This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I don't think the USSR was a particularly feminised society. Blue-haired feminists may consider themselves communist, they may even be communists, but they definitely haven't established Socialism in One Country.
Why? I think it was very feminized- layers of bureaucracy simply to make work (especially important for women), a total lack of emphasis on family formation and children (China is an even better example of that), and total equality of outcome (which favors the gender with the evolutionary disadvantage when it comes to producing physical things at scale).
Were the same things true of the fascists? No; where communists increase bureaucracy fascists do away with it, where communists fail to provide suitable accommodations fascists say 'living space', and equality of outcome is as far as I can tell not a thing for a Nazi (unless it's a group for which a claim that they owe reparations can be made).
I was just a baby at the time, but that seems a bit off. My parents told me the message at the time was "the family is the basic cell of a society", and other such slogans that you could easily mistake for coming from the Tradcath sphere.
Talk is cheap, of course. What did they actually do to support the average working-class non-party-member family? Granted, they did do the Nazi thing of rounding up co-ethnics and shipping them off to concentration camps in Siberia, but far as I know that wasn't an explicit policy goal and was more about paying off supporters than anything that would have benefited the average Russian.
By contrast, there's a country in the Near East- the ethnicity of its founders even had 'nazi' as part of their name- that despite its small size actively sends armed 'settlers' into a combat zone to displace the natives there, spends a great deal of treasure doing this, and the people that do those things have a TFR above 2. That just ain't a thing the average communist does.
Because they don't have to. Russia / the USSR is a different creature, but the Soviet satellite states were so ethnically homogeneous, they'd give the average Californian a stroke. And come to think of it this might even apply to the USSR, give or take minor Soviet Republics being flooded with ethnic Russians to maintain control, it's not like you were free to travel around that country. As for TFR, I think my generation is the last above-replacement one.
Rather than not 'having' to, I assert they didn't want to as a natural consequence of feminine systems only ever competing internally for dominance.
Societies become feminine when they become overpopulated relative to the economic opportunity per capita present. If there's sufficient population they turn to mass murder; that's where the [people of the] Khmer Rouge's "let's murder 1 in 4 people for Mean Girls reasons" philosophy came from. And then there's the South Koreans- a different culture, yes- but they prefer to conduct this conflict by just not reproducing instead of mass post-natal abortion (or pre-natal in the Chinese case).
Now, saying 'economic opportunity' is papering over an utterly massive sum of factors- more advanced technology can either help or hurt this based on who's needed to get the most of it (either it centralizes it and makes capital more valuable, or it decentralizes it and makes labor more valuable; industry was generally the latter, but as labor costs rise all advancements have been in the centralization direction re: robotics). And environmental factors can affect this as well.
And sure, mass murder isn't necessarily unique to feminine societies- late 18th century France being kind of the poster child of that far more than the Nazis were, but if you think of the French Revolution as a massive power vacuum collapsing due to the [not working-class] losing their ability to hold it together (due to technological factors) over 5-10 years, then the working class installing its dictator (Bonaparte), and then striking out to impose the [second] European Union?
To be fair, this model does have some holes- I'm still not entirely sure how to explain the ritual mass suicide euphemistically called "World War 1" other than "we finally figured out metallurgy and assembly lines good enough to do it, so we went for it solely for shits and giggles".
But those wars did create a particular political thinker who did notice that humanity dies when all the world turns female; 1984 is a treatise on that. (So's Animal Farm, for that matter, but it's not explicitly incel-coded like 1984 is.)
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
As feminists (and even superficially non-feminist women) will tell you, even today's society isn't. The USSR definitely did have a short stint of the sort of progressive craziness we are facing right now, which Stalin had to cut short, when he realized it's ruining the country, and he might have a war or two to fight.
Translation: Stalin perceived that the valuation of men in society increased (or would increase), resulting in it being necessary to pander more to their interests lest his forces simply permit the Germans to walk right into Moscow and overthrow the government through inaction.
Yeah, he should get some credit for that. It's more than you can say for Republican Spain, or even modern progressives.
Or Imperial Russia, whose failure to do exactly this was the entire reason Stalin rose to Tsardom in the first place.
Sure, but that still means credit goes to Stalin, no?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link