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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:
That's a huge shift in messaging from just a few years ago in the midst of the Floyd riots.
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.
Being eaten by wolves. Having your head bashed in by a rival war party. Pretty much any given day in the life of a pre-modern man. On feast days Russian peasants used to get drunk and beat each other senseless for fun, and then go home and beat their wives. This is just "words are violence" but right-wing.
Actually none of what you describes strikes me as a fraction as unpleasant as the life of the average person a few centuries ago, which is probably why humanity collectively abandoned that lifestyle as soon as it was materially feasible. "A job you hate" is not fun but it's probably more fun than starving to death because there was a bad frost and the crops all died.
As for "everything slowly but surely getting worse in every regard" idk what specifically you have in mind but most right-wing complaints about everything getting worse are just tautological complaints that everything is getting less right-wing which naturally isn't convincing to anyone who doesn't already buy into all right-wing premises.
It hasn't. Cyclical theories of history were always bullshit, though they may have been facially plausible in 1800 . Humanity is in entirely uncharted territory. The past offers no lessons, because it actually is different this time. Modern people aren't 16th century peasants. They aren't even 20th century proletarians.
All of the "weak men strong times" stuff, the idea that the stultifying atmosphere of modernity will ultimately lead to some great revolt for the restoration of meaning, virtue, whatever, none of it has any contact with reality. Angsting about meaning is itself a luxury available to the excessively wealthy, as everyone is in modern developed countries by western standards. Approximately nobody is going to forsake material comfort to embark on some great vitalist crusade, because material comfort is what most people actually care about first and foremost. Even people who are "struggling" today live like kings compared to the average person 100 years ago, let alone 200.
It would take a total collapse of industrial civilization to produce the global warlordism that you dream of, and that's possible, though I don't think it's very likely.
I don't even know what "we can totally be post-industrial and back to virility and violence" would actually even look like in practice. Like a based fascist party takes over the US tomorrow and then, what, invades Mexico for fun? Resurrects gladiatorial combat? Nukes China?
I remember when right-wing twitter personality Alaric the Barbarian made a post about how young men need GREATNESS and ADVENTURE and should not settle for the drudgery of living in suburban Indianopolis and someone reasonably said yeah posting photos of Greek statues and larping as a Germanic warlord is cool and everything but what actually are you concretely suggesting people do and he replied uhhh run for dogcatcher.
You have no experience of the life of the average person a few centuries ago. You don't even have stories of that life. You have a small, curated selection of those stories provided by a small collection of people, almost all of which likewise had no experience of that life. Biasing that sample for personal or tribal ends provides obvious utility, and it is trivial to observe that such biasing efforts are endemic.
We have actual histories, songs and stories from people a few centuries ago, and even from many centuries ago. They do not demonstrate a life-experience of unending hell-misery, but rather an existence very like our own. Their concerns were similar to ours. Their joy and suffering was similar to ours. Nothing fundamental about human nature or the human experience has changed in any way since at least the invention of writing.
This is largely because "man is a creature than can get used to anything". Even today, Guatemalans are only 0.44 points out of 10 less happy than Americans (yes, you can quibble about the exact measures, but the phenomenon is robust to the choice of measure). I'd sure as hell prefer to live in America than in Guatemala, even though if I lived in Guatemala all my life I probably wouldn't mind it too much.
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An argument which applies equally well to IGI’s catastrophizing. The songs and stories of 50 or 500 years ago were relatable; shouldn’t we expect the same in another 50 or 500?
We should. How is that incompatible with the following?
Compare that to this comment:
The difference seems pretty clear to me.
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The conditions of life in say, tsarist Russia in the 19th and early 20th centuries to give one example are pretty well recorded, and they were not vastly changed from those in the 18th or 17th centuries. The vanishing of the traditional agricultural lifestyle is quite recent in historical terms, and it still persists to some extent today in certain countries. So we actually do have a pretty good picture of what pre-industrial life was like.
