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I was in a Ph.D program in 2014, hoping to go into academia, and I ended up dropping out because I could see that there was no way forward. I know it's a tournament profession and my odds were never good, but once I was inside it became apparent that it was in fact literally hopeless.
I ended up going into technology, because it was the only sufficiently merit-based thing I could find in which I could sort of force open the door. Even there, I think I got a senior role just in time, as I hear the entry level is very very bad these days. I've had conversations with my wife about what we might advise our future children to do with their lives, and I've mentally prepared to tell them that certain dreams are just impossible, and some things can only ever be a hobby for us - even though there are other people who will be able to dedicate their whole lives to them. Maybe it's been a good thing, in that I was forced to keep some things I love as just a hobby, and so I never got burnt out on them by trying to make them a career.
This has always been true. If you really want to make a career out of something like painting, this has been true for basically all of history.
Basically most art and artisanal crafting (woodworking, etc) falls into this bucket
Edit: to be clear I'm not denying the rest of this, I'm just saying I grew up knowing that a significant number of interesting career paths were cut off due to lack of strong economic viability, thats not a new issue
I don't dispute that, but it also doesn't engage with the article's thesis: that there was a window that was previously open for white men to participate in these culture-making activities, which has been closed artificially. Of course it was never the case that everyone could e.g. write for The New Yorker - there were always too many people who would like to. But the premise before, and the ideal for which we should aim, was that whoever could do it best could get the role, regardless of their identity; and now identity is an impassable barrier.
Previously, the parental advice would have been: "It's great if you want to try and become a journalist, but try and build some hard skills as a fallback plan because it's hard to get a job in that." Now it's, "Don't try to become a journalist at all, the field is actually closed to you."
So fair, I was really just commenting on that isolated thought
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The piece addressed this point as well. Based on the stats white men did not migrate into other high-status fields like medicine, law, and tech, likely because of the same discriminatory hiring practices.
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Ding ding ding.
And then there's the added problem of "oh, and any other field you might want to try could arbitrarily be closed off to you if it ever becomes lucrative and high-status enough for entryists to target."
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Professional painters exist, and I don’t even mean housepainters(which anyone who isn’t visibly high when inquiring can get). Portrait artists have no control of the creativity of their profession, is all.
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Yeah I had a similar path, wanted to go for a history PhD but all my professors told me it was hopeless as a white man. I also went into a tech startup, and we crushed it, then I got fired two weeks before my equity would've vested despite far surpassing all the goals in my initial contract.
I try to keep the light in my heart alive, stay focused on Christ, etc, but damn I am fucking angry. I have to say. I wish there was a more constructive movement to end this shit, very sad to see that so much of the dissident right is just pure vitriol.
Bruh, you basically got Saverin-adjacented. I think Jesus would understand if you considered pursuing legal action or going on a revenge arc.
I ended up fighting for a decent settlement that was close to a year's income. Probably the better option all things being equal given that the CEO is insanely paranoid and pushed out everyone that did real work in the company. The CTO had it worse than I did but can't talk about that publicly.
Either way, given your posting history on here you're not exactly someone I'd ever look to for moral advice, tyvm.
I didn’t say anything about “moral advice” or advice in general.
For in general, when it comes to advice, I prefer giving, receiving, or neutrally reading effective rather than “moral” advice, whatever “moral” advice may be. Come to think of it, people who immediately reach for phrases such as “moral advice” or “stay[ing] focused on Christ” tend to have a pretty good track record in recent times of losing gracefully. A follower of my posting history might be aware of examples such as forgiving one’s son’s murderer, washing the feet of those who hate you, conceding the supposed non-negotiability of marriage being between a man and a woman.
I’m glad you were able to at least partially subvert the track record and recoup some of your deferred compensation; ywvm.
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I always find myself thinking about how people in our position handled this drastic narrowing of our scope of opportunities. I was very influenced by Rod Dreher's Benedict Option and Live Not by Lies, as well as Aaron Renn's The Negative World, which, rather than addressing the racial and gender aspects of this, deal with the anti-Christian nature of the current cultural moment; all of these books, in different ways, basically advise you to focus hyper-locally, to keep your internal locus of control alive, and build what you can in the little domain that you are actually able to influence. So I've done that. I've just been elected to a two-year term on my church's leadership board; I managed to get published in a little local history anthology by a small press; I settled down, bought a house in the Midwest and am trying to start a family.
Still - it's painful that we'll never know what we could have done if we were born into a different reality. I had dreams of being a popular novelist. I probably don't have the ability, but because of the cultural headwinds, I also gave up on that before I tried to reach my maximum potential. You might have been a great professor, or maybe you would not have; but people like us, with even greater ability than us, also got pushed into paths where their potentialities are never realized. I am reminded of Marjorie Morningstar by Herman Wouk, a mid-century novel about a girl who dreams of becoming an actress, and ends up shattered by the experience of continual failure. (And of course by encounters with an infamous cad.) Her outcome: a quiet, happy suburban life, but one in which her initial dreams are forgotten. She makes her peace with that, and I've mostly made my peace with what I couldn't do, and of course I can console myself by saying, "Well, that was just my attempt to be special, and I probably wasn't special anyway in the end." There are failures and mediocrities in every generation, but I would've at least liked to try on a more level playing field. Part of this is just growing up, but obviously part of it is that we were frankly cheated out of a fair shot; and it's only so much compensation to say, "Well, I made a great network engineer."
