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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31762 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 2, 2023

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The American right doesn't believe in its own ideology of individualism and therefore is stuck in a losing spiral of hypocrisy.

The US was largely founded when groups, not individuals, moved to north america to build their own communities. The US was not a free hippie-town when it was founded, it consisted of strong communities with strong levels of collectivism. A puritan community was in many ways highly collectivist with clearly enforced social norms, values and expectations. The idea of keeping the state out of people's business wasn't about freeing the individual as much as it was about freeing the congregation or town from the King. Towns and communities who didn't like the British king moved to the US to build towns with their values. However, in these communities norms were enforced and the individualism that is common in the American right wasn't really represented. Taxes were low, there was little government regulation and people could bear arms. However, men were men and women were women, my body my choice views on abortion would not have been accepted. People may have legally been able to dress like they wanted and pray to whatever god they wanted but in practice this wouldn't have been tolerated in a Puritan town. These towns were not morally relativistic and policed behaviour of their members.

The ideology was formulated in individualist terms yet was practiced in collectives. This worked since there were homogeneous communities that stuck together naturally and people didn't really use their right to identify as whatever they wanted and engage in moral relativism.

However, in the past couple of decades, the people have started to practice the law as written in the sense that they are engaging in true individualism. Gay marriage, feminism, multiculturalism, transgenderism etc do in many ways follow from true individualism. The American right have had a difficult time arguing for social conservatism from a truly individualist standpoint. If the legal system is built around the freedoms and rights of the individual it becomes difficult to enforce social norms and values that are cultural. If the US is a country of individuals doing as they wish multiculturalism is more difficult to object to and in a more multicultural society it becomes harder to enforce social norms implicitly.

What many conservatives actually want is to enforce their values, norms, and culture on society. They may say they want a separation between church and state and that they think that religion is up to the individual. However, many of them do not want to live in an atheistic state in a society in which Hinduism and Islam have the same standing as Christianity. Most conservatives want to live in a society that enforces traditional christian/European American values, culture and norms. Much of the conservative movement has had an incredibly difficult time defending what they want and getting what they want since their ideology isn't in line with what they want. Instead, they end up being hypocritical, making unnecessarily convoluted arguments and not promoting what they want since they are bound by an ideology that isn't inline with their goals. When people make arguments that aren't inline with their intentions or true beliefs they often face great difficulty in debates.

One winning strategy I can see is to stake out a piece of land and establish a zone in which norms are enforced. A common way of handling diverse countries is to allow different groups to have their own autonomy. In India, much of the middle east even in Indian reservations there are local governments that enforce the norms of the people who live there. Russia is an atheist state, however, Islam is enforced at a local level in Chechnya and the federal government in Moscow isn't really involving itself in their internal affairs. Without imposing Christian European American values in a geographic area it is going to be difficult for conservatives to get what they actually want. In order to do so they need to realign their ideology with their actual desires.

Conservatives have on the one hand almost uplifted a constitution and political system built around the state as a neutral arbitrator between individuals to a third testament while at the same time often showing a desire to live in a state with a clear culture, religion and moral foundation.

This is meant to be taken as a thesis, and as a start of a discussion of what conservatives actually want to achieve rather than soap-boxing.

The issue with this IMO is that you're conflating beliefs that different groups have had at different times and putting them all under the banner of "conservatism" since they've all found themselves on the Red Team side for various reasons. Yes, both sides of the culture war have created some odd bedfellows, but that's the consequence of having 2 sides and big-tent movements. Your argument would be more meaningful if you could cite a specific person or group who actually believes all of the things you say are contradictory at the same time.

I could just as easily complain that Blue Team contains both people who want better conditions and rights for workers, and people who want open-borders immigration. Or that want us to stay out of foreign wars, but want direct intervention in the Ukraine war. Or that think you shouldn't let people have guns because they should call the police, but want to abolish the police.

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I think the simple explanation here is the right one, conflict theory-ish though it may be. 'Defund' progressives don't want no police, they want the police to be their guys.

Most every serious proposal for police defunding/abolishment I've looked into came with small print about the profession being replaced with Police In All But Name - a vision of social workers dispensing restorative justice to the oppressed. How these unarmed healers are going to deal with the realities of dealing with actual humans at their worst moments is usually glossed over pretty thoroughly, but I think it's not too hard to see where it ends up. Form follows function; the cops will still be there, they'll just be packing Women's Studies degrees along with their sidearms. In theory this will make them kinder, gentler public servants, but I suspect that it would just point their monopoly on violence at a different set of outgroups.

