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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 28, 2022

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Really? I guess Epstein was just doing cultural appropriation. You might as well describe securities fraud as an "early 20th century Italian technique." Or, hell, voter canvassing gets to be a "traditional Irish political technique."

No, Manson himself in interviews and conversations with contemporaries talked about being fascinated by Black pimps he met in prison, and their systems of control. That one isn't just a matter of drawing parallels, it is literally that Manson said that was what he wanted to do when he got out of prison, and then he formed the Family, and pimped the women out. I highly recommend the podcast I linked and the book Pimp.

I stand corrected. Cognitive dissonance really wasn’t an obstacle to this man, was it?

Manson was clearly psychotic so of course he had little trouble avoiding cognitive dissonance.

But why would anyone have any dissonance on this particular issue? Acknowledging that your enemies, which have repeatedly bested and humiliated you, have at least some nifty techniques worth copying is adaptive and sane. In fact, it's ressentiment, reactive self-conceptualizing as the antithesis of everything your enemies stand for and practice, that isn't. Japan became a superpower (for a brief moment) by virtue of humility and aping Anglo-British institutions and the very Western epistemology. Russia, for a very long time one of the biggest players, has long been handicapped by the opposite ideology, and now is turning itself into a nuclear-armed Afghanistan. If you're committed to a life of crime, you've got to follow the lead of successful criminals. Manson couldn't really compete with major mafias, so Black pimps were an adequate role model, and one he was better-positioned to learn from.