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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   22225 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 22, 2025

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Is wokism fundamentally the same thing as so called "slave morality?"

The way this issue came up for me is that a few threads back I claimed the following:

I think wokeness is the current name for a phenomenon which has infested Western culture for thousands of years.

So for example, consider biblical accounts of Jesus, who supposedly stood up for prostitutes and adulteresses. And proclaimed the poor are blessed, for theirs is the holy kingdom. While at the same time, stating that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.

In other words, the idea of revering and exalting low status, marginalized groups while dunking on the (perceived) elites -- as a way of virtue signalling -- is an old idea. it's difficult to see it going away any time soon.

To which another individual responded as follows:

Slave morality.

I was only vaguely familiar with the concept of "slave morality" so I had to look it up. This actually seems like the sort of thing for which AI might give an intelligent answer; here's what I found:

Slave morality, a concept by Nietzsche, is a value system originating from the weak and oppressed (like early Christians) that inverts the values of the powerful "master morality" out of resentment (ressentiment), turning traits like weakness, humility, and pity into virtues while labeling the masters' strengths (power, pride, wealth) as "evil". It's a reactive morality focused on equality, fairness, and protecting the vulnerable, contrasting with master morality's affirmation of strength, nobility, and self-creation.

Key Characteristics of Slave Morality

Origin: Arises from the powerless who lack the ability to act on their own will, leading to a reactive stance against their oppressors. Core Emotion: Driven by ressentiment (resentment, envy) towards those with power and status. Value Inversion: Redefines "good" as what the weak possess (humility, patience, kindness) and "evil" as what the strong have (pride, power, aggression). Focus: Emphasizes justice, equality, pity, and the alleviation of suffering for the downtrodden. Goal: Subtly seeks to overthrow the masters by making their values seem corrupt, ultimately aiming for universal mediocrity or control through subversion, not direct strength.

This does seem to ring a bell, but I think there's an important difference. In the drama of "slave morality," there are two players, the masters and the slaves.

By contrast, wokeness follows what Lawrence Auster used to call the "liberal script"

The answer is found in the “script” of modern liberalism, into which all phenomena in liberal society are automatically fitted. As I have explained before, the liberal script has three characters: (1) the liberal, who represents the principle of goodness, defined as compassion toward and inclusion of nonwhites/non-Westerners and other victims; (2) the non-liberal, who represents the principle of evil, defined as greed, discrimination, and intolerance toward nonwhites/non-Westerners and other victims; and (3) the nonwhite/non-Westerner or other victim, who is not a moral actor in his own right or even a fully formed human being, because his very function in the script is not to do anything but rather to be the passive recipient either of the liberal’s goodness or the non-liberal’s wickedness. If the nonwhite/non-Westerner were a moral actor, then his own actions, including his bad actions, would have to be judged. But to judge him negatively would be to discriminate against him, which would be to violate the very meaning and purpose of liberalism—the elimination of all discrimination against nonwhites/non-Westerners. Therefore the nonwhite/non-Westerner cannot be seen as a moral actor—as a human being who acts and is responsible for his actions.

In other words, there is (in my opinion) a third and key set of players in the wokeness movement -- elites (or aspiring elites) who pursue self-aggrandizement by advocating on behalf of Nietzsche's "slaves."

So it might be better to call it "striver morality" as opposed to "slave morality."

Eh, "slave morality" is just a boolight. I ignore any comment that invokes it, because they are trying too hard to edgelord.

If you're objecting to the word 'slave', then it can easily be euphemized as a superior/inferior axis. The meaning does not change.

Wokeness is the emanation of the brown/LGBT/feminist ressentiment against the spectre of 'white supremacy', which has expanded from mere racism to the entirety of what we would consider to be western civilization. Jealous iconoclasm and seething historical revisionism aside, is this not a collection of inferior moralities, of 'oppressions', trying to find a common superior morality to abhor?

You may disagree with Nietzsche, you may even disagree with people who use his concepts rhetorically, but it is absolutely not a boolight. It is being used in its intended purpose.

And yet here you are... Merry Christmas

And the same to you. Just finished cooking, serving up, and eating the dinner, so am now in a turkey-and-carbs stupor and noodling around online while I digest the meal and work up an appetite later on for "filling up the corners" 🎅

My polish relatives came by for the traditional Christmas Eve dinner and I won't cook again for a week.

Yeah, I don't have a ton of leftovers this year, but enough to do all the week and between all the sweets, crisps, cakes, etc. we got from work and gifts, no need to buy any goodies for a month!

Also disagree, because it's very very hard to separate things out from, you know, the Christian morality that preaches kind of the exact same thing. Where traditionally at least, many personality traits have opposites and one of them is straight up better or superior. Humility instead of pride, gratitude instead of envy, charity instead of greed, industriousness instead of sloth, kindness instead of cruelty, equality instead of inequality, meekness instead of being overbearing, peacemaking instead of violent dissension, being longsuffering instead of quick to anger, etc. Again traditionally, it's not common to see people preach that there's a such thing as being "too humble" or anything like that. The attributes are almost purely positive.

Interestingly to me at least, I really don't think "fairness" belongs here in that Christian virtue list, and to a lesser extent equality is strictly about emphasizing that we are equal in the eyes of God and goes not much further. Although Jesus clearly was all for voluntary charity and equality, as a policy prescription he doesn't offer too much, and it certainly doesn't appear in the Beatitudes or anything like that. Fairness as a concept does not really feature! In fact, the opposite; Christians have good doctrinal reasons to not be too concerned with fairness since it's explicitly proposed that things will be made right in the afterlife, a feature that partially contributed to its adoption in Medieval Europe by many states (it's very handy for those in power when these principles are individually sought but not systemically proposed).

At any rate I disagree with learned helplessness on behalf of the oppressed being necessarily a feature of wokeness, even if they coincide sometimes in practice. MLK is the classic canonical example of an "approved" method of peaceful yet notably strident and forceful resistance on behalf of the oppressed. In that sense "Slave Morality" seems purely pejorative or dismissive rather than truly descriptive.

I don't really know. I think it depends on the person doing it, and why they are doing. Master Morality and Slave Morality are primarily about why you do things and not what you do. Wokeness is largely nebulous and poorly defined, some people like it out a will to power, out of an overflowing sense of self. Others like it as a spite against those they resent.

But the grand irony of Nietzsche has always been this: those who crow about Master Morality are always engaging in Slave Morality. The people who call out the dominant culture as Slave Morality, who imagine a world where they will overthrow all the existing beautiful and good and make themselves kings, are life's losers, their hatred for everything that exists is fueled by resentment of their betters, of those luckier and taller and prettier and richer than they are.

This goes back more or less to Nietzsche, who was a luckless loser. He was no conqueror, no Blond Beast. He got laid once with a prostitute and caught syphilis, which slowly destroyed his career and body and mind. When he railed against the philistines and the slave morality of the majority, he was railing against the actually powerful and successful people liking the things that they like.

Catholicism is essentially the original of Nietzsche's slave morality, but it is also the religion of Charlemagne and the Lionheart and Don John of Austria.

My own journey with religion is very like this. As a child I was raised Catholic. As a teenager and college student, I explored other religions. As an adult, I realized that no other religion is meaningful to me, that I only considered them out of their opposition to Catholicism.

I think this is an egregious misreading of Nietzsche, which was wrong when Bertrand Russell argued it and wrong when religious "anti-Nietzscheans" do it - but the best cure to that is probably to keep on with Junger, "Nietzsche's only true student".

Wokeism is the opposite of slave morality. It is a tool of the elite to beat its own population. It is a way for a corrupt oligarchy to claim that their subjects are evil, undeserving and morally reprehensible. Wokeisms purpose is to invert noblesse oblige.

is a tool of the elite to beat its own population

BASED AND FACTUAL

Edit to add more effort: I find the concept "wokeness is a lever to divide the proletariat and keep them squabbling amongst themselves" to be incredibly plausible. I imagine most of the followers and proponents of "wokeness" are useful idiots, not CIA plants. But the classic graph of the explosion in usage of words like "racism" in major news publication right after OWS, and the general implosion of OWS as a result of proto-woke infighting seems too good to be true.

Further, I find it sad that basically no one ever mentions this anymore.

Avoid low effort comments. Especially when you've been told repeatedly not to do this.

Fair enough, I got a little too excited and my inner shitposter came out. I added some extra thought as penance.

I would like to register protest at your use of the word "repeatedly" though. After skimming through my inbox, I've had 4 mods hit me with the red name text in my time here. Once (now twice) for making a low effort comment.

Saying "told repeatedly" makes me sound like a serial shitposter, not someone who's currently at a rough rate of 0.3% low effort comments.

Five warnings in as many months is repeatedly, and probably a ban next time.

two warnings (one being this one), a fair misunderstanding, a relevant poem that could have used more context, and a request for clarification.

Doing this retrospective, there's a lesson about adding more detail to one's off the cuff thoughts, but 5 warnings it is not.

5 warnings is what you have in your mod log, regardless of whether you agree with them.

Interesting, I genuinely didn't realize all of those counted as warnings. I wasn't interested in litigating it (neither are you), I honestly didn't realize.

Good to know, happy holidays!

Said it before, will say it again. It's not uniquely Western or even Christian. An Indian Army general echoed the same thing nearly verbatim in 1988. Psychology calls it Martyr complex. I don't think wokeness is anything that sophisticated. It only works specifically for the interests of women, blacks, muslims and LGBT over men, straights and whites. The "oppression" bit is just moral cover for that fact. The biggest beneficiaries of DEI are white women, irregardless of income brackets. Western society and IMO human nature tend to be very gynocentric, that is why we care so much about issues that affect women, and causes that they care about generally.

An Indian Army general echoed the same thing nearly verbatim in 1988.

He even has a Wikipedia article and appears to be a fascinating character and a true warrior. It bears mentioning that he was acculturated in British India and was educated at Madras Christian College.

The biggest beneficiaries of DEI are white women, irregardless of income brackets.

There's a Cremieux post about this specific meme:

No, White Women Are Not The Biggest Beneficiaries of Affirmative Action

TLDR: The source usually cited for this claim is a 1995 Department of Labor report, but it doesn't actually say that or provide any evidence indicating it's true. It spread via journalists/activists hearing it from each other and repeating it without checking. It doesn't make sense if you're familiar with actual affirmative-action policies and the lawsuits over them, and a study found that "the primary beneficiaries of affirmative action in federal contracting over 1973 to 2003 were black and Native American women and men".

The biggest beneficiaries of DEI are white women, irregardless of income brackets.

I didn't see anything in that article to support that claim. Closest was this:

Affirmative Action and White Women
Research from the National Bureau of Economic Research indicates that white women have been the primary beneficiaries of affirmative action in education and the workplace. While affirmative action was designed to level the playing field for racial minorities, white women have received a larger share of new job opportunities in previously male-dominated fields.

However, like most points in the article, it's uncited. Although since she as a BIPOC has Other Ways of Knowing, perhaps I should just be quiet while a Black woman is speaking instead of Noticing her general lack of citations. And in what is basically a codified trope now when it comes to blacks writing about racial matters, she does not clarify whether she is talking about per capita or not, nor is it apparent if she understands the concept of per capita in the first place.

Naturally, upon a Googling there are quite a few NBER papers that discuss women, non-Asian minorities, and affirmative action, so it's unclear what research she has in mind. It’s also possible she doesn’t have any actual research in mind and was just regurgitating a passphrase she read elsewhere. One paper from the search results caught my eye, though.

In the context of federal contractors and subcontractors, the paper suggests the "affirmative action program [] is generally ineffective for women, although it has been effective for minorities." And by ineffective, he means "affirmative action has contributed negligibly to women's progress in the workplace." The author explains:

affirmative action under the contract compliance program appears to have played a relatively minor role in increasing employment opportunities for white females, in contrast to its demonstrated effectiveness for blacks of either sex...

In multiple regressions, black female employment share increases significantly faster in contractor than in noncontractor establishments. While the impact across specific occupations differs, the overall demand shift induced by affirmative action for black females is comparable in magnitude to that observed for black males.

Note that the paper is from 1989. It's darkly hilarious how long affirmative action has been around, when for some reason many people seem to think it started sometime in the 201Xs. I'm going to tell my children that affirmative action was invented after Saint Floyd was brutally murdered by a MAGA insurgent in 2020.

Especially within education, it doesn't pass the sniff test that white women have been the primary beneficiaries of affirmative action, especially on a per capita basis. Women have similar average IQs as men (or exhibit a modest deficit if you're Hanania-pilled), but blacks have substantially lower average IQs than whites. Thus, there's a lot more ground to make-up in the latter case through affirmative action.

Indeed, Table 2 and Table 6 of this paper show that, in the 80s and 90s, the black-white coefficient (expressed as an odds ratio) was 4x larger than that of the female-male coefficient from logistic regressions modeling undergraduate admission chances at elites schools. The authors remark that "[f]emale candidates have 50 percent better odds of being admitted than their statistically equivalent male counterparts" in contrast to the 450% increase for being black instead of white. I didn’t see the analogous figure quoted for female vs. male, but the authors additionally report that being black instead of white was worth +230 points on the SAT; being black instead of Asian was worth +280 points on the SAT.

I imagine the female-male coefficient has further shrunk since then, given undergraduate females now outnumber males (thus presumably less need for pro-female affirmative action). I do believe in ${CurrentDay} there are larger affirmative action preferences given to women at the graduate level for admissions, and in hiring and promotion decisions in academia and industry (especially in sectors like tech and finance), but this would still pale in comparison to the corresponding racial preferences given to blacks.

Now back to the original article complaining that white Women Have Always Been the Primary beneficiaries of affirmative action. It Just so Happens the proposed next steps involve transferring ever moar money and opportunities from whites towards blacks and latinos, especially black and latina women. She does some ducking and weaving in bouncing between talking about "Black and Latina women," "Black, Latina, and Indigenous women," and "Black, Latino, Indigenous, and Asian individuals." For the aforementioned third category, she has this to say:

Understanding who benefits most from DEI programs is essential to making them more effective and equitable. While it’s encouraging that white women have gained more access to leadership roles, true diversity means ensuring that all marginalized groups—including Black, Latino, Indigenous, and Asian individuals—experience similar upward mobility.

Considering racial benefits given to blacks and latinos often come at the expense of Asians, this sounds amusingly like she's threatening Asians. I came away with a similar feeling after reading her article as I did after reading OU Samantha’s Essay—namely, feeling slightly dumber.