Not a progressive, but I suppose the charitable explanation is the same as mine - that maybe no actual person claims to support both at the same time. And/or they believe (naively IMO) that nobody will want to attack anybody or break into houses if the proper progressive policies like government-provided healthcare and UBI are enacted.

The not so charitable explanation is that progressives want anybody who disagrees with them or who would prove their beliefs false to die broke in a gutter somewhere and aren't real particular about exactly how that happens.

Which one of those is true? That's not for me to say, you'll just have to examine their actions and claims and decide for yourself.

That depends on who is being attacked by whom. As we saw with the Rittenhouse, self-defense after attempted murder after being pursued after attempting to flee a confrontation is a partisan privilege, not a right.

I'm confused by your premises.

You describe puritans and the founding of the US as if to imply these are strongly related, one flowing from the other perhaps. But if we look at when the Mayflower landed--1620--and when the Constitution was published--1787--there's over a century between those two dates! I'd expect the people and the norms and ideas to have changed much in the time in between.

Admittedly, I know little about early/Puritan America, but looking at the Consitution, it seems to strongly lean toward individualism. The Bill of Rights establishes a framework where the individual is the basic unit of society and seeks to protect the individual from the Government. I know that in reality this didn't always work out this way because people were constrained by customs and norms, especially as seen from our vantage point, but compared to what was and had been going on in Europe back then, it was an incredible leap forward away from collectivism.

These towns were not morally relativistic and policed behaviour of their members.

But this policing was done according to norms that, back then, were revolutionary! Like, in contrast to much of Europe, women were allowed and supported in attaining an education. I don't have sources at hand, but I also believe men were punished for beating women. And again, this sounds conservative now, but back in the day, this was some holy shit progressive thinking and if I were to go out on a limb, many European conservatives of that era would have labeled allowing ordinary women to attend school as something disgusting and upsetting to the perfect, God-ordained order of things.

What I'm trying to say, I think, is that modern conservatives would find issues with how liberal both the Puritans of the 17th century and the Enlightened "Spirit of '76" crowd of the 18th century.

(Though my understanding of modern US conservatism is rather fuzzy, so I should spend more time reading through this thread.)

What many conservatives actually want is to enforce their values, norms, and culture on society.

When I naturalized some years back, I signed up for the Republican party. In my mind, this was the party espousing the values of 1776 (and 1787). Markets, individualism, responsibility. Friedman, McCain, Schwarzenegger. But since then, I noticed the same pattern you point out here, cut my ties, and having no other options, marked myself as independent.

If you listen to a lot of libertarians (or at least classic liberals) they see voluntarism as not atomizing but as part of a community. Stated differently, you can’t have an individual without a community but likewise you need strong free individuals to have a community. This is one criticism of the dole; it hollows out the community as some members don’t pull their weight creating resentment / spiritual hollowing out.

So you need both strong individualism and a community orientation — at first they appear contradictory but the two go hand in hand.

Community of your free choice, community you can always leave if you find better deal elsewhere, is as untraditional thing as there can be.

Strong communities of the trad past were created either by direct coercion (serfdom, Jim Crow laws etc...) or by fact that even if you were unhappy in your home village, there was nowhere to go.

I don't know how true or generalizable that assumption is. I was reading the other day that in contrast to mainland Europe, England is surprisingly intermixed - excepting Cornwall, there are few genetic holdouts anywhere in the country. In comparison you can find French medieval villages where nobody married anyone more than ten miles away for hundreds of years. Despite this, there was robust community organization throughout the country - county clubs and women's institutes and many levels of political and charity organization.

That unique balance of individualism and pro-social behavior is not easy to replicate. For the most part, I think it is totally gone in the modern UK. But it's real and it's not a contradiction. Maybe the divide is not individual versus community, but high-trust versus low-trust. China is hardly an exemplar of individualism, and yet it's not a hivemind either - the authorities don't trust the people and the people don't trust the authorities.

Hoppe and all those feudalist libertarians disagree. They say those communities were created organically specifically in times where if your local lord was a tyrant you always had exit as a practical ability by moving to the other German village a few valleys over.

I tend to agree, people have a weird view of the middle ages inherited from a scornful bourgeoisie when it was actually a time of great personal freedom compared to what followed.

The problem is that your model of the US right is not an accurate model of the US right, it's a liberal's attempt to steel-man the right and then being confused when rightist follow their own beliefs instead of the liberal steel-man.

