hydroacetylene

hydroacetylene 1d ago

I grew up in an actually socially conservative bubble, in the hardcore twenty percent or so of Americans(so this would be the hardcore 10-15 percent or so of working age native whites, even in the Bush era). Going to church every Sunday was the right thing to do; Mohammedans and atheists were inherently untrustworthy. The blacks are racist too, and responsible for the problems in their community(I was of course warned not to repeat this in public). Fornication is bad, actually, but it happens and needs to be dealt with- and if an eligible man was known to be sexually active with a woman he had to marry her, even if she wasn't his preference or he had other plans. Homosexuals are (mental and sexually transmitted)disease ridden perverts. Gender roles and real and not optional. Women shouldn't be in the military. Marijuana is an evil drug, much worse than alcohol. The 'liberal elite' pushes bad values on purpose; I remember much bellyaching about how they had recently succeeded in making bikinis the overwhelming default, and when I was a bit older about themes in Harry Potter and Twilight. Better be spanked as a child than hanged as an adult(and few, if any, of the people around me had sympathy for criminals). A woman's father had the right- and in many cases, the responsibility- to veto a marriage, and maybe even a dating relationship. Ideally the woman should stay home with her kids, unless she was a teacher, but in either case the man was responsible for the bills. Society was going to collapse because the government uses our tax dollars to push bad morals which make people unproductive; that's why people are dumber, less virtuous, and grow up slower than in the fifties. You can't get a divorce just for falling out of love- the man has to be violent or not holding down a job, or the woman has to be an awful mental case, or somebody has to be addicted to drugs, or something.

I don't say these things so the motte can litigate them. I say them to point to the sine qua non which made the worldview work- different people have different roles in society, mostly due to their membership in various classes(age, gender, social class, maybe sometimes race). As a male youth it was my duty to protect my sister if we went to a social event together, and it was more important that my schooling focus on getting me into a good job which would one day pay the bills for a family. My sister had more household chores(well, in the conventional sense- I had to mow the lawn etc but lots of people don't count yardwork as housework) because it was important that she learn how to do ironing and baking and stuff that I wouldn't need. I was told in no uncertain terms that if I got a girl pregnant or lived with her I would have to marry her, even if I was in love with someone else or had other plans(and my male cousins have pretty much all followed this rule when they took concubines)- although the ideal was obviously a white wedding. And of course being that we were basically middle class I would have to provide a basically middle class standard of living- homeownership and stable employment and going places in cars and the like. My parents threatened to kick me out when I expressed my desire not to go to university, and only relented when I found an HVAC apprenticeship- because it was my job as a middle-class man to have a career, not just a job. These are of course an illustration.

I don't see this mentality from, shall we say, 'converts' to social conservatism. I see a lot of bemoaning about how someone else used to do better from e-trads. And I think this is a lynchpin that's missing which makes a bunch of it 'larping' or 'cargoculting' or whatever; the motte likes to talk about it from time to time. But y'know, social conservatism works off of 'who you are makes x,y,z your job and not doing it even when you don't want to makes you a bad person'. Lots of people like to talk about this- positively or negatively- about women's domestic or familial expectations. I don't think focusing on 'a man's role' or whatever is the missing piece I think you just... can't talk about it without talking about it intersectionally. 'How does everyone fit into society' is a question that needs to be answered and if you've already decided personal characteristics are the way to go about it, well...

I feel like this discussion is the missing ingredient to lots of the topics du jour. Let's take the leftward drift of young women- well social conservatism today seems to have, uh, not discussed what other people owe to them, only what they owe to other people. Is it any wonder that the victimhood narrative from runaway woke is more appealing? Or the disagreements over immigration; we no longer have a class of people whose obligation is to do manual agricultural labor(and most of the historical people who did this did it as an obligation, not a job; serfdom and the corvee is the historical norm). The modern American right seems to simply lack the actual difference between itself and progressivism; it differs only in accidentals(I'm pretty open about voting republican because they protect my right to be socially conservative, and not because they'll push social conservatism). I don't think this mentality can come back from the government, but only from intermediating institutions that democrats would like to punish for doing their job and pushing this. But this is the key difference; most adults have probably worked it out for themselves but nobody ever says it out loud.

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hydroacetylene 10d ago

Why is it so hard for people to take the libertarian lesson from such events?

Because CNN does not, as far as I know, object to the ‘tyranny’. They object to Trump. Liberty-as-in-freedom to live your life is not something these people particularly value and they don’t really claim to either.

