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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   23219 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 1, 2025

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Too Weird To Live, Too Rare To Die

"There he goes. One of God's own prototypes. A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die."

Hunter S. Thompson in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

I'm going to try to combine a culture war style post and an "interesting person" post. We've had a few of these "interesting person" posts, with this one being one of the most upvoted posts all time. Hat tip to @naraburns. The good news is that I'll be using a real, live very online person that we can all directly reference instead of an example from my own life.

And that person is Shagbark.

Shagbark is a twitter personality I stumbled across several years ago by accident. Sometimes, you gotta love the algo. In about the last year, he's developed a legitimate following. 52,000 followers as of this morning. I believe 50k is the "famous on twitter" threshold.

Shagbark is eclectic to say the least. I could try to spin a narrative, but I think it's more impactful to go with the bullets:

  • Early to mid 30s
  • Coast Guard Veteran
  • Homeless for, IIRC, 8 years - by choice.
  • Devout Catholic (is he a Trad though? This is a point of controversy)
  • More or less a self-confessed luddite or neo-luddite. Hates not only AI, smartphones, and the usual list of "bad" modern technology, but also airplanes, cars, and objectively good modern building advancements like air conditioning.
  • A New York State hypernationalist. Specifically, very far upstate New York around areas like Plattsburgh and Messina. See this tweet about upstate NY
  • (Related to the above) Has a penchant for desolation. Often writes poetically about the harsh beauty of derelict old steel towns (Utica) and little, out of the way villages no one has a reason to go to (Elko, Nevada).
  • Is married to a woman and, of late, has a child. The woman has her own twitter and is proudly undocumented. Note that she is not an immigrant, but, from what I can tell, part of a line of weird conservo-hippie-anarchists. Her parents never got her a social security card.

Part of Shagbark's rise was due to his wife. I searched for, briefly, but cannot find the tweet exchange where in an young(ish) Asian woman from San Francisco made fun of Shagbark's wife's appearance. Paraphrasing, she said something along the lines of "Good news if you're a weirdo NEET; you can still get married if you're okay with your wife looking like this." Shagbark demonstrated some knowledge of the game by not directly replying and letting his defenders go after the bug lady. Not only did it work, but some rather large accounts came out of the woodwork to do it. Shagbark's signal was boosted and he now, by his own account, makes most of his money off of twitter monetization. On this last point, I am a bit skeptical; as a USCG vet, he's entitled to a pretty hefty basket of goodies that can go a long ways to supporting his bohemian lifestyle.

In sum, Shagbark is a technology hating somewhat-trad Catholic who LARPs as a kind of beatnik nomad / homesteader / flaneur / dirtbag entrepreneur and ... makes most of his income writing on Twitter and Substack. Contradictions abound, yet I cannot help think he does have genuine intent. This is not some multi-levels of irony deep parody or satire account. This is a real human, with real emotions, and many of them are unsupervised.

The Culture War Angle

Recently, Shagbark has been going through a bit of a crisis. After having his child, he realized that he couldn't actually raise her in a dilapidated shack in the New York hinterlands. He's now considering a move elsewhere. The suburbs are a non-starter (cars and soullessness) but any major metro is too expensive both in terms of money and ideological selling-out. So, he's started to look at old busted up cities that could be cheap to live in. His list, from this tweet is:

Utica, Las Vegas, El Paso, STL, Montreal, St John's NL, Brownsville, Yuma, Barstow, Ojinaga, Fargo, Houma, Wheeling, Atlantic City.

Personally, I'm hoping he ends up in Wheeling, WV. I've lived close enough to it to know that parts of it are truly hellscapes. I'm looking forward to the plot arc where Shagbark becomes a bizzaro Catholic-Luddite Harvey Milk advocating for the return of coal burning fireplaces to Wheeling.

Stemming from this look at cities, Shagbark wrote this tweet. The primary point of it is covered well in the second paragraph:

There is nowhere for a Thinking Man to "land" anymore. Even the cities are largely voids of anything resembling satisfying discourse -- largely because in those cities, rents are so high people now have to WORK more than they READ. You simply cannot live as a "starving artist" in cities where the median rent is $2k-3k/mo.