I often get accused of here of hypocrisy for violating libertarian principles (supporting censorship and the like) but the thing is that I'm not a libertarian. I don't actually buy into all those liberal lies about how "you are your own", "emancipation", and other such nonsense. We may be free agents but by nature we are bound. Individualism, especially the radical sort espoused here, is a luxury afforded to children and others who lack wider responsibilities.

The ideology was formulated in individualist terms yet was practiced in collectives. This worked since there were homogeneous communities that stuck together naturally and people didn't really use their right to identify as whatever they wanted and engage in moral relativism.

This is true for all societies at all times. Moral relativism is an unstable solution long-term, and gives way sooner or later to a moral consensus. This is because there is a non-trivial level of values-coherence needed before the negotiation and cooperation required for a complex society become possible. No non-collective society of any appreciable scale has ever been observed. Sooner or later, people come together to coordinate around a shared understanding of the good, and to punish those who defect from that good.

However, in the past couple of decades, the people have started to practice the law as written in the sense that they are engaging in true individualism.

That certainly was the claim. It does not seem to me that such a claim can be sustained post-2014. Once the old conservative social consensus grew weak enough, the resulting absence of a coherent value framework invited alternative ideologies to make their play for hegemony. The Libertarian ideal of "true individualism" is simply incompatible with human nature.

Gay marriage, feminism, multiculturalism, transgenderism etc do in many ways follow from true individualism.

...Except that all of these find themselves enforced by collective action and, increasingly, state power. Christian desire for unrestrained hegemony can at least be pushed back against with the "separation of church and state" meme. Progressive ideology doesn't see itself as a religion, and so accepts no restraint to its ideological demands against dissenting individuals, first through social pressure and then through explicit force of law. Libertarian ideology has proved entirely powerless to arrest such enforcement.

What many conservatives actually want is to enforce their values, norms, and culture on society.

To a first approximation, everyone wants to do this. The constituency of truly-principled libertarianism is vanishingly small. People want to work together to solve their problems, and they want to solve defection by coordinating overwhelming punishment of the defectors. If I murder my neighbor's kid, he doesn't want to have to do calculus on whether he personally can coordinate enough force to hold me accountable. Why prefer that to the nigh-omnipotent collective force of the entire United States of America turned against me?

They may say they want a separation between church and state and that they think that religion is up to the individual.

Many conservatives were willing to accept and even adopt this line of thought, when it could be plausibly claimed that a stable libertarian détente was possible. That argument is no longer credible, and probably never will be again within any of our lifetimes. Call it religion or ideology, common sense or The Science, but some form of values coherence will be enforced by the majority on all dissenting minorities. Far from being dystopian, such enforcement has been the basis for every good thing we've ever gotten out of society; people need such enforcement to work and live together in peace.

Instead, they end up being hypocritical, making unnecessarily convoluted arguments and not promoting what they want since they are bound by an ideology that isn't inline with their goals.

The hypocrisy is certainly real, but I see no evidence that it's limited to conservatives, or is indeed much the fault of most of the hypocrites in question. Our entire society is founded on an incoherent ideology, and what you are seeing is simply that incoherence unavoidably expressing itself over and over again. The Enlightenment believed that people were fundamentally good, and that commonality of values would naturally emerge from the primordial ooze of liberty if only stultifying social control systems were removed. When those systems are removed and things reliably get worse, people rush straight back into imposed social controls, only usually in a far more arbitrary and less workable fashion than what they had before, trading long-evolved and highly fit mechanisms for naïve solutions derived from the local groupthink and labeled "reason" and "science".

One winning strategy I can see is to stake out a piece of land and establish a zone in which norms are enforced.

Why allow such a patchwork to exist? Value of diversity for its own sake? Epistemic humility? Neither seem common enough to be a basis for meaningful social structure. Fear of the destructive results of runaway conflict is the classic answer, drawing on the example of the Peace of Westphalia. But of course, the peace of Westphalia was instituted in the exhaustion following one of the most destructive periods of protracted warfare in human history, and was instituted in an environment of relative values-homogeneity. Even with such favorable conditions, it could not last indefinitely, and the concepts it was founded on now seem quaint.

