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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 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.

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.