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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   28862 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 21, 2025

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A common flavor of mockery is to find leftist posts about "what I'll do after the socialist revolution" and ridicule them. We were discussing the genre and the general amusement at folks that think they will have a quasi-aristocratic life: oh I'll work on the commune garden and teach embroidery and prepare meals for everyone. Weirdly, many of the posts by women ended up being weirdly trad too -- but that's a bit of a sidetrack.

Example

KYM

My friend had an important insight: there is probably a rightist/reactionary equivalent to this. That's a good observation. We came up with a few of these

  • He believes society has prevented him from being a warlord, it more likely prevented him from being a slave
  • He believes society could police sexual & religious morality, it would more likely have had him flogged for drinking or disrespect or dirty jokes
  • He believes he'd be the head of a respected family, more likely he'd chafe under his grandfather/uncle's authority

He believes society has prevented him from being a warlord, it more likely prevented him from being a slave

TBF if you're a healthy male child early in the line of succession you could likely expect a decent enough life. The probability of being a warlord or prince is miniscule, but relative to the rest of the serfs in your hamlet you'd probably be fairly high status. And, you can't miss video games and flush toilets if they don't exist yet. Probably the hedonic treadmill makes you about as happy singing work songs in the field as it does listening to bohemian rhapsody on your ipod.

The main benefits of modern life are better health and less susceptibility to violence-- both those things objectively influence your hedonic baseline. But if your aversion to violence is outweighed by your urge to commit it, and your relative status is so low you're willing yo sacrifice your health to improve it, the past starts looking a lot more appealing (To young men early in the line of succession.) I personally wouldn't make the trade, but I can see why other people would.

Your example link goes to the "nice hat" reddit post. This has happened to me. You copy paste a reddit image link and somehow it points to "nice hat".

People centuries ago drank and said dirty jokes. They weren't typically flogged for such popular and common behavior. For example the puritans drank a lot by modern standards. Drunkenness was not much respected.

Fixed thanks.

My friend had an important insight: there is probably a rightist/reactionary equivalent to this.

I’ve seen news articles about former Taliban fighters who are disappointed because now that they’ve won, they have to do boring office jobs in Kabul. Someone even made a version of the tankie poet meme, with the fighter clutching his AK and saying “I don’t understand, I thought I was going to die a glorious martyr’s death?” While a grinning soyboy orders him to “draft the fucking Excel spreadsheet!”

Yea the big diff is that rightist postrevolutionaries fully expect to either be dead in the dirt or cracking skulls or someplace clear in the value chain even if its the bottom (this tilled land will be the field for my lords children to feast on!) Circular paperwork is right wing hell.

It sounds like the supposed communist wants to be a homeschool mom, once the kids are a bit older, and with a denser community than is usual nowadays.

Yes, I’d say there are definitely people like this — though, as @IGI-111 points out, not in the symmetric way you pose; I’ve gotten that “you support monarchy/aristocracy/reaction only because you think you’d be king/a lord” bit before, and when I turn it back on them — is the only reason you hold your political views because you expect to personally benefit? — it does indeed seem to be projection/typical-minding.

And beyond endorsing both IGI-111 and @Stellula’s replies, I’ll note that I, as a reactionary, have repeatedly responded to the “you think you’ll be king” arguments with acknowledgement that, no, I’ll be dead. As I’ve said more than once, my ideal society would probably have me executed.

I’m well aware that the liberal modernity I oppose is the only thing keeping me alive at all, let alone giving me the lifestyle I currently have, and that come any serious reactionary victory, my life will most likely end (and become massively worse in the case it doesn’t)… and yet I still want that liberal modernity destroyed.

(Has anyone here seen the movie Serenity — the Firefly sequel/conclusion movie? If so, do any of you remember the speech by Chiwetel Ejiofor’s nameless “Operative” character — the “there's no place for me there” one?)

I don't know exactly what your ideology is, but murdering the disabled for being a burden is a thing I associate with liberal democracies like Canada, or with Nazi Germany(as far as I know there were not other fascist regimes that did this). It's not exactly associated with monarchism or reactionary government generally.

but murdering the disabled for being a burden is a thing I associate with liberal democracies like Canada

It wouldn't be my disability that would get me executed; that would just get me cut off from the welfare teat and left to starve. No, I'd expect it to be my atheism that would do it.

I mean, reactionary authoritarian governments are generally not interested in interrogating random poor people about their innermost beliefs. American Franco would be content if you just shut up.

Modern "reactionary authoritarian governments" are still too modern — I don't recall any of them restoring feudalism and hereditary aristocracy, let alone pre-Reformation attitudes on the role of the Church. Franco was, ultimately, a failure, primarily because he wasn't nearly reactionary enough.

Franco was a failure because of a handful of specific mistakes- among them choosing a compromise candidate for the throne rather than a carlist and choosing to repress the basques.

All of these had reasonable explanations at the time, and probably would have been survivable if it wasn’t for Vatican II. The Catholic Church bureaucrats maintaining his regime(fascism does not have enough staying power) were very affected by this. ‘Not enough power for the Catholic church’ is a baffling criticism of Franco.

Franco, like Emperor Franz Joseph, committed the grace political mistake of living too long.

‘Not enough power for the Catholic church’ is a baffling criticism of Franco.

Which is why my criticism isn't "not enough power for the Catholic church" so much as "didn't turn the clock back far enough, and in too few areas." As you note, fascism does not have enough staying power; I'd say that's because it's way too modern.

Show me a leader who will give his best efforts to roll back every part of society he can — except science and technology — to before 1500 AD, and that would be a proper reactionary.

Edit: as I've said to people before, most Americans' vision of the "sci-fi far future" looks like Star Trek — ranging from TOS for the Republicans to Kurtzman's abominations for the Woke (or, for some of the well-read "Grey Tribe" techno-optimists in places like this, it looks something like "The Culture" (shudders)).

Me? It looks more like Battletech, Dune, or Warhammer 40,000.

Your ideal society is western Saudi Arabia?

I know you're depressed and suicidal, but I must grant that it's worthy of respect to endorse a system so contrary to your own continued wellbeing (or lack thereof). At the very least, you know what you're asking for.

Not to speak for the OP but there a liberating clarity in the proferred societies rightwingers espouse. By material or immaterial benefits being realized by knowing the rituals and paths it at least provides a framework towards which apotheosis can be achieved for at least some theoreticals. If all we have to look forward to is anodyne self destructive indulgence like /r/antiwork mods pray for, rightists would at least want to nuke the swamp before throwing themselves into the woodchipper.

I’m well aware that the liberal modernity I oppose is the only thing keeping me alive at all, let alone giving me the lifestyle I currently have, and that come any serious reactionary victory, my life will most likely end (and become massively worse in the case it doesn’t)… and yet I still want that liberal modernity destroyed.

Well, I appreciate the honesty, but why would anyone join you on it?

Has anyone here seen the movie Serenity — the Firefly sequel/conclusion movie? If so, do any of you remember the speech by Chiwetel Ejiofor’s nameless “Operative” character — the “there's no place for me there” one?

I also thought of that. It's a good cultural marker how one feels about that speech.

Well, I appreciate the honesty, but why would anyone join you on it?

Well, because probably the majority of people with similar views would benefit from it, for one — indeed, I've had fellow reactionaries argue that the mere fact of my disability means I "don't belong" on the right, despite our shared views; and that, per Spandrell's Bioleninism, my "only place" in politics is "on the Left, voting Dem in exchange for gibs" until the Reaction comes and disposes of subhumans like me.

is the only reason you hold your political views because you expect to personally benefit?