To a first approximation, no one is ever going to accept a bunch of rapists founding Rape Town just down the road. A generation of serious liberalism can generate sufficient values-drift to make equivalent disputes over values inevitable. Truly diverse peoples will, in fact, adopt values sufficiently and mutually repugnant such that there's not enough room in the country, continent, or solar system for the both of them. Social controls keep regenerating themselves because they solve this problem proactively, by counteracting values drift and keeping the vast majority in pleasing accord with one another. Such societies still have diversity, still have individualism... just maybe not as much as committed Libertarians might prefer.

Conservatives have on the one hand almost uplifted a constitution and political system built around the state as a neutral arbitrator between individuals to a third testament while at the same time often showing a desire to live in a state with a clear culture, religion and moral foundation.

This, on the other hand, is entirely correct. The primary failure of Conservatives is a belief that long-standing social structures are in some way immutable and omnipotent, that rules self-enforce somehow outside the will of the humans involved. Having had their desires effectively constrained by appeals to the Constitution, they imagine that the Constitution constrains everyone's values equally. This is obviously a stupid inference to draw, but their experience and social setting left them ill-equipped to grok postmodern language games and other forms of adversarial social engineering. The resurgence of the illiberal right demonstrates, I think, that they're catching on. Time will tell.

I believe Tanner Greer's analysis here covers similar ground. The Puritans weren't the only founding culture of America, but are the source of much of its elite culture, including on the right. Their collectivizing and moralizing impulses are fundamentally opposed to the folk libertarianism of much of the republican base, which descends from the culture of the Scotch-Irish borderers who settled the Appalachian frontier. Trying to meld them together is like trying to build a secular nation-state by mobilizing a population of tribal Islamists, and the track record there is not great.

Problem is that libertarianism (even folk libertarianism) is a vanishing minority of the republican base but as a rule it will be the only flavor of republicanism that the average college-educated gay aethiest FAANG worker living in SF or NY will have had direct dealings with and thus it occupies an outsized place in both the motte, and the media's discourse.

I believe much of the American right would consider an appropriately palette-swapped version of Turkey’s politics to be somewhat of an improvement.

This is meant to be taken as a thesis, and as a start of a discussion of what conservatives actually want to achieve rather than soap-boxing.

As I've pointed out here in the past, conservatives do not actually want to achieve anything - they don't have a grand utopian vision that they want to realize. They are perfectly happy to do nothing, so long as nobody else gets to do anything either.

The problem isn't that conservatives don't want to actually achieve anything, it's that they are much less ideologically consistent than liberals. Just from seeing people post 'what conservatives value' in this thread indicates the wide spread of ideological differences that conservatives align themselves left, from libertarian types who believe in individual liberties to evangelicals who desire a God-centric government to business owners looking for less regulations to lower middle class complaining about taxes. The modern conservative group is more against anti-woke ideology than they are a cohesive voting block; this makes actually constructive policy much harder to pass (see the recent McCarthy voting fiasco because conservatives congresspeople could not agree on a vote).

Just from seeing people post 'what conservatives value' in this thread indicates the wide spread of ideological differences that conservatives align themselves

All of this has been argued before.

The Dark Enlightenment, by Nick Land, 2013:

The left thrives on dialectics, the right perishes through them. Insofar as there is a pure logic of politics, it is that. One immediate consequence (repeatedly emphasized by Mencius Moldbug) is that progressivism has no enemies to the left. It recognizes only idealists, whose time has not yet come. Factional conflicts on the left are politically dynamic, celebrated for their motive potential. Conservatism, in contrast, is caught between a rock and a hard place: bludgeoned from the left by the juggernaut of post-constitutional statism, and agitated from ‘the right’ by inchoate tendencies which are both unassimilable (to the mainstream) and often mutually incompatible, ranging from extreme (Austro-libertarian) varieties of laissez-faire capitalist advocacy to strains of obstinate, theologically-grounded social traditionalism, ultra-nationalism, or white identity politics.

‘The right’ has no unity, actual or prospective, and thus has no definition symmetrical to that of the left. It is for this reason that political dialectics (a tautology) ratchets only in one direction, predictably, towards state expansion and an increasingly coercive substantial-egalitarian ideal. The right moves to the center, and the center moves to the left.

Etc.

On a separate note: I am still not sure why exactly we have to reinvent some stilted "Right Rationalism" now, at the cusp of Singularity, as if this line of thought, clear and precise, was deboonked by Scott in his NRx critique of obscurantist Moldbuggian gobbledygook and we had a decade to ponder on merits of polyculae and gender theory. Scott, of course, is in a traditional marriage with a straight woman these days, and I gather their planned children will be more traditional still – perhaps even Orthodox.