Naturally, they didn't know anything else. If you lock a kid in the basement from infancy and beat him five times every day of the week and only once on Saturday and Sunday, the weekend is gonna look pretty awesome to him, but most people who weren't raised in a basement wouldn't find being locked in a basement and being beaten once a day on weekends very fun.
You severely underrate how alien these people were. There's pretty good evidence they were practically incapable of abstract thought or logical exercises that would be easy for a small child in the modern United States (this being in reference to the great mass of common people, obviously, not a very small educated elite). You may be familiar with A.M Luria's study of Uzbek peasants as late as the 1920s and 30s as it's made the rounds in rationalist and rationalist adjacent circles. This was not because of any genetic inferiority, but because their world was so founded in the immediate and concrete that a basic "if A then B" syllogism was beyond their grasp. They were also shockingly violent. Besides their regular wanton cruelty to animals for practical reasons as well as for amusement, they were basically always ready to fight and kill each other over the mildest of slights. Sicilian immigrants to the US as late as the 20s, coming from one of the most backwards and least industrialized regions in Europe, had an astronomical murder rate because stabbing somebody in the throat for cheating at cards or hitting on your sister was just totally normal to them.
Yes, our ancestors were "like us" insofar as they loved their friends and families, liked to tell and hear stories, enjoyed food and sex, and feared death, but that's a pretty sparse overlap in my opinion. Outside of a tiny handful of intellectuals and philosophers, you probably wouldn't be able to hold any kind of real or meaningful conversation with a 16th century German even if you could speak his language perfectly, and you wouldn't want to anyway because he might crush your skull.
I am, but would appreciate either elaboration or a link to what you consider the strongest version of the Luria argument. I remember it being profoundly unconvincing, but I'd like to read it again to be sure I'm not missing something. Specifically, I understand the general form of the "if A then B" that was supposedly beyond them, but I'd like some detail on exactly what consequences you expect to derive from this claim, such that you think the absence of this ability would make their thought alien to me. How were they actually different in their lived experience, in their life choices, in how they acted and what they did?
None of these features seem alien in any way. Widespread examples of all of these characteristics are available in the modern world, and in America even, not to mention many other examples of behavior I find equally deplorable or abhorrent in many other varieties. None of this is even close to as alien as, say, the Apache or Comanche, and I would not describe them as bizarrely alien.
To be a bit more specific, they were "like us" in that they had exactly the same vices and virtues as we have, in roughly equal proportions; only the detail of how these were expressed culturally seems to differ. Further, they had most of the same major life experiences, and those we do not share have close analogues. I see no way to couch this as "a sparse overlap". I can read their stories and immediately grok the ideas behind them, and find them familiar to me. I'm pretty sure they had bullying, crushes, sweethearts, rivals, hated enemies, ambition, jealousy, deceit... I am confident they had people essentially like me, and people essentially like you, in short.
I would love to do so. And I do not particularly doubt that I would be able to do so. As for crushing my skull, I suppose you are doubling down on the incomprehensibly violent nature of the 16th century German peasantry; the "astronomical murder rate", the stabbings, the honor killings and so on. Truly, how could anyone communicate with such alien savages?
Well, here's the first graph result for the search "murder rate 16th century germany".
By the 1600s, the Germans are down to around 10 murders per 100,000, and the dread Italians are around 35. At that point, the 1600s Guido Menace would have moderately less violent that American blacks in the 2000s, and moderately more violent than those same blacks in the 2010s. I'd guess the Vile Huns were somewhere roughly in the ballpark of Appalachian whites from the same era. American blacks, in any case, are likewise not entirely unfamiliar with domestic violence, or indeed with animal cruelty for sport. And they're like this in the modern world with all the blessings of modernity, not least of which is a system of truly remarkable trauma medicine to turn 1600s murders into mere 2000s woundings. I used to work with a lot of underclass Blacks in an underclass job. Was I likewise underestimating how "deeply alien" my black coworkers were, or are these feelings of alienation reserved only for the distant past?