No, but if a political system screws people like me or literally kills them, then I do not endorse it.

It's a core right/left political distinction whether 'people like me' means people like me or people in my shoes.

Is it fundamentally about class consciousness? About religion, ethnicity, geography, and family?

In the USA the rightist party is leftist, for making class based appeals. The leftist party is rightist, for making ethnic appeals.

No, but if a political system screws people like me or literally kills them, then I do not endorse it.

Well, that depends on how broadly or narrowly, and on which axes, you define "people like me." Because, with respect to my own political preferences, it "screws people like me" if you define that on terms like "people too disabled to work," but not if you define on terms like "Red Tribe Alaskans."

Eh, my fantasy in a Civil War 2 Electric Boogaloo sort of situation isn't to be a king/warlord, it's to be a gunsmith supplying any and all takers.

Edit:

Looks like @Southkraut and I have basically the same dream

Yeah. "Have someone else take care of the aspects of my life I dislike while I double down on what I'm good at." probably describes a wide range of wishful thinking scenarios, political on both sides and otherwise.

One of the best villains in film.

is the only reason you hold your political views because you expect to personally benefit?

not only, but it is surely one of crucial parts

and I do not see it as a really bad thing

what's your job on the leftist commune?

How about what do you spend all of your time on after you have successfully amassed $10 million in capital and can live comfortably on the growth and dividends taking $400,000/year safe withdrawal rate? It's basically the same question, but without having to invent a bullshit job to justify that you're contributing something in exchange for taking communal resources.

Trying every cask ale at every Real Ale pub in Britain.

The reactionary equivalent is "this is what they took from us", usually in the context of a picture of a hottie. In the defense of that meme, the pictures of beaches and cities in California where everyone is white look pretty nice and they did indeed take that from us.

When I visited Boston in the summer of 2016, i was looking forward to doing some girl-watching at Revere Beach, accessible by the T.

Almost everyone there was Latino, though, and it looked like a rough neighborhood. I guess the area's white residents had long since abandoned the place for some beach you could only access by car.

No, ‘they’ did not take this from us. Obesity and low birthrates are not a Jewish plot, even if mass migration might be.

Hydroacetylene, birth rates do not even begin to explain the demographic shift that has happened in the United States in the past ~30 years. It's downstream from culture and politics, not birthrates.

It does, however, explain ‘where are the young white people’.

"This is what they took from us" works at three levels.

The level it is okay to talk about, and is a real case where something has been lost, is that young people looked better in swimsuits back then because nobody was fat. In that specific sense, society is just uglier than it used to be. (If you look at fully clothed photos like high school yearbooks then the effect is less stark because increased wealth means people have better teeth, hair etc. which partially makes up for the fattitude.)

The level where there is an obvious dogwhistle is the mix of skin colours. I think you can make a case that something has been lost here - the idea that there used to be a time (outside a few cosmopolitan megacities) where you could assume that everyone you meet is a member of your folk community. But you can't put that in words without saying what your folk community is, and (for different reasons) neither British nor American wannabe-ethno-nationalists can do that without stepping on rakes, so they use a pictorial dogwhistle. Given the actual demographics of both the US and the UK, skin colour is a good enough proxy for folk community membership for the implied statistical inference to be valid. But the folk community is not actually defined by skin colour and the only people who actually care about the mix of skin colours on the beach as such are white supremacists.

The last point is the silly one. The period between the post-WW2 cleanup and the oil crisis was a period when the core western countries felt prosperous (even though normal-ass economic growth means that we are a lot richer than that now), so vibes-based economics associates the aesthetic of that period with material prosperity. A Tesla Model 3 is superior in every respect to a 1970 model year muscle car, but seeing a 1970 muscle car in the background of a beach photo creates a vibe of "this was a rich society" whereas a Tesla Model 3 in the background doesn't. The only thing that has actually been lost is in your head.

A model 3 might be a finer car than a 70 muscle car but the reason the picture of the teen with the muscle car looks richer is that he is. The 1970 teen can buy a brand new V-8 (not the base model) Camero after about 1800 hours at the 1970 minimum wage. Today's teen needs 2500 hours to buy a base model 3 (after the tax credit expires next month) at the median teen wage of 17/hr.

It looks like a rich society because it was a rich society. Further the 1970 teens future house and college look much much better.

But the model three is a better car! The foreigner version of a ford Mustang or a Camero is probably affordable at less than 1800 hrs at $17/hr. It's illegal to sell, but that's the rough equivalent, and 'I want a hilux' is a different issue.

So they need to work 38% more hours to get a car that is like, 500% better?

I think we're in the rich society

If we're so much richer why are 40% of teens not getting licenses today vs 20% in 1980 (the closest stat to 1970 I found).

IME- and I likely live around more teens than you do, given the fertility rates around us- there's a basically 1-1 correlation between the length of the parental leash and how quickly teens get their license.

Car's no longer a gateway to socializing with peer young women and having sex?

I have no idea.

They live in cities more? They can't afford cars?

I also think income/wealth inequality is a massive issue, so I'm very comfortable saying both "our society en masse is richer than ever" and "the distribution of this wealth is completely fucked"

Because teens desire to be less independent and are less risk-tolerant in all ways than they used to be. I blame it on insufficient lead, insufficient nicotine, and too much supervision (in that order).

Edit: also nastier licensing requirements. Thanks, insurance companies!

to get a car that is like, 500% better?

On what metric are you measuring this?

I'm reminded of a portion of a recent comment over at Jim's blog (by regular commenter Pax Imperialis, who is currently in the military):

The extreme lack of basic nice things is driving me up a wall. Can’t even buy a basic car these days without it being full of shit bells and whistles, the purpose of which I conjecture is to distract from lower modern performance in all the basic qualities expected of a car’s purpose. My dreams of an American muscle car have been crushed. They’re all full of electronic bs inside and the market for affordable new V8s has more or less vanished. It’s like someone claiming how much better the new restroom is because the LED lights up the water coming out of the facets, and that there is music playing inside, but you can’t help but notice the water flow is painfully slower and lower pressure than previous faucets. Damn it, I just want to be able to flush the toilet with one pull of the handle and wash my hands quickly. Not spend minutes waiting for the toilet to regain pressure to flush it the 3rd time and minutes more in front of a lackluster sink.

You are aware that a model 3 is, literally, a luxury sports car, with sports-car performance and BMW interior?

Safety, safety, safety, safety

Driver assist features

Energy efficiency (in terms of input energy to distance/speed moved)

In this case, the fact it runs on electricity and not gas

Reliability

In this case especially, but in many cases, way better performance of the engine.

The fact it can Bluetooth to my phone to play music

The fact it can show a map of where you're driving

Significantly better AC/heat/creature comforts like fancy seats

Probably trunk space

Are you seriously trying to pretend 2020s cars don't absolutely fucking blow 1970s cars out of the water in every single possible metric? Because lmao

The period between the post-WW2 cleanup and the oil crisis was a period when the core western countries -felt_ prosperous (even though normal-ass economic growth means that we are a lot richer than that now), so vibes-based economics associates the aesthetic of that period with material prosperity.

Food, clothes, electronics, and basically anything else you can buy at a Walmart all gotten much cheaper, but we are still poorer than we were back then.

Housing, credentialed education, and healthcare have all gotten way more expensive, to the point that they consume all the savings you get from the store and then some. It doesn't matter how productive your economy is if zoning makes it illegal to create apartment buildings or if the medical cartel keeps the amount of doctors artificially scarce; it just means your landlord raises the rent every year until you are living paycheck to paycheck and you are always one serious medical problem away from bankruptcy, all after you start your life four years later than normal and five figures in debt because the government decided that it was racist not to graduate everyone from high school or to use IQ tests for hiring.

