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Apparently Labor is going to treat Incel ideology similarly to political Islam in the UK (BBC, Guardian).
As a freedom of speech apologist, I don't think that this is a good development, but just the response to the latest moral panic and about as justified as the response to 'D&D satanism'.
What should be illegal is incitement to crimes. I am sure that this is already illegal in the UK. "Blow up Parliament for Allah", "Rape some bitches to protest against wokism", "Kill a cop to bring forth the dictatorship of the proletariat" are not protected speech, if anyone posts them on their facebook they would quickly be removed and the poster charged.
Of course, even here, technically enforcing this on more obscure pages is basically impossible without cracking down on the free internet as much as the CCP does (and possibly not even then). Punish what you can find and don't lose too much sleep over some .onion board which you can't police, or infiltrate them if it looks like they are planning concrete crimes in the physical world.
To make broader pieces of ideology illegal, such as "people should live according to Sharia law" or "Capitalism is just a development stage to be overcome" or "Women should have less/more power" would curtail freedom of speech too much for my taste.
I also don't think it will succeed on the object level much. Given that the punishments for simply reading the wrong ideology is hopefully going to be light (CSAM being the only content where merely intentionally viewing it should be a crime), that prohibition will do little to dissuade people from consuming Incel ideology. The main reason why an edgy teenager would not read something widely considered bad is not because the government forbids it, which is to admit 'this is so dangerous that we can't allow people to read it', but that it is generally considered lame in his circles. If Mrs. Cooper bans Incel ideology, that will make Incel ideology less lame, not more lame, because established politicians are invariably lame. (My vocabulary is probably half a century out of date, my point stands.)
They have no other option.
They have created a society in which people have less sex than ever, have fewer children than ever and can only dream of getting the housing their parents had at the same age. They have no idea how to fix it so the result is to find ways to make the people who point out the problems seem illegitimate.
There were large riots due to the problems immigration has caused. Nobody in government has a serious and realistic plan for fixing the massive issues so instead of acknowledging them they simply have to blame a handful of Russian accounts. It can't have anything to do with crime, lack of social cohesion, rampant housing shortages or any other issue that the politicians simply can't fix.
If someone is living with their parents at the same age that their parents owned a house the problem has to be their micropenis. They are loser incels and therefore not worth engaging with. There is no political option to create affordable housing as it would completely crash the financial system to bring down housing prices to 3x an average annual salary. Therefore, what is left is repression and arguments that are insults.
Incels are a real threat to the system. The system has failed to create a society in which people can find housing, start a family. People are angry and politicians have no solutions. Lots of young men with nothing to lose and no prospects are the greatest threat to any regime.
The birth rate makes the UK pension system completely unsustainable. Filling the gap with third world labour is going to cause major issues for which nobody has any answers. So if you ask how this is going to be solved your dick is small, you are ugly, your momma is fat and you are a Russian bot so you have no legitimacy.
The effect isn't primarily through direct government suppression. Maybe one or two people with nasty rhetoric will be punished, but it's about generating a news story "look at how evil incels are," not any real likelihood that they'll act. You'll probably have a government unit dedicated to convincing young, stupid men to say they'll commit outrageous violence, just for the sake of making sure that story percolates through media on a regular basis.
Its effect will primarily be to reenforce among women that men complaining about, well, anything are icky and low status (note that "dangerous" is not one of those adjectives). A guy complaining about his inability to pay for dates is really just an entitled incel, so he deserves to be excluded from society. And he certainly doesn't deserve to have his complaints treated as a systemic issue, because we live in a perfect utopian world where anything bad that happens is men's own fault.
Men will then self-censor and retreat from a losing battlefield, at best working until they become a good cog in the system or (more likely) turning in on themselves and self-soothing with video games and porn, until eventually hanging themselves.
Incels won't be a threat to the system, because men who are plausible leaders will never be actual incels, and no one will take the massive status hit that comes with taking up any incel-adjacent positions. Instead, incels will just end up being a drag on the system, supported by the dole and their parents' retirement funds. It's also a self-correcting problem: the more men that drop out, the easier it is for the remaining men. The negative feedback loop ensures the system is stable.
