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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31763 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.

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

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