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Notes -
A new post then. Below @samiam linked to a National Review piece that mocks a recent article in The Atlantic titled "Left-Wing Terrorism Is on the Rise".
The Atlantic is a center-left institution of American journalism. The not-magazine is capable of pushing certain signals over the hill into respectability status. This signal: it's okay to acknowledge left-wing violence as a problem, because we can remind ourselves the right's stochastic terror was successfully defeated, but not forgotten. How significant is it that a couple CSIS think tank goons can send this signal, and how much impact can they have?
In the previous paragraphs the authors set-up their prescription of "programs and expertise" only this time aimed leftward. They justify this by granting the Biden admin (and probably themselves) credit for throwing the book at Oath Keepers and Proud Boys following their January 6th doings. If memory serves the Proud Boys were a group of capital P-atriots who showed up to protests, dared their opposites to do the same, then engaged in fistfights. This is political violence and its escalation can be a concern, but it's not the same risk as a growing number of political assassinations. Assassinations seemingly perpetrated by culture warriors first, not ideologues.
The programs and expertise of think tank goons are unlikely to bring about an effective reversal in cultural trends. Disaffected radicals aren't in the habit of being persuaded by them. I offer two actionable alternatives:
Idea #1: Indoctrination works. Reinvigorate civic indoctrination in schools. Sell this one as renewed civic literacy and try not to pollute it too badly with culture war. Federally fund it as an opt-in for states to participate.
I suspect we do a piss poor job of teaching civics, politics, or anything in the shape of political philosophy in K-12. We do a poor enough job educating kids on subjects we care enough about to measure. We do not even attempt to teach kids to think about social fabric. Instead, we water it down to be meaningless or replace it with with diversity-isms and sin. Then we are surprised the kids go on to be demoralized by short-form videos which they accept as valid belief generators.
Idea #2: Semi-mandatory service. Want Pell grants or Medicare? Better sign up, 18 year old you. You can join the military, or you can go to a national forest to survey land for a year. Compulsory-but-not-compulsory service might sound like state violence to some, and fascism to others, but maybe we can find a few programs in addition to the military that a supermajority could support staffing with conscripted teens.
If the alternative of New Deal conscripts is instead waiting to figure out how to best Balkanize I say we give it a go. What might be other ideas for actionable things to combat the misery and cultural malaise?
Unironically ~all of this is downstream of broken dating/relationship-formation norms and scripts among young people. The sexual revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race, and I am extremely blackpilled and pessimistic about our odds of putting that particular genie back in the bottle whence it came.
People laughed at Rudyard Lynch's incel revolution predictions but historical trends don't lie: having a lot of disaffected men with nothing but violence to turn to is massively destabilizing.
Robinson had a partner but threw his life away anyway. I mean, technically. Presumably they were intimate.
Yeah but the rise of absurd Trans polycules and whatnot is downstream of all these guys being unable to participate in standard heterosexual relationships and gooning themselves into psychosis
Many male porn addicts seem to be in sexually active relationships though. Besides, I don’t think it’s clear that men with trans ‘girlfriends’ couldn’t find female partners, that seems spurious.
Dude was a medium autistic edgelord living in bumfuck nowhere Utah. I don't think he was prime steer in that heterosexual dating market.
He wasn't a school dropout, he wasn't (previously) in trouble, and he wasn't ugly. Guy who's doing an apprenticeship, is reasonably smart and averagely good-looking can find a girlfriend (I would say "particularly in bumfuck nowhere Utah") if he wanted a girlfriend. No, he's not going to get hot liberal college chick, but "conventional Mormon girl from lower middle-class background" is not out of his range.
If he was living with a boyfriend-turned-transitioning male to female, then he's gay or bi and not looking for a (cis) het girl.
The rural western US generally has a male slant in the population. Entirely possible he just wasn't going to be able to find a girlfriend- and the trades are not high status among mormons, who push college very strongly(in fairness, their college is free).
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I'm not sure "prime steer" and "heterosexual dating market" belong in the same sentence, considering a steer is definitionally castrated.
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His partner was a man in a dress, though
Yeah. Most of that divergent stuff has come from people having too much access to weird porn and finding it hard to accomplish the proverbial 'get a girlfriend'. Whilst I'm sure there's some small % of the Queer population that'd lean that way regardless, but there's a pretty heavy social contagion that's only been exacerbated by systematic dysfunction in normal hetero relationship formation.
I think the opposite explanation is far more likely, until recently the pressure to be in a hetero relation was extremely strong and any “divergent” behaviour was kept tightly under wraps. The Kinsey reports from the 1940s found 37% of males had at least one homosexual experience, 11.6% were about equally bisexual and 10% were more-or-less exclusively homosexual.
I’ve known plenty of gay and bisexual men and none fit the profile of “watched too much porn, couldn’t get a girlfriend”. Gay men just have completely different innate sexual appetites, and lots of bi men are closeted and cheating on their girlfriends and wives. The closest thing to what you’re describing would be bisexual men choosing to hook up with men because it takes less effort to organise than ordering from DoorDash, or men dating trans women because they’re more “chill”, but I can’t believe being an incel for long enough will make you want to shove a penis into your mouth with as much enthusiasm as these guys had.
The Kinsey report is not credible. The methodology was very flawed
It’s flawed for sure, but there is substantial anecdotal evidence that the percentage of men willing to engage in homosexual activity, especially in substantially or entirely male communities (men at war, men in prison, all-male boarding schools, male-only religious institutions) is probably higher than the 3-5% estimates of gay men.
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I've had a few friends kinda dabble in furry/gay/whatever culture whilst effectively 'incels' during University which generally went away as soon as they managed to somehow find a girlfriend. I also think that the whole transfetishist movement is a tad bit different to homosexual inclinations on part of a decent chunk of society, or atleast there's a feedback loop that's emphasizing it at present.
I’m really struggling to understand how having a hard time finding a girlfriend can make someone want to dress up as an anthropomorphic animal and have sex with other men in similar costumes. I can understand having those urges, getting into a relationship and it being too embarrassing to share so you just suppress it (although I’m sure many still explore them in porn), or being single because you have non-standard sexual interests and can’t find someone that fulfils you.
I do get that the internet/porn amplifies underlying fetishes and makes you seek more extreme stimuli, but I don’t think it can make a straight man gay or vice-versa, or a vanilla person interested in furry fandom.
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I mean, it's family - children, specifically - that has historically been the fundamental anchor of the social unit. Relationships that can't or won't bear children are fundamentally different than those that will.
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