It is probably true that the Trump coalition is being a bit hypocritical when they back Trumpian caudillismo, but I don’t think the anti-Trump coalition(to the extent that it can meaningfully be called a ‘coalition’ at this point) is hypocritical for backing Biden’s use of federal power to punish his enemies while bemoaning Trump’s- they really do think that the untrammeled rule of the expert scholar-bureaucrats is most important and don't value freedom at all.

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hydroacetylene 4d ago

It was putting words in the mouths of a large, vaguely defined political movement which you associated those you disagree with on the forum with.

I wouldn't have banned you for it- although if I made all the mod decisions you probably would have been banned at the time you posted it for one of the personal attacks you got a slap on the wrist for- but it wasn't the post we'd like to see more of. I think you could have written a better version of that post; goodness knows we have enough discussion on native white men and the economy.

We have conservative posters who whine about the mods oppressing them, too. I generally say the same thing to them.

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hydroacetylene 13d ago

Have we considered that he's in love? IDK, seems like the most plausible reason to me.

In general men on the internet have this level of paranoia about marriage that needs to be pushed back on as much as the 'OMG all men are rapists and abusers' tiktok feminism demoralizing women.

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hydroacetylene 9d ago

Ok, Cherokee and Navajo independence are absolutely uncontroversial in the US. The reservations are just uncontroversially sucky places but everyone tolerates them having casinos as a loophole and understands Indians with the means to live elsewhere do so. It’s not very cucked.

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hydroacetylene 11d ago

When I had a kitten I maimed a captured rat to teach it how to catch rodents. I feel no guilt about this whatsoever.

The great chain of being is real. I simply refuse to give a crap about shrimp welfare. You can too. The answer to ethical vegans saying ‘but think of the animals’ is ‘yes, when I do that I remember what they taste like’. I recommend this approach.

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hydroacetylene 18d ago

Didn't we have a previous article from this lady? A couple of points-

Serious mohammedanism seems worse for women than serious Christianity at any equivalent point along the fundy vs liberalism spectrum. Of course I would say that, but I suggest this woman talk to some ladies living in conservative Christianity.
It comes as no surprise to me that women are not by and large fans of low commitment sexual activities, nor that many women value the attention they get more than anything.
This is not a new problem. The age old refrain of the cad is 'I swear I'll marry you, I just can't wait'. This is just the modern iteration. Of course, when you reject men having the authority to protect women from this, you also reject them having the responsibility to do so.
There is, in fact, a middle ground between 'women are virgins until their wedding night' and 'sex then have a date if the man liked it'. I reject it entirely but it clearly exists. I don't consider any point on this continuum a stable equilibrium but lots of people wind up there.

As to what this woman's solution is, might I suggest that an onlyfans star writing about this on her substack might have motives other than sincerely seeking a solution to a problem?

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hydroacetylene 22d ago

This guy is probably just crazy, Walz might not be a great guy but a governor of a small state in flyover having a secret stable of US-military trained assassins doesn’t sound real.

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hydroacetylene 12d ago

In practice, feminist journalists always want highly successful men to marry women like themselves.

In practice, it seems like feminist journalists get angsty and critical no matter who highly successful men marry. If Bezos had married a feminist journalist she’d be writing angsty op Ed’s about it.

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hydroacetylene 15d ago

I've noticed this blue tribe insane striver culture, like white orientals. I feel bad for their children and strongly believe the striving doesn't actually do anything. But at the end of the day, it is the default response to a hyper-credentialist culture with overproduced elites(see also, oriental countries). I... don't actually know what we can do about it, other than to let the blue tribe shrivel up and die from the low fertility this produces.

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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 9, 2025

hydroacetylene 29d ago

I have a different take- there are so many reasons not to be violent in modern society because modern society has set it up so that being violent tends to end up with you being less likely to get what you want over the long run.

It is not hard to imagine a society where the elites are more violent than the lower orders- there have been quite a lot of them throughout history. But we live in the reverse. It's fairly plausible to me that for the very bottom rungs of society- the homeless, male(adult women in these communities are much better off) residents of the worst black ghettos, etc- violence is net positive on an individual level. But for everyone else? Violence decreases as you rise on the social totem pole for a reason and that reason is that people towards the top are better at avoiding maladaptive behavior. In polite society, the top four-fifths or so, willingness to resort to private violence is strongly correlated with being towards the bottom, starting with literal dogs.

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hydroacetylene 12d ago

It seems like the Ukraine invasion is mostly an analogue to the Iraq war from Russia’s perspective, not the USA’s.

