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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   23070 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 6, 2026

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Another culture wars item of the week, this time involving culture, and this means culturally cultured culture. Books, luxury bookstores and fine wine, what's not to like?

World famous superstar Dua Lipa decided to do something about rising tide of censorship.

What? Open a library of banned books.

The doors are open to the Manifesto Library

To celebrate its inauguration, we gathered inside one of Europe’s most storied bookshops for a very special Book Tasting, exploring four titles from the collection, each representing one of its core themes:

Nineteen Eighty-Four (Power)

The Handmaid’s Tale (Control)

My Pen Is The Wing Of A Bird (Voice)

Patriot (Memory)

Accompanied by thoughtfully paired Portuguese wines from @sogrape, the evening opened up conversations around censorship, resistance and the importance of preserving voices that challenge power and refuse to be silenced.

Full list of the books is in the Cosmopolitan article, it is exactly what you would already expect.

Actually banned books in UK and EU banned as "serious prison time for production, distribution and possession" are not on the shelves, for obvious reasons.

Yea, it is about performance, about sticking it up to fictional MAGA villain, not about reading. Neither Dua Lipa not any of the prestigious guests are not going to read these books (and neither any other), not that there is something wrong with it.

Just another notch on the list of centi millionaire celebrities doing nothing with their wealth and influence except to climb up the ranks to hopefully ascend from paltry nine figure wealth to glorious ten and finally make it.

Another reminder that no god, no tsar, no hero and certainly no millionaire is there to save you. You must save yourself by your own hand, aided by huge spare disk space.

Addendum: so what can be done to thwart the censorship of banned books? There are already efforts to make information free on the internets, too numerous to count, just pay their bills, support and amplify them. Just about any book ever digitized is out there at the click of your fingertips.

What about books that were not digitized? Cryptocurrency solves it - establish forum/website where you can put up bounty for ultra obscure book you are looking for, payable at successful upload of usable scan at free book pirate site. Something like this, only with stronger incentives than reddit upvotes. (it had probably had been done somewhere, the hypothetical millionaire has to make the effort more visible).

I don’t understand the point of banning and distributing physical books when books are obsoleted by technology.

The point is to show you are doing something and standing strongly against whatever is the villain of the day, the rewards are various, ranging from promotion and pay raise to clicks and retweets.

You do not need wait for internet age, actual censorship of physical books was long string of defeats since the invention of printing press.

Tsarist Russia, was know for the most extensive censorship in the world back in 19th century.

Despite it, poor boy from Caucasian boondocks was able to acquire and read books by Marx and Darwin, and the system was powerless to stop him.

When he was about thirteen, Lado Ketskhoveli took him to a little bookshop in Gori where he paid a five kopeck subscription and borrowed a book that was probably Darwin’s Origin of Species. Stalin read it all night, forgetting to sleep, until Keke [his mother] found him. ‘Time to go to bed,” she said. “Go to sleep — dawn is breaking.” “I loved the book so much, Mummy, I couldn’t stop reading.” As his reading intensified, his piety wavered.

One day Soso [Stalin] and some friends, including Grisha Glurjidze, lay on the grass in town talking about the injustice of there being rich and poor when he amazed all of them by suddenly saying, “God’s not unjust, he doesn’t actually exist. We’ve been deceived. If God existed, he’d have made the world more just.” “Soso, how can you say such things?” exclaimed Grisha. “I’ll lend you a book and you’ll see.” He presented Glurjidze with a copy of Darwin.

Neither Dua Lipa not any of the prestigious guests are not going to read these books (and neither any other), not that there is something wrong with it.

While I agree that the library is largely performative, Dua Lipa is one of the few celebrities, perhaps the only celebrity, that actually is a serious reader and literary critic.

While the overlap between her literary interests and mine is fairly small, by all accounts she really is fairly well read and even hosts a legitimately quite intellectual podcast where she interviews various prominent authors.

This sounds less like the purpose is to criticize Trump, and more that it is to drink some nice wine, talk about books, and discuss some (in their circle) noncontroversial politics. Just a nice night out for older, well-off leftist intellectuals really.

The left's inability to accept that they aren't the rebels anymore predates Trump, though his victory has likely allowed them to continue to live in denial.

When were leftists the rebels? Haven't Universities and intellectuals have leaned left since the end of the cold war?

A certain sort of leftist would argue that the "real" (read: Marxist) left was killed by the end of the Cold War.

For the rest of us, nobody would argue the academy has been anti-actually-existing-left in our lifetime. But they could at least claim that the prudes were running the culture when people were going after rap and rock and roll, or that evangelicals and neocons were in charge in the Oughties. In the long run all of those battles were lost decisively by those groups and for a bit only the left-wing position stood as legitimate.

Hell, Communism was arguably dead by the time Brezhnev took power, it just hung on as a convenient shingle for Russia to play global power politics, and as a nucleation point for various anti-colonists ethnic nationalist groups in the global south (and Belfast). Western liberals looked at this marriage of convenience and erroneously thought that Maoism was the somehow the pure golden path of Marxism, which is why they’ve spent the next fifty years getting rooked into various ethno-nationalist blood feuds. Any excuse to throw on a uniform and get in line will do, no matter the cognitive dissonance. If you want the right-wing version just look at all the Ukrainian slavic Nazis and their Jewish fuhrer.