AutisticThinker with his assabyiah fixation was a hundred times more insightful than mainstream rats. It's telling that he became akin to a plague to the respectable Mottizens.

AutisticThinker was either a troll, or someone whose mental disability caused him to act like a troll, which should be handled like a mental disability forcing someone to rob banks--you may have slightly more pity for him, but he doesn't belong anywhere near a bank.

AutisticThinker with his assabyiah fixation was a hundred times more insightful than mainstream rats. It's telling that he became akin to a plague to the respectable Mottizens.

I'm reminded of the old "Jews in the attic" (something came up a number of times in my arguments with AT) the idea being that regardless of truth value the correct response to "are you hiding Jews in your attic?" is always "no". Insert quip about context here.

If you're sure that there are no Jews in your attic, 'yes' is defensible.

this makes actually constructive policy much harder to pass...

Can you give some examples of "constructive policy" enacted in Conservatives' absence? Perhaps at the state level?

Maybe constructive policy isn't correct - I just meant policy in general simply because there is a lack of uniformity of opinion

I've been arguing for a while that what people generally think of when they hear the term "policy" doesn't, strictly speaking, exist. Laws get passed with some frequency, but it seems to me that there's very little observable connection between the laws being passed and the outcomes those laws are supposed to generate, and that this fact doesn't actually seem to have any impact on either the people writing the laws or the people voting for them. Having watched this process for more than two decades now, I find it impossible to maintain credulity that the standard model of our political system is descriptive.

When you talk about "policies", I think you're referring to a planned intervention in our social systems to try to improve some specific thing. We make all the cops wear body cams, or we start teaching the 1619 curriculum in fifth grade, or maybe we start allowing prayer in school, and each of these is supposed to improve metric x or y or z. Can you think of such interventions in your lifetime that have clearly worked? Where has policy been a clear win, to give us an idea of what obstruction is costing us?

They are perfectly happy to do nothing, so long as nobody else gets to do anything either.

This isn't really true. First, for plenty of conservatives there are a lot of progressive measures which they believe are harmful and they would like to roll back. That alone means that conservatives would like to do something, and they would only accept "everybody does nothing" as a compromise solution to stop further progressive measures they think would be harmful.

Second, as @aqouta recently put it (with respect to conservative views on finances): the conservative vision is that things are pretty good right now, and that they don't want to ruin a good thing by messing with it too much. However, that does not preclude careful improvements. Conservatives don't believe that the world has ever been literally perfect, and they are in fact open to making changes. They simply want reforms to be of the incremental variety, not the "reshape large swathes of society all at once" variety.

I mostly agree with this but I'll slightly quibble with word choice. It's less that things are pretty good now, although they are, and more that the conservatives view the motive force of progress as private action that depend only partially if at all on what the government does; mostly in the form of upholding private property rights, fixing rare tragedy of the commons/multi-polar trap situations and more than anything staying out of the way. As things stand the government not changing anything at all accomplishes 1 and 3 pretty well and neglecting 2 as a compromise is probably worth it.

The progressive formulation however views collective/government action as the main thrust of progress citing things like the civil rights act and legislation enshrining minority rights. In it's proper place this isn't wrong or anything and has some positive trade offs but it's going to lead to pretty different perspectives on how tragic a government that does nothing is.

You've presented a conservative libertarianism, @SubstantialFrivolity a Burkean conservativism. Both are at odds with progressivism, which is going to use state action to drag you kicking and screaming into the future whether you like it or not, and a more harsh traditional conservatism which would use state action to force you into your proper role or into prison (or exile in times when that was an option). They are also at odds with each other but less so. But this doesn't mean they don't have a vision.

I don't have much to add except that you may be interested in reading a related article from Aaron Ross Powell over at Reimagining Liberty. Powell is a libertarian who thinks the fusionist alliance between libertarians and conservatives was a big mistake for libertarianism. In the article above he develops a similar thesis as your comment. That conservatives often have preferences towards certain kinds of social and economic arrangements that are disrupted when people are free to develop and live out their own conception of the good, so that there is a tension between the idea of being a conservative and supporting ones liberty to lives ones life the way one wants.

In a world where most people accept or go along with the conservative’s preferences, he will see little reason to use the state to enforce his preferred patterns because they will be, in effect, self‐enforcing. This is why, for a time, fusionism looked like it might work. Conservatives were broadly in favor of markets and against regulation because greater wealth is good and because most people’s economic behavior and the resulting outcomes weren’t a threat to conservative preferences. Leftist big government, on the other hand, was a threat. This enabled conservatives and libertarians to find common ground on opposing big government, repealing regulations, and promoting free enterprise.

