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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 23, 2025

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Okay, initially I wrote a rather harsher response, because the combination of projection ("You are being snide! You are responding with Nuh-uhs!") and the old "emotional investment" gambit (a low class tactic usually seen in forums where going to straight to ad hominems is the norm - "Huh huh you are arguing with me, you must be emotional about this! Like a woman!") annoyed me. However, from your lengthier reply I think you are arguing in good faith and deserve a kinder response. So, just to make a few points in order:

  1. If you are referring to Revolutionary France, that was more than 200 years ago. 200 years was your criteria, hence my confusion.

  2. A common tactic I see, usually from Christians, is to accuse atheism of being responsible for the mass atrocities of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, et al, when the defining feature of communist dictatorships was communism. State enforced prohibitions or control of religion are just one aspect of communism. It's not the atheism that is their ideological driving force, it's the Marxism. (Indeed, I would argue China never really became "atheist" in a real sense. They just replaced Confucianism with Maoism.)

  3. I still disagree about Rome and the Weimar Republic, and I think you haven't really brought much evidence to bear that "control of women" was the defining or even most significant failure leading to their collapse. Even you back down a bit from that proposition, merely citing it as a contributing factor.

  4. Yes, I am kind of personally invested in my society not collapsing, but I don't think I am just ignoring evidence that it is. I just think we are on a long slow decline for a lot of reasons, not a rapid collapse that is happening because of modern hypergamy and male avarice.

To address your broader meta point: no, I am not going to accuse you of being personally misogynistic. But anyone proposing something like "Women must be controlled or their sexuality will destroy society" has to grapple with the essential misogyny of that position. You can bite the bullet and say "Yes, for the good of the species, women must be treated as property." You can propose social guardrails (like Christianity) that hopefully will constrain them in a less brutal fashion. You can argue against the premise (I am far from sold on it). Or you can go full blackpill and say "Who cares what women feel, they aren't even people." (Not hyperbole, that is more or less the position we have actually seen a handful of people take here over the years.) But a lot of this talk about how women being able to choose and the feminization of society seems to just complete lack any empathy at all for the position of a (female) person being told to accept a society where she has little or no say in who gets to fuck her and when and whether she will be impregnated. That's stating it in its bluntest terms, but it's hard to dismiss the hysteria of of women wearing Handmaid's Tale cosplay at protests when they can actually see men who really are proposing what they fear. For those who are honest and say "Yes chad" to that, okay, points for being forthright about it, but you don't get to sneer at feminist arguments anymore, because they are actually right about your intentions.

Yeah, that is a hell of a bullet to bite. "Humans must be controlled or their sexuality will destroy society" seems broadly reasonable, but fundie Islam/Handmaid's Tale seems like a durable abomination.