Mitchel McConnell and the Collapse of Common Sense.

Before I start -

-Please don't feel personally attacked if you bought the FUD, you are not alone.

-It could totally turn out that the recent releases are doubling-down in which case whoops, and feel free to judge me later.

Anyway.

After weeks of speculation, Mitch McConnell appears to be alive (per CNN, Fox). This is good news (because death is bad, and also because he is one of the most competent people remaining in American government). It seems like he and his family wanted some privacy and that he was sick (probably held down by some pneumonia it seems?).

This was always the most likely outcome.

Despite that we've seen a crap-ton of conspiracy theories, and I think these are a microcosm of the decline in America and perhaps the modern world. On reddit and most of blue social media this was painted something that the evil Republicans were doing for evil Republican reasons (with a sidebar of his wife/handler immediately fleeing to China). The mainstream media bit into it as a tabloid chaser (...how far we've fallen) and as a cudgel to hit the Republicans with, and of course you can also blame the 24-hour news cycle.

Posters here and more moderate/right-leaning spaces did better but some still went in on conspiracy theories.

Lest we think it is online only I deliberately polled some people I know in real life.

This never really made sense though. The political hit from having been caught lying about this would be high (well for Republicans, anyway). The benefits on stalling are murky. The amount of family and other people you'd have to keep in the dark was high.

It was silly. Perhaps some people didn't mean it seriously, but that's the problem isn't it.

Too much of politics is low information, demanding people have an opinion, and that opinion is valueless and sometimes more of humor thing or as we talk about with woke a religious stance more than a policy position.

People being stupid and silly isn't a new invention but people are asked about or forced to state their opinions more often and can do so publicly and without later shame for saying something ridiculous. On the other hand the people we used to look to for information have fallen off the rails, and on the gripping hand people feel entirely comfortable completely throwing out experts because the experts have lost a step, not realizing random individuals or influencers really aren't doing any better.

And of course we have what we see anytime a Republican aligned figure is ill or dead - the grave dancing.

The whole thing has been tremendously gross but I can't help but think we'll get more of it.

The decline and fall of Joe Biden has essentially permanently broken any public trust that might have existed around the health of older politicians. Every news consumer and voter remembers when the entire establishment, including many Republicans, lied to us about the mental state of the president for years. There will be no charity for elderly politicians for some time.

The political hit from having been caught lying about this would be high (well for Republicans, anyway). The benefits on stalling are murky. The amount of family and other people you'd have to keep in the dark was high.

What makes you say that? What politician has actually faced consequences for lying to the public in the Trump era? I guess Biden, but he mostly just aged out, and only a handful of his immediate Bidenworld cohort have been banished from public life. As Jung said Hitler was the incarnation of Wotan, Trump is the incarnation of Loki. We live under the reign of the trickster god and are surprised when people suspect dirty tricks. In the Iran discussion just one post away, we have Trump's defenders arguing that he was lying the whole time about his intentions and that the lies are what justify signing the MOU, which was just a dirty trick against Iran all along.

We live in a post-truth era. Why would any elderly politician have earned the benefit of the doubt?

Aren't you conflating different spheres here?

I want my military leaders to be good a keeping secrets, lying even. I'm very happy that nobody knew about the Maduro raid until it was over. Similarly, much of what's happening in Iran is being kept secret because it literally is top secret.

Politics is a different matter. We should desire maximum transparency from our elected leaders, since their actions are the basis on which we elect them and hold them accountable. In fairness though, much of what they do is also classified, or has effects that require deliberation before sharing information.

But I think op is actually more concerned with the media. We absolutely should, and largely don't, hold them to the highest standards for integrity.

Conflating these spheres just muddies the issue.

You certainly seem quite muddled, so I clearly didn't communicate clearly!

OP seems mainly concerned about the public, rather than the media, with specific call outs to social media and to real life. A public made up of people who just watched as Joe Biden fell apart publicly after years of being told he was fine.

I think we can play some motte and bailey games if we want to define what exactly is ok for the government to keep secret and what isn't, but I think we can all agree that the government has repeatedly been on the wrong side of that line. I don't think anyone can dispute in good faith that the American political class has routinely lied to the American public, in ways that were easily and publicly proven to be lies quickly enough for people to notice, and that people notice this. It matters that Trump tweets out extremely clear things that he later backs off on. People learn not to trust their government.

"People Think Lying Liars Might be Lying" is kind of a non-headline.

I mean he was completely MIA and even Trump said he had no idea how he was doing. There have been a ton of health concerns and falls etc. Plus that video where he blankly stared into space during a speech. Makes sense to speculate wildly

Honestly I think I prefer this information environment to the ‘trust the experts’ soft censorship of 2019-2023. I’ve been pretty upset with the Israel conspiracy theories on Twitter, but I’m starting to again think that really inane stuff spreading makes people more cautious about what they believe. I even think the QAnon stuff could have gone away earlier if more people had been exposed to how crazy it all was.