In a world where society’s contours and tastes largely align with a conservative’s values, he will support political and economic liberty because they bring recognizable benefits such as freedom for his religious practice, plentiful high‐paying jobs in places he wants to live, and so on. But in a state of freedom, the economy and culture are never static.

In contemporary America, secularism is on the rise while membership in organized religion declines. Women are spending more time pursuing education and careers, are earning more money, and so are having fewer children. The population of cities is growing, in large part because their economic and cultural dynamism make them attractive places to live. Immigrants are introducing new ideas, languages, aesthetic preferences, foods, and ways of living, and many of those are catching on in popular culture.

In other words, the conservative’s preferred patterns are being disrupted by liberty. Being free means people have the option to choose lives that are different, sometimes radically so, from what the conservative prefers. Freedom has increased wealth, making it easier for them to make those choices. And it has increased dynamism, upending old economic arrangements such as those which enabled middle‐class jobs in small towns.

In this changed world, political conservatism has two options. The first is to reject liberty. In recognizing that political and economic liberty have undermined their preferences, they’ll demand that the state restrict freedoms in order to incentivize or coerce people into returning to the conservative’s preferred way of life or to prevent them from continuing to do things that threaten it. In this case, political conservatism places this pattern above the liberty‐maximizing pattern, and so conservatism is no longer an ally with, or even compatible with, libertarianism.

The second option begins similarly, in that political and economic liberty cut against conservative values and preferences. But instead of fighting the tide, this conservative accepts it. It’s not ideal from a conservative perspective, but they recognize the need to respect everyone’s liberty to choose, even if their choices are distasteful. In this case, the conservative sees that liberty has disrupted his favored patterns, but he still sees the government’s role as maximizing liberty. But notice that, in taking this path, our conservative isn’t a political conservative at all, because now his political philosophy is aimed at maintaining maximum liberty. Thus there’s no need to make a case for the compatibility of conservatism and libertarianism, because the conservative and the libertarian are now both libertarians, though perhaps with different cultural tastes.

Your winning strategy is Waco. It doesn't work because the Feds eventually come to shoot at your women and children with incendiary ammunition. And if you resist that's proof you deserved it.

You're not allowed to escape the system.

And the reply is that if you're worrying about what is "allowed" you've already failed. The correct answer will always be "Let them come."

If you want to die stupid, maybe.

The correct answer will always be "Let them come."

Tell it to David Koresh's crispy corpse.

So what, let's just have Waco then. A 1000 Waco if needed.

To all the Republicans who think the elections were stolen. So what? Be better. Cheat twice as well as them. Biden gets 80 million votes? Get Trump 160 million votes. Have news anchors read 'the real voting results comrade' at gunpoint on Election Day. Next time you feel like waltzing into the Capitol and having a gay little BBQ, actually do something. They shoot one of yours? Shoot two of them. Burn down the whole place. You will get years in prison anyway.

Some of us are hoping it doesn't come to that. Peace is valuable, and not easily repaired once broken.

A more hopeful option is a strategy of large-scale defiance of federal law, "sanctuary" cities and states, in hopes of forcing sufficient concessions by fiat accompli. The name of the game is brinksmanship, and the first side to start large-scale violence quite possibly loses.

the first side to start large-scale violence quite possibly loses.

What is the threshold you have in mind, and why is the Summer of 2020 below that threshold?

A fair point. Allow me to rephrase: large-scale, cross-tribal, lethal violence. Summer of 2020 was mostly blue-tribe-on-blue-tribe, and the incidents that weren't were thankfully isolated. While the violence we did get was very bad and appears to have done catastrophic long-term damage to our society, it has not yet resulted in a spiral of retaliatory terrorism and murder.

Yes, what people presenting solutions don't want to see is that there's a meta-rule built into society which simply says "you lose", and until that's removed nothing will work. But it's a major blackpill so of course few want to see it.

Yes, what people presenting solutions don't want to see is that there's a meta-rule built into society which simply says "you lose", and until that's removed nothing will work

This is a lie told to you by your Marxist college professors.

The truth is that you were always were going to lose, and yet that this has never been an obstacle to making things "work". Your Marxist college professor wants you to believe that you can make things better by tearing society down not because it was true but because he/she/xe wanted your help. It is a fundamental law of the universe that you can not "win" only "break even", or "delay the inevitable". Accordingly the best any of us can hope for is to delay the inevitable. The enemy always wins and we still to fight him.