The disparity between your claims and the immediately-available evidence is confusing to me, to the point that I worry I'm reading the charts wrong. Is there something I'm missing here?
In any case, humans do heinous shit, always have and always will. None of this is new, or indeed old and forgotten, but rather simply is. None of it is incomprehensible. I imagine German or Italian peasants would be horrified by a description of American abortion practices, or OnlyFans, or Pride Parades, or indeed any number of our other modern abominations, but in fact none of that is new in its fundamental essence either.
Nice hat... strikes again (the 'first graph result' link is borked)
thanks. replaced it with another source of the same chart, should be working now.
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I don't really know what I'd call the strongest version of the argument, as I don't think Luria really was making an argument (well he was, but the argument was that socialist development was raising the mental level of the peasantry which is not really interesting) so much as just collecting data. But in any case here's a summary of the research. Here is Russell T. Warne describing a study in Africa which showed the same phenomenon.
That's a matter of taste. I would find it extremely frustrating and yes, alien, to hold a conversation with someone who was incapable of entertaining a hypothetical.
Killing somebody over a card game or killing a cat for fun are pretty alien to me. If someone did either of these things I would stay far away from them and consider them dangerous and anti-social, as would everybody else I know. Some people do do these things even today in the modern USA and they are generally considered to be acting in an extremely aberrant and objectionable way.
I would. The Comanche used to teach their children how to torture prisoners of war to death. That is bizarrely alien to my experience and I think it probably is to yours as well.
That's burying the lede pretty hard. The details of how base emotions, most of which are shared even by non-human animals, are expressed, are very important.
Wild animals above the level of insects have all these too. Maybe not jealousy.
You're the only one using the word "savage." They were different from us, which doesn't necessarily make them worse or better. I'm not even passing judgment. I wouldn't wanna live like they did, but that's just my personal preference, being as much a product of my environment as they were.
Compared to Germany's rate of 1 per 100,000 today, I would call that shockingly high.
I can't speak to that specifically, but yes there are pockets of life in modern society which are extremely alien to me. I have also interacted fairly extensively with "underclass" people, or at least people from a different social class than me, mostly whites and Mexicans (including some who have spent time in prison for violent crimes). Yes I have found their experiences and backgrounds very alien to my own, to the point where it was often difficult to find the common ground necessary for any kind of fruitful conversation. The feeling was mutual, and I imagine it would be even more the case with a 17th century peasant commune.
No doubt.
I live in a modern-ish suburb. My parents come from flatland hillbilly/swampbilly backgrounds with extended family members who have committed what would be felonies(mostly kidnapping) if they happened outside of deep deep rural areas to enforce family honor in the 21st century, seriously expect us to respect their disownments over religious issues, and other such clannish behavior. I'm not underclass but I've lived among them and seen the way they behave.
People underestimate the cultural gaps among a single ethnicity in the same part of the country in a single year, let alone across centuries and continents.
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You're a 21st century aristocrat expounding on the idea that you wouldn't get on with 16th century outlaw bikers. This is not the argument you think it is.
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Hmm, my grand dad was basically a subsistence farmer, and while it wasn't universally miserable of course, it was certainly a lot more stressful and worrisome than his kids becoming trades people. He had to spend more time tending the farm to get by than he would have in a normal job by a long long way. And that was with fertilizer and a tractor.
The further you go back, the more labor was required to do any basic task. Certainly they still took joy in what they could, but they did so with aching joints and bowed backs.
There is a reason in the rust belt than when you ask many miners do they want their sons to become miners they say no. Because they know it is a crippling, dangerous job. They want to send their kids to college so they can work in an office and not have crippling lung diseases and missing fingers.
In other words we don't have to look back hundreds of years to see that things are better now. We can see it in one or two generations back. Or you can go to see subsistence farmers in China. Humans haven't changed, but the amount of work and danger it takes to live is significantly less than it was. Technology has made material differences to people.