Indeed, you get it my friend. I also just took on a leadership position at my local parish, and am volunteering in a broader capacity with my larger church body.
I think that the best we can do is simply bide our time, spread awareness, and grow our social capital, our virtue, while supporting our side of the culture war here and there. Store up treasures in heaven, where moths can't destroy and thieves can't steal.
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If it helps, I do think that there's a lot of angry underemployed highly skilled men floating around right now, just waiting for a chance to do something. Trump is old and there's no clear successor, so there's a big power vacuum right now. X is a great organizational space. It feels like we've got the chance to do something now. I just don't know what.
My personal push would be to form a unified group that pledges simply to withhold tax payments while this particular discrimination regime is allowed to continue.
Needs to be enough buy-in that "they can't prosecute all of us" is a legitimate factor. And ideally pool funds to pay for attorneys for those who do get tried.
Yes, there's like a dozen ways the state can crack down on this, but that would actually force them to cross those lines OR negotiate.
It's harder to disrupt or de-legitimize such a group compared to one that threatens violent martial resistance. Hence why this approach would probably beat forming an informal militia.
This is nuts! Law fare is the tried and true way of damaging US institutions to effect change.
Who is going to pay for the lawfare?
Peter Thiel of course! There is always some rich white guy with an axe to grind in practice.
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I think you'll find that it's quite easy for the IRS to take your tax money. They don't even need to win a trial, they can just take it directly from your bank with a tax lien and force you to contest it. Unless you're talking about money laundering, but then that's a lot more complicated and a serious felony.
Not more serious than armed insurrection, of course.
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What does this look like? W2 income is already automatically taxed for e.g. FICA and to some extent income tax. And the government has plenty of well-exercised sticks to get compliance from both employers and employees.
The only way I can plausibly imagine this working is men going NEET en masse, and that may arguably already be happening. But it's unclear to me what change an army of NEETs can effect.
Yeah this is the "lying flat" movement in China, which is spiritually corrupt imo.
Personally I prefer a strategy of working a low-effort job, enduring relative material poverty, and putting more effort/energy into building social capital, virtue, and an awareness of the problems.
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There needs to be more vitriol. You can't just ask nicely not to be ethnically cleansed. The people you are up against have recently and openly learned they can just murder you, your children, and your representatives and suffer virtually no political consequences.
Vitriol is a start to what you need to do.
The guy who killed Charlie Kirk is suffering the consequences. He will likely be executed. What more do you want? Random innocent people to be punished as vengeance? People getting shot by random crazies is a fact of life in a free society, and the only person responsible is the killer.
Yes, the left traded a pawn for a knight or a bishop. Maybe even a queen. They don't seem too upset about that trade, and in the meantime they are winning elections, and their base is crying out for more political murders.
"Oh" you might say "But after Charlie Kirk was killed, thousands of chapters of Turning Point USA were founded!"
First, we'll see how that pans out, and second, the left decided they can murder those too.
Meanwhile almost every single popular conservative is afraid to appear in public because the left will murder them. The right has almost zero ground game because the left will murder them if they do.
It's a winning strategy, and I think we need more of it. Making journalist, judges, legislators and administrators fear for their life in public is a proven strategy.
Can we please wait until there's at least a suspect in custody before using the Brown shooting to support your narrative?
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Yes but this sort of hate-fueled rhetoric is just inaccurate which turns a ton of people off. Democrats lawmakers/elites are not openly murdering conservatives, poorly adjusted criminals and depressed schizos are. I understand that there's a strong argument to be made that the Democratic governance LEADS to these murders, but you have to actually make that argument!!
When you say things like
This loses you the moral high ground, and the fight when it comes to normies. You're being taken in by your rage and making strategic mistakes. It's not just that it's factually wrong it's that it's a losing strategy.
Democrats have been almost pure delusional hate-fueled rhetoric for most of my adult life, intensifying into cancerous ferocity over the last decade, and it doesn't seem to have turned anyone off on general principles.
No, it seems like that's just media dominance and message control. If you refuse to ever tolerate or acknowledge validity of criticism of your own extremists, you apparently can just brazen out the moral high ground.
The rhetoric of pro-Israel politicians is a great example of this point. Randy Fine can talk about how beautiful it is to see dead babies and call for the extermination of Palestinian children all he wants and the DNC aren't even willing to mildly chastise him, let alone pass a condemnation of him like they did for Nick Fuentes.
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Look up Jay Jones again.
You are point of fact wrong on every point.
