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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   22959 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

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.

"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 ringer 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.

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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.

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".

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