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[Apologies in advance for bringing up an old story, but I couldn't find any record of discussion of it]
Deep downthread in the election megathread @Folamh3 linked to a wonderful article you might all enjoy, but that's really beside the point. I want to talk about something mentioned within the article, namely a commercial. I'll copy the article's description here:
Here is the commercial in question that seems to have been almost entirely scrubbed from Youtube.. This kicked off a series of only vaguely connected thoughts I lack the ability to synthesize, but perhaps you all can put it together more successfully than me.
Burgers?
Of course there's a certain element of "Burgers?" to a commercial about suicide for an upscale department store. But I feel a few other elements of the commercial are curious to me. Take this screenshot from the ad, does this not look like a scene from Midsommar? Why are all the participants women? Why are they all White? This seems to frame the euthanasia as some sort of White feminist religious ritual, possibly connected with nature worship.
Suicide Girls
I'll note that the euthanized woman was described as having Ehlers Danlos. Anyone that has casually explored "SickTok" in the past few years will have surely heard of this condition. While I'm sure it's a real disease in some cases, there is undeniably a trend among young women sharing this concept with each other. I actually first encountered this disease when exploring the twitter of a porn model (so sue me) at least a dozen or more years ago. It struck me at the time as an obviously invented attention-seeking condition that allowed her to post hospital selfies every few weeks and be continually weak and bedridden with no obvious externally visible symptoms.
My second encounter with this disease was my cousin. My cousin is a few years younger than me and fifteen years ago was a sufferer of gluten sensitivity of one form or another (when it was popular for everyone to be suffering from it). About three years ago I heard she was now suffering from Ehlers Danlos.
It strikes me as telling I first encountered this in a porn model as I now consider them to be sort of canaries-in-the-coalmine for female neuroses and social messaging, obviously being more susceptible than most to these things.
Appropriately I just saw this going viral on twitter yesterday with the infamous Taylor Lorenz catastrophizing about her long COVID
Antinatalism, Environmentalism, Suicidality and Leftism
Here I'm just going to wave my hands in the general direction of The Socialist Phenomenon with its lengthy sections relating the running theme of suicide pervading socialist movements (Christian and otherwise) throughout human history. If you ever visit the /r/antinatalism subreddit you'll notice the distinctly leftist and often environmentalist concerns of its posts. In contrast, as pessimistic and addicted-to-doomposting as the far right can be I've never detected a major suicidal or antinatalist current on /pol/ for example. As an aside, see the movie First Reformed, it's horrible.
So what to make of this? I don't know exactly how to piece it together but there is some common through-line that connects feminism, White people, desire to be ill, environmentalism and suicide. Just wanted to hear whatever thoughts this commercial might spark in you all, as I don't really know how to connect the dots myself in a satisfactory way. Apologies if this is not coherent or focused enough for a top-level post.
The through-line is the conception of guilt and the utility of victimhood.
Only white people are sincerely interested in whether they are or are not 'guilty', whether their actions are 'just' in some universal sense. The Mongols don't torture themselves over Genghis Khan, the Turks take the attitude of 'it never happened and it was good that it did, Armenians are scum' when it comes to their misdeeds. Arabs will complain about the West but happily smash the Kurds. They don't think there was anything wrong with going around raiding and brutally enslaving southern Europeans, they haven't apologized for it. There's a reason Slav and Slave sound so similar - Turkey is sublimely indifferent to their role in the slave trade. Only whites think they have some need to correct for past wrongs they've inflicted on other peoples. So in our culture being wronged can be helpful, victimhood can be a useful status.
By and large, all other populations are immersed in Schmittian friend-enemy logic. It's still pretty hard to coax apologies and guilt out of Japan and they've been heavily immersed in white culture and norms for many years now. And before we messed with Japan, they were totally Schmitt-pilled, they were the archetypal 'white people are terrible oppressors and we're liberators (We shall do worse)' faction.
Environmentalism is another angle of being guilty, this time in crimes against the planet.
Antinatalism is an expression of an overwhelming sense of guilt. 'Being ill' is a way of being a victim and getting sympathy from others.
Feminism requires a sense of guilt and restraint in men to have much relevance. Afghan women might be super-feminist, that doesn't change their conditions. It's a little like anti-colonialism in that it requires the occupying power to feel ashamed and hold back their full power. The British could have (and did) smash colonial uprisings in Malaya and elsewhere - even then they reserved their full energy for killing Germans. If the British decided that they weren't going to give up India or Africa, there's nothing their subjects could've done against the enormous fleets, bomber wings, toxic gas and tanks (foreign intervention complicates this but it would mainly be an expression of broader white opinion)... But instead there were 'winds of change'.
Likewise, if men wanted it, feminism would be gone tomorrow. And so we see feminism has its fullest expression in white countries, followed by countries heavily influenced by whites.
That’s absurd.
Every major belief system uses guilt as its feedback mechanism. The unusual thing about white people is that we’re running a system derived from Christianity. That tells us to feel guilty about a broader circle of concern. But if all the Christian guilt in the world circa 1700 didn’t stop white people from dominating, it can’t be the deciding factor now. Something else has changed the cost/benefit analysis.
IMO, what changed is anti-colonialism, enabled by increased European weakness after they got themselves into two unnecessary massive wars from which the Americans had to rescue them and into which they dragged, well, the world.
Europe basically destroyed itself, and because it became weak, it was unable to culturally or militarily resist anti-colonial actions. The US pushed that process along by endorsing anti-colonialism.
To maintain relations with the now fracturing empires, upon which they were economically dependent, Europeans were forced to become apologetic and humble. And like the Japanese after WWII, they complied with this necessity.
So then generations of European elites were raised in a milleu of anti-colonial apology, which destroyed any sense among Europeans that they were good, or moral, or valuable, or net-positive in the world, unless they were steadfastly repentant and self-abnegating.
And because American elites have always obsessed with being accepted by Europeans (who look down on them), where European elites go, American elites follow. This has only somewhat reversed with American social leftism being exported to Europe, but Europe was already fertile ground for such things and the critical and postmodern theories that enabled their rise in the academy originated in continental philosophy. People, including themselves, like to see the postmodernists as these great contrarian rebels, but really they were just providing intellectual explanations of the prevailing social winds on the continent the same way medieval theologians were providing intellectual explanations of the teachings of the Church.
I'm of the opinion that Adolf Hitler was the worst thing to happen to Europe since the plague. The death of half the population would have been less terrible than the humiliation they've undergone.
Something like that, yeah.
The Industrial Revolution gave unprecedented firepower to European empires. As it continued, that power was steadily diluted to their subjects. By WWII’s end, we’ve got the Maxim gun, but they have, too, not to mention the improvised explosives. The balance tips. Maintaining a garrison rapidly gets more expensive. Colonial policy has to tread ever more carefully. At a certain point, it’s no longer cost-effective to play at empire. Only the biggest can keep trying, and they’re usually pretty unhappy with the process.
So yeah, social pressure shies away from traditional colonialism. It’s expensive and keeps generating ugly pictures for our mass media. Every time someone bucks the trend, they take a bunch of casualties and then get accused of being fascists. Far better to find a reason to give up that imperial ambition.
Two years after the maxim gun had been developed, well before it had reached wide acceptance:
Arguably it was never cost effective.
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