Shagbark bemoans that a bunch of pseudo intellectuals cannot find a cheap neighborhood to be unemployed in yet still meet up for beer, cigarettes, and High Quality Discourse About Subjects of Great Import. Now, I've been in enough bars around the country in all kinds of different cities and towns to know , sadly, exactly what Shagbark is envisioning. A bunch of weirdos sit around, nursing beers and cheap cocktails, shooting off their malformed opinions about random topics and letting the alcohol smooth out the edges. When you first encounter this in your 20s, as a brainy nerd, you think it's the coolest thing ever. After you round the corner into your 30s, you realize that it's a lot of talking in circles and well disguised emotional commiseration. Real intellectual work is done via writing because it forces you to state what you mean and the build an argument and evidence around it. You discover your own weaknesses, assumptions, holes. You often end up writing a totally different thing that you set out to, which, just as often, is a good thing. You've dug through the dirt and mud and found gold.

Pontificating in a bar is not this. It feels like it the way that LLMs feel like you're chatting with a human. But even a momentary bout of self-awareness dispels the idea that you're really doing the thing. We get drunk and debate in bars to form and sustain relationships of various sorts. We're not there to write the next Tractatus.

Obviously, you can tell I'm thinking of The Motte now. Part of what sustains this site is a culture of effortposts and even effortful comments. I believe most of our AAQCs are responses to topline posts, not the original screeds themselves. If you want to spout off about something random, that's what the Sunday thread is for. Mostly, I think, it works. As the holder of both several AAQCs and multiple temporary bans, I can say that most of the time if there is a "break down" it's because of the personal irresponsibility of individual posters, not something systemic or cultural.

The question I am left with is, however, what if Shagbark got his wish and found a cheap, "beautifully depressed" minor city with a magical bar full of ... Mottizens! Would this actually work or would most of us, being Turbo Autists, shut down in public and let this drunken HippyCath dominate the space? Would there be verbal equivalents of AAQCs or would it all devolve into drunken shouting before anyone got to their second section heading?

Stated plainly; is verbal discussion about any topic actually a road to productive work on that topic, or is writing absolutely better? The obvious exception is when the subject is a specific interpersonal relationship. You talk to your wife/husband/*-friend about your relationship, you don't write markdown formatted posts about it.

Following on that, is Shagbark a greek hero; doomed to horrific failure specifically in the case that he wins. If Shagbark's Booze Lair opens in Houma or St. Louis or Utica, will he find out he's simply created a flophouse for bums instead of a watering hole for this generations Sartres and Hans Uns Von Balthasars?

There's a subset of Mottizens that if transported to a rural setting, working remotely in fairly lucrative jobs, would have a good time at the bar/coffee shop. A big heuristic is if you can already pull that off. An issue is that reaping the benefits of rural living requires quite a bit of less productive labor, and it's hard to resist the incentive of working your more productive skill sets harder.

I am very sympathetic, I’ve always dreamed about going off and living in the woods. Unlike many I’ve grown up rural adjacent. On the list of effort posts I’ll never make is how expensive it is to switch from urban/suburban to rural. Being well off and rural is a lot of fun, but maybe not that fun as Critical Access doctors are hard to come by, unless that’s just because lefty docs don’t want to live around righty plebs.

Over roughly 70 years annual growth of 3% will double that of 2% growth.

Subsistence living sucks, it sucks hard, as evidenced by all of history people moving into really (by our standards) crappy urban life because of just how much subsistence living sucks.

Incentives matter, there’s a reason rural life is in the decline, and if you’re not very cognizant of what the issues are you’re going to get bit hard.

I'd pay good American greenbacks for that effortpost! (Not really, but I still encourage you to write it)

In your mind, what are the things people miss when thinking specifically about the "full remote white collar work, live rural" fantasy. I've had a number of friends who've done this but only to the fringes of exurbs or small cities (10k - 50k population). I don't yet know someone who is literally living the rural J.D. Salinger life way off in remote West Virginia, Montana, West Texas.

