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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   28595 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 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.

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.

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