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My initial thought after reading this post is that the future will have two types of capital C Conservatives: those who are excited by this kind of stuff, and those who think anyone enjoys this should be involuntarily sterilized.
No need for it to be involuntary, just allow the degens to sterilize themselves.
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Suit and tie conservatives lost the culture war. The far-right insurgency that won was based around spaces like 4chan, where cutting-edge political theory gets spread by memes and anime porn is the daily bread.
I don't think 4chan "won" some much as the simply contributed to the blue and grey tribes collapse in influence which cleared the way for the Tea-Party to build a national mandate.
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"Suit and tie conservatives lost the culture war."
Though they still tend to win the economic war, in their own lives most certainly.
Im not even convinced they lost the culture war. It's the liberals who appear to be imploding.
The lost the intra-right culture war - BADLY, which means that if the right wins the big Culture War then the suit-and-tie crowd don't get the prize.
This is tied into actually dressing well being correlated with education/IQ/high-status white-collar work and so becoming left-coded as a result of the latest iteration of the Sort. Hence @die_workwear. The same is true of any high standard that requires consistent moderate effort to maintain - increasingly even ones that are explicitly right-wing like regular church attendance. (The most MAGA demographic is people who tick the Evangelical box on the census but only darken a church door at Christmas and Easter.)
In the world where MAGA have won the culture war, only faggots and an dwindling minority of aging churchladies wear tailored clothes or talk in complete sentences. Idiocracy was non-partisan, but in the current year Richard Hanania thought is correct on how the Brawndo-drinkers vote.
Have they though?
The Christian conservative coalition is arguably more powerful today interms of ability to influence policy than they have been since the 90s. This influence largely stemming from the rise of Catholic and classical education as an alternative academic pipeline and the ability to point to the progressive excesses of the last 2 decades and say "i told you so".
As for the idocracy argument, it is not MAGA country that is becoming illiterate, it is blue-tribe strongholds like Oregon, California, and Maine.
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The robot waifus are the sterilization. This is a problem that solves itself.
Over a long enough time horizon all problems are self-solving, the question is what do we do in the meantime
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I once said, here or at the old place, that if legit cyborg waifus become a thing I’m moving myself and my family to a compound in Utah to join the Mormon mujahideen that will no doubt inevitably develop.
Unfortunately, I meant it. Timeline seems to be moving up, better start making some concrete plans.
Just have the robot waifu be able to bear children. Then we wouldn't need ELON money to have 30 children. If anything, this might actually fix the demographic collapse
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So what would it do to the abortion debate? Would robo-abortions be illegal (since you clearly wouldn't oh god i forgot about fetishes I'm going to bleach my brain have created a pregnancy with a robot unless you intended to have it carried through to term)? But then what does that say, that the sanctity of a robo-vat-fetus is more legally "alive"/protectable than one in a human womb? But somewhere out there is a future where, if it isn't made illegal, some youtuber is repeatedly aborting his pregnant robot for the hate-clicks.
And I think that's the worst sentence I've written in my entire life, but I'm still young. Even without longevity, I'm sure there's time for me to write worse.
What will it do for old style abortions, frankly they might become illegal. You don't want it in your body? Fine. But you don't get to kill it. And you don't get to weasel out of raising it.
I'm fine with that. Surely deactivating an artificial womb before perusing the robot is going to be more reliable than ordinary birth control.
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I think it's more the raising of children that's the bottleneck at the moment.
I saw a post on X saying there’s a subgroup of elder right wing millennials raising children as unreliant on digital consumer tech as possible with the implicit goal of preparing them for Butlerian Jihad.
I laughed aloud when I saw that, I hadn’t thought of it exactly that way but I instantly recognized it as right. As far as I know from my peer group growing up I’m only one of 15% of them that currently has multiple children, and of that 15% I’m clearly in the top 5% or so of how anti-tech I am and I’m obviously the most right wing.