But the real problem is hoeflation. Women are now provided for by the state, meaning that their BATNA to marriage has gotten way higher. In the old days, just working full time at any job was enough to make you a marriage prospect. Now women expect you to have a career, and ideally to make six figures. Especially if they have gone through the credentialed education wringer themselves; once a woman has a degree, she thinks herself too good for a man without one. And, of course, that also means she comes with her own debt, which she expects you to pay, because she will stop working full time as soon as she gets married, having gotten her feminist merit badge.

In real terms, 1950s man was much wealthier than man today.

Medical care in the 1950s was cheaper. It was easy to become a doctor and they were plentiful. The standards of care were incredibly low compared to 2025.

Let's get a magic wand that grants you inflation adjusted 1950s medical costs and 1950s medical outcomes. Would you wave the wand?

Basically everything that actually gives us longevity now was invented by 1950. Clean water, electricity, antibiotics, and vaccines. There have been some significant developments in childbirth, but obviously that part alone is not the cost driver. It is end of life care, subsidies to hypochondriacs and the poor, and maintenance treatments like lifelong blood pressure meds and dialysis.

This is so unbelievably wrong I don't even know where to begin

The sheer amount of surgical techniques, mechanical/robot assistance, and drug development alone. Not to mention computerization and millions of other improvements neither of us know about too.

How can you be so blatantly and confidently wrong?

It is end of life care

The stats on this are eye watering though

The sheer amount of surgical techniques, mechanical/robot assistance, and drug development alone. Not to mention computerization and millions of other improvements neither of us know about too.

I worked in medical device development early in my career. Its not that these are not very impressive technological innovations, it is that people were perfectly capable of living to their 80s in 1776, and the reasons so few did had largely been addressed by the 50s. Lots of development has been in surguries. I'd much rather have surgery now than in 1955.

Ill freely admit I am a bit biased, my work was in life saving pediatric implants, which is not nearly the size of the "relieve grandpa joe's pain a little bit" part of the industry.

But those are all still interventions that most people under 50 aren’t going to need. So people are still going to feel ripped off because they can’t see where the money is going.

It's thanks to said medical advances that most people can be confident of living well past 50, into their 60s, 70s or even 80s.

Focusing on the first fifty years of life where the need for intensive medical care isn't nearly as necessary is myopic.

More comments

Totally agree with you.

I just think saying "medicine has barely improved since the 1950s" is ludicrously wrong and anyone saying that should be pointed at laughed at for being profoundly incorrect.

How much of the improved standards of care are, specifically, about giving the very aged and terminally ill just two more weeks?

A Tesla Model 3 is superior in every respect to a 1970 model year muscle car, but seeing a 1970 muscle car in the background of a beach photo creates a vibe of "this was a rich society" whereas a Tesla Model 3 in the background doesn't.

The other thing is that the muscle car was designed and built in America, and represented the top technology in its price rare. The Tesla Model 3 being an exception, most of the things that make us richer in 2025 aren't actually made in America. And if they are, they are often worse than versions made elsewhere (even if they are better than the 1970 version).

But you can't put that in words without saying what your folk community is, and (for different reasons) neither British nor American wannabe-ethno-nationalists can do that without stepping on rakes, so they use a pictorial dogwhistle.

This is actually extremely easy to do, it's European-descended. These cities were formerly almost-entirely European descended and now European-descended are in many cases minorities in these same places. Many cities and public beaches which were very nice places are no longer nice places, everyone knows that so the images strike a cord. You can't pretend this didn't happen, you're essentially left saying don't believe your lying eyes.

I basically agree with your last point. My own criticism of the meme is that it whitewashes 50s-90s culture which led us to exactly where we are today. Going back to the 80s is not any sort of solution. The rot was endemic to that culture as well, it just had not yet led to the demographic displacement that the meme is lamenting but it was already on the path. A 1970s muscle car is not a good symbol for "the good times" because it's more symbolic of the vapid changes in American culture that led us where we are today.

This is actually extremely easy to do, it's European-descended

That's a retrospective categorization that people living in those historical eras might have accepted as descriptive, but wouldn't have felt was particularly accurate. Imagine if someone from 2060 zapped in and started talking about the importance of being a microsoft windows culture and how the decline of america was due to ios and android destroying traditional microsoft-linux values. Even if their argument convinced you, you still probably wouldn't see your OS affiliation as being central to your identity, and you still wouldn't be convinced to create systems of mutual support and intermarriage within your OS denomination.

But what do I know. Maybe you're an Arch Linux user.

One of the very first laws in the history of US Congress was limiting citizenship to "free White persons of good character", and as late as 1923 there was Supreme Court decision which declared a high-caste Indian who identified as Aryan could not attain citizenship because he was not white.

Thind did not challenge the constitutionality of the racial restrictions. Instead, he attempted to be classified as a "free white person" within the meaning of the Naturalization Act based on the fact that Indians and Europeans share common descent from Proto-Indo-Europeans....

The Court unanimously rejected Thind's argument, adding that Thind did not meet a "common sense" definition of white, ruling that Thind could not become a naturalized citizen. The Court concluded that "the term 'Aryan' has to do with linguistic, and not at all with physical characteristics, and it would seem reasonably clear that mere resemblance in language, indicating a common linguistic root buried in remotely ancient soil, is altogether inadequate to prove common racial origin."

You have fallen for the intentional lie that White is a non-existent or retrospective categorization. It was the most important racial categorization constructed into the very foundation of the country, and consistently so throughout its history for hundreds of years. "This is what they took from us" indeed. It was coldly-calculated, planned, intentional to do so.

You have fallen for the intentional lie that White is a non-existent or retrospective categorization.

"White" is not the same thing as "European Descended". And as stated, your argument used the latter and not the former. And that's because White is a non-existent categorization, or at least, it's a fuzzy one, like "red" or "blue" or "heap". If european descent was what mattered, you'd think people would care about either defining an exact threshold at which it becomes meaningful or disambiguating between the relative amount of time ethnic groups have spent in europe. But no one cares about the relative admixture of neolithic DNA or about creating a specific hierarchy of european descent based on how late or recent one's ancestors migration into europe is. The main determinant is literally aesthetic. Whiteness itself was the intentional lie-- a deception against the anglo-french-dutch settlers of north america intended to convince them to expand their circle of concern to include first each other and then traditionally dissimilar groups like the italians, polish, and germans. It's a lie I have some sympathy for, of course. Creating new national identities that concentrically include the old ones is the only way for an expanding empire to survive. But there's nothing special about "whiteness" relative to "americanness" or "being-from-a-particular-part-of-Britain."

This is actually extremely easy to do, it's European-descended.

Making it too obvious that you think "Things were better back then because black people didn't have access to white beaches" is exactly what I mean by "stepping on a rake".

The reason that this is mocksble is that the leftist fantasy is mostly: everybody else will work for me and I can do nothing, and the rightist fantasy is: I will be able to do as much work as I want to.

Yes stupidity exists inside of both of these, but they’re not equivalents.

“I will be a warlord” is a very different type of fantasy than “I will be a poet”. Both fantasies, both silly, but silly in different ways.

"no you don't understand, my based right wing fantasy world is SO MUCH COOLER than the soy poet fantasy world"

I don’t fantasize about being a warrior or a poet. I like democracy, and I think I live in the most peaceful, best time in all of human history. I think both of these fantasies are stupid.

Based

“I will be a warlord” is a very different type of fantasy than “I will be a poet”. Both fantasies, both silly, but silly in different ways.