There's a Cremieux post about this specific meme:

No, White Women Are Not The Biggest Beneficiaries of Affirmative Action

Note that the paper is from 1989. It's darky hilarious how long affirmative action has been around, when for some reason many people seem to think it started sometime in the 201Xs.

Yes. On of my relatives was a career US military officer, and he described to me the methods through which his branch incentivized recruiters to find diverse applicants (this would have been roughly around 1989, a few years in either direction IIRC).

It seems to me like that the opinion that things just went off the rails recently is very common. I suspect there are a few reasons for this, one of them being the ability of the internet to form a coherent counter-consensus against institutional power, and one of them being that the forces of woke or whatever you want to call them really overextended in the 201Xs, using rhetoric that diverged from the more defensible "make society better for the marginalized" and veered into "make society worse for the unmarginalized." And then finally it seems to me that given the above, there is a very strong incentive for many people who see themselves in the middle to say "woah woah woah, [consequences downstream of X] are clearly too far," while glossing question of whether or not X should be removed since it caused the downstream consequences because fundamentally they support X, or something like X.

There are probably some other reasons I am not thinking of, but I find it interesting that, even though affirmative action has always been controversial, it seems like opposition to it has really been consolidating into something that might actually "stick" beyond grumbling about political correctness. It's interesting to me that this turn took about a generation, perhaps 1.5 generations ("affirmative action" dates to 1961) for the wheel to turn this far. A real reminder of both how slow and how fast society can change.

I do, however, suspect this may have happened before – with progressive overreach in the 1960s and 1970s fueling backlash leading to Nixon and Reagan. So I wonder if part of the "reason many people seem to think it started sometime in the 201Xs" is simply because a lot of younger people had grown up in an era where progressives/leftists were more chastened (Clinton) and cautious about letting their most radical members steal the microphone and run away with it. But by the time of Obama, they had grown overconfident again (and people who would have pushed for more moderation were aging and sidelined or dead or retired) so the fringes ran away with the microphone and now we're getting Nixon all over again. As one of the younger people, I'm not sure if it's different this time, but it does seem to me that, however you slice it, the question of wokeness definitely goes far back beyond 201X.

People only start noticing things from around the time they became politically aware. See how many people think America is especially more polarised now that it's gonna have Civil War 2. The gender pay gap myth has also been explained by economists since at least the 80s, the fact that we're still having that conversation is surreal.

Wokeness is slave morality because it's a Christian blank slatism with the numbers filed off, original sin replaced with racism/colonialism and no Jesus/salvation sin forgiveness figure. Thus transitively it is also slave morality as its ideological source.

One of Scott's best recent works is a deep dive on the modern embrace of slave morality and he explains a lot of social and artistic trends that have been bothering him.

Matt Yglesias Considered as the Nietzschean Superman

you may not be interested in slave morality, but slave morality is interested in you. Master morality isn’t interested in you - the masters are out achieving things and conquering places, they’re not going to take time out of their day to turn missionary and “convert” you to master morality too2. But slave moralists are obsessed with ideological purity and invested in cutting down anybody who’s less slave moralist than they are. Even if you find it easy to avoid yourself, you need to be prepared to live in a slave morality world.

...

Parts of this vibe shift still confuse me, but the zoomed-out version seems clear enough. The old pro-embiggening world was complicit in moral catastrophes - racism, colonialism, the Holocaust, the destruction of much of the natural world. At some point these atrocities caught up to and outpaced its very real accomplishments, and society stopped being proud of itself and shifted to a harm-reduction approach. Nobody comes out and says outright that harm reduction necessarily has to mean doing as little as possible and trying to make yourself smaller and less impressive and sadder and uglier until you curl up into a tiny point and disappear. But “slave morality” and “master morality” are attractors; if you select too hard for part of one, you end up with the whole package

He doesn't use the word "wokeness" in this post but you can read between the lines.

Warning: it is long, even for a Scott post.

Started reading this. Didn't finish. Know what it will fall into. It's going to be one of these split the world into a dichotomy that doesn't actually map onto reality then spend thousands of words agonising over the discrepancy between the real world and the 2 variable system. There should be a name for this. Perhaps Retard's Dilemma.

Master Morality is just the more natural way of things. Bears, lions all live under master morality. So do elk. They can't co-ordinate much to create moral systems or aren't incentivised to.

Slave Morality is just the moral rules people come up with when the want to push away some of the harshness of nature. If we don't constantly compete over each others wives, and we don't steal from each other etc. etc. we can all be more successful (as a group). I don't know if group selection is involved biologically (I have heard this is controversial) - it certainly can be in culture. And cultures which punish those who break group norms will de-select those people from the gene pool. Japanese are very different to Africans.

Systems which organise people with better incentives to co-operate will outcompete those which don't. African people are much closer to Master Morality. Strong rule. You see this in black NBA players when they are close to an MVP - they will talk themselves up saying they are the best. White players do not do this. In most white cultures it is very impolite to do so. You perform and let others judge you for your performance. You don't make the judgement on yourself. Also - much of the distaste of Trump (it is distasteful once you stop laughing, but it takes a long time to stop laughing).

Obviously a society is made up of individuals and they still need to do things so you only want your moral system cutting down antisocial behaviours. Extremely boastful behaviour is like this - it creates a race to the bottom. Moral systems are basically that - what rules and enforcements are needed to avoid races to the bottom so the group (individuals in the group) can be better off. And then gaming the moral system.

We still need to show off and so negotiate rules around these behaviours, then try to break the rules, accuse other of it etc etc.

The strong want to game the system by lionizing their strength and taking what they can get away with (or are at least incentivised to) and the weak limiting their harm. All while attaching themselves to strengths they can feed off. There own strengths aren't actually fair strengths to target etc. etc.

So a starting point for negotiation is all your behaviour that doesn't benefit me is bad (can simply be you doing good stuff that makes me less competitive with you) and vice versa. Then argue, lie, and try to create a ven-diagram of what we agree on and can/are willing to enforce. Thus, morality.

It makes groups stronger so it persists. It creates genetic selection in the groups.

And Slave Morality is the Master Morality of moralities, because it is clearly most effective and now people are blindly justifying it whatever the outcome because it is powerful and blindly justifying whatever is most dominant is ... Master Morality. Gee wiz that sounds like recursion.

Highly recommended. I literally didn't understand the concept of master vs. slave morality until reading this post, and then huge chunks of modern culture began to slot into place for me.

(from Scott's piece -- thanks for referencing it, it's nice to see he's still sometimes not completely pozzed -- by which I mean fully accepting of one particular form of slave morality)

Some right-wingers have responded to the piece, but their responses are mostly “but I like being bad and cruel” - which seems to prove Bulldog’s point.

I think we can do better - that it’s possible to make a case against “slave morality” that doesn’t rely on being pro-badness and cruelty.

You can't, though. Not with the slave morality definitions of badness and cruelty, which e.g. require that I bankrupt myself saving all of Pete Singer's drowning kids -- it's cruel for me to allow them to drown and bad for me to restrict them so they can't keep jumping in the lake. You either have to argue over the definitions of badness and cruelty, or yeschad.jpg. Guess which is master morality?

But also, don’t we like altruism? When we’re bestriding the Earth like colossi, working on our glorious rocket ships to colonize the universe, isn’t part of what we’re thinking “this is going to revolutionize humankind and make everybody better off?”

It becomes a lot less altruistic if you add in "...and I will be the one who did it", as the people who do that rather typically do. People with master morality will sometimes make everyone better off for their own glory. Elon Musk, yes, but also Andrew Carnegie and many others.

Not with the slave morality definitions of badness and cruelty, which e.g. require that I bankrupt myself saving all of Pete Singer's drowning kids -- it's cruel for me to allow them to drown and bad for me to restrict them so they can't keep jumping in the lake.

I don't follow. Why can't one say slave morality is stupid and disregard it and be a yeschad.jpg that tithes 10% to EA charities and selfishly spends the remaining 90% on themselves?

It becomes a lot less altruistic if you add in "...and I will be the one who did it", as the people who do that rather typically do. People with master morality will sometimes make everyone better off for their own glory. Elon Musk, yes, but also Andrew Carnegie and many others.

Getting rich while building great things and doing noble deeds for status (which can be cashed in for hedonic utilons) still seems strictly better than doing ugly things just for money to cash in for hedonic utilons. The first one is more altruistic, even if it's just as selfish at its core.

I see the point of Scott's article as an appeal to give the status to the first kind and not mistake the second kind as status worthy.

I don't follow. Why can't one say slave morality is stupid and disregard it and be a yeschad.jpg that tithes 10% to EA charities and selfishly spends the remaining 90% on themselves?

Because giving 10% to the enemy when you can give 0% to the enemy is stupid. Even where EA doesn't veer off to the left and go full woke, or waste money on a Berkeley Villian Lair, they miss the boat; there they were, buying mosquito nets, when they should have been put a lot more money into malaria vaccines.

Getting rich while building great things and doing noble deeds for status (which can be cashed in for hedonic utilons) still seems strictly better than doing ugly things just for money to cash in for hedonic utilons. The first one is more altruistic, even if it's just as selfish at its core.

Your language bakes the assumptions of slave morality into it. Building great things is ALREADY good; you don't need to take the money and do "noble" things with it.

I think it depends in how strict we are with our definitions of master morality. If saving children is considered neutral, having possessions is virtuous, and losing possessions means losing virtue then yeah, you are right. But consider another perspective: You will not save every child on earth, but you will save every kid in your local community. This way you are perhaps still losing a lot of possessions. Your nice suit, the money you had in your wallet when jumping into the pond, maybe you invest in people to watch the shores and so on. But in return, you become a pillar of the community. Someone that people look up to because you embody a kind of intrinsic worth. Meanwhile, your community is enriched by the presence of young people which over time can make you more virtuous. They might buy stuff from you and make you richer. You might compete with them and win.

Same goes for the virtuous warlord. From one perspective, the virtue comes from your conquests through slaughter. From another, the virtue is in your ability to best others. In that case, the virtue is there whether you choose to fight or not. If there is no just cause for a war, then you can surely use your abilities in different ways that benefit your people and still shows how virtuous you are in that sense.

You are proposing a solution that ignores the tradeoffs. I cannot save the children and invest in people to watch the shores and so on, because I have limited resources. If I spend them saving the children I will never get to the point of having enough to hire other people to watch the shores. I could take something like Carnegie's view and let the kids drown until I'm rich enough to do something about it without destroying myself, but slave morality would reject that as "cruel".

So master morality in the end optimizes for the things you own, which means celebrating actions that we consider immoral. Because that is often the fastest way to own as much stuff as possible. Fair enough.

What I really want is not to bring that back then; What you describe seems like society would be regressing by centuries. Instead, I want to hold people and institutions to some kind of standard. Celebrate the people who put in effort, look down on those who do not. Surely that much is possible. In that case, what is needed is for society to agree on a new moral system. One that incentivizes effort and celebrates success and beauty, while still punishing those who gain wealth by trampling others.

So master morality in the end optimizes for the things you own, which means celebrating actions that we consider immoral. Because that is often the fastest way to own as much stuff as possible. Fair enough.

That is not what I said. Certainly master morality is not mostly about "stuff"; even "resources" are not merely about "stuff" -- time is a pretty major one as well, for instance. And you can't define "master morality" in terms of "actions we consider immoral" because that implies a shared morality. You can say that master morality celebrates some actions slave moralities would consider immoral, but that's not very informative.

In that case, what is needed is for society to agree on a new moral system. One that incentivizes effort and celebrates success and beauty, while still punishing those who gain wealth by trampling others.

This is certainly a common ideal of a moral system. Doesn't seem to be very popular in the real world though. It's attacked on one end by those who think some trampling is fine, and far more successfully on the other by those who argue that all wealth and beauty and success is gained by trampling others, and therefore success itself is immoral. And of course the relativists who deny the existence of objective, or even common standards of, beauty.

You will not save every child on earth, but you will save every kid in your local community. This way you are perhaps still losing a lot of possessions. Your nice suit, the money you had in your wallet when jumping into the pond, maybe you invest in people to watch the shores and so on. But in return, you become a pillar of the community. Someone that people look up to because you embody a kind of intrinsic worth. Meanwhile, your community is enriched by the presence of young people which over time can make you more virtuous.

What master morality has a problem with (and thus the problem that slave morality has with it) is not doing good. It's not that the master never does anything good or nice, or that he doesn't do so on even just pragmatic grounds. Even a pagan aristocrat like Caesar saw reason to be seen as liberal and generous (generosity coming out of overflowing capacity is okay).

It's the leap to "okay, but you can help everyone in your community". It's the totalizing, the flattening. There's no community, this is an idea from slave societies. We're not equals. Some people are better than others and their capacities matter more. In fact, caring about everybody denies them the aristocratic surplus they need to achieve their potential.

To use an example: let's say a Frenchman could sell the Mona Lisa to a billionaire who really wants to burn it and, in exchange a million nondescript, randomly selected people across the globe (no Frenchmen) will be saved from death. The part of him that feels this is either obviously right or not easily argued against is slave morality. The part that recoils is the impulse behind master morality. There's just something here worth more than some people's lives. And that impulse would almost certainly be called cruel if articulated, if it came down to a choice.

and bad for me to restrict them so they can't keep jumping in the lake.

I don't think this holds for most of Christian history. Yes, you had to fish the babies out of Roman trash heaps. I don't think Christians, once they had the power, were against using it for their own good.

It becomes a lot less altruistic if you add in "...and I will be the one who did it", as the people who do that rather typically do. People with master morality will sometimes make everyone better off for their own glory. Elon Musk, yes, but also Andrew Carnegie and many others.

This fits Alfred Nobel, who gave his money to do something to glorify his name after the invention of dynamite. But...this is slave morality too no? He already achieved something great, yet he was so guilty he needed to do something to atone. All great men possess agency, but they're not really free of slave morality either.

Bill Gates already was a great man, giving away his money to strangers merely to improve their lives (some might cynically say as a way of washing off his more unsavory reputation as Microsoft's ruthless head), hell this entire notion of billionaires handing off their money is pretty Christian (it's of dubious legality in Islam iirc).

I'm pretty sure Gates gives money away to strangers to control their lives. He says he "fights poverty and disease" but damnit the recipients will do it the Gates Foundation way. Nobel certainly seemed more guilt-ridden. A purer version of what I mean is those whose main business makes people's lives better; this applies to Musk and Bezos and Carnegie -- his steel business rather than his later philanthropy.

