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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   22680 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

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