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.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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.
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link