You can't, though. Not with the slave morality definitions of badness and cruelty, which e.g. require that I bankrupt myself saving all of Pete Singer's drowning kids -- it's cruel for me to allow them to drown and bad for me to restrict them so they can't keep jumping in the lake. You either have to argue over the definitions of badness and cruelty, or yeschad.jpg.

Indeed.

Thanks, Pete—now that I think about it, I do value my suit more than I do the life of some other random dude's kid. What now? A glance at the kid might even tell me if the expected value of his life is negative to mine and that of my descendants, which would make the call even more straightforward. Plus, maybe my suit brings me more happiness than drowning brings the kid sadness.

It has been a long time since I read Nietzsche in length, but from what I recall, I think it's worth noting that Nietzsche's ideas about slave and master morality were complex. On one level he despised slave morality, yet he also clearly saw its strength, its success at shaping values. What he called slave morality is the actual master morality of our time, and he knew it. He admired the power of Christian priests to overthrow the ancient world's moral order, their tremendous ability to transmute values within themselves and dominate the world with their new values like some sort of superhumans from a Dune novel. This somewhat echoes what @functor said below about how slave morality is an elite phenomenon.

The so-called slave morality is completely dominant in our time. I do not know about other parts of the world, but in the West is difficult to find anyone who is not genuinely mentally deranged and/or deeply ostracized by mainstream society who truly believes that it is good for the strong to dominate the weak - truly believes, not just as an fun intellectual exercise, a vice-signalling online grift, or a fetish. So-called slave morality completely penetrates both the left and the right in the West. This is why outside of a few online ranters with Greek statue avatars, who I'm not sure even actually believe in what they say and in real life are probably mostly very nerdy people who are either grifting or desperately trying to compensate for their lack of power in the real world, almost everyone on both the left and the right believes in the vision of the plucky oppressed rebels overthrowing the evil empire. The left and the right just disagree on who the rebels are, and who the empire is.

And this is not surprising. The left and the right grew up on the same movies, and popular movies are about plucky underdogs fighting evil empires. This moral framework has almost completely won. It utterly dominates our civilization, it shapes most people's consciousness on a deep level. The so-called master morality has been driven from the field and only survives as the suppressed shadow of the "slave" morality. The so-called "master" morality survives in hiding in obscure crevices of consciousness and among freaks and obvious sociopaths. It persists psychologically in the great appeal that antihero narratives have for moderns, the sex-and-violence Game of Thrones depictions of lustfully and openly wicked people which serve to still satisfy some of that ancient craving for master morality, a craving that likely cannot go away as long as humans remain human. This is also the reason why sociopathic gangsters are so popular in our media - the mafioso, the inner-city gangbanger, and so on. We still have a need to psychologically engage with "master" morality, but almost none of us actually believe in it on a deep level.

No politician can expect to win more than a small fraction of the public's support by running on a ticket of "it is good and beautiful that the strong dominate the weak". Even Adolf Hitler did not campaign politically on master morality, he campaigned on the notion that Germans were plucky underdogs who should overthrow the supposed oppressive evil empire of the Jews, the French, the British, the Bolsheviks and so on. In other words, even the most prominent far-right politician of the last 100 years ran his politics based on slave morality, on the same script of plucky rebels going up against an evil empire, not based on some sort of "master morality" appeal to the beauty of the savage and dominant aristocrat.

Wokism is a "slave morality" phenomenon, but as Nietzsche would have understood, it is also a master morality: it insists on its values, it revels in dominating its enemies, it seeks to conquer, it seeks to stamp its values on the entire world, it believes utterly in its right to rule and to destroy its enemies. Today's right-wing populism is also almost entirely a "slave morality" phenomenon just as much as wokism is. Outside of some narrow highly online circles, the modern right-wing populist does not believe that he has an aristocratic right to rule through strength and beauty. He believes that evil aristocrats have taken over society and that the "good people" have to fight against the "evil people" to overthrow their domination. Ironically, right-wing populism has not so much that masterful steel in its backbone that wokism does, it is not as much of a master morality. But then, it is young in its current open form. Modern right-wing populism is ideologically almost exactly the same as it was in the 90s, the difference is that now it has breached the containment walls of polite conservatism and escaped the online forums and small clusters of paleoconservative fandom to which it was largely confined in the 90s. So it is possible that right-wing populism, too, will at some point become more psychologically confident in itself. I don't really see it moving in that direction right now, but much can change very rapidly in politics. One thing I'm fairly sure about, though, is that it will not take the form of actual ancient-style master morality. If Hitler's political movement didn't, then it is extremely unlikely that any of today's right-wingers will do it.

Thanks for pointing this out, I think you make an excellent point. I am reminded of Biblical stories like David & Goliath; or of the Hebrews' exodus from Egypt.

It seems everyone likes to think of themselves as the "plucky underdog" as you put it, and this idea has been around for a long time.

sigh Scott covered it in 2013 no less

sigh

Thanks for taking time out of your busy day to provide that link! It certainly shows that you are in the know.

lol, the sigh was intended in resignation, something like “Indeed, it really has been around for a long time: at least 12 years! And wouldn’t you know it, things are no better than they were back then”, rather than an exasperated “lurk moar scrub”

Wokism is a "slave morality" phenomenon, but as Nietzsche would have understood, it is also a master morality: it insists on its values, it revels in dominating its enemies, it seeks to conquer, it seeks to stamp its values on the entire world, it believes utterly in its right to rule and to destroy its enemies.

There is no contradiction between being a slave moralist and trying to dominate, because slave morality is not the absence of the desire for power but the result of the inability to fulfill those desires and an attempt to achieve by undermining and inverting the values of the master.

The idea that desiring power for its own use makes one a "master" and categorically different from the victim/slave is actually a woke view. Nietzsche, well, he was less optimistic about their motivations.

A link to an article about kids toys somehow led me down a rabbit hole to this article

https://lydialaurenson.substack.com/p/why-i-was-part-of-the-neoreactionary

Which I am still processing right now so maybe it's too premature for me to be posting it for discussion.

In any case I haven't been around here for a while, and I guess I still owe you all thoughts from the war, but one thing I've been doing is dipping my toes into activism in the "reducing extreme polarization" sphere and this article was from a totally different country and politics from my own and yet way too terrifyingly similar. The feeling of people existing in two different realities and erasing any evidence that threatens their specific chosen reality and starting to feel like you're going a little insane from being able to sympathize with both sides instead of comfortably siloing yourself into one black and white self-righteous viewpoint.

(Sometimes I wonder if we all just know too much and read too much these days. In my moments of debating whether I even should be doing activism trying to set up coexistence circles and hikes I wonder if everyone needs to just never read the news ever again and only talk to people they know personally face to face. I don't know, surely I'm not the only one here wondering how many truly obnoxious unbearable people I meet online are secretly bots created solely to make me and the rest of the planet miserable...?)

Anyway I'm interested in the motte's thoughts and I guess I'm once again shamelessly using you as a sounding board while I try to figure out my own.

Edit: she quotes from another article but the link is a dead link, it's fortunately available on webarchive, so if someone wants to read that one as well, it's here: https://web.archive.org/web/20250904220910/https://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2007/02/liberating_iraq.html

(Sometimes I wonder if we all just know too much and read too much these days. In my moments of debating whether I even should be doing activism trying to set up coexistence circles and hikes I wonder if everyone needs to just never read the news ever again and only talk to people they know personally face to face.

I think this all the time. 'News' is a mind-virus worthy of a bare few minutes a day--max. Yet it's addictive, somehow.

this is a long article, might take me some time to get through it, but one thing I notice straight off is the implicit assumption that all young people seem to share that "everything is political." It's just seeded into every aspect of everything everyone younger than 50 seems to want to talk about. It's not even questioned, it just is. I think this is a big part of the underlying problem because everyone is just desperate to be a Good Person (tm) and every life choice revolved around this basic motivation (even the people who overtly reject this have the same basic presumptions).

I really wish there were more "go fuck yourself" punks in the world. I feel like we need this energy to counteract the "I'm paddling my feet as fast as possible to be a Good Person (tm). I'm sick of Nice People (tm) and Good People (tm). It's not your job to save the world and trying to know every last detail about every possible threat to humanity just drives everyone insane.

I'll keep reading, it's not uninteresting just long. If something else catches my attention I'll reply again.

Anyway I'm interested in the motte's thoughts and I guess I'm once again shamelessly using you as a sounding board while I try to figure out my own.

To me it seems like the situation is still pretty bad, possibly getting worse. The most concerning recent event to me was the July 4th attack on a border patrol station a few months ago, which involved five to ten people. That indicates to me that actual organized paramilitaries are forming below the surface.

Then you have comments by the Virginia District Attorney and the general internet commentatariat in the wake of the Mangione assassination and the assassination of Charlie Kirk which indicate the body politic is becoming increasingly comfortable endorsing political violence. That’s not just a spiritual and moral issue. You need that kind of hardness and willingness to accept violence among the gen pop to sustain any kind of campaign of armed struggle like the IRA’s in Northern Ireland. People have to be willing to provide passive aid and look the other way.

The right wing is angry too. Although Rob Reiner’s murder was apparently not a political killing, I heard comments in right wing spaces that mirrored the level of bitterness you saw in the left over Kirk.

Oddly I don’t see the same level of paramilitary organization forming in the right which you wouldn’t think given their greater affinity for gun culture. I don’t anticipate any major attacks coming out of the right in the near future. The anger is there but no one seems interested in doing anything about it. Maybe because the current Federal government is perceived as friendly. I don’t know.

The right affiliated zoomers are concerning to me. I think a huge percentage are in the process of seriously embracing actual unreconstructed naziism as an ideology. They are keeping it on the down low for now, probably not for too much longer.

I think there are two main escalation triggers to watch out for. The first is the dying off of the baby boomers, which will have a similar effect to pulling out all the control rods from a nuclear reactor at once. Boomers are less radical and they are an underrated part of damping both sides more violent impulses. I think the Boomer die off induced radicalization will be more potent on the right, which by and large places more importance on what their parents and elders think of them.

The second is the economy. It’s not great for regular people already. If there’s a big crash and mass unemployment in the near future you’ll see some serious shit.

Oddly I don’t see the same level of paramilitary organization forming in the right which you wouldn’t think given their greater affinity for gun culture. I don’t anticipate any major attacks coming out of the right in the near future. The anger is there but no one seems interested in doing anything about it. Maybe because the current Federal government is perceived as friendly.

Gun culture both makes paramilitary activity easier to hide(it would take me about three phone calls to get into a ‘yeah, we have a commander, and we like to get together and train on the weekends, and we’ve got plans for when the shit hits the fan, but we’re definitely not a militia, no sir’) and makes would be attackers think twice. This stuff is concentrated among the functional, elite end of the red tribe, which already likes guns, hunting, firefight training, etc, and which is consequently very well aware that shooting people kills them. It sounds obvious, but I genuinely don’t think a lot of the nuts that go shoot people for political reasons really intend to leave body counts(I do, however, think they are crazy). Red tribe schizos who want to commit mass shootings don’t need to join a paramilitary group to do so, because they live in gun culture, and those paramilitary groups largely wouldn’t accept them anyways because they work on word of mouth, vetting, and reputation- like a more civilized motorcycle club. This mode of social organization- deinstitutionalized networking with high functioning members and extensive IRL vetting- is very red tribe and very good at excluding nut jobs.

The right affiliated zoomers are concerning to me. I think a huge percentage are in the process of seriously embracing actual unreconstructed nazism as an ideology. They are keeping it on the down low for now, probably not for two much longer.

This is honestly the best part, my "actually the jedi are evil" conceit. The Zoomers are going to have absolutely nothing even close of the exposure to the "holocaust" memeplex. Instead they are only on the receiving end of the bitterness and hatred of an already disintegrating edifice of the neolib/neocon machine.

I can only dream of a world where the US has successfully removed it's futurama esque green brain slug. And the zoomers seem to be a good stepping stone towards that.

I think there are two main escalation triggers to watch out for. The first is the dying off of the baby boomers, which will have a similar effect to pulling out all the control rods from a nuclear reactor at once. Boomers are less radical and they are an underrated part of damping both sides more violent impulses.

Maybe they're less radical, but they certainly were more violent back when they were young compared to the youth of today.

It’s not just about capacity for violence, it’s about the level of desire for a radically new social order. Old people don’t want that, they want things to remain comfortable just long enough for them to die. Even the ones that intensely dislike the way things are now are still like this.

Oddly I don’t see the same level of paramilitary organization forming in the right which you wouldn’t think given their greater affinity for gun culture.

The reason for this is that any attempt to do as such is often met with the reply of 'Nice try, Fedboy.'

The Right as a whole is excruciatingly aware of the double-standard of how paramilitary organizations are treated. Antifa? John Brown Society? A-O-Kay, says the Feds. Patriot Front? A right-wing organization of people dressed in anonymous uniforms?

Clearly a fed-run honeypot.

I can't really blame them, going by the long history of treatment by right-wing elements by said fed. Even just recently, with the governor kidnapping attempt, who's conviction of those indicted was actually overturned because the majority of said group was federal operatives egging the entire plot on. And that overturned conviction was reversed by a higher-judge.

Because of course it was.

So. Any right-wing paramilitary organization is going to be quiet, run deep, run silent, and will probably never get talked about unless things get really, really bad.

I also imagine cell based approaches will be more popular among righties. Even though it's less capable of coordinated action, it's far more resistant to fed infiltration.

Even just recently, with the governor kidnapping attempt, who's conviction of those indicted was actually overturned because the majority of said group was federal operatives egging the entire plot on. And that overturned conviction was reversed by a higher-judge.

Can you provide some more information on this sequence? Particularly the bit where the conviction was overturned, as I'm having trouble finding anything about it.

What I've seen on this is that the initial trial had some convictions and some acquittals, with entrapment being presented as part of the defense, and then the court affirmed on appeal for Adam Fox and Barry Croft, who argued that the court didn't let them focus on the entrapment aspect as much as they wanted to.

Which, maybe they're right, but if this is just the appeals court going "we're sticking with what the jury said", that seems significantly less bad than judges fighting each other over the conviction, which I can't find evidence of.

