site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 29, 2024

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

9
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

White Dudes for Harris

It should be remembered that it was the Democrat party that broke the ice on invoking White Identity Politics directly to muster political support. The Republican party has only ever used proxy rhetoric like "they have to come legally" or "tough on crime", but looking at the recent Convention it's clear the Republican strategy is to go for the Big Tent rather than directly appeal to white voters. It's the Harris campaign that makes the direct appeal to white men, and you would not see an event like this hosted within the Republican party.

This is another indication that we're probably over the hill of Peak Woke that a white identity is acknowledged in a non-critical context:

“There is an epidemic amongst men in this country,” Mike Nellis, a Democratic strategist who helped organize the call, told The Hill.

“That loneliness, that anxiety, that disconnection, it gets filled by something. And what Republicans have done an incredible job of, depressingly so, is creating a permission structure that makes it very easy for white men to embrace Donald Trump, to embrace MAGA culture, to embrace this sort of devolution of our politics into something much more crass,” he continued. ...

Nellis, on the other hand, argued that Democrats have been too quick in the past to give up on constituencies that seem out of reach, like rural voters and white male voters.

“We should be fighting for every inch and damn sure know that the Republicans do that. They communicate with every constituency that they can win, lose, or draw,” Nellis said.

“If we could move even a fraction of white men and get them to a place where they feel comfortable with being a part of the multicultural movement that is the Democratic Party, as imperfect as it is a lot of days, that would change our politics dramatically and so much for the better.”

That's a huge shift in messaging from just a few years ago in the midst of the Floyd riots.

“There is an epidemic amongst men in this country,” Mike Nellis, a Democratic strategist who helped organize the call, told The Hill.

The "masculinity crisis" is probably down mostly to the traditional foundations of masculine identity, what distinguished it fundamentally from femininity going back several thousand years at least, e.g being physically powerful and being good at killing people/animals are less and less relevant than ever in industrial and post-industrial society and are only going to become more so.

Probably not actually "fixable" short of a Kaczsynskian collapse of civilization and why all proposed solutions whether they be left-wing "build a positive masculinity" stuff or right-wing "retvrn" will fail.

This is discounting the fact that we can totally be post-industrial and back to virility and violence.

Indeed this is what most critiques of traditionalism and twitter emulators miss when they caricature it as RETVRN. Tradition is never going back to the past, going backwards or trying to literally go back to past glories, and whenever it is that it fails. Because it is impossible to turn back entropy, because we are not people of the past, we have neither their virtues nor their vices, neither their innocence nor their wisdom.

What tradition is is acknowledgement of eternal truths and their practical, moral, social and metaphysical requirements.

In this case, the fiction you, and modernism, sells of a peaceful society created by industry is a blatant lie. One all too evident now. We do not live in peace, we do not live in civilization, we have only grown more base and brutal with the advent of plenty and the inevitable cthonic pull that came with it. That brutality is sheathed in nice even language and plentiful fast food and video games. But even those are fading and drifting out of grasp under the current of debt, slowly but inevitably moving away like the ship of a lone sailor who dropped overboard and has to resign himself to drowning.

What is more cruel and violent than the plain imposition that you will never own your home, you will never have a loving wife, you will never have a loyal husband, you will never sire children and all you will ever do is pay for pensions working a job you hate while your black rectangle beams images of happier people into your mind as everything in your vicinity including your own life gets slowly but surely worse in every regard. Perhaps the threat of the punishment that awaits you if you dare to contest such a fate?

Some societies treated slaves with more decency than modern man commends in all areas that are not commodified material comfort. But alas, the choice between annihilation and annihilation is not going to tame the youths spirit for very long.

Is is entirely predictable that such an age should be dominated by feminine thinking and modes of existence. But no age is eternal and the troubles created by the desolation of all social structures that require will necessarily wreak the advent of a new age of conquest and grandiose virility.

Our bandit hordes are already here. The warlords that will tame them have already been born. And when they do, earthly notions of equality, sameness and tolerance will go with them.

All this has happened before, and will happen again.

I work with quite a few young men. They generally have girlfriends. The older ones (let's say 30+ years old) generally have wives and own a home. A few even have children.

There's some subset of sad incels. I somehow don't personally know them. The median young man I know seems to have little despair.

It's hard to get a good grip on statistics in so manipulated an epistemic setting as ours, but given what does get reported, I'm going to go on a limb and say that the median young man you know isn't the median young man. Otherwise those reported rates of celibacy are either impossible or men are mysteriously under-reporting relationships.

To say nothing of home ownership rates.

The median young man I know is struggling to get by and largely celibate. But then again he's also highly likely to be a homosexual and have a specific set of religious beliefs and hobbies, because nobody's friend circle is representative of the population at large.

Besides, friendless people have literally p = 0 to be your friend by definition.

Considering that the numbers that initiated the "sex recession talk" were still at sexlessness for young people (ie. sex less often than monthly - even that would include many people that would not be "true incels") being around 30 % among young people, it would imply that the median young man is indeed having at least some sex and the median young man you know not being as representative as the median young men /u/TIRM knows (or, indeed, the median young men that I know).

Broadly agreed. At this point in my life the people I know are largely other parents that I meet through some school or child event or my coworkers. And we are mostly a cabal of tech workers.

So selecting for employed engineers, they date around in their 20s and settle down early to mid 30s. Broadly speaking. I know some these people recently bought properties with their spouses or fiances, etc. Multiple coworkers have in the past few months aged into the "get married and buy a place" stage of life. No kids yet from this group, incidentally. Good thing my Chinese coworkers are picking up the slack in the having children department.

The couple of hopeless dweebs I know (no offense, decent guys and coworkers, but being realistic here) are Indian immigrants. They both got wifes with a little help (coercion? hard boot on the ass?) from their families.

If we made some horribly unrepresentative polling of just my experiences, I'd say young people do nothing but work and date and eventually marry. And I would list off examples to support that.