Let me put that another way. Ten years ago everyone knew white males were being discriminated against. Say it then and people like you would accuse me of "giving into hate and losing the normies". Now that it's fait accompli, all the institutions have been lost, white family formation is in the toilet, and our country is lost, people are coming out of the woodwork admitting "Yeah, we did that shit". Articles like the above are allowed to be published. But it's too late, there is no reversing it.
And I'm sure in 10 years time, there will be another slate of late admissions "Yeah, we did permit the ethnic cleansing of white people. Oh well!". And when the actions required to make the survivors whole are proposed, people like you will once again wring their hands going "Woah, woah, that's too scary, you'll lose the normies!"
The normies need to be radicalized. And attempts must be made 24/7 to see that they are brought on board with saving themselves. If you are afraid of losing them, you are failing in your moral duty to save them.
Just a reminder that whites have the stablest TFR in the US, it's actually slightly ahead of the black TFR, that US immigration is more white than black, and that whites of any age are the most likely to be married. Your blackpill on white people is not true, although white demographic decline is still likely.
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You're not wrong, but what use is it to have a bunch of radicalized red tribers if there is no plan for them to fight back? As far as I can tell, the "The Republican Party is Doomed" article still holds true today. Without control of any important institutions, there's not a lot you can do.
"The Republican Party is Doomed" is still written by a man that conflates certification with education with job security with meaningful skills, and who today has yet to confront or recognize a very simple flaw downstream of what that means:
I don't think you can avoid plans happening, as people get radicalized, as someone who has even an inkling of what that could looks like, and very many good reasons to wish it wouldn't happen.
More seriously, there's a lot of options radicals have, many of which do not require vast planning or coordination, only common knowledge.
Some of those options aren't bad. If, as a completely random example, the left will be murdering political enemies with impunity or the police and prosecutors will just look the other way when someone on the right gets his or her face punched in... well, I was on team Pink Pistols when gay guys getting bashed was a non-zero risk. I'm not abandoning that because some people insist it'd be better if I were beaten than their brownshits shot, and if they've never said the name "Paul Kessler", I'm not going to even care. There's a functional moral and legal principle, here.
But the majority of options are bad, and they're still going to happen. There's some subtle stuff, like what happens when we it becomes common knowledge the Civil Rights Act doesn't and hasn't realled since its inception, and every jury the least competent lawyer in a red or purple state can manage will nullo your prosecutions, and any lawyer slightly above that Platkins out any attempt to Uno Reverso by getting jurisdiction in a blue state first.
And then there's an actual horror stories.
Remember Malheur? Two years ago, if it happened again, common knowledge had already become that people committing actual terrorist arson against federal police didn't get a 'mandatory' terrorism enhancement. Today, there is basically nothing the nuBundies could say that would cost them political support, and until and unless they literally shot -- not shot at -- federal officers, they'd still have behaved better than anti-ICE groups. That includes literally dropping heavy rocks onto the front windshields of fast-moving cars and people, or running for a national office with a nazi tattoo.
But don't worry, without a college diploma, Red Tribers won't drop rocks. That's a fancy-boy edujumacated physics problem. Electricians, machinists, plumbers, gun nuts, maintenance employees, firefights, construction workers, no possible relevant domain expertise. or at least none I'm willing to discuss publicly
Remember when FEMA decided that they weren't going to provide support to houses with Trump political signs? Ah, without the proper cred-en-tialis there's no way some Red Triber would end up walking door to door or considering neighborhoods dangerous based on matters tangentially related to politics. They'll just be a ton of people doing work requiring hands-on expertise, to serve people they hate and know hate them, with ready and long awareness of normal and subtle failure modes. No way they might be in evacuated neighborhoods before most residents return, with easy arguments to defend any place they could be at all.
Remember some of the California trans sanctuary laws? What do you think happens when the mainstream news reports a father just now kidnapping his son, the federal marshals heroically rip a long-pregnant early teenager from their parent's arms the next week, and no one can talk about what the kid's current gender presentation or who assaulted him to start with? Do you think there's anyone who can argue Loudon County a success case for gradual stepwise moderation? Do you think people need a medical doctorate to notice the difference between a week and twenty-one weeks? A historian's degree find every single person with their name on public record for those orders?
These don't require a plan. Many of them don't even require explicit coordination beyond listening to the news, sometimes even only listening to news reporters biased against them. They're not even indicia I think are particularly likely -- since I don't want this to happen, I'm not going to meme my way into disaster.
But think for five minutes, hard, about what thirty unrelated bad actors might individually want to do, just repeating the greatest hits of the last five years.
Then consider how much post-Civil Rights Act civility may have depended on how difficult it was to ensure an attack would hit the 'guilty' and not hit the 'innocent' -- as the charcoal briquettes rant highlighted, the Oklahoma City Bomber very specifically choose to burn children to death among others -- and what signal hearing "Kirk deserved it" jokes and 'jokes' from their neighbors have sent.
I would like it to not be this way. I don't see many people actually arguing it isn't. Only that it shouldn't be.
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There was no plan, and Charlie Kirk is still dead, the power he wielded in life shattered into a thousand pieces and scattered to the four winds.
You can make a pretty big impact without a "plan".
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