Here I thought I was about to pay for my sins of not doing my due dilligance on the Motte, but;

Gretchen Whitmer: Michigan governor kidnap plot case collapses

Fox and Croft were the two I was thinking of. Not acquited, but a mistrial. I find it telling that the initial court for those two were ruled as a mistrial, only to be convicted after a second trial(of cource) and both were given very heavy prison terms - again, of cource - and then denied appeal by a panel of Judges, as noted in your second link.

Of. Cource.

Perhaps I'm being very uncharitable, but I find it difficult to do so in such a case as this one.

While mistrials can be declared for a bunch of reasons, your article is very clear on why there's a mistrial:

Mr Harris and Mr Caserta were found not guilty, but the charges against Mr Fox and Mr Croft ended in mistrial.

The government had argued they targeted Gretchen Whitmer, 50, in a 2020 plot.

Jurors began deliberating this week after 14 days of testimony and had indicated earlier on Friday that they were deadlocked on some of the charges.

They ultimately reached no verdict against Mr Fox, who was alleged to be the group's ringleader, and Mr Croft, both of whom were also facing an additional count each of conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction.

They didn't find Fox and Croft not guilty, they were unable to decide whether they were guilty or not, which means a hung jury, that mistrial status, and generally a retrial: this was a pretty high-profile case, it would be very surprising for the courts to say "eh, we don't really care about this enough for two trials, let it go". Their co-defendants Harris and Caserta, who the jury did acquit, did not have a second trial, and if Fox and Croft had managed that they wouldn't be getting a second trial either.

You can argue that the courts stacked the deck to make sure the second trial had a better chance of finding them guilty, but that was clearly a reasonable possibility even in the first trial, or the jury would have just acquitted as they did for Harris and Caserta.

Still no judge overturning the convictions: Fox and Croft were still in the indistinct "haven't resolved this in a court" status after the first trial, a second trial found them guilty (still by a jury), and then the appeals court decided the jury's decision was from a trial that was performed adequately and didn't need reexamination.

I'll start off with my condolences to anyone of any gender that had to listen to nRXs for this to happen at the end of it.

I don’t spent as much time in the movement these days; it’s turned into an echo chamber; racism and sexism are front-and-center, and most of my favorite people have left. But there was a fascinating moment in time when it truly felt like the so-called “dissident right” could discuss almost anything in a sensible way.

... I have a thought. That's not fair, I recognize... though I'd like some counterexample showing I'm just cherrypicking.

Talking about anything in a sensible way is not the point of the story; talking about why no one can group can talk about anything in a sensible way isn't part of the story. Laurenson isn't writing for Red Tribers, obviously, nor writing to Red Tribers, or even explaining Red Tribers to Blue Tribers. The point is to explain where Laurenson's coming from to Blue Tribers, and that's fine.

But from a Red Triber perspective -- and I fully recognize I'm far from hydroacetelene's level of 'real' Red Triber -- it's kinda the last part of this story where there's anything interesting. The Now What section is the biggest frustration, since it starts with 'here's the Blue Tribe principle insulting me and here's the Red Tribe random asshats insulting me, tots similar in scope and regularity' and then leads to a trio of revelations that practically come with the punchline 'do you think we don't know that?' But does anyone think there's a literate Red Triber on the planet, and I'm defining 'literate' here by Chicago definitions, that does not already know that a news media environment with any mix, no matter how lopsided, of Red and Blue Tribers devolves into squabbles?

I can make the argument that deradicalization matters, I can and regularly do make the argument that liberalism is dying at this rate, I can and have made the argument that it's really really dangerous. I'd like to solve that! I've been doing the (sometimes literal) Touch Grass thing, and some STEM-focused community outreach, and a half-dozen other programs trying to bring people together without bringing politics to the forefront.

Online, I'm overtly the bi furry gun owner for a reason, knowing how offputting the constant gay or gunnie references are to so many people: areas I'd like to go and philosophies I'd like to let live become 'target rich environments' if the only ones who wear it on their sleeves are the Everything Leftism Coneheads and straight-from-central-casting . I'd hope that there'd be some impact from showing people are people, and that Red and Blue can join together to achieve goals more important than wars of all-against-all over microns of worthless territory, and that at least some goals of those politics are more than hate or rage or malice.

... but I don't know if that will work, either, and ultimately, the Litany of Tarski wins. The STEM outreach program's had a small and subtle cold war over rainbow pins in the local community, the modded Minecraft server I helped with software problems had its owner proudly promote the time he beat the shit out of Brendan Eich, there's many Blue and Red tribe spheres I can't wear anything on my sleeve. Worse, so many high-profile people pretending to straddle political aisles are very clearly not that there's less than zero trust, here.

Everything else is a distraction. Yes, people are hallucinating their own consensus realities, but (as Laurenson points out!) it's not like the normies are doing any better. If we can't even talk about anything in a sensible way, if we can't talk about why we can't talk about anything in a sensible way, trying increasingly complicated and roundabout messaging won't solve it.

Touch Grass thing, and some STEM-focused community outreach, and a half-dozen other programs trying to bring people together without bringing politics to the forefront.

... but I don't know if that will work, either, and ultimately, the Litany of Tarski wins.

No offense, I hope you're getting something out of your projects other than their stated purpose, but history is coming, and it doesn't care about who's in the way. Forces significantly greater than one man and his good intentions are angling to crush and wipe out what you are trying to protect and nourish, and they will, and all your efforts to stop them are in vain. Narratives serve to tie people together and unite them behind a cause, they insulate them against attempts to divide them and help consolidate power that can be wielded against the outgroup. Trying to oppose that with good epistemics is hopeless. You'd need a more powerful yet simpler, a more attractive and inclusive, a generally fitter narrative to supplant the one that currently dominates - and "let's be reasonable and not fight each other" is a guy climbing out into no-man's-land to get ignored at best, but probably just shot. The culture wars won't cool down or stop over someone showing up with doves and olive branches. They'll stop only once all or all but one side are marginalized and the winners are smart enough not to discredit themselves, or once another party shows up with nukes pointed at all sides and forcing them to stop, or when the aforementioned superior narrative shows up and divides people along entirely new lines.

The stated purpose of the programs is to teach, and to learn by teaching. Can't say we're always doing that as well as I'd like, but I don't have to seriously consider the Litany of Tarski, either.

But, yes, I'm not optimistic. I'm not even trying to solve things with doves and olive branches; I'm just hoping that having an idea of what the 'other side' even looks like at least could leave us more grounded on actual disagreements instead of several layers of imagined ones. And I'll emphasize the 'hope' on that.

racism and sexism are front-and-center

I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling racism is going on in this establishment!

... I have a thought.

I'm not on X and refuse to join (because I believe social media is a major net negative for the culture). So I don't know what I'm supposed to be looking at.

Laurenson had no X commentary about either the Jay Jones scandals nor the Charlie Kirk assassination, and as far I can tell, did not anywhere else. Perhaps I’m missing some counterexample, or some massive story from her media deal.

The movement she’s left has changed. It’s not the only thing failing her tests.

Worse, so many high-profile people pretending to straddle political aisles are very clearly not that there's less than zero trust, here.

This, I think, is a huge part of it. Calls for "deradicalization", "reducing polarization", or "moderation" are nearly always calls for the other side to surrender and disarm. Either there's no offer for the caller's side to give something up, or they obviously don't have the power to make it come about.

Cross-posting from Small Question Sunday (with some addendcums) upon suggestion: Maybe I just missed it, but a little surprised to see no discussion of Knives Out, Wake up Dead Man on the forum given the culture war angles of the previous two (immigration, tech billionaires). Disclaimer - I haven't seen glass onion. I will avoid major spoilers but minor spoilers may be included. I wouldn't read if you haven't watched it yet and want to.

Wake Up Dead Man certainly seems to be set up to skewer the church, and conservatives, with characters including a sci-fi writer-> substack blogger who is paranoid of the "libtards", a failed right-wing politico, who is attempting to build a following through youtube videos, and Monsignor Wicks, the bombastic preacher who exclaims that he must "fight" the decay in the country as an excuse for his own failings.

However, despite this, I was drawn to the film by the character of Father Jud - a young priest who killed a man in a boxing ring before coming to the priesthood, he is a compassionate character who pushes against the excesses of Wicks while nonetheless being devoted to Christ and to his faith. He offers eloquent verbal parries to Detective Blanc's (the main character in the Knives Out series, played by Daniel Craig) rationalist, atheist worldview, and takes his vocation seriously.

One of my favorite scenes involves Blanc and Jud working to try to find a clue which involves Father Jud calling a construction company and getting their receptionist. There's the standard comedic setup of the super-talkative receptionist who won't let him ask the question they need an answer to, but the whole scene shifts when she asks him to pray for her (link here: https://youtube.com/watch?v=7VHPrO3SX5A). It's a really beautiful portrayal of pastoral care and prayer, and played straight. It seems to impact Blanc as well.

The sacrament of confession also plays a role and is highlighted in its entirety, a scene that happens due to Blanc's realizing that the moment calls for personal grace more than his grand reveals.

Father Jud seems almost more apolitical than political to me despite his opposition to Wicks and the other more conservative characters - he comes across as much more above politics than taking any particular political stand.

It seems like Rian Johnson has had a history of being religious but fell away from the Church at sometime in the last few decades.

Anyway, curious to hear what others thought of it.

I'm surprised, too. The last two movies were all over social media I consume, but this one? Not a peep about it. I was very surprised to learn a third movie had been made.

Again, just going off the synopsis, but it made me go "Yeah, this is a movie written by a Protestant" and that seems to be correct:

Johnson also drew from his own religious upbringing in Evangelicalism, with Blanc reflecting his own mixed feelings on organized religion. However, he chose to have the film focus on Catholicism for aesthetic reasons, admitting the churches he grew up in "kind of looked like Pottery Barns" and hence served as a poor visual basis for the film.

The church structure etc. as per the synopsis of the movie makes no sense in Catholicism. Where is the bishop in all this? Who is "Reverend Prentice Wicks, Jefferson's grandfather"? Does this mean his grandfather was a Protestant minister (if he has a daughter) and the daughter then had her illegitimate son who... became a Catholic priest????

Oh well, I guess we should be glad that we're still the movie face of religion, because when you need to show the church, you show the Catholics!

I believe they specified his grandfather had a daughter, his wife then died, and THEN he became a priest

In the past, this might have been accepted in some places(notoriously Tolkien was raised by a Catholic priest) but today having a child is generally disqualifying from the priesthood absent exceptions for married priests, and allowing priests to be guardians is incredibly rare(there is literally a single case in the entire US where a priest is allowed to be a guardian of a minor child- and in that case, the mom abandoned her baby when the parish was offering free babysitting so she could work an unusual shift, then got arrested, and they weren't able to track down the grandma for something like a year, at which point she testified that the kid should remain with the priest).

The adult children of former Anglican-now Catholic priests and of Eastern rite priests are very different people, is all I can say.

My memory is fuzzy about which priest this was, but I've definitely had a parish priest mention their son in several of their sermons. Actually, it might have been teo separate priests with two separate sons. Either way, I thought it was reasonable common and unexceptional. I'm surprised to find out otherwise. (For reference, the sermons were post 2010, but the son was almost certainly an adult by the time I heard them.)

In the Anglosphere it’s not that unusual to find a married, Latin rite priest who converted from Anglicanism or Lutheranism. Priests who were ordained after widowhood is not a thing in the USA, however- although it’s theoretically allowed to ordain widowers, those with dependent children are right out(and dependent is interpreted very broadly indeed). And theres typically also an age cutoff- priests must begin their nine year formation process before a certain age.

Again, my memory is fuzzy, but I have high confidence that they mentioned adoption and never mentioned a spouse. One of the two priests it could have been was raised in a different denomination, but I think they mentioned converting at a young age.

Prentice Wicks would've lived a long time ago given the age of Monsignor Wicks.

Protestantism is either Catholic light, indistinguishable from surrounding society, or aniconic when it comes to the visual language. Orthodoxy is too foreign. Tridentine Catholicism- or a hybridized version with the novus ordo- is what filmmakers like shooting, because it shows up well on camera, it's distinctive, and it looks cool.

I loved Knives Out. It definitely came from a particular worldview, but at least the out-of-touch liberals were a target of fun-poking in addition to the alt-right teen and conservative assholes. Plus the plot was really quite brilliant, a truly novel twist on the genre (I think?).

Glass Onion was much less good. The plot was more convoluted and less satisfying, and the characters were over-the-top culture war stereotypes. As faceh pointed out, they really just make sure that the bad guys are 100% bad and worthless with no redeeming qualities whatsoever.

I enjoyed Wake Up Dead Man, more than Glass Onion but less than Knives Out. A fairly interesting plot with explicit homages to the genre. The religious protagonist really is a good man, and he represents what is supposed to be the mainstream religious worldview, so Christianity does not come off as being mocked.

But despite the "moral clarity" that Rian Johnson tends to demonstrate in these movies, Jud's behavior at the end of the movie leaves me a bit confused, but can be explained with a boring CW angle.

[ MAJOR SPOILERS FOR THE REST OF THIS POST] Near the end of the film, Grace, the Harlot Whore, is reframed as a "poor girl." Prentice's decision to hide her inheritance (and everyone's judgements of her?) are played up as a grave mistreatment, with multiple characters muttering "that poor girl."

But then... Jud does the same thing to Cy. He hides the insanely valuable jewel from its rightful inheritor, and this is played off as a "booh yah" because that smug prick deserves it. Jud is definitely supposed to be a good guy, so first off it's wild that a priest just decides to keep a lie for the rest of his life and there's no moral conflict presented. But furthermore, this is the exact same behavior Prentice had taken vis a vis Grace, and we're all supposed to feel bad for her. I was genuinely confused about what I was "supposed" to find to be good.

The boring culture war angle is: she's a harlot whore, which is something that is treated positively in Johnson's worldview, whereas Cy represents right-wing political aspiration, obviously a bad thing. Who/whom.

I agree there's a conflict there but it's heavily implied that Grace was raped by her father and actually stated by Blanc in a roundabout way. I think they thought directly stating it would ruin the tone of the movie. But that's what all the road to Damascus moments and realizations and exclamations about "that poor girl" where about,

Oof guess I missed this. So Wicks was the son (and grandson) of Prentice? What are the beats that suggest this?

The biggest one is Blanc saying it. At one point during one of his monologues he says that Wicks was laid to rest with his father, and A lot of the characters reactions make a lot more sense keeping this in mind.