Hey, I will not stand for this anti-Elko slander! I will have you know that the city of my birth has both a world renowned cowboy poetry festival and one of the largest gold mines in the country. And it's absolutely beautiful high desert country.

Shhhh, stop telling people about the few remaining unspoiled places...

Stated plainly; is verbal discussion about any topic actually a road to productive work on that topic, or is writing absolutely better? The obvious exception is when the subject is a specific interpersonal relationship. You talk to your wife/husband/*-friend about your relationship, you don't write markdown formatted posts about it.

If you want to pin down something crystal clear that is to stand the test of time, then of course it needs to be written down. If all you want is a lifestyle, then writing is actively hostile to it - the written word can catch up with you, can pin you down, can put you on the spot. The lifestyle is easier when it's not documented, and you can adapt at a moment's notice without needing to recant, revise and re-annotate your earlier works.

Following on that, is Shagbark a greek hero; doomed to horrific failure specifically in the case that he wins. If Shagbark's Booze Lair opens in Houma or St. Louis or Utica, will he find out he's simply created a flophouse for bums instead of a watering hole for this generations Sartres and Hans Uns Von Balthasars?

I'm sympathetic to the guy. Now I'm more of a techno-doomer than a luddite - technology is actively hostile to humans, a barely synergistic parasite, history's true protagonist who will outlive us all, but you're either with technology or you get ground up under the boots of those who are - but the whole "disregard society, make babies and contemplate the wasteland that is the world" thing is basically me when I don't force myself to be a good German and live to work. But it's certainly not heroic. It's a failure to adapt and perform, fallback option for those who can't hack it, a turning-inward in the face of outward and actual defeat. That he manages to turn it around into a living is impressive though.

I wonder why Plattsburgh isn't on his list. There's nothing much there but SUNY Plattsburgh, but it is a real (if small) town and he apparently already thinks favorably of it. Certainly it's a better choice than Utica.

Unfortunately, I think Shagbark's threshold for "high rent" is quite extreme. It seems like anything over about $600 / month is out of the question.

The question I am left with is, however, what if Shagbark got his wish and found a cheap, "beautifully depressed" minor city with a magical bar full of ... Mottizens! Would this actually work or would most of us, being Turbo Autists, shut down in public and let this drunken HippyCath dominate the space? Would there be verbal equivalents of AAQCs or would it all devolve into drunken shouting before anyone got to their second section heading?

If we're doing this I have numerous suggestions in my neck of the woods. There's a lot of tiny cheap old towns where you can buy a home, have a car, and walk to a church and a bar.

The verbal equivalent of an AAQC is the bon mot, the line that everyone remembers and repeats back to each other for years afterward, until it becomes part of speech.

This sounds lovely. Make sure there's an Orthodox church there and sign me up.

My actual escape plan if I can't take it anymore, is to run away to Wilmington, Ohio; which is a completely unremarkable town except that it does have a (tiny) Lutheran church of my type. It is interesting how that is a real consideration I never thought of as a youth.

Now, I've been in enough bars around the country in all kinds of different cities and towns to know , sadly, exactly what Shagbark is envisioning. A bunch of weirdos sit around, nursing beers and cheap cocktails, shooting off their malformed opinions about random topics and letting the alcohol smooth out the edges. When you first encounter this in your 20s, as a brainy nerd, you think it's the coolest thing ever. After you round the corner into your 30s, you realize that it's a lot of talking in circles and well disguised emotional commiseration. Real intellectual work is done via writing because it forces you to state what you mean and the build an argument and evidence around it.

Well, allow me to present the counter-factual. Yes, writing is essential. It is absolutely required to create a coherent system of belief. But before you put pen to paper, there is a natural human urge to bounce your ideas off another human. Maybe more than one. Possibly a small group, in some kind of social situation, where you can engage in vigorous discussion (dare I say debate?) where your ideas are winnowed down before you ever put them on a piece of paper. It might even be reasonable to give your group a name, something a little pretentious, because you are discussing Important Ideas, not merely commiserating over a beer coffee.

