vorpa-glavo
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User ID: 674
vorpa-glavo
19hr ago
5/Woke culture files
You’re not hallucinating the great weirding of America
You’re in a small town in Wisconsin.
The transgender assistant manager at CVS has a septum piercing, a wolf cut, and a nametag that reads “Finn.”
TL;DR: Wokeness is not dead yet. It might be wobbling at the top, but it is marching triumphantly across America.
Dinergoth is the aesthetic of ruined suburbia and dying small towns.
They are the mainstream now, they are not weird anymore. You are the weirdo.
While I compliment the author of that piece for coining the word "dinergoth", I'm not sure that I would make the same connection to wokeness that you are making here.
My main objection to wokeness was always more about the tactics than the things they advocate for. There are plenty of groups that believe in and advocate for weird things that I don't agree with from the Scientologists to the Jehovah's Witnesses. Heck, I think the Fundamentalist demonization of Harry Potter, Pokemon and D&D was always pretty silly, but I don't care about it as long as they don't make it my problem and attempt to restrict my access to things I enjoy through law. Wokeness crossed the line by trying to force everyone to live according to their dictates through a number of underhanded and illiberal tactics, but a little-L liberal wokeness would be as unobjectionable to me as any of the other crazy things my fellow country-men and -women believe in.
More than anything as I read the piece, I kind of wondered where the author has been for the last 20-30 years. A lot of the trends he was noticing for the first time with his dinergoth girlfriend were already in motion decades ago, as any kid who had a high school classmate who was a little too into Naruto can attest. I also don't think "dinergoth" actually captures what I see as the cause, which is the proliferation of "extremely online" subcultures as a pan-American phenomenon. This explains the loss of regional accents (which were probably already in decline from the TV era and the radio broadcast era before that), and why "weird" things like anime, memes, queer culture and many other things are becoming more common everywhere in the United States at once.
I just think that the author is a normie yuppie, probably raised by normie yuppies, and he's making the wrong generalizations about the why and how of "weirdness" in American culture. I think even if many young people didn't feel down and out in America, that we would probably still see a lot of the same weirdness. I found it especially funny the way he threw together phrases like "Nintendo Hispanic", as if Hispanics enjoying one of the longest running and most popular brands of video game consoles was some weird and mysterious thing that could only be explained by American decline and degeneracy.
vorpa-glavo
20hr ago
If the only thing that could convince you is literal sci-fi technology, why are you doing the "it worked for the Irish" bit, then? That argument certainly doesn't meet the standard that you put upon people who disagree with you, so it should be rejected on similar grounds.
The metric of IQ was invented in 1905. Around the 1970's we measured Irish IQ, and it seemed low. In the late 1980's Ireland became a banking hub and in the decades that followed we measured their IQ's and they weren't low. Those are the facts as I roughly understand them, without causal links added.
I do agree that the banking hub explanation is only one possible explanation for the observed changes in IQ. It's not as certain as the conservation of momentum, to be sure. It is just a balance of probabilities.
We have seen Irish IQ go up to around the White European average. We have also seen black IQ go up, but it does not match White IQ (today it averages around 85 in the US.) I don't think we have definitive evidence that this is as high as it will ever go. I guess my question would be, would it surprise you if in 100 years, people with similar genetics to today's African Americans ended up having average IQ's that were equivalent to a 90 or a 95 today and no medical interventions were responsible for the measured rise in IQ? Would it surprise you if in 100 years the black murder rate fell 10%-20%? What about if the rise in IQ was larger, or the fall in the murder rate even greater? What do you consider unrealistic for us to observe in the future?
By that metric, there's nothing special about New York. I'm not buying a ticket to watch any of the stuff they make there, there's more than enough local artists I can enjoy. Even in the US a trip to the city scarcely seems worth the bother, and the city's impact on the rest of the culture is dwindling.
Sure. I was just defending American culture as a whole there. You were the one who said it was on life support.
American blacks are still not integrated, and Africa is still a basket case. How much longer until you accept you were wrong, ans who will be held accountable for it?