He mentions Wicks being buried in the tomb of "his father" at one point

Cy does seem to get treated poorly by the script - his adopted sister is super upset at him but its unclear when he found out (and was a literal child when he first met her).

I do agree in hindsight that it's odd for them to hide the jewel. Honestly, I don't know why Martha didn't just toss it in the acid? EDIT: I guess diamonds don't get hurt much by acid...

He hides the insanely valuable jewel from its rightful inheritor, and this is played off as a "booh yah" because that smug prick deserves it.

Well of course, he'd use that fortune to go into right wings politics/influencer world and that would be the worst possible outcome of all.

I'm used to this happening with Johnson's movies now, though. The rule is that wealth should go to whom 'deserves' it. If the person its 'supposed' to go to doesn't deserve it, better it goes to nobody at all. Hence he could be fine with literally torching the Mona Lisa.

And, uh, the "Harlot Whore" apparently WAS perfectly fine with beating the tar out of a CHILD over mere material wealth.

Rian also snuck a little jab against the whore's father clergyman in there, making the point that no, turns out that things DON'T turn into the body of Christ when you imbibe them.

Transubstantiation is orthogonal to ingestion. And diamond isn’t a valid host.

I pulled up the scene again, and the guy very directly states

[spoilers] "the body of Christ" while holding the jewel like a communion wafer, right before swallowing it.

That and everything else he says indicates to me that his actual idea was to convert the entirety of his wealth into nothingness, thus forever removing the temptation it represented. Otherwise, he could have just tossed the diamond into the sea or something. If he DIDN'T expect it to still be in his body for relatively easy retrieval, then this scene makes more sense in context.

[/spoilers]

I do think that was Rian's intended jab, even if its not theologically sound. As others have mentioned, the whole church seems more like a pastiche of Evangelical Protestantism, but given full Catholic dressing for the aesthetics.

Anyway, this idea seemed pretty close to something Alan Moore did in V for Vendetta, so I happened to catch what seemed like intentional subtext.

He does do that. In the moment that didn’t strike me as him fundamentally misunderstanding transubstantiation, rather it was some dramatic flourish.

Transubstantiation specifies that the transformation happens at the moment of consecration, not consumption. And that only bread is a valid host. And that only the substance and not the accidents (material representation) are transformed. Think in the RDBMS of the universe there is a Boolean field, is_body_of_christ, and it gets set to True upon consecration.

But I suppose your interpretation is correct and I was giving the filmmaker too much credit.

Wikipedia mentions Johnson was raised Evangelical, so he has as much notion of Catholic theology as I do of nuclear engineering. This is the sort of thing that makes me wince when I see it in movies/TV/media; if you take things like the Eucharist seriously, it's very jarring, not to say hurtful if meant to be deliberately mocking.

I suppose in the movie the idea is meant to be that the bad guy treated his wealth like his god and it was his real religion, not whatever he pretended to believe ("you cannot serve both God and Mammon"). I just wish Johnson hadn't used Eucharistic similes.

That "V for Vendetta" part looks like the Reformed explanation of the Eucharist; it only becomes the body for those who truly believe, while for unbelievers it remains only bread (I'm shaky on Protestant theology so I'm probably not getting that right). Consubstantiation not transubstantiation.

The V panel also gets it wrong: it's not "whatever it is now", it has to be bread and wine, so you can't have a Coke and cookies eucharist.

Well in-context that's not an issue, its an actual communion wafer, but V poisoned it.

I guess then the argument is that sure, the wafer turned into Christ's body but the poison was still poison.

I do notice some crossover in Rian and Moore's apparent approach to depicting right-wingers, although Moore does allow them to be sympathetic and maybe even be correct in some way before they get their just desserts. Rian, as mentioned, is obsessively devoted to ensuring his RW characters aren't allowed to claim even a single win.

Yeah but then we switch and see her desperation. I agree that Rian Johnson and the audience this is aimed at are totally fine with someone being a "harlot whore" But a big point of the "legend" of the harlot whore is that Grace was never offered Grace. She spent her whole life castigated by the town and controlled by her father (and implied rapist) and never given the chance to repent and change only held up as an object of sin.

Yeah. Rian did his classic tactic of showing a flashback, then revisiting said flashback with new information to cast it into a new light.

I wasn't really fooled this time around because the narrator was clearly unreliable (again, just going off Rian's rules), and Grace, as a female character, would clearly have 'good' reasons for doing what she did per the script.

I just found it a tad funny that they directly portrayed her ground 'n' pounding a prepubescent girl.

Its also a bit amusing to think on what she would have done with that fortune. Once she escapes her present circumstances, we really think she's going to become a fully upstanding member of society?

I managed to enjoy the movie 'in spite' of Johnson's politics being present because I went in knowing and expecting them so it wasn't like ordering a bowl of soup and being surprised there's a fly in it. I knew that the fly was part of the chef's specialty so I can just kind of 'eat around it.' Good performances, solid cinematography and good editing choices. A script that's too full of itself but is 'clever' and has decent dialogue moments (like the scene you alluded to).

Unfortunately that managed to sort of ruin the movie's twists because now Johnson's habits have made it easier to predict whodunnit and why.

Female Characters are generally 'good.' Poor, working class characters are ALWAYS heroic in understated ways. Characters that espouse right-wing views (even if they clearly don't believe them) are not good. Any tropes/cliches will always be subverted, even at the expense of the plot.

Those four rules by themselves get you approximately 90% of the way through the mystery.

EVEN THOUGH Rian sort of cheated and [SPOILERS] made a female character a killer this time, she never strikes the killing blow herself. [/SPOILERS] He really has an aversion to making his 'good' characters ever do anything that might make them less likeable. Likewise, he doesn't let his bad characters have any moments that might make them seem 'cool'.

I can actually envision this guy's writing process, he probably goes through like a dozen drafts refining the script to make sure there's no way an icky right winger is ever proven right in the slightest, that they're humiliated and sufficiently hypocritical to make it impossible for viewers to pretend they're 'better' than the protags, and finally to make sure nobody can criticize the protagonists' actions at any point, there's always some justification baked into the script. And to his credit, he's good at it, you don't get people pulling a "Thanos did nothing wrong" argument with his movies. He wants to make an airtight moral victory. In this film the Fire-and-Brimstone clergyman is [SPOILERS] an impotent drunkard scamster with an illegitimate son, and the reverence of his followers is entirely unearned, which they come to realize.[/SPOILERS] In GLASS ONION the hypersuccessful billionaire has to be shown to be stupid, petty, tasteless, secretly hated by everyone and not even deserving of his own success in even the tiniest way, it all has to be stolen. YET, as I mentioned at the time, I'm not sold on the idea that his defeat is complete and irreversible at the movies' end:

He wants to push forth the idealistic vision that a smart, educated, clever interloper like Blanc, who champions all the 'right' ideas too, can assist an underprivileged, exploited commoner to win against connected, wealthy idiots through sheer effort and persistence when the stakes are high enough. But then he has to end the movie before reality ensues and the world he posited reasserts and reverses most of the alleged gains.

This was also how The Last Jedi played out. SAME FREAKIN' RULES. See how they elevated Admiral Holdo, deflated Poe Dameron and Luke Skywalker, and made the entire First Order leadership out as incompetents. And Mary Sue'd Rey harder than ever.

I think he screwed up just a little this time, in that while the 'victim' in this case was a bad guy (in contrast to the previous two movies) he didn't manage to make it seem like they deserved to die. A whole line of humiliations is inflicted on him, some contemptible decisions were shown, but all-in-all killing him was objectively indefensible.

But the mystery needs a dead guy to happen, so whatevs. That part was clever enough for me, although I could spot the one way the plan as portrayed could have failed in any 'realistic' setting. Red herrings were set up and executed well. Characters don't behave in stupid ways to make the plot move. And its mostly logically consistent except that one time (you're telling me a guy happened to be recording a baseball game, on broadcast TV, and that a particular device was powerful enough to interfere with the signal?).

Although Kudos to Rian for actively incorporating modern tech into his stories. Rather than trying to pretend cell phones don't exist or ignoring that they can solve most plots instantly.

Anyway. I grew up on mystery novels and shows. I've read Sherlock Holmes, Encyclopedia Brown, Hardy Boys, and more since I was very young. And I'm slightly pained to say that the entire Murder Mystery genre is played out and practically dead by now. It has been years since I saw a mystery resolution that actually made me go "WOW." And that mystery was in fact... KNIVES OUT. And thus I can credit Johnson with trying very hard to revive the genre with a fresh approach. But much like the actual corpse in this film, Johnson can only give it the illusion of resurrection, its still very much dead and no amount of mortuary makeup alone will solve that.

This was the last mystery that got me to sit up and cheer: https://www.magnetic-press.com/blackwaterlilies/

While I loved the comic, the source novel is probably good as well. It was considered "un-filmable" but the comic hits hard, IMO. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/33391439-black-water-lilies

I haven't watched any 'Knives Out' stuff and at this point I never will. No point.

EVEN THOUGH Rian sort of cheated and [SPOILERS] made a female character a killer this time, she never strikes the killing blow herself. [/SPOILERS]

I'm still convinced the real ending of Knives Out is that the nurse is guilty and she successfully plotted to influence the old man to change the will in her favour, etc. It just makes the ending more coherent and the entire story more satisfying; she played the "me? poor innocent angelic nurse brown immigrant lady?" card so well that she fooled Blanc, who is maybe not up there with Hercule Poirot even if he does like showy dénouements, by using his biases and prejudices, and the end shot is the family knowing she dunnit but unable to prove it. Standing there sipping her coffee out of her "my house" mug to rub their noses in it.

You don't even need to rewrite anything in the movie to conclude the guy wouldn't have even died if the nurse's family had immigrated legally. They would've just called an ambulance, and he'd have been fine. Especially since she gave him the right medication to begin with. There'd have been no disciplinary consequences and they could investigate who swapped the labels in peace.

More evidence for my theory that Rian Johnson is secretly a crypto-conservative who makes movies that skewer woke liberals, and only pretends to be woke so that he can get them made in Hollywood.

Rewriting that movie so its a parable about immigrants scamming Boomers out of their fortunes and/or scamming this country's generous welfare system would be hilarious and topical.

And yeah, the clear biases shown by Blanc SHOULD be a weak spot of his, but instead its basically him being aware of the rules Rian's universe works under.

As I said, 'Airtight Moral Victory.' Blanc's approach isn't so much putting together the clues to figure out what series of events happened, he solves the MORAL narrative of the case and then the rest of it clicks into place around that. This seemed ESPECIALLY true in the third film.

And even funnier, the fact that in EVERY movie, the protags needs a high IQ white male to actually fix things while they, the downtrodden, do almost all the dirty work is absolutely patronizing if you think about it for more than a minute. He tried to undercut that with this film. The final Blanc film should absolutely have Blanc himself being the murder victim and the out-of-depth protagonist manages to solve it all on their own for once.

Glass Onion ends with burning the Mona Lisa because Teacher Lady has her feathers so ruffled, and I don't think "black woman destroys cultural inheritance of humanity because she's peeved" is that moral a narrative. If you wanted to look at it in a certain light, you could even claim it's racist: black people depicted as resorting to violence because they're incapable of responding to set-backs any other way.

But to be fair, Johnson's Knives Out universe is a very stylised one running on particular tropes and only tangential to our reality. It's artificial and chock-full of artifice, because it's recreating the Golden Age 'body in the library' detective stories where the more baroque the plot, the better, so long as you could be held to have played fair with scattering clues throughout the book (the early Ellery Queen novels routinely had a "challenge to the reader" about 'can you guess/work out whodunnit?' before the final chapter wrapping up the entire case).

I don't think "black woman destroys cultural inheritance of humanity because she's peeved" is that moral a narrative.

I can steelman that one. If your sibling was brutally murdered, and your response is to freak out and break some 'property,' is that really morally objectionable? Are we genuinely weighting the continued existence of the Mona Lisa (of which there are many copies, its not some hidden gem) over a human life at that point? Its a thought worth weighing, at least. I think one can sympathize enough to see why from the sibling's perspective a piece of artwork is not worth preserving over the life of a loved one.

And yet, it is also pretty hard to believe the point "genius black lady invents something which is stolen by mediocre white guy" since that's something that has probably never happened in all of history.

The concepts in Glass Onion were actually really good and were probably dragged down by the Johnson's absolute need to get his message across at all costs.

I think the idea there is that it destroys the bad guy's reputation with the public so he can't get away with it or something? But the problem is, as you point out in another comment, the second the real world applies then Burninator Lady gets the blame, not him. She's the one blew up the place, after all. She knew what she was doing. Bad Guy may be a murderer and a vain idiot, but he didn't want the Mona Lisa destroyed. She's just like the paint-throwing activists, except one step worse.

Are we genuinely weighting the continued existence of the Mona Lisa (of which there are many copies, its not some hidden gem) over a human life at that point?

It’s worth a great many human lives by most reasonable measures

Can we quantify it? How many family members would you sacrifice to preserve it?

I think people's moral intuitions will diverge pretty aggressively on this.

Zero, I'd burn the whole world down to protect my family, but that's why we don't let the parents of soldiers decide our military strategy. It's good and right that each of us individually values our loved ones above everything else, but you can't possibly make society-wide decisions like that.

If some demon told me he would destroy the Mona Lisa unless I agreed to let him sacrifice a random stranger, and then kept adding strangers until I told him to just destroy the painting instead, I imagine I'd get to a couple dozen before my conscience swang the other way. But maybe not, it's really hard to predict how my ethics would fare under such extreme circumstances.

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Are we genuinely weighting the continued existence of the Mona Lisa (of which there are many copies, its not some hidden gem) over a human life at that point?

That's not what is being compared though, rage over the loss of a human life is what is being compared to a priceless painting, not the life itself.

But even then, on various videos of Just Stop Oil and similar protesters defacing works of art, you'll find plenty of commenters whole throatedly supportive of slitting the protestors throats.

I'm just saying, is it not at least sympathetic for someone to have a crashout and destroy stuff (even irreplaceable stuff) because their loved one was killed? "My brother/father/daughter was killed, you think I give a shit about your painting right now?"

Hell, its a common trope is 'revenge rampage' movies for the protagonist to kill dozens of mooks on their way to taking out their rage on the person they hold responsible for killing their loved one.