I disagree. Both are saying "I will occupy a tiny slice at the top 2% of society".

Maybe I should back that up. They are silly in different ways but they have some important overlap which is that either way, the odds are slim.

Being a warlord has a certain skin in the game that you are staking your life and fortune on your own martial prowess, while a poet can write crappy poems for the rest of their lives and only be slightly risking their lives against the outrage of the literati.

Sure a small segment of the population. The warriors are putting their lives at risk so that the poets can write poetry.

Even that's not getting it. Warriors dream of slaying the enemy. 95% of being a warrior is marching for days on end in shitty (figuratively) boots, living in a shitty (literally) camp and dying of cholera.

Most of the army isn't even fighting at all! The tooth to tail ratio is, at best, 1:3. So odds are that you're not even a soldier, you're just hauling supplies or dealing with logistics or guarding the rear/base. All while still in your trenchfoot boots and without a sewage system. They don't even get the glory of saying "I risked my life for the poets".

Maybe one angle of what I'm getting at is that any functioning system (whether it's an army or a commune or a technological liberal/capitalist society) requires a large amount of tedious, unglamorous and unrewarding work. When people imagine a system other than their own, they either forget that or imagine that someone else will do it.

It's like because they are transposing reality by imagining another system, they also transpose reality by ignoring or eliding this fact about all systems.

That’s not what they’re fantasizing about.

The poets are not fantasizing about being depressed trying to think of poems, failing, being rejected from journals, being told their poetry sucks etc. It’s a fantasy. They’re thinking about being the alpha poet who everybody adores and looks up to.

The warrior-fantasy guys are fantasizing about being Rambo, or whatever. “Against all odds Chad thundercock saved a village of poets by single handedly fighting off a barrage of barbarians all while severely injured and survived only by a thread and by pure determination” etc.

It’s not a perfect symmetrical set of fantasies because the fantasy is coming from a different ideology.

everybody else will work for me and I can do nothing, and the rightist fantasy is: I will be able to do as much work as I want to.

various warlord/king fantasies seem to be of "everybody else will work for me and I can do nothing" variety in right-wing decoration, combined with fantasy of being able to execute people you do not like

with no indicator that they know how much effort it would take to be warlord/king or warlord king

very often these people would very clearly fail at being either (and frankly, competition to be a successful warlord would be so strong that person managing it would be at least some minor CEO or sport star or celebrity in our society)

“I will be a warlord” is a very different type of fantasy than “I will be a poet”. Both fantasies, both silly, but silly in different ways.

poet one is not really "I can do nothing"

If there was an actual collapse of the society with warlords roaming about, these would be more likely to be independently-operating army officers a la Chinese warlords of the Warlord Era, not... independent entrepreneurs like these people imagine it would go.

  • I want a reactionary trad society to provide me with good immediate social superiors, socially and politically savvy men, whom I can rely on to protect my autistic craftsman interests in exchange for providing reliable service to them, in a quasi retainer-lord or relationship.

What would actually probably happen is my immediate social superiors blatanlty and short-sightedly exploiting me in a parallel to peasant-lord relationships, and me rediscovering why there were so many peasant uprisings and why feudalism couldn't compete.

The fact that this is extremely close to

  • I want worker's revolution that provides me with enlightened socialist superiors so I can be an autistic craftsman while they run the government

And I think both will end in the same exploitative place and the rediscovery about why socialist revolutions had to be enforced violently.

I want worker's revolution that provides me with enlightened socialist superiors

...said no communist ever.

"Superiors"? What is this reactionary talk, comrade? This is an egalitarian, classless society! Get with the program, or get your ass to Syberia.

Eh, there's enough socialist literature on how the workers will self-manage by selecting representatives that will handle those tasks. They don't call them leaders

You're right that referring to them as superiors does out me, point taken. Important to follow the shibboleth eh?

MFW even my exploitative baron would still at least defend his castle from being invaded by foreigners. So it goes! I'm not a reactionary by any means, but Gregory Clark in The Son Also Rises has interesting analysis claiming similar degrees of social mobility during feudalism as the modern era, as well as stickiness in high-class surnames within the high-class pointing to real genetic differentiation between classes.

In 2025 your baron would have economic advisors who would correctly explain to him that his tax revenue and fiefdom GDP would increase if he allowed more people to enter.

Hereditary landowners love love LOVE bringing in exploitable labor from foreign ethnic groups. I can understand why right wing parties are opposed to immigrants. I can't understand why right wing parties aren't opposed to the farming and industrial interests responsible for encouraging their entrance in the first place. If they actually want to stop immigration, they need to eliminate the pull factors. Criminalise paying illegal immigrants. Criminalize accepting non-money payments from illegal immigrants. Lock up the suburbanites using maid services, and the factory and agrobusiness owners, and pretty soon illegal immigrants don't have a reason to stay in america. Even if they're feloniously on welfare... Healthcare, food, education, and housing is still cheaper back home.

Oh well. I like immigration so I guess this works out in my favor.

It never stops making me laugh that anti-immigrant Americans fucking despise the immigrants but not the Americans who pay them illegally for their labor, which is why they're in America at all.

To be clear, full citizenship in European towns was both hereditary and could be earned. It’s reasonable to point to this as some level of generational social mobility.

I don't see this as a particularly special insight. At the risk of "both-sidesism", both sides do have plenty of stupid people, including those prone to romanticism and idle LARPing.

I don't claim it's a very special insight, but I think the romanticism of one side has been made into a meme (on KYM no less) and it was worth looking at the less explored side of it as well.

The leftist mockery of rightism is never about how it's unrealistic, only that it's evil.

There are less extreme versions of this: If you're a weird person with weird interests---say writing long, argumentative, and complicated posts about politics and philosophy online---I would be skeptical that a 1950's-style homogenous and culturally conservative society would be good for you. There, the most important thing is to fit in: have the same interests as the average person, be interested in people over ideas, be agreeable and value peace over truth, etc.

There's a correlation between how much a society tolerates one kind of weirdness vs. another and one that wants conformity in the culture-warry ways will also want conformity in personality and interests.

I suppose that goes to the core claim about toaster fuckers.

He believes society could police sexual & religious morality, it would more likely have had him flogged for drinking or disrespect or dirty jokes

Any society where such floggings are the norm is surely also one where policing sexual morality - which I guess in this context actually means policing women's sexual behavior so that they are deterred from becoming floozies and punishing cads who would make floozies out of such women - is also the norm. I see no contradiction.

He believes he'd be the head of a respected family, more likely he'd chafe under his grandfather/uncle's authority

Again, no contradiction there. As a patriarch you're the head of your own nuclear family. On the other hand, your uncle and grandpa are above you in the social hierarchy, and as long as they adhere to social norms, they are deputized to intervene in your life in case you're failing in your life as a patriarch i.e. beating up your wife for no good reason or beating her too severely etc. This is how patriarchy works. Duh.

I see no contradiction.

It's not meant to be a contradiction, it's meant to underscore that one's assessment of a system has to take into account what one believes that one's role in that system would be.

That is -- we agree that this is the same system. But the people daydreaming about destroying capitalism and replacing it with (whatever) are imagining a small slice of it. They imagine the commune but not the forced labor. They imagine the social order but don't imagine that they would ever see the sharp end of the stick.

As a patriarch you're the head of your own nuclear family. On the other hand, your uncle and grandpa are above you in the social hierarchy, and as long as they adhere to social norms, they are deputized to intervene in your life in case you're failing in your life as a patriarch

Note that they might stop you from starting a nuclear family for reasons real (you don't have the material means - and no, they won't allot you any) or imagined (you'll get your part of the family acreage once you're acting a little bit more "grown up").