In a certain sense, I don't think we can be 100 percent sure until we have computers that can simulate the physics of our biological processes to a high degree of accuracy, because until that point all we will be able to do is genome-wide association studies and find genetic correlations with life outcomes but not explanations for why those correlations exist or whether they are causal. (Though I grant that we could in principle get a physical explanation earlier than that, the same way we figured out that the genetic disorder Phenylketonuria leads to low IQ if one eats a high protein diet due to their body not producing phenylalanine hydroxylase, and thus discovering that with a strict diet people with PKU can have normal IQ's. Genetics is weird sometimes, and interacts with the environment in odd ways.)
I'm perfectly open to the idea that black people might genetically be predisposed to low IQ and personality traits that lead to higher criminality, but I think this is far from proven. It would actually be great news if it was all genetic, because that means we could probably do voluntary eugenics or gene therapies with the right framing and marketing, and be rid of the problem without much issue. If it's cultural, that's much harder to deal with.
American culture and entertainment are on life support.
I think we're highly biased by our novelty-focused culture, but I would wager that America is producing excellent cultural and entertainment products at least as consistently as Ancient Greece or Rome did.
How often did the ancient world produce a Virgil or a Homer? How often did they coast for a few centuries on the insights of a Galen or an Aristotle?
If you want to enjoy human artistic excellence in the United States, you can find it in virtually every large American city. You like opera? We've got opera. Ballet? Classical music? You could disengage from American pop culture, and probably fly to a different city every week and enjoy great Western art and performances that are probably at least as good as the average of what you could have experienced 500 years ago, or 1000 years ago, or 2000 years ago. Maybe we can't compare to the Gaussian tail artists of those eras, the virtuosos like Beethoven or Chopin, but you probably wouldn't have to look hard to find artists and performers in the top 20% of all of human history all over the United States today, which I think is nothing to sneeze at.
And if you're not rich, there's always the wealth of recordings we have, which give even the common man access to the great performances of the past. For a mere pittance, you could buy the Harvard Classics and immerse yourself in the greatest thoughts of Western thinkers of the last 2500 years.
Maybe it is true that many Americans choose to engage with the new and the now, and ignore the mountain of gold they're born into. But I'm grateful that I've had access to the public domain books on Project Gutenburg since I was in middle school, and got to enjoy works from 1001 Arabian Nights to Plato's Republic for free. I think it is possible, even with brain rot and the nightmare of the algorithm that more people today are engaging with the thought stream of Western civilization than ever before. And let's be honest, most of the servants of Ancient Greece and Rome probably weren't deeply immersing themselves in the art and literature of the era (even if there are notable exceptions like Epictetus and Cleanthes.)
When talking about large groups of people over time, the only constant is change.
Dante might have been a Christian, but he also saw himself as an inheritor of Roman culture, and so his Divine Comedy ends up with a strange mix of references to Classical Mythology and the Aeneid, in a book about the Christian Afterlife. And before Rome "Hellenized" and adopted Greek philosophy and Homeric myth as its own, it saw the Greeks as foreign and other. We know that Cato the Elder considered Greek philosophy "un-Roman" and he probably would have hated to learn that his great grandson, Cato the Younger would be remembered as a sort of Stoic martyr and sage. It only took four generations for a resistant Rome to Hellenize in this way.
Just as there is no "truer" Rome, there is no "truer" West. All of those version of Rome are the real Rome, whether pro-Hellenistic or anti-Hellenistic, whether Pagan or Christian, all of them were Roman. So too, the West has been a lot of different things. The West is Greece and Rome, and Geneva, and London and Paris. It encompasses secular enlightenment ideals from the Encyclopedists of France, to the Marxists of Russia, and the Christians of the Crusades, and the Pagan Romans.