This is usually cheered. If killing a bunch of henchmen to get at the person who murdered your kin is sympathetic/justified, how is burning up a painting not just a little sympathetic/justified too? What are the actual bounds of 'acceptable' behavior to enact righteous vengeance?

vs. the Just Stop Oil folks who are doing it deliberately as a cry for attention.

The opposite to Burninator Lady is Ray Bradbury's story The Smile. She's like the people in that, just acting out of blind vengefulness for a loss that the destruction won't repair and palliate.

If killing a bunch of henchmen to get at the person who murdered your kin is sympathetic/justified, how is burning up a painting not just a little sympathetic/justified too?

The henchmen, in most such stories at least, are pieces of human garbage and the world is made a better place with each one the protagonist kills. The priceless work of art being destroyed is a permanent loss for humanity and its culture. The problem with your steelman here is that it presupposes that all human life is equally valuable, or at least that no humans are net negatives on humanity.

I love the scene in Citizen Kane when Kane destroys the shit out of his room. It's very visceral and conveys the emotions he is feeling exceptionally well. So I appreciate it as a story-telling device. But morally, in real life, it is purely destructive behavior and a sign that someone is unable to control their emotions. It doesn't make me think more highly of Kane's character when he goes on a destructive rampage.

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is it not at least sympathetic

No. People have endured far, far worse with more dignity. By the sounds of it this is entirely gratuitous and achieves nothing.

There is also the fact that, when you get right down to it, there are billions and billions of people and very few precious works of art. Yes, most of them are special to someone but if we acted like every person was as precious as their mother/father/brother etc. thinks they are then society would be unable to survive.

(This is an assertion, of course. I can't make an argument for my moral intuitions, I can only describe them.)

On a lighter note, are you aware of the story about Edward James Olmos and the model ship from Battlestar Galactica?

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I can steelman that one. If your sibling was brutally murdered, and your response is to freak out and break some 'property,' is that really morally objectionable?

Yes, of course it is. The Mona Lisa didn't kill your sibling, so taking your grief out on that thing is attacking a party (the public, who has a desire to enjoy that cultural artifact) that is not guilty of the crime you suffered. That is very clearly morally objectionable.

Are we genuinely weighting the continued existence of the Mona Lisa (of which there are many copies, its not some hidden gem) over a human life at that point?

This line of argument really only applies if destroying the Mona Lisa will prevent the human's death, or bring them back to life. If it won't (and I'm not under the impression it would, though I haven't seen the movie), then there's no grounds to invoke the "human life versus work of art" calculus. The human life and the work of art are not in tension in that case, so destroying the art is just throwing a tantrum.

This line of argument really only applies if destroying the Mona Lisa will prevent the human's death, or bring them back to life. If it won't (and I'm not under the impression it would, though I haven't seen the movie), then there's no grounds to invoke the "human life versus work of art" calculus. The human life and the work of art are not in tension in that case, so destroying the art is just throwing a tantrum.

I’m reminded of the common rejoinder to complaints about the vandalism of the 2020 riots. “Oh you care about property more than people?”

black woman destroys cultural inheritance of humanity because she's peeved

>”Humanity? That’s the white man’s cultural heritage and no one else’s.”

sjw_hitler_combined_speechbubble.jpg

I dislike Rian Johnson's writing tone; it's very flippant, very contemporary in a way that will age it poorly, and seems tuned for getting Leftists to clap like circus seals.

I think this has definitely had moments of truth, but some of the spiritual scenes did not ring like that to me. Blanc and Jud's first conversation (ending in Blanc's "Touche, Padre"), the phone call, the final confession and absolution. There was something sincere there. It might just be Johnson still feels some fondness for his religious upbringing and time in his life that he doesn't for the conservative end of the political spectrum.

seems tuned for getting Leftists to clap like circus seals

Local man discovers the current Hollywood design paradigm

Revisiting Vivek Ramaswamy's Christmas Rant: One Year Later

The tome in question, in case you need to refresh your memory. One hundred and twenty five million views. This single tweet tore open a gash in the Republican coalition that has yet to heal (though I don't want to overstate the counterfactual impact here, this particular fault-line was inevitable).

Looking back, it is clear now that the controversy was never just racist shit-flinging. There is a real philosophical conflict underlying the backlash. It is perhaps most elegantly stated as a variant of the Euthyphro dilemma; is our culture good because it is American, or is it American because it is good? Vivek is a functionalist. If an aspect of American culture is non-functional, then it should be replaced. His opponents in the comments are overwhelmingly essentialists. Americanness is an ontological property that is good because of it's essential nature as American. In this context, the idea that someone might choose to discard prom queens or jock sports fandom is a threat to America itself. Of course, this begs the question, who counts as American? And we end up with the "Heritage American" discourse that has been popping up lately.

Ramaswamy's mistake is backing the wrong horse. The Blue tribe has no shortage of meritocratic strivers (albeit, rarely to the degree of the stereotypical Asian immigrant). By contrast, meritocracy/achievement is not a premiere value for blood-and-soil conservatives, who generally prefer loyalty, hierarchy, and - above all - lineage. Some second gen immigrant with the wrong religion telling them they need to hustle harder is never going to fly.

America as an attainable idea is consistent with the founding meta-principles of the country, but is not really compatible with the present American conservative movement, which is dominated by nativists who view Americanness largely as a function of in-born traits rather than demonstrated values.

Of course, this begs the question, who counts as American? And we end up with the "Heritage American" discourse that has been popping up lately.

"Heritage American" is just the latest formulation of the idea of Real America, which goes back quite a ways under one guise or another. It holds that, white, conservative (and usually rural and uneducated) Christians are the true heart of America. To the extent that you deviate from this prototype, the legitimacy of your participation in American society and politics is questioned or outright rejected.

It's not a coincidence that the idea isn't very coherent. It's often invoked by people who trace their ancestry to Catholic immigrants from the mid-19th century, or by people whose heritage ancestors that give them a claim to special status are people who literally repudiated their allegiance to the United States. The point is not to assemble an intellectually consistent basis for who really counts. That would exclude many, if not most, proponents, and in any event they're not really interested in cutting out some Polish American whose ancestors came in the 1880s as long as he votes the right way. It's to create a fuzzy category that legitimizes the aforementioned idea of Real Americans while avoiding any question of values (which are largely anti-American).

I don’t think the Westerner has the genetic disposition to compete against the Brahmin or Han in terms of raw Olympian memorization and test-taking, but he makes up for this lack with greater prosociality, collaboration and novelty. Unfortunately, the West has decided to structure its educational culture on the oriental mode of study, rather than leaning into its generic and cultural strengths. (An elite British university in 1800 was more about the cultivation of social skills than learning; lectures were nonexistent, learning was one-to-one with a tutor, and tests were fewer). The Brahmin has been selected by his religion to master the art of memorization and recitation in complete obedience to authority, but this is not so for Christian-derived Europeans. I think there may be clever ways to structure education to uniquely benefit the European genotype, by adding more independence, fellowship, and sense of moral purpose, but that’s just a hunch.

An elite British university in 1800 was more about the cultivation of social skills than learning; lectures were nonexistent, learning was one-to-one with a tutor, and tests were fewer

The big problem with this is that it doesn't scale. It's fine to educate a small elite this way, but you can't teach the masses like this. (Though you could keep doing it for your small elite and educate the masses in a more assembly-line-like manner, which kind of is what ended up happening anyway.)

During the course of the 19th century, the British Empire quite consciously copied elements of the Chinese imperial examination system in order to find talent and staff their civil service.

It's not even necessarily about meritocracy, though it does help. If you need a large civil service to run a somewhat centralized empire, there aren't enough nobles, you will need to recruit commoners and you will need to be able to figure out which commoners to recruit. You will also need to educate said commoners. Something like the Chinese system is the natural result. The British just didn't have or need a large civil service before.

So this:

Unfortunately, the West has decided to structure its educational culture on the oriental mode of study, rather than leaning into its generic and cultural strengths.

is simply a necessity for a large, centralized society, which China had and European countries did not really start developing until the rise of absolutism, at which point they ran into the same problems China had had and solved them similarly.

I have to wonder who would've won an actual primary, if Dave Yost or Jim Tressel stayed in the race. I honestly would not expect Ohioans to pick Vivek if a real primary happened. Very frustrating to not have a proper choice.

America is what America is. Vivek being upset about what it is does not change that. This is, literally, tautological.

Now you can of course argue that we should improve America by making it more like some other country which does things better. That is, historically, not a GOP position, to put it mildly, and race as such is kinda irrelevant- because the GOP reaction to we should have socialism like Denmark is also sharply negative. Our culture is American because it is American; Fourth of July is an American holiday because it is celebrated by Americans in America. Literally that is what makes it so.

Vivek is arguing ‘we should have oriental grindset study obsession like they do in the orient’ and nobody seems to like that- including the orientals themselves, the Koreans are refusing to bring children into the world because they don’t want to subject them to that. Obviously it’s unpopular, although there’s certain elite circles which like the idea. They are, however, not GOP elites.

Vivek needs to learn his audience instead of crashing out on Christmas every year. Republican politicians keep track of college football because that is what elite red tribers do(NFL is much more working class and much more politically neutral). They don’t rant about SAT scores.

Obviously it’s unpopular, although there’s certain elite circles which like the idea. They are, however, not GOP elites.

Which American elite circles like it? Plenty of Democratic elites want to make us more like Europe. But "bring on the Asian grind" doesn't seem to be popular anywhere. I remember the "Homework Gap" (with Japan, not the modern DEI wikipedia version), but I'm pretty sure the most fervent supporters of more homework would recoil at modern South Korea.

Hmm, you might be mostly right. I do remember some very blue educator bigwigs pushing for more homework because it was bonum in se to study like the orientals. But they might not truly be elites anyways, I suppose.

Which American elite circles like it?

Capital holders. They benefit a lot from having a workforce that is more skilled and less lazy.

If an aspect of American culture is non-functional, then it should be replaced. His opponents in the comments are overwhelmingly essentialists. Americanness is an ontological property that is good because of it's essential nature as American. In this context, the idea that someone might choose to discard prom queens or jock sports fandom is a threat to America itself.

I don't think that's what's going on here. There may be some root value differences that are due to different cultural backgrounds, but the Boy Meets World fans don't think "I don't care of Cory's life sucks; it's ontologically American so I support it!" No, they think that living a good life (functionally) is not just about being valedictorian and going to the best college. I think a big part of why America is so successful has to do with values such as individualism, experimentation, exploration, personal integrity, and kindheartedness. That's what Western "mediocrity" narratives teach.

I'll step in an steelman Vivek here. Remember Vivek's presidential campaign ran to the right of Trump on one issue: ending affirmative action.

Let's start by loading into context the take-aways from Compact Magazine's "The Lost Generation" - that Heritage American sold out their own sons from taking positions they were as-qualified or often better-qualified for. Now imagine you're Vivek - you come to this country and you like the Red team's vision for the future, you want them to win - but everywhere you look in the halls of power tells you the Red team can't possibly win. They've walled their own people out, and the Blues are in no mood of letting any more Reds through their gate.

You're Vivek so you are familiar with one mode of social mobility: a generational compact where the older generation assists the capable and deserving strivers of the rising generation if they will demonstrate consistent work ethic. Is this not exactly what the doctor ordered for the Red team's ailment?

To dig a into a Straussian reading of Vivek's lament: Grill Americans have largely adopted a slave morality that elevates "Special Education" spending to multiples of Gifted and Talented programs. They've co-signed student loans for their daughter's gender studies (albeit through gritted teeth) while sending their sons into low level career training programs (that were good enough for the Boomers).

But you can't run for President and just tell your voters this "your cherished morality is wrong - stop spending more on literal retards then your future inventors - it's why you're losing!" Instead you need to find a rhetoric that is within the Overton window - and that's football programs and sitcom re-runs. Less of that you say but this isn't an exhortation for the kids to adopt Korean study habits (as many seem to think), but for Grill Parents and Grill Towns to make a new social compact of assigning social prestige and support to activities that generate more Power for the Red team. This is of increasing importance in this new American landscape of zero-sum or even adversarial negative-sum games, like the land where Vivek and his family escaped from.

The problem with meritocracy is that it’s pointless.

If you want meritocracy, just administer a single IQ test to every child at 10 years old and distribute every accolade and job based upon that and whatever protected characteristics you want to prioritize (‘Other Backward Castes’, ‘Pardo’, ‘gender diversity’, ‘URM’, ‘BAME’, whatever) and you will be more efficient than the entire wretched body of meritocracy - not just in America - but in even more degenerate systems like those of South Korea, India and elsewhere.

The whole making kids study for 7 hours after school to pass bullshit tests isn’t meritocracy, it isn’t education, it doesn’t make for a successful society. It’s pure ideology. It doesn’t serve the objective of allocating power, resources or status in any way, since along whatever lines you want, you can do it more efficiently in another way.

Well, except one line.

Imagine your children are second or third generation immigrants. You are wealthy. Pure meritocracy will see your children (due to IQ reversion to mean) likely outcompeted by others - either immigrants or natives. Pure status hierarchy, legacy, families with centuries of history and deep social ties to those who run the august intellectual bodies that are the leading universities will outcompete you. Looks and charisma will also largely favor the beautiful, tall, etc, which probably isn’t your kids.

So what is one to do?

Build a ridiculous status system that specifically prioritizes an absurd and unreasonable level of parental investment. Monetarily yes, but also in terms of time, your children’s and yours. Make the kids suffer, so that parents from nicer cultures that care more about kids choose not to push them through the ridiculous pantomime. Poor families won’t have the knowledge, time or money to compete with you. Very rich ones won’t care to. And the future is yours.

Strongly agree on removing the bullshit. I think it's especially bad in science. I think most of the disciplines do next to no useful work because of it. If you're going to give someone the title, just give them the money and let them work on whatever they want. Fewer scientists - fine - but full freedom.

(‘Other Backward Castes’, ‘Pardo’, ‘gender diversity’, ‘URM’, ‘BAME’, whatever)

Tell me about Bame! Why is it a protected class?

Tell me about Bame! Why is it a protected class?

AIUI, "BAME" stands for "Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic," and is the UK term for non-whites, originally for statistical and data collection purposes, later for the various "diversity" programs.

A lotta loyalty for a hired gun!