You know, as an actual literal tradcon I can say that this guy just shouldn't be dating- the man pays in relationships, that's part and parcel of rejecting modern gender roles.
I more or less agree with your point. Incels are by definition men who are thoroughly cowed by the system- obviously not the chads that are natural leaders, but not the lumpenproles that take drastic action at the drop of a hat either.
Descriptively, I agree that a man who can't pay for dates would be much better served by getting to the point where he can pay for dates than by other areas to put effort in.
As to what should be, I'm neutral. A point I would make is that trad and modern male gender roles aren't a rejection of each other: they're largely the same, at least in terms of what women find attractive for a suitable partner. Here, it's the man pays. Even feminists have taken to justifying the norm with references to the pay gap/cost of makeup/dating risk.
What incels see is that the male gender role has the same responsibilities put on it as before, but with a weakened social basis for men to fulfill it. The hollowing out of the middle class, the fetishization of bureaucratic over productive roles, various cultural norms.
And, without the ability to achieve enough masculinity to attract a mate, they give up altogether and turn into passive, pathetic creatures. Who won't be leading a revolution or even stochastic violence higher than noise level.
Certainly there are many women who insist on men paying for dates using this formula, but I believe the sort of women who make references to the pay gap/cost of makeup/dating risk as reasons for men to pay for everything on dates are too self-oriented and men who have self-respect should not date them. I say the same for men who complain about paying for dates, excepting situtations in which the sorts of dates women are expecting are genuinely excessive -- particularly when it's excessive for their social class. Worthwhile women do not whine about men not paying for dates, and worthwhile men do not whine about paying for them.
Men and women who care about each other should each pay a portion towards their dates in accordance with their ability to pay and interest in a particular subject. Going to a woman's favorite restaurant on her birthday? Maybe treat her to it. Going to see Cheesy Romantic Comedy 8? Maybe she should buy his ticket. Watching Action Sci-Fi 11? He should buy. But ultimately if you're breaking your relationship down into a list of debts that must be transactionally repaid, your relationship is worth shit, and you should either make it worth more than that or end it. Love pays debts, owing nothing; forgives debts, losing nothing.
As a more moderate socialcon, I'm a strong proponent of partnership-based relationships, where the people in them view each other as fundamentally teammates in facing the highs and the lows of life -- you know, "for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer." @ProfQuirrell had a wonderful description of how such a partnership should operate. (And I hope his marriage is better than his namesake's partnership with his, um, other half.)
My view would be that men and women need to contribute towards their relationship in meaningful ways. That can be they both pitch in monetarily, that can be one tends to pay and the other tends to the garden, that can be one cooks and the other sweeps the floor, that can be one works a 9-5 and the other watches the kids. It depends on the couple, their strengths and their needs.
Obviously this is a bit of conservatism being liberalism driving the speed limit. But we're at a point where even the normal and healthy give-and-take that characterizes healthy human relationships is missing from people's expectations. And that's wrong, terribly wrong, horrifically wrong, daemonically wrong. We crossed a line that isn't just non-traditional, it's actively destructive.
Find someone who doesn't see you as a piggy bank or a cum depository. If you can't do that, you're either dating too 'high' or dating in the wrong place. Kind, caring, warm people exist. But the unfortunate thing for people dating later in life is this group is usually taken early, because their standards are realistic and their approach to relationships invites commitment.
I liked your reply and the link to @ProfQuirrell's post.
The key truth in both, I think, can be distilled to "prioritize the collective success of the marriage above your own day-to-day wants." Excellent and actionable advice.
My concern is that society is now insanely hyper-individualized with focus on direct personal success. It's one of those things that so endemic it's almost hard to notice (fish in water sort of thing) and then, once one does notice, its ubiquity is mind boggling.
Corporations are boiled down to a single CEO making everything happen. Political candidates are portrayed as singularly responsible not only for their own success but for driving the success of their party. Forget celebrities and sports starts - not even worth it.