CertainlyWorse was expressing concern for the fate of "the West", and I was addressing him in those terms. But the simple fact is that the only thing we can say for sure is that "the West" is going to change in ways we can hardly predict, and would have no matter what happened. That's the weird thing about concerning yourself about a civilization instead of a nation or an ethnos or a tribe. Civilizations contain multitudes and are ever-changing. At least if you zoom in to the tribe level, you can say that there is a continuity of genetics, even if there is cultural drift and change over time.
vorpa-glavo
22hr ago
What level of intellect is required to see the violence and murder difference between races?
Irish Americans had high rates of criminality until the around the 20th century. And the Irish in Ireland had low IQ's until their country became a banking hub. Lovecraft wasn't wrong to hate and fear the Irish in one sense, but after they were anglicized, the Irish Americans are just another "spicy white" ethnic group.
Certainly, I don't assume unkind things about someone when I hear they have some Irish heritage today.
I think the basic intuition is, sure, there might be genuine cultural or genetic differences that are leading some races to have higher rates of criminality in the United States today, but we don't actually know whether those groups are more like the Irish (where under the right set of societal conditions they might be made to assimilate) or whether it would literally take gene therapy to fix it. Also, the genetic factors for say, criminality, might not be precisely what we think. Just as the Native Americans seem to genuinely have higher genetic risk for alcoholism, I could easily imagine that ADOS black people might be more susceptible to certain kinds of drug addiction and that might end up explaining a large part of the difference in criminality between them and other ethnic groups.
It’s not dead - but it COULD have been the capital of the free world.
Sure, instead it got the consolation prize of being the wealthiest city in the world, and one of two megacities that makes a major imprint on all of American culture and entertainment.
It's this broader desire for suppression to allow narrative control that worries me about the West right now. Its happening along other fronts such as Multiculturalism which also seems to now require suppression of speech to get incompatible cultures to coexist.
That politician from Australia notwithstanding, I don't actually think that Multiculturalism requires suppression of speech to function, it just requires some amount of cultural assimilation and little-L liberalization. It's really easy to go back and read something like H.P. Lovecraft's He, where he wrote:
So instead of the poems I had hoped for, there came only a shuddering blankness and ineffable loneliness; and I saw at last a fearful truth which no one had ever dared to breathe before—the unwhisperable secret of secrets—the fact that this city [New York] of stone and stridor is not a sentient perpetuation of Old New York as London is of Old London and Paris of Old Paris, but that it is in fact quite dead, its sprawling body imperfectly embalmed and infested with queer animate things which have nothing to do with it as it was in life. Upon making this discovery I ceased to sleep comfortably; though something of resigned tranquillity came back as I gradually formed the habit of keeping off the streets by day and venturing abroad only at night, when darkness calls forth what little of the past still hovers wraith-like about, and old white doorways remember the stalwart forms that once passed through them. With this mode of relief I even wrote a few poems, and still refrained from going home to my people lest I seem to crawl back ignobly in defeat.
And see it as a bit silly and overblown. New York city isn't dead just because it isn't Dutch or Anglo American. (Also, surely London has had some shift in ethnicity from its Roman founding to the time of Lovecraft? Like, what about the anglo-saxons and the vikings?) And it just seems obvious that many of the ethnic groups that H.P. Lovecraft was worried about, like Southern and Eastern Europeans, the Irish, and Asians just aren't that scary in the modern day. Surely, even critics of multiculturalism would find a passage about the scary Asians like this one:
And swarming loathsomely on aërial galleries I saw the yellow, squint-eyed people of that city, robed horribly in orange and red, and dancing insanely to the pounding of fevered kettle-drums, the clatter of obscene crotala, and the maniacal moaning of muted horns whose ceaseless dirges rose and fell undulantly like the waves of an unhallowed ocean of bitumen.
To be utterly laughable. Seriously, I've been to Chinese New Year celebrations within my city, and it is a fun time. They do have drum performances, and dress in strange clothes, but I don't feel like a group celebrating their heritage once or twice a year is some death knell for Western civilization and culture.