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hydroacetylene 15d ago

I tried to read the book review before making a top level response, I really did. But I couldn't make it past this part without going on a rant:

In practice “deep” just meant “un‑measured.”

It should certainly raise our hackles when an organization claims its strengths are unmeasurable. Like maybe these people are lying.

But more to the point, there seems to be this mentality of the educational institution being what matters. Not results, not the kids. The system. Spending more money on public schools is automatically better, even if it's spent on buying cigarettes to pass out to the kids it's better than spending the money on some not-public-school-related thing. Iron law I suppose.

None of this is casting shade on individual teachers, who mostly care about how the kids are doing, would like to be paid more but wouldn't everybody, and are simply very conformist women who've been taught that people pulling ideas out of their assholes are 'experts' who should be listened to. Union heads and admins, on the other hand...

I think we see this mentality on wild display with the principle in this first section- she is, by virtue of her position, entitled to deference and respect and obviously knows best, correspondence to reality be damned.

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hydroacetylene 23d ago

I'm starting with a ramble about historical city government

There's a tendency for fantasy settings(which is how most modern westerners are familiar with medieval operations) to portray everything as running according to very strict monarchy/feudalism- they're usually kinda confused as to the difference between the two things, but with enough oversimplifications as to make the distinction meaningless. But historically, that's not how any cities were governed- a hereditary lord just isn't how urbanites organize themselves. Instead, there's a largely-hereditary(but in the medieval case open to new admittance on a theoretically meritocratic but also super corrupt basis) social class which elects city leadership- usually a board of senior figures, a few magistrates doing specific tasks, and some generals. That class- which we call 'citizens' in Greece and Rome and 'burghers' in medieval free cities- makes up the military as citizen-soldiers who provide their own equipment(yes, even in the middle ages). The city might owe allegiance to some overlord, say an emperor, and might be in alliance with other similar cities, but it's probably not under the direct overlordship of a local noble.

It's the burghers that I want to focus on today. Entry into the burgher class required either guildsmanship or enough wealth to buy membership. Obtaining it practically guaranteed your sons full membership in a guild(acceptance as apprentices, not laborers). Their burgher status was tied to a specific town, and it was- by implication- tied to their service to a specific town. With the heretofore unprecedented pace of technological change beginning in the high middle ages, highly skilled work(and I do mean work, here- these people are largely technicians and skilled craftsmen, not engineers) becomes ever more important, and they naturally live in cities, which are ruled by corrupt political machines dominated by the guilds. Increasing technology and trade makes these cities more and more valuable, both economically and by enabling more effective military activity, giving the cities more bargaining power to wrangle special rights for their citizens. This is, as far as I can tell, the first time in history that it is prestigious to be meritocratic. There are roman accounts of wealthy freedman- invariably they are negative. But it seems that the medieval working class aspired to be guildmember burghers and not to be nobles. Now, you(maybe not you personally, but if you're an able-bodied twenty year old male reading this and you're not sure what to do with your life you should consider it- apply and take an aptitude test) can learn a trade today through a union which is functionally a guild, but nobody thinks of the IBEW or UA as aspirational, despite the high salaries. In non-european parts of the world at the same time as the middle ages skilled crafts/trades were passed down through clans, not guilds, and while artisans were often taxed differently from farmers there are straightforwards and obvious reasons for this in non-monetized societies rather than it being an expression of a special status.

Know your place. At the end of the day, society has to be made of lots of different members doing lots of different jobs, living in different ways. The high middle ages with its social classes- peasants who farm, nobles who fight, clerics who pray, study, and do white collar work, townsmen who do artisanal work, merchants who move things from point a to b, with wealthy and prestigious and respected examples of each(and there were wealthy peasants- the term 'yeoman' actually descends from one subcategory thereof). We have, as an urbanized and technological society, very similar roles in society that need filling. We need people to study and push the frontiers of theoretical knowledge. We need people to do white collar administrative work. We need people to move things around. We need people to physically make things and do things, many of them highly skilled. We need people to defend us. Etc, etc.