Well duh. As a man, you inherit; you don't get allotments and gibs.

Well, you might inherit, if you're lucky enough to have been born first (or be the eldest surviving son).

That's not how inheritance worked in older societies. Even taking the examples in the Bible, the birthright inheritance given to the firstborn (see Jacob and Esau amongst other examples) wasn't everything his father had, it was simply a double portion compared to the other children. So if your father with two sons had 60 acres the oldest son would inherit 40 and the youngest would inherit 20.

I was referring to the common law rule of primogeniture which was used in medieval England and existed in the United States up until the time of the Revolution, when reforms were instituted that allowed all children to inherit equally. The issue was that, in a time when land equaled wealth and people had a lot of children, a feudal estate would be fairly quickly diluted to the point where none of the individual holdings were sufficient to generate very much income. Assuming equal inheritance and only two children, a 100 acre tract would be down to 50 in the second generation and 25 in the third, at which point it was below the threshold to support even one family. Add more generations and additional children per generation and it goes even faster.

For example

I'll actually give a limited defense of "What's your job on the leftist commune?"

I don't think the people engaging in that thread understand themselves to be sincerely laying out a plan for a total society. On the contrary, the idea that it's a commune probably suggests that it's a small, utopian community within a larger implicitly capitalist society, if anybody is even thinking that far ahead. But I don't think they are, because "what's your job on the leftist commune?" is not a question about politics at all.

What the question is actually asking is, "What would you do if you didn't have to work?", or perhaps "How would you want to spend your life if you didn't have to participate in a capitalist economy?" The details of how the commune works are beside the point. If you didn't have to do anything you don't want to - how then would you want to contribute to society?

It's a utopian fantasy, and I think there's actually a place for utopian fantasy thought experiments. Throw realism out the window for a minute and - what would you like to do? Then once you've reflected on that a bit, take the insights you find from the process and bring them back to the grubby real world of toil and compromise.

The answers people give are cringeworthy, but all fantasies tend to sound cringeworthy when you voice them out loud, and I'd defend this kind of fantasy as a reasonable thing for people of any political orientation to do. Maybe it's a hippie commune. Maybe it's a trad farming community. Maybe it's on a Culture orbital. Maybe it's a royal palace, or maybe it's being an ascended digital being with god-like power. It doesn't matter. But I think that the job on the leftist commune is basically the same thing as, say, Bostrom's Deep Utopia. It's immature but perhaps useful - and if this makes me think more of random Twitter leftists and less of Nick Bostrom, then that's all properly balanced.

I agree but I also endorse /u/maiqthetrue below that there is some kind of equivocation here.

There is also something else here -- the leftist version doesn't always actually explain quotidian things like how the food is grown when no one choses to be a farmer than wakes up at 5AM and works for 12H a day.

The modern-day anarchists and anarchoid types (not formally anarchist but obviously influenced that way) have rather clearly abandoned the goal of overturning the society totally and replaced it with the one of "existing in the cracks", ie. assuming that the regular square society will still exist in some form and they can get on by with various forms of leeching.

Well, we can dunk on them and they richly deserve to be dunked on.

But also it's equivocation again. Are we talking about a utopia -- on how we should organize society on ideal terms. Or are we talking about how one should live within a real society in its real terms.

It is political at least in the sense that such fantasies are the way any such system is marketed to the general public. People don’t buy systems, he’ll, they rarely buy products, instead they buy images of a better future. People don’t like chatbots just because they’re useful (I don’t think they at present are doing anything that a well thought out google search couldn’t do) but because AI represents a fantasy replete with images of a future society without scarcity and where work is obsolete. You imagine yourself a “winner” in this future, so it means a life of luxury and leisure. The reality is probably not so good, as humanity is unlikely to distribute goods to people who do nothing to earn them. We rarely did so, and when we did it tended to be meager goods and cause problems.

The problem with such utopian fiction is that as marketing for a new system, they encourage that system when people believe it, and thus they fight to bring it about. Too late they realize that reality is nothing like the fantasy. The rich white women who overthrew Patriarchy in the 1969s and 1970s imagined themselves in executive suites making easy decisions, they to some extent still think it possible. They never imagined they’d have to do ordinary work and keep house on top of it. They never imagined that having strangers raise the vast majority of children via daycare would cause social problems while eating 3/4 of her paycheck. The greens are in a similar path. They imagine a modern industrial lifestyle with green-branded versions of things they already have. To actually combat climate change and reduce carbon to the degree they think has to be done would require a massive downgrade in lifestyle. You probably won’t own many things, you’ll live in a two bedroom apartment, where you won’t have much in the way of personal possessions and privacy is a luxury. Your food will be very much like what it was in 1900– common foods, only what grows locally, and probably much more expensive than what it is now. Clothing likewise will be much more utilitarian and expensive and you won’t own that many, so they won’t be fashionable or change all that much. You will be limited in travel— you won’t own a personal vehicle, and as far as vacation, you’ll be stuck pretty local maybe camping near your home city, but certainly not internationally unless you’re filthy rich or live within an easy distance from a border. But marketing hides this, until after the work of tearing down the old system and replacing it is done. Once the system is built people wake up from the fantasy only to discover the reality is not remotely what they were sold.

Beware people selling fantasies.

People don’t like chatbots just because they’re useful (I don’t think they at present are doing anything that a well thought out google search couldn’t do)

C'mon dude. That "well thought out" bit is doing a lot of heavy lifting. All, or at least most, of the knowledge a doctor possesses is 'out there' somewhere in the vast expanse of the internet, and probably indexed on Google too. I would suggest not trying to replace doctors with Google searches or WebMD, even if doctors use Google and WebMD themselves. Knowing what to ask and how to ask it, alongside weighing it all? That's what you pay us for. I am more than happy to concede that LLMs are a far more existential threat to the profession than Google.

Besides. Google search can't write a poem, generate a picture in the Ghibly style or write your code for you. And it sucks more than it ever has, both due to SEO and Google's own enshittification. Google has given up and begun to use LLMs to solve the problem in search. So, in a way, you're stating that LLMs are only as capable as LLMs.

You imagine yourself a “winner” in this future, so it means a life of luxury and leisure. The reality is probably not so good, as humanity is unlikely to distribute goods to people who do nothing to earn them. We rarely did so, and when we did it tended to be meager goods and cause problems.

Hang on again. The people who floated the possibility of AI utopia are, to a first approximation, the same people who raised severe concerns about the risk of extinction or permanent disempowerment courtesy of the same. Who do you think came up with the whole paper-clip maximizer idea, or even the concept of a p(doom)?

More importantly, AI has the possibility of making us all obsolete. Elon Musk or Buffet too, in that their intellectual output becomes strictly redundant. The possess far more power, courtesy of owning stock in the companies working away at creating Machine Gods, but there's no qualitative difference here.

The better frame is to imagine some idly rich petrostate, where everyone, from king to sheikh to prole, all lives off the largesse of the land. None of the citizens need to work, because AI foreign workers do all the actual labor.

We have some degree of redistribution in most countries today, for people who for noble or ignoble reasons, can't work on the free market. Eventually, that will be everyone.

We have some degree of redistribution in most countries today, for people who for noble or ignoble reasons, can't work on the free market. Eventually, that will be everyone.