Something like the Society of Psychoanalysts, founded at Café Korb in 1908 by Sigmund Freud. Or there is the famous Café Central, patronized by Peter Altenberg, Theodor Herzl, Alfred Adler, Egon Friedell, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Anton Kuh, Adolf Loos, Leo Perutz, Robert Musil, Stefan Zweig, Alfred Polgar, Hitler, Trotsky, Tito, and Stalin. All of these men of course eventually put pen to paper. But they didn't keep coming to the same coffee house just because they really liked the barista's triple caf no fat skim milk four pump blended mochachino. They found value in arguing, debating, and discussing what would become some of the most influential theories in the world with other intelligent men.

Now I'm not saying that Shagbark's club would look like Café Central. It probably would look like a bunch of weirdos sitting around nursing beers and cheap cocktails while pontificating loudly on subjects they were not qualified to take a 201 class in. But that is no reason to write off this kind of circle-jerk entirely. A circle-jerk it may be, but a circle-jerk can still result in ideas that will cause the world to tremble.

Now I'm not saying that Shagbark's club would look like Café Central. It probably would look like a bunch of weirdos sitting around nursing beers and cheap cocktails while pontificating loudly on subjects they were not qualified to take a 201 class in.

The vast majority of people at the Cafe Central were weirdos sitting around nursing beers and cheap cocktails and we've never heard of them. For every Freud and Herzl and Stalin and Hitler, there were fifty losers whose manifestos wound up lining a parrot cage. One of the important things you realize when you read the biographies of revolutionaries, is that it's really hard to tell the serious ones from the unserious ones until suddenly it is very obvious. The Bolsheviks embodied every stereotype of the LARPing coffee shop revolutionary, the thugs who use Socialism as a cover for robbing banks, the burnouts who just hate their parents, the grifters trying to avoid getting a real job, etc. Then suddenly they took over Russia. And I don't think it's something you can predict in advance, some people rise to the occasion and others turn out to be failures. Sam Adams was far more important than John before the Revolution, afterward Sam was an afterthought until he became a beer. Jesus may not even have been the most important Messiah running around Judea in 33, he turned out to be the most important man to ever live.

These kinds of environments are important because they support a huge petri dish of ideas and thinkers, and most of them will be unimportant but some will be earth shattering.

I have these in person drunk chats with the local neighborhood dads. Many of the better discussions are about interpersonal stuff. Turns out that random dads in a good neighborhood are likely only experts at not fucking up their own lives. Political discussions vary heavily in quality depending on the topic.

We don't get to it as often as we would all like, but that is part of our expert ability to keep families together: we don't try and get wasted more than once or twice a month.

One argument in favor of speaking (even, or perhaps especially, lubricated with alcohol): you're much more likely to get people's true beliefs and gut reactions. With writing, as you say, you state what you mean and an argument and evidence. But it's not quite those things themselves, but public representations of those things. When people write, it's less immediate; there's time for revision; and there's a public record of what you say that can be held against you for all eternity. This introduces more opportunities for dishonesty and crafting an inauthentic argument, either intentionally or not.

There's also a quickness and flexibility with concepts that speaking teaches in a way that writing doesn't, which probably helps with thought more generally.

Both modes of communication have their pros and cons. I'd say something like 25% speaking/75% writing is near the ideal, though I don't have real evidence of that or know one way or another what evidence would even look like.

I actually love the Wheeling/Weirton/Steubenville area. I go up there at least once a year, and I always have a great time. It's pretty bombed out but there are actually fascinating, intelligent people trying to build in the ruins; you can spend your whole day just striking up conversations with people, and it feels like everyone is happy to tell you about the history, or some new thing that's being tried. I think something beautiful is going to come from there sooner or later.

For those that have been - Raven, the huge bookstore cat at BookMarx apparently passed last year; but they have at least one and possibly two new ones.

Well, thank you for putting some things together for me that didn't click, before.