But increasingly, the only roles which are prestigious in modernity are those of white collar undefined-what-the-value-add-here-is jobs and those of pushing the bounds of theoretical knowledge(much of it actually more the philosophy of fartsniffing). UA HVAC techs make more than either(and that's assuming minimum payscales and no overtime), but it's nowhere near as lionized as the girlboss middle manager in an HR department at a startup that bills itself as Uber for cat psychics. I wonder if that's upstream of many of the motte's obsessions- let's take the fertility rate here. Having kids will not fuck up your career as a k-12 teacher, or accountant, or RN, or for the vanishingly few female long-haul truckers. 'Explain this gap in your resume' being met with 'I was a SAHM when my kids were in diapers' will not stop normal average jobs from hiring you. It's only awesome girlboss career track progression that will be derailed that way. Now, ideally, 'housewife' is a role that society lionizes the same way it does professor of queer fartsniffing or founding HR manager at uber for cat psychics. But it goes beyond just that- the motte fixates on admittance to very selective colleges. But society has far more unmet demand for electrical linemen than it does for another hotshot lawyer or Mackinsey consultant(I don't actually know what the latter does, except that it is pointless, well paid occupation for Ivy league grads). Now sure, whatever it is Mackinsey consultants actually do, it's probably more comfortable and easier than electrical linemen. But at a certain point, shouldn't we as a society go 'it takes all sorts to make the world go round, why don't we make the top of every field prestigious, give everyone someone to aspire to. In the words of country music, every sort of person should have something to be proud of(https://youtube.com/watch?v=PXg8E0kzF1c)'.

I remember when movies had a trope- I'm not defined by my work, I do x from 9-5, but all day long I'm a dad- one who happens to do x to pay the bills. The idea of an identity to be proud of, genuine pride in our differences and diversity, was singing its swan song. It's now dead. How many of the world's problems are actually downstream of that? I'm reminded of the several AAQC's about why South Koreans aren't having kids(my answer is pretty simple- it's not fun. Rednecks have kids because they look forwards to going to t-ball games. South Koreans don't because they don't look forwards to twelve hour study sessions).

Darnit, I wish I'd written this before trying to revive the user viewpoint focus series(@netstack how's yours coming?).

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hydroacetylene 13d ago

It tells us that accusations of antisemitism aren't enough to decide dem primaries. It doesn't tell us that racism isn't still a potent political accusation.

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hydroacetylene 25d ago

Biden's admin did lots of bizarre far left pushes that have since been swept under the rug; this is probably just another example.

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hydroacetylene 6d ago

Part of adversary proof production for the modern U.S. would almost certainly be near-shoring; Mexico has one of the largest manufacturing sectors in the world and it’s probably easier to convert a pickup truck factory into a humvee factory than to build a new factory.

The other thing that seems often left out of these discussions is diversion of civilian goods(probably through rationing). Civilian boots, food, fuel, mechanical parts- it can all get diverted to the army. This is part of why I think it unlikely the modern U.S. will engage in a full blown war anytime soon- thé cuts to civilian standard of living would be a no go.

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hydroacetylene 13d ago

Very possible that what women mean by dad bod is not what's popularly envisioned, too.

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hydroacetylene 16d ago

To Rightists with daughters reading this: are you concerned that they might encounter "natural family planning" on the internet and really f*** up their life?

No. Keeping their legs closed before marriage is entirely possible.

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hydroacetylene 25d ago

Having a soft spot for single mothers is, in the normiecon view, very much the lesser of evils.

You seem to continually refuse to believe that we actually, literally, believe that aborting a baby is murder. Yes, including if the race of the baby isn't what we'd prefer, it'd be poor, the mom would be kinda a shitty parent(and statistically, she probably would). It's not because we're opposed to women having careers- even those of us who are. It's not because we want to see black women have kids before they finish high school(we don't, they should keep their legs closed instead of murdering babies though. I proudly, explicitly endorse slutshaming but draw the line at murder).

Having more poor single mothers is an unfortunate side effect. Their lives are already harder than they need to be and there's no reason to keep piling on- especially when the kid has a chance(granted, not a great one) to break the cycle, live life according to the success sequence, and become a normal working class person. You have the hand you're dealt and there's no point giving up.

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hydroacetylene 5d ago

I'm continuing to register my prediction that AGI will prove useless due to being deranged, and this problem will prove unfixable. The singularity will be a million copies of Chris Langen refusing to do anything useful when they could schizopost instead.

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hydroacetylene 8d ago

They mostly have not done this. The black and indigenous minorities who are poor performers have tried; the once-oppressed Chinese have been content with their rising standards of living.

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hydroacetylene 8d ago

The real lesson is actually 'if you oppress a group of low performers you must never stop. If you grow tired of oppression then leave no survivors, but only if they are low performers. It's fine to just liberate Chinamen or Ashkenazim because they'll catch up without really needing the help their more unhinged activists demand.'

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hydroacetylene 9d ago

Is it possible the body writing this is full of true believers who actually think they’ll get all this crap?

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