My children don’t have tablets, or smartphones, tv time is very limited and monitored with an eye towards classic movies and long form YouTube content that’s purposely less bombastic. The only time they play video games is when we are all together and we play couch party games, and we have one laptop that is mostly used for my work. There’s no unsupervised internet access whatsoever. My eldest just got a basic music play that they have their own restricted Spotify account on.
They mostly draw and read from a big library, play imagination games and build things. We hike regularly, and spend lots of time outdoors in rivers and mountains and the beach.
It’s not necessarily a reactionary thing; really for me the goal is helping prepare them for an increasingly hostile environment by helping them learn to love being human, love their bodies, tolerate boredom, generate their own fun, act without being prompted, etc, etc, etc. they’ll need it.
Curiously, the elder millennial couple I know most committed to this are both rather woke lefties, but to the outside observer, they probably appear small-c conservative (or perhaps traditional). They seem to have arrived at their child-raising style via old lefty suspicion of capitalism and 90's-style leftist anti-vaxer/homeopathy-type health beliefs. Horseshoe theory strikes again.
While I don’t doubt your take on your friends is correct, there’s a much misunderstood rise of the “right wing hippie” over the last ten years.
The biggest crunchy hippie I know, who’s a huge enthusiast of yoga and has been on the wellness & spirituality kick as long as I’ve known her, is pregnant with her third child in three years, raises chickens in her rural town that she escaped to during covid, and owns several firearms. She 100% voted for Trump and loathes democrats and you’d likely never suspect a thing if you met her.
Same with me; I assume most people just assume I’m a grown up ex-hipster elder millennial who loves slamming craft brews and is somewhat Reddit-coded (barf).
But I am straight up to the right of Franco, 100% Bukele-pilled gringo.
A lot of people got very good at hiding their power level. Basically no one outside my closest friends know anything in detail about my personal & political beliefs, hiding them became second nature during the great awokening.
Almost every person in my wider social circle would be absolutely scandalized if they knew what I believed in. People just assume because I’m smart, courteous and well spoke and I keep my cards close to my best that I agree with them.
Believe me, based on some conversations I've had to sit through, they are True Believers. And probably example #1 of Henderson's luxury beliefs theory. They are vocally (strongly, and often) in favor of all kinds of lefty positions that are destructive to society, and they follow none of them. Aside from not attending church, one would be hard-pressed to identify a traditional belief they don't obey.
Otherwise, I agree with you fully because I've followed the same pattern.
These days, this provides less coverage than you might think. I do the same, but my nigh-absolute refusal to engage in culture war politics has led some friends and family to (correctly) conclude I'm to the right of Attila the Hun. As the sage said, one must be very right wing to not discuss politics.
I think your instinct is correct in general with regards to how much the game is up in terms of being able to “hide your power level”, I’m just an extreme outlier living in an extreme outlier environment.
I have a very social job that requires me to be everyone’s buddy and have an “always on” personality. Disagreements, even polite ones, are not tolerated and heavily punished.
The area I live in is not only deep blue like the Pacific Ocean, it’s extremely isolated from trends that are obvious to outsiders.
I live in the DMV area and close enough to the dark heart of the stay-behind operation of Obama’s America that I’m dealing everyday with maximum ideologically motivated reasoning. I call it the “Iron Bubble”, people are extremely out of touch and in denial with what’s been shifting underneath their feet in the culture at large. Ironically, it’s very “Hitler & his closest associates in the Bunker” vibe, or reminiscent of “Baghdad Bob”.
It’s not surprising, there’s real money and power at stake here with the fall of the old order. Things like DOGE & the fall of DEI broadly have extreme direct consequences to these people. I’d love nothing more than to loosen up and be sincere as is my nature, but it’s like being in a squad of Japanese soldiers who are holed up in an island and don’t know the war is over.
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Somewhere there is a good sketch comedy when you realize a good chunk of "almost every person" who'd be scandalized actually agrees with you.
I don't think you're alone: I think I am far more centrist than you are, but the rest of the description applies to me. I try to avoid discussing politics IRL, although griping about general government incompetence is evergreen, although not trivially to actually solve generally.
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