I think the sad fact of the matter is that in the majority of western marriages, a rocky patch is seen by one or both partners as the other person becoming an albatross to individual success and/or happiness in life. It isn't "we're messing up our marriage," it's "Bob/Alice is now an adversary to my happy life journey." Once that thinking tanks root, divorce is just a timestamp away.
This is my biggest problem with anglosphere society, and I believe it's rooted in the broader sense of individualism and freedom that people often praise in America. I wonder very frequently whether these are actually the factors that have made America wealthy, or if it's actually just the privileged economic and military position of the country due to the World Wars. Individualism and freedom are destructive to community and purpose. Say what you will about the socialist realists, but at least they had an ethos!
There was a scene in The Crown where they dramatized what they thought might have been the conversation between Queen Elizabeth and (then the) Duke of Edinburgh Philip. This conversation took place after some alleged infidelity on the part of Philip, which the dramatization was incredibly coy about. Not sure what the reality looked like, but I'm specifically talking about the dramatization and would make the same point even if the story were entirely fictional. It went like this:
Without endorsing (fictionalized) Philip's misconduct that got them into this situation, I'd say there's a real kernel of value in this -- if you see your marriage as indissoluble, you begin to see fixing your marriage as a task you must collaborate on and compromise in order to accomplish. Obviously this requires that both parties are actually discussing in good faith, want to fix the marraige, and anyone who has done wrong is willing to make amends; in situations where there is no remorse, no respect, and no resolution, there must be dissolution. If the ring won't fit, you two must split. If they're both out to plunder, let it be torn asunder.
But I firmly believe there are far fewer of those than most people, in our "divorce is adult breakup" age, believe. And the reasons for ending such a significant long-term relationship, on the part of both men and women, are often incredibly petty. Marital therapy often serves not to let both partners release their goblins and find a path forward, but for one partner to ally with a sympathetic authority figure in order to bully the other into submission. And that's not a marriage, it's a sublimated cuck(old)(queen) fantasy.
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I think this is just conservatism flat out being liberalism, as in "secure personalities that will insist upon their own idiosyncrasies, but in the context of any given relationship spend their time more interested in the other's well-being than themselves".
Which in turn leads to "driving the speed limit" phenomenon, because these people also tend to take time to investigate corruption rather than have a fast-path moral stance that rejects it on its face. Because that's what they'd do for anyone else. (Of course, that ability to have a moral stance also creates corruption on its own, so you get one or the other- which is why we notice that the further from 'secure human being' we get, the faster they are to moralize... which is not generally meaningfully distinct from just looking out for number one in the way they do this).
The more I think about this, the more I think transactionality of this type is optimistically cargo-culting the want to worry you're not contributing enough, or more cynically going through the motions. I also think that this is one of those things that people who already do this as second nature (i.e. making sure I'm not pulling too hard on the relationship's finances) probably shouldn't talk about openly, since if you describe doing this to someone who doesn't have love backing it up/informing their choices it's likely going to damage [what little of] the relationship they had by implementing this.
And some people are going to be more attentive to this than others, because that's just the way they are (this is what I hear in the "Paul bemoans men getting married because they'll be more focused on pleasing their wives than pleasing God" [if I'm remembering that correctly]- I figure he must be talking about these kinds of people since traditionalist men don't truly prioritize what will please their wife [as an end] to begin with, and vice versa for progressive women), and conversely some people are going to be more interested/invested in what society says about that than reality. What's worse is that it's going to generally be incumbent on the partner that society currently privileges to countermand that messaging, so currently it's going to be harder on the woman when it comes to developing the man and his sons [pressure enforced by peers] than vice versa.
We used to be richer. When some non-secure personalities are given financial stability it tends to make them into better people, or rather, allow their better traits to be expressed. (This can also happen if you give them a goal.)
We're poorer now, so we can't afford that, hence we get more pathological/corrupt behavior. The power imbalance favors women this time, which is why "see men as piggy banks" dominates "see women as cum depositories" in popular messaging.
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