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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   34974 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 5, 2025

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Hmm, there are lot's of possible criticisms, some less valid than others, and if you are encounting folks calling it a LARP soley on some un-earnest enough mindreading, then your counter is fine. But I think the more germane LARP criticism is not about 'intention', but the fact that a LARP is by definition, not real, superficial, and thus unsustainable.

Like if someone 'LARPed' the middle ages by conquering and setting up an actual feudal state and ran it thus, but on their death bed they left a note saying 'tee hee, twas a LARP', it falls kind of flat. But this is quite different than actual LARPing, which involves temporary, superficial escapism, that's fundamentally facilitated by the non-LARP. Armor that looks cool, but can't stand up in real combat, forts and 'castles' that you couldn't actually maintain, all funded by an email job.

To this point, accusastions of LARPing, rather than mindset, should be accusations against rigor and of fragility, and serve as predictions about sustainability.

I think bringing up the Benedict Option is a bad counter-example, since the trope-maker, Rod Dreher is a pretty damning case study of all this. There's nobody who publically committed themselves harder to this idea, yet he failed to even superficially create even sustainable parts of this project in his own life. The book he wrote, was a cherry picked set of anecdotes, cobbled artificially into a picture he wanted to paint, not an examination of the concept in earnest.

I think bringing up the Benedict Option is a bad counter-example, since the trope-maker, Rod Dreher is a pretty damning case study of all this. There's nobody who publically committed themselves harder to this idea, yet he failed to even superficially create even sustainable parts of this project in his own life. The book he wrote, was a cherry picked set of anecdotes, cobbled artificially into a picture he wanted to paint, not an examination of the concept in earnest.

How do you mean regarding Rod?

are you familiar at all with Rods life trajectory and current state?

I haven't kept up with him too much lately, I last heard of him when he announced he was getting a divorce which has gotta be two years ago now.

In general I remember liking Rod when he was one of the first Hipster Orthodox right wing writers I knew in his TAC days, just before the Benedict Option came out.

I also heard he seems to have noped off to Hungary, but yeah, last time I checked in with him he said he was getting a divorce. I believe there was an argument about "whether the cross can be co-opted." But that's the last I heard of him.

While I really respect his struggles with Catholicism, and I know they were very personal for him (he said that a priest he was personally close with was credibly accused of sex abuse, which broke his trust in the whole institution), I also get the sense that they went full-steam-ahead into Orthodoxy as kind of a second option, the second-most attractive girl at the bar altar rail, and so there's a lot of trauma, conversion, and ideological flip-flopping involved in his personal journey, which reads to me more like desperation than divine ascent. I wonder if that just got to be too much for his wife, especially considering how famously repulsive Orthodoxy is to non-Orthodox women, something I've observed personally. He also just strikes me as quite a depressive, just a very moody and somber person whose view of life and the future is almost perfectly apocalyptic, and I can't imagine that makes a marriage easy to manage. When I think about Dreher, the overwhelming feeling is "sad." He doesn't feel like he's chasing the divine, he feels like he's running away from brokenness. Which is not a bad starting point, but far from anything that measures up to holy Benedict.

especially considering how famously repulsive Orthodoxy is to non-Orthodox women, something I've observed personally.

I have not observed this personally. Do you mind giving us some examples? I'm struggling to envision how orthodox christianity would be particularly repulsive to secular women, compared to any other conservative religious belief, such as islam.

Islam is a fargroup conservative belief, Orthodoxy is an outgroup one. If my country went full Handmaid's Tale, it would be the Orthodox putting the women back under the boot sooner than the Muslims, despite the sizeable Muslim subpopulation.

I have no idea what type of orthodoxy you guys are dealing with. The type I'm familiar with (immigrants and such) encourages women to get degrees and high-powered jobs.

American exvangelicals in ROCOR or an old country ethnic church have a reputation for being… special.

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