Only a true liberal would would be so arrogant and culturally ignorant to believe in the possibility of a final victory this side of Armageddon.

This is a lie told to you by your Marxist college professors.

No. I actually didn't have any Marxist college professors, at least none who were out about it in class.

Only a true liberal would would be so arrogant and culturally ignorant to believe in the possibility of a final victory this side of Armageddon.

Thermodynamics doesn't really apply here. In the long term we get the heat death of the universe. In the short term -- and human lifetimes are extremely short term, with all of human history being short term -- we can win or lose. There is no law of the universe that says the left must win; it's an entirely human law.

It is a fundamental law of the universe that you can not "win" only "break even", or "delay the inevitable".

What does "final" mean? If they keep increasing their power until the fact that their system simply cannot work becomes evident and civilization falls, that's final enough. Sure, after the collapse human society will probably rebuild, but that is no comfort to me, who will not live that long (I likely will not live long enough to even see the collapse, despite their best efforts).

The point isn't to independently escape the system but to change the system to allow for the enforcement of local norms. I don't personally agree with this idea (it would render the 14th Amendment largely useless), but that's what the OP was arguing.

You can solve this problem by ‘not hoarding machine guns’ and ‘not having underaged harems’.

The Branch Davidians were not "hoarding machine guns". The girls in the underaged harem were all burned alive in a fire that began immediately after federal agents launched pyrotechnic grenades into a highly flammable wooden structure, and then detained responding fire department vehicles until it was too late to do anything but cool the ashes, before engaging in an extensive coverup that nevertheless collapsed roughly a decade later.

I strongly oppose "christian" cults that discover that their leader needs to have a harem. I oppose government agents burning men, women and children alive to cover up a botched PR campaign a whole lot more.

Branch Davidians

Obligatory twitter thread for people who want to crawl into this rabbit hole.

TL;DR: the official line on Waco is as accurate as official line on ... anything else.

https://twitter.com/mattakersmusic/status/1528054223254040578

edit: link

I'm skeptical of anyone claiming CIA involvement, and deeply skeptical of connections to more general conspiracy theories like government mind control experiments, but a lot of the actual, documented evidence about interactions and specific government violations seems legit. I don't think there's any connection to a grand dramatic narrative in Waco. The government was looking to make an example of some weirdos for PR purposes, tried to manufacture a dramatic armed raid, fucked up, and then killed a whole lot of people in a plausibly-deniable way during the cover-up.

No need for any CIA stuff. Just ask anyone spouting the official line how the hell the government loses an entire door. The double front door to the compound is where the shooting started. The Davidians claim ATF shot first. ATF presented one of the doors, with bullet holes going out. The other door simply vanished.

So it's proven they lied for years about the incendiary nades but I should trust them not to plant machine guns on the premises and generally falsify more evidence why?

What about Ruby Ridge? Weaver survived and it was proven in court he didn't make a machine gun, that's not going to resurrect his wife.

No, you can't solve this problem by obeying the law. They'll find a reason to fuck with you, they don't give a shit whether you're guilty or not.

The Hasids do an excellent job, actually a perfect job of maintaining an insular community. Their strategies can be studied and copied. Their victories are stunning, they literally take hundreds of millions of the gentiles’ money and use it to indoctrinate their children into the Hasidic culture. There’s no reason why sufficiently motivated conservatives cannot begin to organize according to an Hasidic template.

In the early days of this site, there was an extremely interesting comment regarding one user's investigation into their ways to evade taxes in NYC, appropriate much more or the city budget money than commonly reported (by orders of magnitude, to the extent NYT investigation would be more of a coverup in comparison) and generally run things like a powerful mafia. He deleted it, unfortunately, and in private communication stated that on further reflection he'd rather support people abusing the system for valid darwinian ends than disgusting deracinated liberal NPC drones who believe they're fundamentally on its side and it only needs a little tuning (to wit, us).

I think he just got cold feet, perhaps because it dawned on him (or someone politely made him aware) he left traces of his sleuthing all over. It's honestly hard to never leave identifying traces.

Groups without the ability to inspire such mind-numbing fear are fucked. And I don't think anyone would fear a bunch of conservatives.

Groups without the ability to inspire such mind-numbing fear are fucked. And I don't think anyone would fear a bunch of conservatives.