The good, still mostly functional Western countries that matter like the United States, still remember what it means to be an empire (even if they don't call it that), and we've successfully anglified basically every white ethnic group that has come here, we anglified the Native Americans, and sufficiently assimilated Asians and Hispanics so that they're no great threat to our society. People look at the statistics of Europe's failed immigration policies, and assume that they also apply to the US, but they just don't. Regardless of whatever foolish policies Europe and the wider anglosphere adopt, the United States is doing fine and will continue to be a torchbearer for Western values even after those cultures have become just like the New York of Lovecraft's imagination.
I kind of don't understand people who look at the facts of succesful past assimilation, and who just assume that there is no soft or hard pressure to assimilate anymore in spite of political correctness and what the progressive left say. People who come here learn English. People who come here, learn a baseline of American culture and values. Just as the Chinese Empire of old hanified many of the disparate ethnic groups within its borders and failed to hanify others, so too America has and will succesfully anglify (or if you prefer, americanize) many ethnic groups and will fail to anglify others. But as long as we have the state capacity to stop the non-anglified groups from being too much of a problem (and we definitely do), it is a total non-issue for our civilization and way of life.
We’ve completely given up putting people in prison in this country.
Isn't some of that downstream from a limited supply of prison housing? I remember when Covid happened, and because prisoners are the one group in the United States whose health is the responsibility of the US government, a lot of non-violent prisoners were temporarily being released to house arrest in order to aid in social distancing, because otherwise the prisons would just be petri dishes of disease.
So, isn't the problem in many cases (varies by region I'm sure), that there just aren't enough prisons to hold all the people we might want to imprison? In which case the answer is "easy", just make more prisons. Except that because of NIMBYism, everyone tries to make sure that the prison doesn't get built near their neighborhood and hardly anything gets built half the time.
vorpa-glavo
6d ago
Yeah, it's basically the roots eu- (good), angelion (message.) Shares a root with angels, who are the messengers of God.
vorpa-glavo
10d ago
But even when the US didn't formally declare war, Congress has generally implicitly consented to military actions by the president by agreeing to fund them.
Congress didn't do that here.
vorpa-glavo
11d ago
Ok, with that in mind, and assuming that there were a brutal 10/7 style terrorist attack planned for Canada, what percentage of Americans would lift a finger to stop it?
Elsewhere in this thread, I already conceded I may be wrong on the Americans-saving-Canadians question, depending on the level of inconvenience involved.
But we shouldn't just judge ourselves or others purely on on how we treat our friends or allies.
I'm willing to grant for the sake of argument that Iranians wouldn't make a phone call to prevent American deaths in a terrorist attack. But I would again ask how many Americans would make such a call for terrorist attacks against Russian or Chinese citizens? I don't believe that the general sentiment here in the US is "Death to China" or "Death to Russia", and yet I think even our more tempered animosity towards these geopolitical rivals is enough that I have serious doubts about how many Americans would make a phone call to try and save Russian and Chinese lives.
Don't get me wrong. I actually think the bigger the consequences, the more do-gooder Americans would try to stick their necks out for Russian and Chinese civilian lives. That is, if it were 30 lives at stake, I think there's a reasonable chance a majority of Americans wouldn't make the call. But if it were 3000 lives or 30,000 lives of innocent Russian or Chinese civilians, I think Americans would be more likely to make the call despite our animosity.
But I actually would guess that that is also the case for Iranians to some degree. Don't get me wrong, I am far from believing I have a good read on their general mindset, but I suspect that as the potential death toll in a terrorist attack rises, so too would the odds of an Iranian citizen making the call to try and save American civilian lives rise. Though I have no idea if it would be anywhere close to the rate of American do-gooders in similar circumstances. We could be talking moving from a lizardman's constant of 7% of Iranians for 30 American civilian deaths, to 8% of Iranians for 3000 American deaths.
vorpa-glavo
12d ago
I think by changing it to a 911 call you warp the question being asked.
I doubt that most Iranians are ever in a position that a 1 hour phone call could guarantee the safety of Americans from a would-be terrorist attack. My personal guess is that if an Iranian became aware of a terrorist attack against Americans, and wanted to prevent it, it would take a lot more personal effort and research than a mere hour-long phone call, and they might not even succeed at preventing it.