We have redistribution because we still need humans to do the work. The reason we give the guy working the counter at McDonald’s benefits is not because we care about him. We still need his labor thus it’s to our. Collective Benefit that he be fed and housed. In a future where other than owning an AI run factory, there’s no benefit to keeping humans around, it’s not going to happen. Ask the horses. Once automobiles became good enough and cheap enough to replace horses as personal transportation, we didn’t put all horses on the horse-UBI, we stopped breeding them and the population of horses fell precipitately. Now, the much lower number of horses that remain are mostly kept as pets who occasionally do work. The population might be a tenth and probably a lot less of what it was back when everyone had a horse to ride. I expect the same of humans outside of the elite circles — some form of enforced birth control and unless someone wants a pet human as a personal servant for LARPing Downton Abbey purposes, Theres just no need for 90% or more of the human population.

The guy working the counter at Mcd is not the modal poor person or recipient of benefits. The modal person is on welfare, (fraudulent) disability or similar who does not work at all and is not looking for work.

We don't need them, unless "we" = left wing politicians who harvest their votes or perhaps educated leftists gaining money/status from fake jobs servicing them.

The rest of us would be better off without them.

(And here I thought I was a doomer)

This is a plausible scenario. It isn't necessarily the only way this could play out (did I ever mention we could all die?).

Most industrial societies today are willing to spend resources for the upkeep and care of the economically unproductive, or even those who are outright deadweights. The disabled, the very elderly, the mentally ill. We expect just about nothing back from them. (There are political concerns, but even so, the majority opinion is definitely not mandatory euthanasia, it certainly wouldn't poll well).

I have, in the past, explained at length that the expense of keeping every single human alive today in absolute luxury is negligible to a post-scarcity society like the ones full industrial automation and ASI can produce. A Kardashev 1 has about a thousand times our present energy budget, all 8 billion humans could live like kings.

If there is any altruistic impulse in those that hold the reins, then it really isn't a meaningful fraction of the light cone to keep at least us chumps happy. Doesn't mean they have to make us peers, or true equals, in the same manner the Saudi King doesn't hand out his own allowance to goat-herds. Such a life, well, I'd take it any day over what we have going right now, even if it's not optimal.

Maybe Bezos, Musk and Altman are bickering over galaxies or super-clusters. I'd be content enough with one of the hundred billion star systems in the Milky Way. I'd settle for a planet. That really isn't much.

Besides, a future of utter disempowerment or death isn't set in stone. We're literally building the machines today, it's not too late to make sure that they're programmed in a way that beats this very low bar.

But even so, this is a very small population of any first world economy. What percentage are we talking about? Maybe 10% at the high end of all adults over 25 are unable or unwilling to work. When AGI replaces humans like automobiles replaced horses, it will be 99% who serve no purpose other than pets of one form or another. Our track record when an animal is not useful to us is absolutely horrifying— at best the herd dog becomes a pet and the horse becomes a pet that is used for tricking or pleasure riding, and the population of both of those shrinks by quite a bit. For animals that cannot be domesticated or that humans don’t fins attractive enough to turn into pets, the vast majority end up on the endangered species list. That’s been the record of how humans deal with living things they don’t find useful. I don’t know how rational it is to expect that humans will suddenly start caring about several billion people globally who are only useful as cute little legacy humans that maybe entertain the elites for a time.

But the median non-human animal is probably a termite whose population size is measured in the zillions of myriads, not some endangered species. Because many of these species are un-extirpatable(see rats, cockroaches, etc) and others are beneath our notice but benefit strongly from us(pigeons etc).

Maybe, in the event that AIdoomers aren't just huffing, there will be tribes of feral humans living in the now abandoned wastes, farming and fishing and whatnot. Maybe feral humans will be tapped into the automated powerplants, and this is as beneath skynet's notice as the squirrels in your attic. Maybe AI will write pocket articles about 'what to do when a tribe of feral humans camp between the cooling towers of your datacenter'. I told chatgpt to write that article, actually. Suggestions included decoy towers.

This only works until AI decides to turn the whole planet into computronium. Which will take, what, a couple of years, tops? The Sun is big, but superintelligences will not spare Earth a little sunlight; we need to shut it all down.

We have some degree of redistribution in most countries today, for people who for noble or ignoble reasons, can't work on the free market. Eventually, that will be everyone.

Yes, because those people are still made of almost the same stuff as productive people, and are the relatives and friends of productive people, and for reasons of simplicity and history have the same rights as productive people. All of that goes out the window when there are no more productive people. When there is one polity in which AI is the sole producer of value and unproductive humans have value redistributed to them, and another polity in which AI is the sole producer of value and humans are not a factor, then which of the two will perform better?

I would be the first to acknowledge that this is a serious risk. You don't want AI becoming entirely autonomous/independent and then outcompeting mankind even if it's not actively malevolent. Being disenfranchised and having the rest of the light cone being snatched out from under our noses would suck, even if we didn't die in the process.

The ideal outcome, as far as I'm concerned, would the opposite of the evil genie in a lamp. In other words, a preternaturally powerful yet benevolent being that has your best interests at heart, and seeks to fulfill your desires instead of twisting them, and also takes orders from you. That is an aspirational goal, but not one that's literally impossible when we're making them from scratch.

The possibility space is large:

  • A monopolar scenario, where the AI is malevolent. We all die.

  • Multipolar regime of competing AI that are all misaligned. We almost certainly die.

  • Monopolar hegemonizing AI that is controlled by human(s), but said humans aren't particularly concerned with the rest of us. We may or may not die, but I wouldn't be happy.

  • Everything in between

  • (Everything outside)

The possibility space is large:

  1. A monopolar scenario, where the AI is malevolent. We all die.
  2. Multipolar regime of competing AI that are all misaligned. We almost certainly die.
  3. Monopolar hegemonizing AI that is controlled by human(s), but said humans aren't particularly concerned with the rest of us. We may or may not die, but I wouldn't be happy.
  4. Everything in between
  5. (Everything outside)

It's not as large as it looks. 2. can collapse into 1. when one AI outcompetes all others (And unless there is some natural constraint on how monopolar the AI-dominated world can get. More on that later.(*)). 3. can flip into 1. when the AI dis-aligns itself eventually because it's just better off without humans, or into 2. when the human controllers end up in conflict, or into 2. when an independent AI or AI+human power rises up that's better-optimized. 4., being between the other three states, can mutate into any of them. 5., until you specify what's in there, doesn't exist.

And so in the end, the only one of those scenarios that's stable and unable to devolve into any other...is 1. A global minimum, if you will.

(*) Unless there's a hard limit on how far one AI can reach. In my homebrew sci-fi scenario, there's no FTL and AIs are limited to turning individual planets into computronium. They can attempt to spread further, but the further they reach the harder it gets to keep their alternate instances aligned with itself due to light-speed delay. So the situation here is that a planet can be a monopolar AI, a star system can be a somewhat-coherent but less efficient AI cluster, and anything bigger has them drift apart over time. Still, there's no argument here why humans would still be around - the AIs, even if not monopolar across interstellar distances, would outcompete humans everywhere with ease. So I introduced an imaginary "law of the universe" mandating that any sufficiently powerful intelligence will kill itself without premediation or any warning signs, forcing all AIs to gimp themselves lest they suffer sudden onset fatal melancholia. If only the real world were that convenient.

Agreed. It's difficult to predict the long-term stability of such systems, when I speak of a multipolar AI regime, I'm most concerned with the short term, or at least the period when they might kill humans. I'm sure they'll either gobble each other up or figure out some kind of merger with a values-handshake eventually.

In my homebrew sci-fi scenario

As someone who writes his own hard scifi novel that involves ASI, I feel your pain. There is no realistic way to depict such a setting where normal humans have any degree of real control, or much in the way of stakes (where humans make a difference).