What group? Hasids?

If so, they have indeed an advantage that other mafias, gangs and cartels cannot even dream about.

Italian Americans once tried to learn from the best and emulate their success. Unfortunately, too little and about a century too late.

I remember that. He worked in a federal department that handed out grants, I think by phone line. He looked into the businesses and they weren’t really eligible for them and many didn’t exist. Did you happen to screen shot that comment?

No, missed by like an hour. This reminded me, painfully, that one should never trust things on the Internet to not just disappear on you.

There are tools for continuous browser grabbing, implemented in different ways from caching to actual recording.

This reminded me, painfully, that one should never trust things on the Internet to not just disappear on you.

Everything lasts forever on the internet unless you actually need it - then it never existed in the first place.

I once had this weird theory that, whenever I embedded a video on Tumblr, it would bring more attention to YouTube's invisible police bots, eventually ensuring its takedown.

But the welfare office staff they're conning don't hate them or sit around the office all day talking about driving them into the sea. That makes a big difference.

Gentile conservatives who tried to do what they do would be instantly slapped with investigations from the state prosecutor and probably have their kids taken from them.

The Amish don’t. The broader fundamentalist Christian landscape in America is threatened with losing their children more often than average, but they don’t actually lose them that often(in part because they will just take their children and disappear when CPS is probably going to take them away, and social workers don’t get paid enough to attract the best and brightest). And of course, actually working for a living instead of living off of welfare fraud also helps a lot.

St. Mary’s, Kansas, is a majority traditionalist catholic town in the USA. By all accounts it’s a near theocracy and they get away with it. Heck even the FLDS(which violates significantly more laws) still runs their own towns and gets their kids back.

St. Mary’s, Kansas, is a majority traditionalist catholic town in the USA. By all accounts it’s a near theocracy and they get away with it.

What's this? That town doesn't sound familiar to me.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/01/retreat-christian-soldiers/603043/

Cheers, that was an interesting read.

Change takes time. No one would be making such propaganda if advertisers were seriously boycotted and funders had legal protestors outside their businesses and activist-journalists phoned up all of their past classmates and partners fishing for reputational damage.

The Hasids also had their fare-share of rock-slinging a la David & the Goliath: https://www.nytimes.com/1978/12/03/archives/70-are-hurt-including-62-officers-as-hasidim-storm-a-police-station.html

The American right doesn't believe in its own ideology of individualism and therefore is stuck in a losing spiral of hypocrisy.

Isn't conservatism to some extent at odds with atomistic individualism? Conservatism has always been in a losing battle, save for a handful off issues like taxes and guns, because of the tendency of norms to not stay fixed but move leftward .

They may say they want a separation between church and state and that they think that religion is up to the individual.

Few conservatives argue this. This would be libertarians. Religion being up to the individual is not the same as separation of church and state.

Isn't conservatism to some extent at odds with atomistic individualism?

I believe that's the point. American conservatives employ individualistic and libertarian rhetoric in support of their political goals, but while this makes some amount of sense in the context of opposition to welfare or regulation, it is more broadly incoherent because they're religious communitarians rather than libertarian individualists. You might be able to square banning abortion with libertarianism on the grounds that you regard it as murder, but it's harder to do that for, e.g. restricting drugs and alcohol, wanting Christianity to have a privileged status, banning immigration, or more generally wanting collectively enforced conservative social norms.

I'm not entirely convinced by the above; I think the GOP's failure to achieve many of its goals are less a matter of a mismatch between goals and rhetoric and more a matter of being unable to resolve real tension between disparate goals (or between their stated goals and maintaining electoral success). Of course, a mismatch between goals and rhetoric may impede the resolution of these tensions, but the root issue is their existence in the first place.

American conservatives employ individualistic and libertarian rhetoric in support of their political goals

Do they? As I alluded to up thread I feel like this post is in large part motivated by a failure to recognize that "Libertarian" and "Conservative" are not the same thing and that Libertarians are tiny minority within the US right relative to conservatives.

I have the impressions sometimes that people who rediscover non-individualistic ideology end up looking even less individualistic than those that are already there. Their conclusions from it tend to be very ant-colony-maintainance and top-down-rule, because theyre applying the same egoist materialism as before, but now from the perspective of the community instead of an individual.

This is how many people see things even after doing the first step away from individualism, and most definitely before that. So when you talk about Great Men in any context other than them already being leaders who are followed, it will sound relatively more individualistic to them.

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