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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 29, 2024

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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:

“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.

Some societies treated slaves with more decency than modern man commends in all areas that are not commodified material comfort.

I will ask again: can you list societies that had slaves treated better than modern man?

I could, but you'd just go ahead and ignore my caveat because you don't understand anything that is not material comfort.

So you simply are unable to substantiate your bullshit and insane claim how supposedly slaves were better treated than people nowadays.

Even to let other people (not me) to judge it and potential admire your great examples.

For future: making less overly strong claims could be much better tactic and let you argue without blatant lying.

Also, not having delusions that specifically me would be lord and king that subjugated others is not the same as understanding only material comfort.

Your understanding of antic civilizations and feudalism seems to be mostly based on 1700 bourgeois propaganda.

Go read about Antic Greece, Medieval Europe or modern warlord era China. Then we can have a productive conversation instead of you regurgitating Liberal memes.

Before taking advise from you on this I await examples of societies that:

  • had slaves
  • treated them better (in your opinion) than societies treat modern people now

For best effect: in which society that existed in past you would prefer to be enslaved over living your current life?

mostly based on 1700 bourgeois propaganda

"slavery bad" is opinion fairly widely shared, if you want to argue that slavery is better than freedom then I await your examples

"slavery bad" is opinion fairly widely shared

By Liberals and their successors only. Slavery has been widely considered a just or necessary practice before the Industrial Revolution. Aristotle famously makes a convincing argument that without it, progress is impossible.

I don't support it myself since we have machines now and I generally agree with Liberals directionally when it comes to the individual. But they do overstate their case for political reasons. That much is clear.

in which society that existed in past you would prefer to be enslaved over living your current life?

I don't believe in Rawlsianism, but let's consider Rome.

Most household and business managers and agents were slaves, and they were even a preferred caste in banking and accounting, and quite common in intellectual pursuits. So I'd probably fall under that category in that society anyways. And my life would be less constrained in some ways and more constrained in others. In

The most brutal accounts revolve around what one would predict: agriculture and mining. But they don't strike me as less exploitative than the treatment of nominally free workers in the 1800s. In fact it is often remarked upon by contemporaries of the Industrial Revolution (such as Marx as I mention previously) that the incentives of capitalism are actually worse for the underlings than those of slavery.

A slave you have to feed and shelter all year and throughout his life lest you eat into your investment. An employee you can and should dismiss if they are not making you money. To be fair, abandonment was also an issue with slavery, but in Rome it was specifically made illegal to reclaim abandoned slaves because they system relied on these incentives. The lumpenproletariat is a uniquely modern issue.

From the point of view of the middle class, slavery is an indignity for obvious reasons: it refuses them bluntly access to higher prestige, certain professions, and general control over their personal life that they could fully enjoy given their means.

But for the lowest of the low, for those people for whom getting a meal is not a given, which is what led us down this path of discussion, rights and dignity are not those prized treats. And selling themselves into service can actually be a good deal.

This is the real charge against modernity that communists and other successors of Liberalism successfully accuse it with. That those nice ideas of individualism and freedom are only good for those that already had the means to enjoy them and that removing the other forms of bonds society used to run on makes all the miserable untied to the now free individual.

Being more free and having more rights is not necessarily in your interest.

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Don't worry too much about it, a lot of this lot are wanna be religious fanatics that don't have the courage of their convictions and authoritarians that don't have the power to actually impose their will on people. Just par for the course. The only power they have is a downvote on a fringe website that is slowly turning into stormfront.

Oh, I do not worry about it at all.

It is more that I am poking at this as I am curious is there any self-consistent and reality-adjacent vision of world there.

As far as hot takes go "live as modern man is worse than living as a slave in some societies" is quite out there so I keep wondering how they managed to justify this.

But sadly*, it seems that even they do not really believe in this as they keep trying to backpedal and limit claim to lumpenproletariat at most.

*for the expected return on discussion, for themself and world in general it is a good thing that it was just shitposting.