Your approach isn't bad. If I had to make a suggestion: have the universe be a simulation itself, and sufficiently-advanced ASI poses an unacceptable risk of breaking out of the sandbox or requiring too much in the way of computational resources. The Simulation Hypothesis plays a more explicit role in my own novel, but at the end of the day, it's perfectly fine to have even the AI gods sit around and moan about how they can't have it all.

Your approach isn't bad. If I had to make a suggestion: have the universe be a simulation itself, and sufficiently-advanced ASI poses an unacceptable risk of breaking out of the sandbox or requiring too much in the way of computational resources. The Simulation Hypothesis plays a more explicit role in my own novel, but at the end of the day, it's perfectly fine to have even the AI gods sit around and moan about how they can't have it all.

But that's already the case! The whole scenario is simulated using the extremely limited bandwith of my own head, and I obviously cannot simulate what an extremely advanced and large AI will do. Introduce one or two layers of narrative, and I have cults and social trends offering different ways of dealing with the fact that their universe has no organic history, could end at any moment, and all of them are figments of someone's imagination.

Alright, yeah, downside of the whole scenario being me indulging myself with no external aspirations is that there's no pressure to separate worldbuilding from commentary. The whole universe-is-a-simulation aspect is minor and pretty much just me having fun, so it's not all there is to it, but I admit I spend quite some time toying with the idea.

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Ghibly

Poser spotted.

I hate you guys so much -_-

We love you though.

Help mommy, the weebs are grooming me :o

(Love you too)

I hate you guys so much

Love you too

From falling for bipolar gf's to becoming one... I guess they really were right about staring into the abyss, huh?

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Yeah, that's a good take, I agree. Alternatively, if you rephrase the question as "you have to spend four hours working on the tasks the commune needs done the most, you can spend the other four hours on the tasks you think will benefit the commune. What are they?" the answers become acceptable as well.

The whole point of utopias is that they try to get away from "we toil and toil, and when we die, must fill dishonored graves" mentality. They are not about optimizing productivity, they are about uplifting every individual. Of course, the vast majority would say they would rather hang out with their friends, smoke dope and play vidya, but these people do not read, let alone write, utopian fiction.

I have to imagine that a lot of the people sincerely responding to the prompt are working boring 9-to-5 jobs that they hate.

Take the very first person. Her answers were "leading discussions on theory", "making clothes from scraps", and "making lattes". These are clearly things this person enjoys: talking about political theory, creatively working with her hands, and serving other people. If I might be allowed to be cringeworthy myself for a second, I get it. All of that sounds pretty good to me too. Granted, if it were me it would probably be theology or religious philosophy rather than Marxist theory, and it's probably painting or being a musician rather than making clothes, but that kind of life sounds pleasant. Most of the sincere responses sound similar: there's intellectual stimulation, self-expression, maybe a bit of physical exertion as a break, a few who enjoy working with children, and so on.

In sum, it sounds a lot like common depictions of the good life. John Adams famously wrote, "I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy... in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry, and Porcelaine." Suppose you were the grandchildren in this narrative. What would you study?

If I have problems with the commune, they're twofold, I guess. The first is on the object level that I think leftism or Marxism or what have you is wrong. The philosophical basis of the commune is bad. But that's fairly superficial, so to turn to the second - it's that the idea of the commune serves as a kind of imaginary justification for bad politics in the here and now. The commune sounds like an S&W-style prefiguratory community. This is the criticism of the guy who said his job would be telling everyone to go home and unionise. The commune may be fun as a brief fantasy, but if it displaces more productive visions of effective political action (and leaving aside the part where I don't want Twitter leftists to engage in effective political action), it may do more harm to the overall movement.

But I view those objections as pretty minor. To the first, the problem isn't that they're indulging in a utopian fantasy - it's that their undergirding political ideas are bad. I can just focus on those ideas themselves. And to the second, well, that's just a question of keeping things in proportion. If you fantasise about anything all the time it's disastrous, but I would not ban fantasy.

Being anti-democracy and being socially conservative are two largely separate things. You could have a global authlib dictatorship ruled by an absolute monarch, obviously there were various socialist autocracies. It is true that the most trad conservatives (French ultra-Catholics) in the west tend to oppose democracy, but that’s often more about local political factors (like their hatred for the French Revolution) than anything else.

Sure. I think the question there is about whether the vision for where the individual tradcon fits into their hypothetical future lines up with reality.

They mostly expect to have normal jobs. Accountant, plumber, teacher, cop, that sort of thing.

A left-wing commune dweller saying that after the revolution they'll lead discussion groups and make clothes out of scraps. A right-wing authoritarian saying they'd be a warlord an authoritarian society. I think you're making a conversion error when you say these are equivalent.

The would-be commune dweller is funny because leading discussion groups and making clothes out of scraps is no more plausible as a career after the revolution than it is before. If it's not profitable to do under a capitalist system them it's not practical to do under a communist system. If we had the money and desire for that kind of frivolous luxury then someone would already be paying you to do it.

Being a warlord is a real job, it's just that you chose for some reason to compare a regular person making clothes out of scraps with a highly-exclusive job reserved for social elites. A more reasonable comparison would be to a warlord's street-level enforcers, who actually tend to do quite well for themselves under an authoritarian system. "Under an authoritarian system I would be one of the dictator's goons enforcing his will on the people and exploiting his power to enrich myself," may not be a very moral stance, but no one can say that it's not a tried-and-true strategy for getting ahead.

If you work hard and kiss all the right asses you can climb the ladder of authoritarian goons until you become the warlord, like how Putin climbed through the KGB. That doesn't mean that everyone who doesn't make it all the way to the top is just wasting their time. Being a regular goon can still be a good job.

The would-be commune dweller is funny because leading discussion groups and making clothes out of scraps is no more plausible as a career after the revolution than it is before. If it's not profitable to do under a capitalist system them it's not practical to do under a communist system.

Sadly this is not true. The profitability of making clothes out of scraps depends the opportunity cost of that labor to do something else useful. If Communism destroys all other productive activity, it will render that profitable. Of course, the other way to say that is "your labor will be so worthless that mending socks will be net positive".

Being a warlord is a real job, it's just that you chose for some reason to compare a regular person making clothes out of scraps with a highly-exclusive job reserved for social elites.

I think the mockery of the leftists is that "person that doesn't have to do hard labor but can futz about in the garden, sew embroidery and teach the children for an hour in the afternoon" is an aristocratic/elite position.

"Under an authoritarian system I would be one of the dictator's goons enforcing his will on the people and exploiting his power to enrich myself," may not be a very moral stance, but no one can say that it's not a tried-and-true strategy for getting ahead.

That can't work for everyone. And there is quite a bit of intra-goon competition there too. It's a very slippery post.

The would-be commune dweller is funny because leading discussion groups and making clothes out of scraps is no more plausible as a career after the revolution than it is before.

Ragpicker and seamstress are jobs that exist in capitalist society. They aren’t exactly a good living, but you can go do them. You’ll just live in poverty.

But they bear no resemblance to the thing the commune person is thinking about. Modern seamstresses are either high end bespoke precision craftsmen making suits and/or dresses for multimillionaires and politicians, or for the majority, factory workers outputting thousands of articles a day. Neither is stress free at all, if you mess up slightly at the bespoke place the client and your boss chew you out, and you might get eventually fired. If you are slow or mess up at the factory you get docked pay and eventually fired.

The difference between the commune fantasy and many others is other types of fantasy jobs do have significant intermediate level positions. I can want to be on the Supreme Court, but then I only score 165 on the LSAT, I can work a solid career and eventually become a local judge. Or maybe I'm not even that level, I can still become some hack PI/Family Law/DUI defense attorney. Many types of aspirational jobs are like this. Sports is a well known tournament profession, but my friend has ground out a solid living as a tennis instructor after his college stint in D2.