Just turning the question around. If the information about a terrorist attack in Russia next week fell into your lap, how much time would you estimate it would take you to ensure that the right people got that that information, and how sure are you that your effort would actually prevent the terrorist attack? Do you think the vast majority of Americans would be willing to expend that effort for the citizenry of our geopolitical rivals?
vorpa-glavo
12d ago
I guess some of the question is: is 10% of your savings enough to materially impact your standard of living much? If you scaled your income to "average American" levels, is that a candy bar or a car for you?
Do you think the 30% of Americans who have their health care costs paid for by Medicaid would be willing to give 10% of their savings to prevent a 30+ person terrorist attack in Canada?
If I'm wrong on the Americans-saving-Canadian point specifically, then fair enough. But I still maintain that regardless of the Canada angle, the vast majority of Americans wouldn't even slightly inconvenience themselves to save Russians or Chinese people from terrorist attacks. Am I supposed to think worse of Iranians when they have the same hang up about saving Americans?
Agreed, and I would also ask the following: Of the people who say "death to America," but really only mean "down with America," what percentage would inconvenience themselves to prevent a terrorist attack on Americans?
That actually seems like a surprisingly high standard. What percentage of Americans do you think would inconvenience themselves to prevent a terrorist attack on Canadians? We mostly don't even hate Canada, and I don't think you'd get more than, say, 30% of Americans actually willing to materially inconvenience themselves to prevent a terrorist attack on Canadians.
I guess it matters how much of an inconvenience we're talking about here, though. If it was something like, "would you be willing to spend $1 more in taxes to prevent terrorist attacks on Canadians", I suppose I could believe that possibly a majority of Americans would be willing to make that sacrifice. But if you turn it around and ask about a rival nation like Russia and China, I'm not sure how many Americans you could get to voluntarily pay $1 more in taxes to prevent a terrorist attack against Russian or Chinese citizens, and I don't think the prevailing sentiment is exactly "Death to Russia" or "Death to China."
vorpa-glavo
13d ago
I am once again reminded that right-wing political violence is completely invisible to many. Either it's excused because it's carried out under a veneer or law enforcement or the perpetrator is written off as a crazy person who in no way reflects on the right more generally. Or the perp gets a pardon. The history of political violence in America did not begin on 9/10/25.
I think more generally it's that you remember and internalize what offended and outraged you, and not what didn't. I'm sure there's a certain kind of trans skeptical person that can cite chapter and verse of every bad thing a trans person has done in the United States over the last 10 years, while your average trans-friendly progressive either didn't hear about such incidents or even if they did hear about them, they weren't horribly offended by them or were happy to say something like, "Yeah, trans people are human, they do bad things just like everyone else," and moved on with their lives.
In a way, it is a form of political myopia that basically everyone who sees themselves as part of a larger political coalition ends up experiencing. The only way to avoid it is to feel in your bones that neither the Right nor the Left are "us", and to instead center your "us" in some completely orthogonal grouping. Otherwise, it will take constant effort to correct for this "myopia" due to then nature of human psychology. And most people don't want to correct the myopia because righteous fury feels good.
I mean, the whole point of our mixed constitution is to get all of the benefits of the good aspects of rule by the one, few and many, with as few of their downsides (tyranny, corrupt oligarchy, and mobocracy) as possible. Whether the United States actually accomplished that goal is a separate question, but a major idea of our system is that for a small handful of protected rights we don't just let the mob do whatever they want, but force them to achieve a broader societal consensus before we change anything major.
For less important issues, we allow a simple majority (or really, their elected representatives) to determine government policy. Maybe that could be called tyranny, since we'll always be forcing 49% of the population to listen to whatever 50%+1 of the population has decided, but I'm not sure I buy that argument.
vorpa-glavo
13d ago
But I also only see push-back on this one from the conservative side of aisle: the Roberts court has a continuing theme in its jurisprudence of telling Congress that it actually has to govern (overturning Chevron, the Major Questions Doctrine), and some of its most prominent members were nominated by Trump himself and confirmed by a right-leaning Senate.