Now perhaps there is an argument we waste that saved time and energy in frivolous ways. But we have it to waste. They might not have had unending hell-misery, but they certainly had more hell misery in a very material way than almost any modern Westerner.
By the end of his life, my grandad in his 60's couldn't walk, was blind in one eye and the massive strong hands that could pull a calf from a cow or wrangle a sheep were gnarled and twisted with arthritis. He was in constant pain. He refused to let his kids take over the farm, because he wanted better for them. His kids are older than he was when he died and they are all much healthier than he was at the end. The human experience really has changed. Our bodies can only take a certain amount of wear, and certainly many technologies since writing have reduced the amount of wear we need to put them through.
Just because lives weren't unending hell misery and that people made do with what they could, does not mean that the very real and material benefits of human endeavour have not improved the human experience.
And we do so with mental illness, narcotics abuse, depression and loneliness. They were happy in different ways and miserable in different ways, but I'm not convinced they were actually fundamentally more miserable than we are in any meaningful sense, or happier either for that matter. Which is better: to lose some of your children, or to never have children at all? The former seems much superior to me, and claims to the contrary seem naïve.
I'm pretty sure those miners thought that their sons could have all the good things of their own life and none of the bad things, with the idea being that the bad things wouldn't simply be replaced by other bad things. But it seems to me that, in fact, they were. Less aching joints and bowed backs. More meth zombies and fentanyl corpses, suicide, mental illness, deep alienation and so on. I am not convinced that the former outweighs the latter.
Life has obviously changed in many ways. There are fewer of old bad things, and more of new bad things. There are likewise fewer of old good things, and more of new good things. Your argument is that there's more units of good and fewer units of bad on net, and if that's your honest impression, fair enough, but it is certainly not mine. I've had a lot of changes in my own life, and a considerable amount of both pain and joy; I note that the sources of both were generally things that were not in any meaningful sense novel. The ways I've been miserable were ways that were, in all essential particulars, available to people five thousand years ago, and likewise for the ways I've found joy. Is it truly different for you?
While fent and meth were nonexistent in that era, suicide, mental illness, deep alienation, and so on were not. Nor was alcoholism, which wrecks you perhaps somewhat slower than fent or meth, but just as well.
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I would suggrst the main difference is that 5000 years ago, you had no choice but to endure the bad things. You couldn't avoid that your life and work and having kids was dangerous. They were inescapable. Today many people can still have the good, having kids and the like, but don't become fentanyl addicts or require mental health care..Many. many millions of people fall into the bracket and have the old joys, less of the old miseries and not much of the new.
Now at least we have that option. You've never taken joy in a truly great book, or video game or movie? Or learned some new thing about the world? Not only would those not exist 5000 years ago, you would not have had the time to enjoy them compared to today.
It seems to me that we have greatly expanded the access of good things, reduced the number of bad things..and yes we have created more bad things, but if my choice is being crippled or having to deal with the ennui of a pointless office job. One of those is worse than the other. And one can be fixed by switching jobs, or homesteading or becoming a lumberjack or whatever. You can do that and still benefit from the good things about modernity.
Thats the key diffetence to me. You can have kids and most of them won't die, nor is your wife at much risk in labour. You can live in a small close knit community. The old joys still exist. And you can not indulge in drugs, you can still worship your God or gods, you can still tell stories around a fire in the woods. Or take your kids fishing.You can just do it with a full belly instead of empty, where your life does not depend on it.
What joys of old have we truly lost? You right now can choose to do anything your forebears did. You just have a lot more options as well. You can farm, and find other like minded people. You can opt out of almost all of modern society if you wish and in varying degrees. Thats why today is better. You have that choice. 5000 years ago you did not have the option of choosing modern devices and medical care and knowledge. Today you can buy some land and a horse and choose your level of advancement. Amish? Or Mennonite? Kacyzynki or Musk? You can choose to have your family live without a washing machine or an oven or a TV. You can choose to be a farmer or to hunt for food, or pick up road kill. All of these things are possible right now today.
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