Who the [censored] do you think you are, calling me a "hired gun"!? Who am I supposed to be a "hired gun" for, in this baseless accusation of yours. Who am I supposedly displaying "a lotta loyalty" for, by daring to explain what BAME stands for?

https://youtube.com/watch?v=9OXbfo3Mbx0

Low effort. And you're supposed to actually make a reply, not post a link to an unknown video, without even a mention of what it is or why it's relevant?

Because I'm not going to just click some video link.

@ABigGuy4U's post "A lotta loyalty for a hired gun!" is a quote from the memetic first scene of The Dark Knight Rises (his username is also a quote from said scene, the line immediately preceding the "loyalty" quote is "Tell me about Bane! Why does he wear the mask!", and "Somebody get this hothead outta here!" is a quote from later in the movie).

@sun_the_second linked to a video of said first scene.

So, instead of an attack aimed at me, this is, what? Low-effort "chan behavior," not making a clear point, not writing for everyone, and not in keeping with the standards of the Motte, then?

Yes, yes, yes, and yes.

I must confess that I've never really understood the US habit of self-censoring profanities. You are allowed to say "fuck" here - there is no word filter - and implying you said "fuck" is approximately as discourteous as actually saying it. So, what is gained by censoring yourself?

Somebody get this HOTHEAD outta here!

So because I responded with a bit of a temper to your baseless accusations, I'm a "hothead" and you're calling the mods to ban me?

@erwgv3g34

@sun_the_second

@ToaKraka

@CapitalRoom

The report I just filed with the Moderators lists me, my men, and Dr. Alexander here, but only one of you! First one to talk gets to stay on my message board!

I can't tell whether you're joking. If you aren't, see Baneposting.

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Okay, the bit was kind of funny, but you've got to know when to call it quits. Switching to a different part of the movie is a sign!

Or perhaps he is wondering why someone would create an acronym for non-whites if all races are equal.

We used to use BIPOC as an imported term until irate English people pointed out that we were indigenous.

The UN has unofficially defined indigenous people in a gerrymandered way that excludes the English.

Yes, but that only works in refined circles. It still makes people snigger in public so they changed it in the UK.

Ramaswamy is doing some motte-and-bailey nonsense here, pointing out a few flaws in American culture, but then using that as a non-sequitur to justify his ridiculous immigration views. The simple fact is that the H1B system is used to undercut American wages. While ostensibly only permitting "foreign experts", companies game the system by allowing diploma mill bachelor's degrees in India to be valid, and then pay them garbage salaries. An easy solution would be to just require anyone hired on an H1B visa to have high relative wages. Basically everyone agrees this would fix the problem, but nobody makes the change because they actually want to use it H1B's as a cynical vehicle for mass-migration.

I think it’s important to note that striver Vivek does not work in an industry where striving is necessary. He’s literally a politician. He’s not an engineer or Doctor. Being good at problem sets has very little to do with the skills you need as a politician. Most people end up in careers that striving doesn’t produce any tangible value.

There were some big changes to the H1B program announced this month, https://www.uscis.gov/newsroom/news-releases/dhs-changes-process-for-awarding-h-1b-work-visas-to-better-protect-american-workers

Applicants will have their applications weighted based on salary for the job occupation code and location. Devil is in the details, but they are trying to change things.

Amusingly, this will only make it easier for smart Indians to import their countrymen. It’s just that instead of Infosys it will be some motel owner in Iowa who figures out that there’s a local shortage of massage therapists or health administrators or insurance salesmen or machinery operators or vegetable traders or whatever is both in demand and locally deemed hard to hire for and sets up a business that brings over people who did a bullshit 3 month fake degree in whatever it is from an amendable university in his hometown.

The only thing that would really fix the program (other than scrapping it) is to limit no more than 10% of visas to a single country.

I'm of the opinion that the best way to stop these sort of games is to do random audits and fine the companies violating it 10x the amount of money they saved.

Very much so, same with other forms of illegal immigration. It's infuriating that it hasn't been done already, it's pretty much the only way to seriously disincentivize abusing immigration loopholes.

Indirect solutions like this always sound good but in practice end up as anarcho-tyranny -- people end up having to do a LOT of work to prove their workforces are legal (some of which work may itself be illegal according to other laws), if they screw up they get nailed to the wall, and meanwhile someone else who operates completely unlawfully gets away with everything.

Keep it simple, reduce collateral damage, if you want to stop illegal immigration, go after illegal immigrants.

I mean if you want to keep it even simpler- the wage premium for legal workers is actually pretty small, the lack of healthcare/hr overhead is what makes illegals so attractive. Just remove employment regulations. Prevailing wages and working conditions in the vast majority of the USA are already governed more by supply and demand than by regulation, you're mostly cutting red tape.

Random audits? You don't even need an advanced AI to simply produce a table showing every single H1-B employee and how much they're getting paid. If I had access to government systems I'd be able to put out a list of every single H-1B getting paid below market rate for their job in five minutes. After that you'd want to go target all the ones working in positions that weren't really advertised to Americans in good faith - the ones that appear on sites like jobs.now. This isn't exactly a hard problem to solve - the actual issue is that the government is corrupt, and everyone in a position to do something about this problem is profiting off of it instead.

Indeed, only the jobs they're taking are as you note, degreed jobs. Gated sinecures reserved for the aristocracy, or at least the striving class being told they're the aristocracy. The "white collar" college jobs have been using anti-white racism to justify the wholesale displacement and attempted replacement of the working class (previously white catholic ethnics and black people) with more tractable hispanics. Now they find out their precious college degree-gated industries aren't safe from a billion indians, and the actual ruling class finds them as disposable as they found the Poles or Guatemalans.

Now they find out their precious college degree-gated industries aren't safe

The H1B program has been going on for 35 years, so I don't know what the "now" is referring to.

And why are you lumping together all "white collar" jobs, as if software engineers agree with the nonsense coming out of HR?

The H1B program has been going on for 35 years, so I don't know what the "now" is referring to.

Hasn't the scale of the phenomenon changed over the years?

I'm sure its waxed and waned, but SWEs have been complaining about H1B's since at least the Dotcom boom in the 90s.

Software is special because the previous wave of applicants didn’t just need the H1B, they also needed whatever local cartel was required. The bar and going to law school in America and the fact the law is a verbal heavy field strongly preference native speakers raised in the US. The AMA locks foreign doctors out of any desirable residency places (which it mandates for almost all foreign doctors). Engineering has various local licensing requirements, and a lot of federal stuff requires you to be a citizen anyway. Meanwhile, sales, consulting, finance and a lot of other professional service jobs have a strong sales/relationship component which again makes it harder for Indians and Chinese applying from overseas.

Software engineering was unique in that it didn’t really require social skills, doesn’t usually require client interaction, paid well enough to get the visa, didn’t have a domestic licensing cartel and could be taught as a technical skill in foreign universities and schools.

Yep, I agree with all of this. Software engineers really should do what other engineering fields have done and set up that rent-seeking licensing cartel. It's bad for society overall, but most other fields do something like that, so why not us?

Oh, kick me out of the one field that pays me well despite the lack of credentials, why don't you?

You could just... get the new credentials? Plus, this would likely cut down on the impetus for nearly every shop to do Leetcode style interviews, so you'd be just exchanging one set of nonsense for another.

You could just... get the new credentials?

Yes, going back to school for 3 years (to learn things I already know, mind you) is just what I want to do when I'm 40.

Plus, this would likely cut down on the impetus for nearly every shop to do Leetcode style interviews, so you'd be just exchanging one set of nonsense for another.

Hearing Americans talk about Leetcode is one of those things that makes me go "wait what?". Every job I had over the past decade just handed out an assignment to be completed over a couple hours / a day, and they judged based on that.

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Right. However bad infinite Indians are, the "real engineering" gerontocracy is far worse.

Vivek’s big issue is he’s lived a sheltered life. He’s never been with normies. 95% of the people in any country are just too dumb to win as strivers (Israel excluded). Promoting striving culture is just bad politics because 95% of the voters can’t win that game.

I don’t think striving culture makes countries rich. I think the best scientist just enjoy being scientists and are having fun. It’s not grinding for them. I think few professions benefit from striving culture. The only potential exception being medicine.

I don’t consider myself a striver. I did do math problems for fun growing up. I went to math tournaments. Why did I do it? I was having fun.

Vivek is the only Republican I would vote against. The vision for the party he has is a cancer and it’s worth giving Dems a little more power to destroy him.

It’s stupid to let Vivek run in Ohio because I highly doubt I’m the only one in the base who vote against him.

Vivek is the only Republican I would vote against. The vision for the party he has is a cancer and it’s worth giving Dems a little more power to destroy him.

It’s stupid to let Vivek run in Ohio because I highly doubt I’m the only one in the base who vote against him.

Thankfully, Casey Putsch (a car YouTuber) is running as Republican specifically against Vivek. The party probably won't be fucked in Ohio.

95% of the people in any country are just too dumb to win as strivers (Israel excluded).

Israel has its own underclasses of Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews that feel like they are being screwed over by the disproportionately Ashkenazi upper classes.

And in point of fact, Israeli Christians are local version of orientals, in having incomes and educational outcomes that handily best the majority. Jews do better than Muslim Arabs or Druze but behind Christians. Basically nobody disputes that this is for IQ reasons- Arab Christians are a genuinely high IQ group.

Hmm I wonder why that is. Arabs are generally low iq. So why is this one group high iq? Do they not practice cousin marriage unlike Muslim Arabs

Arab Christian’s have globally normal rates of cousin marriage compared to the very high ones among Muslims, yes. There’s a few HBD just so stories(sub-Saharan African DNA in the Muslim population and jizya forcing conversions among the poor), too, but they seem like just-so, and also it’s a pretty even spread; Maronites who lived in enough isolation to get away with stuff aren’t any dumber than Copts who didn’t.

He's also just really scuzzy, even by the low standards of Ohio politicians. Musk can make these sort of arguments stick by pointing at one of several giant factories. Vivek can point to... failed biomedical stuff in an even-more-scammy-than-normal field, a politically-focused investment fund, and partial ownership of BuzzFeed.

None of it's clearly fraud, or illegal, or even likely to get the New York AG going after him, but I wouldn't be surprised if he loses more Red Tribe support than Jay Jones lost Blue Tribe support.

Getting the New York AG to go after him would be one of the better things for Vivek's popularity.

I just don’t see who in the Republican Party that Vivek appeals to. He seems to believe in blankslatism which is very unpopular in the high IQ parts of the GOP. He made fun of football and cheerleaders so I don’t think he’s cool with the blue collar guys. He’s not Christian. I will be completely honest that I don’t think someone can be American without conversion.

Who’s his voter base? Boomer neoliberals? I thought they all became Democrats already.

This anti - Vivek rhetoric is wild to me. He was one of the most eloquent avid culture warriors and had the skin color and balls to say what everyone was thinking more than Trump or DeSantis.

I am tired of presidents that play dumb or are dumb. I want 4-syllable words in speeches and the worship of merit. I want to crush pro-black racial spoil systems, salt the earth so they never return, and I'll take any ally anywhere to accomplish it.

I understand that many in the red tribe don't want these things but I would have voted for him, easily, even with the scuzzy businesses.

If you believe in hbd and are concerned about racial spoils systems then how could you do anything that might increase the number of Indians in America? The vast majority of Indias population is no more intelligent than American black (probably lower due to race mixing). A few Brahmins are fine but anything that risks potential immigrants of 100’s of millions of lower class Indians is a gigantic risks.

Infinity Indians isn't the argument I'm making, and I don't think Vivek ever made it either.

But that seems like what we will get. Heritage Americans don’t like being racists or mean. Indians will advocate for other Indians. Without limiting Indians today we end up with infinite Indians which eventually means the large amount of low IQ Indian populations.

I don't know the statistics about how Indians advocate for one another. I work in tech, so I see plenty of the ingroup preference there. I agree it's a risk, but I also don't think high-caste indians are interested in importing their lower-caste brethren.

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This anti - Vivek rhetoric is wild to me. He was one of the most eloquent avid culture warriors and had the skin color and balls to say what everyone was thinking more than Trump or DeSantis.

Huh? Vivek went on a rant about American laziness wherein he listed a bunch of reasons why America would crush India in a war and somehow came to believe they were bad things.

Do you doubt in any way the pervasive culture of laziness in this country? His comment hit a nerve because deep down we know it's more true than not. It transcends racial lines. Talk to a millennial or Zoomer about hard work or striving. They're almost alien concepts.

I think American culture would be improved dramatically with 10% more striving: white included.

His rant isn't really about laziness though. Laziness is not what causes people to prioritize "prom queens" and "jocks". Indeed, the prom queen and the jock are examples of excellence in their own fields, that being maintaining physical beauty + good social status and athletic prowess. And what he further gets wrong is thinking these things are somehow anti-correlated with the things he would personally like to see popularize like "math olympiad champ" and "valedictorian", while in America they are not. Perhaps if he were more in tune with real American culture he wouldn't be buying into left wing movie tropes as indicative of real life. But here, in the real world, you can be prom queen and get a 1500 on your SAT and maintain a quality GPA (whatever that means in 2025 is not something I know, when I went to HS 4.0 was still considered exceptional, but grade inflation has probably changed that). In the real world you can win a science competition while making all conference or all state on the football team (or in my case winning a regional title in an individual sport).

Indeed, if we drill down into Vivek's screed, it is simply self serving ignorance. It was a bunch of jocks, who happened to also be brilliant, who ran the British Navy as it established an empire that easily subjugated Vivek's people, and Americans of the same ilk then won the world wars and beat back communism (which, again, Indians thought was really cool). But he attacks things he does not know, and/or cannot compete on (and in fact many other Indians tend to struggle in these realms as well). No mention of his sporting in his background, and we would expect from his rant he was not prom king. Indians as a whole struggle with athletics, having the lowest Olympic medals/capita of any large nation.

And is there a laziness problem? Yes, but it is not some problem with Prom Queens failing to cram in a dozen extra problem sets a day so they can get their SAT score from a 1400 to a 1450, and its not because some jock does a half ass job on some meaningless homework assignment given to him by an overeducated English teacher who couldn't get with the jock she liked when she was in HS. No, its the stoners and the antisocial kids that need to be reformed, but since Vivek buys into the Hollywood high school myths of dumb jock and repressed genius that gets shoved into lockers he doesn't have any real applicable solutions. Instead he has a dumb rant against the very great things about America that cause America to put every other country into the metaphorical locker.

Honestly, now this is all I can remember about Vivek's culture warring. Sad!