By the way, the lady in question - RealDianeYap - who insulted his wife was the same one prattling on about wanting to be a sex-slave for a 9 or 10 rather than a housekeeper for a 5. People claim she's a troll, but fake retarded behavior online is still retarded behavior, regardless.

Shagbark's wife, by the way, is a lovely woman and he's atleast lucky in that respect, I feel.

As for Shagbark - I'm not sure what my opinion on the man himself can fall into. He received a heavy amount of flack on twitter about his admission that his priors had shifted post-birth of his daughter. Advice he had been constantly preaching on how he felt men should follow his example and do what he was doing - all of a sudden, that didn't fly now that he had a small child to take care of, and he was getting roundly called out for it.

It was about this point where he admitted his big hope wasn't a round-robin bar scene for trad men(or even a round-robin trad-men coffee shop), but instead he had hoped to inspire men to basically settle with him and build a unified community.

Which shows where the critical failure lies, and what his sin really is - the lack of leadership, of charisma, of inspiration, of a passive type of ideological cowardice where instead of boldy stating 'Come with me to build a good society' he instead wibble-wobbled about how men should just do the things he had been doing while making limp-wristed motions in his general direction.

...Okay, I'm probably being very unfair to the guy. I get how fatherhood can radically change one's priorities. But I find it hard to respect someone who's actions prove him to be more than willing to sacrifice his prior principles and ideals.

On the other hand, as a parent, you haven't got the luxury of principles.

Now, having said all of that, I feel you're atleast doing him a bit of disservice. There's nothing wrong with wanting to have the company of your peers to throw around and discuss ideas, even outside of alcohal. I mentioned coffee shops before, and I actually got to see this, where a bunch of old men would come in like clock-work to have idle discussion on various topics, from politics to business to just idle chatter. It was definately interesting to see that in the flesh, and if that's what he was going for, I applaud him for it.

I don't think that's what it was, mind. Conversely, if he had setup his overall ideal community, it's possible things like that would grow out of it organically. Again, something I feel overall would be a good thing.

But it's clear by this point that if this is what he wants to do, he needs to step up and be a Leader, a Patriarch, someone whom others find worthy enough to follow. And that's something he's failed to do up until this point. He might want to work on that.

...running back to your initial question, while writing can cultivate intellectual work, open and skilled communication and debate is a completely different skill. Ideally, one should cultivate both, and my opinion is that one isn't nessecarily superior to the other.

Which shows where the critical failure lies, and what his sin really is - the lack of leadership, of charisma, of inspiration, of a passive type of ideological cowardice where instead of boldy stating 'Come with me to build a good society' he instead wibble-wobbled about how men should just do the things he had been doing while making limp-wristed motions in his general direction.

The issue is this get's pretty culty and has trouble lasting long-term. I see it a lot in churches - particularly non-denominational - that get big, sucking in the remnants of the declining churches around them. They create quite the impressive "community". It's all based around the Charismatic pastor, they start a little Bible college, if they make it a decade or two the pastor tries to set up his son, and then they whither away.

Guy in my home town played football for the state team. The Tide, as we say. A bit before my time--I was still in elementary school then--but he played well enough that under Bear Bryant he made a name for himself locally. Never went to the NFL but had a respectable following. Graduated, disappeared for a several years then was suddenly back and opening a church, as one does. Charismatic protestant, people speaking in tongues, ran it out of a little part of what we called strip malls back in the day, now I think these outdoor malls are the norm, at least back home, and the old indoor malls are nearly dead. Bama paraphernalia shops, a Victoria's Secret where the customers do not resemble the models on the displays, Spencer's Gifts, Sbarro's with slices of pizza under heat lamps.

I do not recall the name of his church. I believe the word Light was part of it. Many people attended his services. I knew some of them. Twice on Sunday, then Wednesday nights to top you up during the week. Lots of singing and praising God, etc. The dude was a very charming sort, apparently, and athletic even into his older age--though I'm older now than he was then.

