability to have a college education. At the same time, these arguments elevate the feelings of power of the powerless.


These arguments should always be about examining power and agency of the players involved.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 18, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The obvious answer is religious prejudice against Scientology. Which may be justified and I may share, but it's still how this conviction was reached.


Among other things one of the women testified that her own mother (!) told her that while what happened was tragic she shouldn't report it because of the damage it would do to the faith. After the woman accused Masterson, her mother cut off all contact with her.


The jury was persuaded by a lot of testimony about the weird cult the perp was in, the way Scientologist hierarchs pressured victims not to go public at the time, the testimony about consequences women faced from the Scientologist community for going public. The jury found all that persuasive.


This is as much a MeToo case as it was a religious persecution/cult case depending on your view of scientology. There's precedent for overruling the SoL in cases of religious pressure to hide accusations... But I find the urge to eliminate procedural protections for rapists deeply fascist. We've already seen these laws used against Assange. Give the state infinite power to prosecute its enemies when accused of sex crimes and all the state needs is a woman, who can hide behind rape shield laws anyway. The urge to prosecute minority religions should be viewed similarly, even if scientology really is nutso.


Aside from this, lol@ everyone involved in the Ashton Kutcher Mila Kunis imbroglio resulting from their letter trying to offer mitigating character evidence for Masterson. They tried to write letters about what a nice guy he was, but failed to realize A) the letters would be public record, B) it's generally better to admit he did it in that kind of letter. The classic format is "I can't reconcile what he's been convicted of with the man I knew..." They failed to include that, indicating they still think he's innocent. They then issued a mealy mouthed half apology to the victims, victims they don't believe are victims. If you want to stand by your friend, regardless of circumstances I think that's admirable, but say it out loud standing up straight. He did it or he didn't. If you think he didn't there are no victims to retraumatize.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 24, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I want to problematize the idea that there was a pre-WWII White Unity, that then disappeared all at once post-WWII. To post up off of @RenOS 's excellent response, desegregation doesn't start with Black people, it starts with "trusting people from the next village" and then moves through the French Revolutionary levee en masse to "trusting people from other regions within one nation." For immigrant and mixed nations like the United States, there was a long process to achieve linguistic and religious unity within the category of "White." The ancient Greeks drew such strong distinctions between so many different races and city states within a region that is roughly the size of modern Florida.


We can argue about what the degree of discrimination between groups existed pre-WWII, but it was common for a variety of reasons for white-ethnics to marry purely among their own community. Italians married Italians, Austrians and Germans married each other, Irish Catholics married Irish Catholics, WASPs looked down on intermarrying with Catholics. My Hungarian Great Grandmother had a framed photo of JFK and Jackie in her kitchen, because she had taken so much shit for being a Catholic when she came to America, JFK's election was for her similar to the way Black people felt about Barack Obama.


Post WWII, while I still have some Long Island Eye-Talian friends whose parents want them to marry another Eye-Tie, most people are subsumed under the category white. Theological differences between Papists and Prots have been erased or narrowed, to the point that very few people are sufficiently devout to care one way or the other, often a religious Catholic would sooner their daughter marry a devout protestant than an agnostic nominal Catholic.


Viewed in this way desegregation is part of a longer gradient. The amalgamation of disparate identies, from regions into nations, then of nationalities and religious groups into racial categories on the census, to a further integration between census categories of Race.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 10, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
-- Young men who are having trouble dating love seeing their theories proven by a promiscuous woman entering middle age having trouble dating.


-- Trad people have to point out that she's miserable because she's quite aggressively not trad. It's not hard to argue from the evidence provided.


-- Any time you post personal facts on the internet, you get mocked. She's probably a perfectly average woman, but on the internet people whose last five sexual partners average a full point below her will say she's hideously ugly. I once made the mistake, during a Covid discussion in /r/stupidpol (of all places), of mentioning that by BMI I was overweight and that I wondered if the BMI increased risk even though I lifted/climbed/ran a marathon that year. The whole thread turned into a dogpile of stupidpol-ers (of all people) telling me my lifts were dogshit and I was probably really fat and lying to myself. Say anything about yourself personally on the internet and you'll get shit on.


-- There is a contingent of people that just hates when other people try to do something in a "cheesy" way, especially if cheesy succeeds for that person.


-- The ad was almost certainly designed with hooks (spirituality? Really?) To get people to argue about it, therefore making it more likely to be spread, therefore getting more eyeballs on it. Once the doc is a spectacle, someone will reply to her, inevitably. If she's "pure" bi, possibly a woman, in which case a lot of the dynamics are quite different. Celebrities, even internet celebrities, who can't get laid don't exist.