I want to crush pro-black racial spoil systems, salt the earth so they never return, and I'll take any ally anywhere to accomplish it.

How do you feel about pro-import the world to compete with your children? Maybe no slots at our top research institutions should go to Americans who are American, but this will translate into a better America via culture. Then again, what if this were but a guise to continue importing the rest of the world to compete with your roofer's kids, too? Same old, same old.

I agree with a significant creedal or ideological element in the American spirit. I also don't believe I'm opposed to America, the nation and its people, improving in some way. I agree that America should try to brain drain places where or when appropriate. Yet many people before Vivek have said they want to brain drain the world of its genius and that being American is something more than blood, soil, or whatever fairy dust is in the air. Others have made defenses of certain visas or programs as important or valuable things for the nation. Had he made a limited defense of his preferred program he might been booed but forgotten. Instead, he said we Americans must change because of and motivated by a specific, topical visa discourse. Not the nationality that needs to change, but the culture-- for the race with China. Nobody bought it as, in my opinion, they shouldn't have. They still shouldn't.

Say what you will about black Americans, but at least they've spilled blood for the country. That's not something adequate software engineers are going to do even if we double our efforts or import them wholesale. Not even if they did improve the culture.

Vivek's problem is that his whole persona is designed to appeal to edge-lords on twitter, when edge-lords on twitter are a overwhelmingly Democratic Party constituency. Meanwhile the MAGA crowd having taken his statements at face value have concluded that he must be either a beltway grifter or a progressive Trojan Horse.

The red tribe elite is probably more blank slate than the blue tribe, if anything. They unironically believe that black underperformance is due mostly to culture and that removing blacks from the ghetto culture(and forcing them to assimilate to a better one, namely theirs) is what is necessary to fix issues in their communities. They can respect the oriental grindset but think they should age out of it with assimilation. Twitter is not real life.

I think it depends on which groups of elites you talk about. The young congressional aides types I tend to think are big on Fuentes and hbd. The 80 year old congressman may still be blankslatist.

I think rent tribe elite people want to think like Romney but I think the blacks have bad culture people have died out. Intellectually the right needed to develop a thesis on disparate impact after woke and blacks are just dumb makes a lot more sense now.

The thesis on disparate impact is 'they're uncivilized, and they should be more like us'. That is what normie red tribe elites think. The ultrapolitical ones not so much, but they're a small fraction. The fuentards are far outnumbered by people who think blacks should go to church, study, and work harder and they'd achieve white outcomes.

The fuentards are far outnumbered by people who think blacks should go to church, ... and they'd achieve white outcomes

Isn't Black church attendance already significantly higher than white church attendance?

The African American female church attendance rate is much higher than any other demographic sees; the male church attendance rate is not. ‘The men need to go to church more’ is a criticism of black culture that most black people themselves would agree with, and the usual red tribe elite formulation is that blacks should go to churches with stronger family values moralism anyways(the black church is not that).

I don’t even know how you would calculate the normie belief. Even anonymous surveys don’t work because people still don’t like answering things that sound racists. The belief you think they have I would agree was there belief pre-2020 but now I have no way to measure it.

I think you’re hitting the core here.

If Vivek moved here, converted to Catholicism, named his kids Sean and Brad, starter personally going by Jim and became an obsessive football fan, maybe I’d buy it.

Because that’s basically what my ancestors did. They changed their names, punished their kids if they tried to speak the old language, named their kids almost comically American names, and just thanked god they were allowed to be here. They wanted to be American not lecture Americans on how to be better.

Four generations from now if some Vivek descendant wants to “rediscover their roots”, then fine. But America does have a culture, actually, and if you want to be an American the good news is they you can! You just have to actually do it.

Here is the actually comically American list of names

If Vivek moved here, converted to Catholicism

Shouldn't he be converting to, like, Episcopalianism or Presbyterianism or something? Catholicism is the religion of low-skill immigrants trying to replace the founding stock of America.

There were Catholics here from the start.

The efforts by modern Catholic nationalists to insert themselves into the founding ideology of the United States is a weird sort of stolen valor. They were always a small minority, even in the places that were meant to be tolerant of them like Maryland, and American Republicanism was strongly associated from the outset with Protestantism. One of the Intolerable Acts pertained to toleration of Catholics! And, of course, anti-Catholicism flared up again with large scale Catholic immigration in the mid-19th century.

(You can, of course, admit Catholics into the founding mythology, but then you have to admit basically everyone)

You can sneer at Maryland but you can't make it go away. Many have tried, none have succeeded.

One of the Intolerable Acts pertained to toleration of Catholics!

Establishment of Catholicism, by giving the Midwest to Quebec.

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I think the internet has just been devastating for Protestantism. I don’t really think there are any “serious” Protestants left.

If Vivek “converted” to some pointless Evangelical mega church, it would just feel hollow and unserious.

Catholics (and I include the orthodox in this) have basically just won. Protestantism isn’t taken seriously anymore, and so a “conversion” to Protestantism would similarly not be taken seriously.

It's funny, this is a particularly Catholic argument, in that whenever I see a Catholic culture warrior online, they are usually saying basically this ("I mean, the culture wars are basically over, we won" - first saw it during the Clinton administration). Not sure if it's an aggressive and slightly delusional form of conviction or cope, but it's almost charming, for the vast majority of us, especially in the US, who really don't care much about the schism. It's almost like seeing a "papist!" epithet in the wild.

I think the internet has just been devastating for Protestantism. I don’t really think there are any “serious” Protestants left.

I don't know what you mean by "serious" Protestants. There are clearly plenty of Protestants who are serious about their beliefs. If you mean that Evangelicals are tacky and unintellectual, I won't argue, but I don't see why that would make it unserious (plus, I think the main difference between megachurch evangelicals being tacky and Roman Catholics having ornate gravitas is about 1500 years). I'm also unsure on the role of the internet in this - Evangelicals started on their current trajectory well before the internet. And, of course, Evangelicals are not all American Protestants.

I don't think it's true that Protestantism isn't taken seriously. Rather, Protestantism lacks the centralized hierarchy, unified style guide, and Ancient Traditions^tm of Catholicism and Orthodoxy, which puts it at a disadvantage with people who really like those things. The aesthetics/values/ideas of American Protestantism (especially capital-L Liberal Protestantism) are heavily conflated with general American aesthetics/values/ideas, and, much like American culture as a whole, lives in an eternal present. The power of Catholic identity is not that it is inextricably tied to America, but that it isn't.

What I mean is that Protestants are not intellectually serious, and that most of the claims keeping people in their church don’t stand up to basic scrutiny.

“The Church is hiding the Bible from you they don’t want you to read it only WE have the true words of God!” was a convincing argument when it wasn’t easy to find out that this is just very literally not true.

As far as conversation to Protestantism being unserious: not only could I become a Protestant tomorrow if I wanted to, I could become a Protestant pastor, and so could Vivek.

Vivek Could announce tomorrow that he is starting a church, could call it a “Christian” church, and go around trying to convince people in Ohio that he’s a very serious Christian of some kind.

But this would all take 5 minutes, and be meaningless.

If he wanted to become Catholic, there’s a process to it, he’d need to get his marriage convalidated, baptize his kids, etc. If he wanted to become a priest (to contrast this with the seriousness of becoming a Protestant pastor), it would take him around a decade of philosophy and theology classes, he’d need to leave his family, etc. (Although I'm not sure The Church would take

That’s the point I’m making. It Vivek went through OCIA, got confirmed, convalidated his marriage, went to mass at least weekly, and baptized his kids, I think people would see it as more likely to be genuine.

If he showed up at some mega church or revivalist thing a few times and bought a Bible, I think it would read as performative.

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Just your daily reminder that in the US, the average Roman Catholic Sunday mass is tacky, and does not particularly follow unified style guides. That isn't even trad griping about things which aren't my preference like altar girls and the like; I am the Lord of the Dance Said He is a much more common hymn than anything like Faith of our Fathers, let alone the lovely classical music that inspired so many composers. Mass prayers may differ much less in verbiage, but when sung they are often set to cheesy folk music, or evangelical praise-and-worship light. Guitars are more common instruments than organs. Catholic churches vary strongly in architectural quality but the average Catholic goes to mass in an uninspired pseudo-amphitheatre decorated with designed-by-committee religious art that has nothing in common with the historical churches of Europe that nobody goes to, in a brutalist style if they're unlucky. The typical vestments look, literally, like burlap sacks. The 'ornate gravitas' that you speak of is uncommon enough in America to have special names for it(and is far less available than the other common strong liturgical preference- 'charismatic style' which apes evangelical worship services much more strongly. The majority of deeply religious Catholics in the USA imitate Evangelical outward forms). It's popular with Hollywood because it's easy to show on a screen looking and sounding cool. Most American Catholics have never heard Gregorian chant in a church service, see incense a couple of times a year, and dress worse for mass than protestants do.

Hi there. I'm a serious Protestant.

It's worth bearing in mind that in the real world, as opposed to the internet, evangelicals are doing a much better job of holding on to faith than Catholics or Orthodox. News stories about youth conversions to Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy are usually looking at a few high-profile outliers rather than the overall demographic trend.

The Catholic Church in the United States, demographically, is buoyed up by large numbers of Hispanic Catholic immigrants, but if you restrict yourself to looking at people born in the US who were raised Catholic, they look very similar to mainline Protestants, i.e. in decline. They have noticeably lower retention than evangelicals. Church attendance is consistently higher among evangelicals than Catholics, as is consistency on moral or social issues. (Go through and compare if you like - 59% of Catholics are pro-choice, 70% support same-sex marriage!) If you compare what Protestants and what Catholics say about why they stay in their church, Protestants are significantly more likely to say that they believe in the religion's teachings and that it gives them spiritual comfort, while Catholics are more likely to say that it's because it's just the religion of their family or community. Note also that 1% of Americans are ex-Protestant Catholics, and 4% of Americans are ex-Catholic Protestants, which seems suggestive.

I'm not American, but I work in a religious field and I will say that just anecdotally I have run into a number of ex-Catholic evangelicals, and I would say that for every person raised a Protestant who felt that they were given a shallow spiritual education, and looked longingly at the riches of tradition and liturgy in the Catholic and Orthodox churches (and I count myself as one such person), I have met a person raised a Catholic who found that faith numbing and deadening, but who came alive on discovering evangelical Protestantism, which gave them the tools to cultivate a more passionate, heartfelt relationship with God.

I don't say this as a triumphant evangelical myself. I'm a mainliner, and I will forthrightly confess that the mainline churches are hollowed out, frequently heretical, and dying. I'm part of what I hope will be a small but devout rump of surviving mainline Protestants. My own institutions are largely betraying the faith and receiving in their own congregations the due penalty for their error.

But I would suggest that if you think that Protestantism in the broader sense isn't being taken seriously any more, or that Catholics have just won, or are in a healthier position overall, you may be in a bubble. Evangelical Protestants are probably the healthiest large church tradition in America.

What’s the point here? If Reddit claimed itself as a Christian church, there would be more Redditors than Catholics too. They could say that posting on Reddit is “attending church”, that being a Reddit moderator is being a “pastor”, claim each subreddit as a denomination even!

The point here is about how seriously a conversion by Vivek would be taken. Vivek attending a mega church every week would move the needle either 0 or negatively.

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Confessional protestantism and fundamentalist evangelical-adjacent protestantism are going strong, and they don't restrict the internet anymore than hardcore Catholics do. They're hard to track and more geographically constrained but they do exist.

Can you link me to an example of a church where, if Vivek Ramaswami converted to it, Americans would see this as a strong signal that he was all in on America?

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I think the internet has just been devastating for Protestantism. I don’t really think there are any “serious” Protestants left.

The Mennonites don't count? I mean, Anabaptists are very much Protestant (a product of the "Radical Reformation"), and they seem rather "serious" about it to me.

Doesn't this prove my point pretty cleanly? The Mennonites are not using the internet.

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The conservative true elite is increasingly Catholic, but evangelical megachurchianity is more common for the masses. Episcopalians and Presbyterians are… not common, and don’t go to church anyways.

Wasp churches have largely died out. Catholicism still has an intellectual class which makes Catholicism the closest thing to a national religion now. Evangelicals lack intellectual rigor and have outsourced that to Catholics. Mormons are honestly probably the number 2 Waspy Christianity today.

It does seem like we’ve already had one great replacement. True heritage Americans seem to have already died out.

Evangelicals lack intellectual rigor and have outsourced that to Catholics.

I don't think this is actually true per se, but evangelical intellectuals who are known for being evangelical tend to be theologians. Evangelical intellectuals in other fields exist, but they often aren't known for their evangelicalism – and conversely, evangelical theologians often aren't known outside of evangelical communities or sub-communities. (I reckon it's very Protestant to double-down on theology, do a better job developing it than Catholics, and then mostly drop the ball in other areas because they're of "secondary importance" with the predictable consequences.)

For a variety of reasons I think Catholics are better at bridging the gap between mainstream culture and Catholic culture – one of the notable reasons being that "Catholic" isn't shorthand for "right wing" whereas "evangelical" is, which tends to make Catholic intellectuals more respectable. (However I also think it's true that the Catholics have built better mechanisms/pipelines for their intellectual elite. They deserve both kudos and study for that.)

Episcopalians are still going- shrinking congregations that skew much older than the average church, but they're not about to die out, there'll just be fewer of them. Methodists are still there, albeit older and slowly shrinking, PCA has managed to avoid full collapse even if it's got hard times for the forseeable future. ELCA(mainline lutherans)- famously not a waspy denomination- are the real mainliners who won't be around when their current congregants kick the bucket(which won't be that long).

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Yes that’s one thing I dislike about Vivek. That he seems culturally alien to America.

My second complaint is that at about a 70% probability I think his mental model of the world is incorrect. Striving only boost output in maybe medicine. I don’t think striving culture would boost American wealth.

We had the discussion last time. Vivek was (and presumably is) just wrong. Zach on Saved by the Bell was all-around competent. He's not mediocre at all. Canonically he gets a 1502 on the SAT. He was almost as good at sports as Slater, almost as book smart as Screech, he had Tom Sawyer's social skills and business skills on top of that. And a rebellious streak a mile wide, which gives lie to Vivek's later complaint about "nerdiness over conformity". Perhaps Ramaswamy's own immigrant parents sheltered him too much from American culture, and he is criticizing that which he does not understand.

This is brilliant.


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