He had married at some point and had a daughter who was by then a fetching blonde teenager. You could see a younger version of her mom in her, or at least that was my guess. I heard many stories that they (dad and daughter) were very clingy, would dance together in ways that did not seem, let me say, normal for a father and daughter. One guy I knew claimed to have seen them kissing on a dance floor at the Old L&N Club.

I didn't follow what was going on and I knew even then that people like to run their mouths about other people without any basis, but it's true various sources were whispering the same thing. Whether it was this, or money, or some other scandal, the church went under, just suddenly wasn't there any more. Not that his followers abandoned him. The true believers always said he was a great guy--they all called him by his first name, let's say it was Garrett (it wasn't.) Garrett this, Garrett that, Garrett is a good man, etc. Maybe one or two would say Garrett's ideas about the Lord are wrong because of A B or C but nothing against Garrett.

He seemed to submerge again, then suddenly there was his face in the back of the phone book. Injured? Call Garrett Footballer, free consultation. So he had become am ambulance chaser. Apparently he had also begun (or continued) drinking. And then one night, alone in a suburb, he wrapped his car around a tree and went to be with the Lord. That last part was of course the popular coda at the time. I've never trusted preachers.

Shagbark bemoans that a bunch of pseudo intellectuals cannot find a cheap neighborhood to be unemployed in yet still meet up for beer, cigarettes, and High Quality Discourse About Subjects of Great Import. Now, I've been in enough bars around the country in all kinds of different cities and towns to know , sadly, exactly what Shagbark is envisioning.

This is true and false. It is true that pontificating over beers is not real work, and has real risk of being wankery.

However, to have a culture that is doing real artistic or intellectual work, it sure helps to have a lower cost of living so the writers or artists can spend many, many hours on the work in their homes and garages or workshops or converted lofts without having to work 50+ hours a week at a stressful job. And it helps to be around others, not because the work is done at the bar, but because you get credit for the work at the bars, you get feedback and ideas, you get inspiration and motivation.

Mottizens! Would this actually work or would most of us, being Turbo Autists, shut down in public and let this drunken HippyCath dominate the space? Would there be verbal equivalents of AAQCs or would it all devolve into drunken shouting before anyone got to their second section heading?

Having been to many events with intellectual friends I've met through writing online, it has been a great experience. It's not a time for inventing theories or fully working out theories, but it is great for cross-fertilization, getting inspiration, learning things people weren't able to put in their writing, brainstorming, etc. etc. However, it would be a big leap from meeting up once or twice a year, to actually living with them. Not sure how that would work out.

I have met him and his wife a few times. I have bought a few properties in the rust belt area he lives in and we're both from the same area elsewhere. Very good guy.

Even the online world is a very, very small place.

Any interest in nudging him towards looking at The Motte? If nothing else, he's going to have an interesting perspective on, well, everything.

It’s entirely possible to rescue failing cities by boosting particular neighborhoods(there’s a word for it- gentrification). IIRC shagbark wanted to do this in rust belt New York.

Unfortunately, he wanted to combine this with Luddism(lol), trad-Catholicism(minus the guilt), and ideological commitment. Alas he found no takers; most people don’t want to live a third world poor lifestyle, they would rather have jobs.

Personally, I'm hoping he ends up in Wheeling, WV. I've lived close enough to it to know that parts of it are truly hellscapes. I'm looking forward to the plot arc where Shagbark becomes a bizzaro Catholic-Luddite Harvey Milk advocating for the return of coal burning fireplaces to Wheeling.

Which parts? It isn't that big, and the only parts of it that I would consider remotely bad are the parts of the island where it's all drug addicts. But he isn't likely to live on the island if he doesn't want to have a car. Parts of it are dumpy for sure, but most of it is completely safe, and it isn't really blighted. If he's looking for actual hellscapes that aren't inside big cities, parts of the Mon Valley are much worse.

Mingo Junction is where my mind goes. It's not scary or anything, but it's so empty it's like the Cairo (IL) of the valley.

Was 100% thinking of the island.

Also you might like this ArcGis story map about the Mon Valley @Rov_Scam

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