I think there's a real sense in which conservatism in the United States is just right liberalism dressed up as conservatism. Classical liberalism was once (and arguably still is) one of the most radical ideologies in the history of politics, and it is the Foundation of the United States and how we think about ourselves.
While we do have a mythical past conservatives can pine for, I think one of the basic issues is that the freedom afforded by liberalism is what got us here to the present moment step by step. Unless you are some form of reactionary who thinks we need to forcefully return to some past social arrangement, it will be very hard to "hold on" to any particular era of US politics. (I once knew an older gentleman who pined for the left liberalism of the 1960's and JFK, and I had to point out to him that all of the contradictions and craziness of that era are what eventually led to to the "bridge too far" of today that he considered absurd from trans kids to social media.)
Even in glorious past eras, a lot of the problems were caused by groups people today want to idolize. Like, when people bring up something like the 13/50 statistic around black people, I feel like they forget that if that is a real concern, it can be laid entirely at the feet of the ruling elites at the Founding (and reaffirmed on down through time by the post-Civil War amendments, and the reactions of "heritage American" elites and their successors at every step of the process.) I suppose an actually fascist president could just "deport" all of the black people in the United States to Liberia or something at this point, but Trump certainly has no appetite for that sort of thing.
What I'm confused by is MSM who prefer "feminine" men. Naively, you'd expect that they'd want the most masculine gay men they could find. If you like femininity that much, why not just sleep with women? Why seem out "passing" transwomen or ladyboys or twinks or...
I feel like the butch and femme dynamic among lesbians is similar. While I get the feeling it is a lot less prevalent as a dynamic in modern lesbian spaces in the West, I have seen plenty of Tumblr posts where lesbian women fawn over tall, muscular women presenting in a mannish style, so there must be something to it.
My best guess is that the human brain generally tries to detect two things in mates: man/woman and masculine/feminine (or perhaps dominant/submissive.) In most people they are attracted to a congruent set (man+masculine/dominant or woman+feminine/submissive), but a minority of the population end up attracted to an incongruent set (man+feminine or woman+masculine.) This is why a small percentage of men love the idea of Amazon warrior women, or orcish women. And why you get some gay men attracted to femboys, and some lesbian women attracted to butch lumberjack women.
I was asking to get a sense of how people were thinking about the genetic proclivities of African Americans for IQ and criminality. Like, I'm willing to entertain that the difference is genetic, but just as I think that differences in genetics probably explain differences in sporting ability (say, height in basketball to name just one factor), and yet I also believe that a clone of Lebron James who was half-starved his whole life and kept in a dark cave with no human contact would not be a good basketball player, I also think it is reasonable to speculate that there might be environmental factors exacerbating whatever genetic differences are there.
For example, a quick search shows that the following vitamin deficiencies are common in African Americans: vitamin D (likely due to their darker skin), iron, vitamin B12, magnesium, and vitamin B2. Now, I don't have a causal story for how any of those interact with IQ or criminality, but if we imagine the US making an intervention similar to iodine in salt or vitamins A and D in milk, would it be totally crazy if that led to some positive outcomes for criminality?
I also think the focus on relative rates is a little silly. It would be one thing if every black person was a genetic monstrosity with a 50/50 chance of turning on you and killing you dead in the streets every time you encountered them, but because America has a relatively low murder rate (high for a rich developed country, but still lower than most of the developing world), the practical effect of a statement like "black people are around eight times more likely to commit murder than the rest of the US population on a per-capita basis" is that in a year like 2023 around 6,405 black Americans committed murder out of a population of 48.3 million black people (and most of their victims were other black people, so it's not like they're mostly making it everyone else's problem.)
That is, even if black criminality is 100% genetic, it cashes out to a level where we should still treat the remaining 99.99+% of blacks with a strong presumption that they are not murderers, if we want to be well-calibrated to the statistics. It would almost be hysterical to do otherwise. Certainly it is statistically illiterate to make a big deal out of such a tiny number of bad apples, even if it is relatively higher than other groups.
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