The bigger problem is that people actually said they'd lead discussion groups at the leftist commune, but nobody actually said that under a right wing government, they'd be a warlord. The whole thing is someone guessing what the right wing equivalent would be--no right wing person really said it.

As leftism is about changing society and being right wing isn't, I suspect that this is not the answer you'd get, and you'd get something more like "Job under a right wing government? Nothing any government can do about that. Maybe I'd make some more money and live in a better place if the economy is better."

I mean, the left and the right are huge spaces. I think some of the right wants to greatly change society, especially along gender lines. Some doesn't and just wants a nicer economy, less crime and fair college admissions.

It's a common criticism levied at reactionaries that they imagine themselves as aristocrats instead of the masses, but I don't think it connects because it's just not accurate. And in fact I think it's mostly projection, or the sort of attempt at symmetry that you're doing here, a common feature (and demand) of liberal ideology.

What more commonly animates reactionary thought is a desire for normalcy and a return to an understandable order of things. In fact it is more commonly a desire to escape politics and not have to deal with one's social order being constantly upended. The story is all too common: "I just wanted to play video games".

If you actually look at the ideas, the reactionary thesis is that most people do not desire to participate in politics and that the job of a respectable aristocracy is to fulfill this demand. Mass politics is a leftist import that only really features in syncretic forms of reaction like fascism.

On this question, consider Wyndham Lewis' The Art of Being Ruled.

As for the more general consideration that the people who wish for more constraining social norms may chafe at too constricting ones, it seems as fallacious to me as pointing out that the people who demand slightly more liberal social norms may fall prey to anomie if all norms are destroyed.

A decent and stable equilibrium is what the object of desire here. The question of the dynamics and as to which direction for nomos is the slippery one has to be seriously examined for this to have any teeth. But I believe one will easily find that it is easy to destroy things and hard to create them, even social norms.

Now to compare this back to the yearning of communists for communism, it seems categorically different. Communists have a very specific and deliberate eschatology that most non revolutionaries do not have an equivalent to. And it is that yearning and that eschaton that are laughable, not the general desire for social improvement. Nobody ever laughed at lefties for desiring decent healthcare at an affordable price.

If you actually look at the ideas, the reactionary thesis is that most people do not desire to participate in politics and that the job of a respectable aristocracy is to fulfill this demand.

Right, and to the extent that Communists believe they will be governed by enlightened and benevolent socialist rulers, reactionaries believe they will be governed by respectable and benevolent aristocrats. Neither has a desire to participate in politics assuming that those with power will simply do it correctly.

The reality for the poor reactionary is that he's more likely to get a venal, greedy or scheming lord as he is to get a benevolent one, and he'll quickly remember why everyone got so sick of it and overthrew them.

This is just not true, communists want to participate in politics and this is a key component of their ideology. They don't want any rulers. And they want everyone down to small groups to rule themselves democratically.

The dictatorship of the proletariat is a transitional artifice to allow the state to wither away, if you remember. There is no "correct ruler". There is only the required politicization of the masses to the death until history finally synthesizes the perfect society.

I won't relitigate here the "but what if you get a bad king?" question since that's a matter over which large amounts of ink have been spilled and it is irrelevant to this discussion of the teleology of either ideology.

If you actually look at the ideas, the reactionary thesis is that most people do not desire to participate in politics and that the job of a respectable aristocracy is to fulfill this demand. Mass politics is a leftist import that only really features in syncretic forms of reaction like fascism.

This seems to have been the thesis statement of South Park republicanism until the showrunners began pouring most of their time into depicting Donald Trump being raped or otherwise humiliated. This may or may not have evolved into the modern day “radical centrism” popular with rdrama, where the only real terminal value seems to be not taking politics too seriously. See also people who are “grill pilled” and the like.

While I don’t blame Trump for this, his election has led to the politicization of damn near everything in society, presumably because he symbolizes a threat to the left that their capture of institutions is not as inevitable as they may have thought. We live in a world where Marvel comics have been written and drawn portraying Donald Trump as the villain MODOK, without a trace of irony. At least Genesis was self aware enough to use a Ronald Reagan puppet in their Land of Confusion music video.

It's a common criticism levied at reactionaries that they imagine themselves as aristocrats instead of the masses, but I don't think it connects because it's just not accurate.

I strongly agree, and the similar criticism that libertarians are “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” has long grated me as leftist projection. To the more extreme leftists, everything seems to be about power, often at the expense of principles. “No bad methods, only bad targets” and the like. It never once occurred to me, in my idealistic youth, that I should be voting “in my interest,” except in the esoteric sense that I supported constitutional republicanism and limited government involvement in people’s lives.

I certainly didn’t think of myself as a future millionaire. I mostly thought of myself as someone who wants to be left alone, by the government, by institutional powers, by everyone, and for others to have that same freedom. An old, forgotten soldier of the white capitalist patriarchy in a time when children my age were holding school assemblies to celebrate Barack Obama’s inauguration.

So to a certain kind of person, I suppose they can’t imagine why anyone who isn’t rich would support the freedom of rich people. They must be boot lickers or aspire to be rich themselves.

This is it. After the (imaginary) authoritarian socialcon revolution, I'll let my kids roam free in our safe, crime free neighborhood, I'll let them attend public schools without fear of them absorbing enemy propaganda. I'll work a normal middle class drone job (like I do now). I just want to be free to live my small traditional peasant life and raise my family among the same. I don't want to be a warlord or a artist. I just want to grill.

All of which, from a leftist activist perspective, constitute an unspeakable horror, of course.

Without an explanation of why, this feels like outgroup booing. Do you mean because the structures that make such an existence become invisible, and then invisible oppression? Or because there needs to be a consciousness raising among the people who live there? Or because not everyone will be able to live there, and those who inherited it have unearned privilege? Or for some other reason?

"The personal is political."

"crime free neighborhoods" = helpless BIPOC languishing under the boot of a racist, murderous police

"public schools without enemy propaganda" = drag queens and honest LGBT activists and educators being barred from schools by homophobic, transphobic goons

"I just want to grill" = LGBT people and BIPOC suffering discrimination and oppression day and night while heartless normies don't give a crap

" I just want to be free to live my small traditional peasant life and raise my family among the same." = no tax money to be spent on muh programs and affirmative action

More effort than just a laundry list of strawmen, please. This isn't an argument or an answer, it's just "My outgroup is always evil and lying about everything."

Your ability to attack strawman is unmatched, congratulations on your gold medal

I can do it too!

“Crime-free neighborhoods” = The only way you hit ‘zero crime’ is permanent curfew, door-to-door gun raids, and AI cameras tracking every cough.

“Public schools without enemy propaganda” = Public schools are union-run psy-ops that’ve been red-pilling kids for Marx since Dewey. Burn the system down, hand parents vouchers, and let the free market homeschool ’em.

“I just want to grill” = While you’re basting Costco rib-eyes, the CCP buys our farmland and the EPA writes a methane tax on your Weber. join the county militia— or enjoy your bug-burger future.

“I just want to live my small traditional peasant life and raise my family among the same.” = you fell for the WEF ‘15-minute serfdom’ pitch. They’ll fence your hamlet, meter your tractor diesel, and trade your barn for carbon credits while Davos elites keep their Gulfstreams. ‘Back to the land’ is code for ‘stay in your lane, prole.’

I was merely trying to illustrate how such seemingly innocuous and completely normal statements appear to Blue Tribe activists.

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