People actively refuse to use common sense or do research when confronted quite often these days, and the amount of people who trust a random person or influencer over an expert even when it is obviously stupid is quite high (ex: listening to a social media influencer who is getting kick backs to sell a product and that's their obvious business model over a physician).

Much of this stuff can be argued to not be new, but the distrust and hatred of actual experts is 100% a new problem and it's a serious one. We are talking patients refusing life saving treatment because of doctor google (or now AI google) or because of some TikTok.

The guy is old, health problems are to be expected, but the immediate rush to "he's dead and this is a cover-up" was silly. Why? What reason to cover it up? This, and the "Lindsey Graham was actually killed by a Russian strike in Ukraine" rumour-mongering is just everyone has gone crazy.

Isn't it based on the experience with Feinstein? Her staffers and family didn't cover up her death but did everything but to act as if she was still a functional bit of Senate machinery. This may have been her wish but it is also the last hurrah for the people on her coattails.

Between that and Biden it's not a shock that people don't trust the inner circles of these people to be forthright.

To be fair, this is a world where a president's senility was hushed up for at least a year and it's expected for senior politicians to continue their duties while almost insensible from stroke or in their hospital beds. I can see why people jump to a 'weekend at Bernie's' explanation without a huge leap in logic.

The political hit from having been caught lying about this would be high (well for Republicans, anyway)

I'm not a Republican but from where I'm sitting it looks like their opponents already uniformly assume the worst about them. I don't think there's much difference between being accused of this and getting caught doing it. The disgust is already priced in.

Decided to take a break from Twitter for a while and for some reason thought I'd do better on reddit. Opened up a thread full of thousands of people raging about and mocking Elon over something he allegedly said. Looked it up and found out he never said it at all. Pointed this out to a few people. Universally downvoted of course, but one of them bothered to respond and tell me that "It doesn't matter. This is exactly the kind of thing he would say."

Posters here and more moderate/right-leaning spaces did better but some still went in on conspiracy theories

MARGARINE ISN’T BUTTER! It says it right there on the label, it’s not butter! It’s not butter! It’s not butter!

The margarine I use definitely claims it's butter. (It's not butter. It contains butter. I don't care what the USDA says)

@throwaway I HATE MARGARINE! I HATE MARGARINE! WOE UNTO YOU FALSE BUTTER! THE LAMB OF GOD COMES FOR YOU, DECIEVER OF MANKIND! YOU HAVE PROFANED THE SACRED GIFT OF BUTTER!

We shall not accept this false butter! For the lord hath clarified the butter, and it has become GHEE!!!!!

I don't understand what this is supposed to mean.

I think he can't believe it's not butter.

Can I interest him in some ghee?

Most of the content I saw was more of the 'McConnell is potentially braindead and being kept alive for political reasons' moreso than straight up not recording his actual death for what it's worth

What's strange is this is happening on the same day that Lindsey Graham suddenly dies, almost like McConnell wanted to present himself as continuing to be a part of Republican control of the Senate after Graham threw the SC Senate race into disarray with his death.

That said, I don't love that we're having geriatric senators stay on through major health concerns.

I mean it makes sense, Graham dying and it being announced immediately would just raise more questions about the lack of updates. Although it's entirely possible it was just timing.

Graham dying and it being announced should have steered people in the direction of "if McConnell was dead it would have been announced". If he was severely ill, there could be all kinds of reasons (including his family wanting things private while they dealt with the crisis) for not giving on-the-hour updates. If they had issued on-the-hour updates, the conspiracy mongers would have found some reason to find that suspicious: "why are they telling us he's not dead yet? what is really going on? do they mean he's on life support and is a vegetable but they haven't pulled the plug yet? that's it, isn't it?"

The idea that Mitch was near-death was plausible. In fact, it’s still possible that this happened and he recovered and that’s why they’re posting about it now. Pneumonia, right?

Other conspiracy theories were much more far-fetched, but not anywhere close tot he worst. Didn’t Twitter have a national freak-out when Donald Trump wasn’t seen in public for three days?

I don’t think conspiracy theories are a sign of decline as such. A lot of them turned out to be true, or events justified immense skepticism. Off the top of my head: Hillary rigged the 2016 primary, Russiagate was a hoax, Corona was probably man-made, the government lied about masks, Snowden, Assange, Twitter Files, Kavanaugh rape hoax, Duke Lacrosse Team rape hoax, Rolling Stone UVA Rape hoax, Trump assassination attempts. The largest mass shooting in American history happened at Mandalay Bay and the investigation went nowhere and odd details went totally unexplained and Trump got up on TV and basically said, wow that was crazy don’t worry about it. Etc etc etc.

In a way conspiracies are just a natural product of society. Any time a small coordinated group is acting in secret against a larger group, that’s a conspiracy. But we wouldn’t really call the journalists who sit around lying to you a conspiracy, even though it’s quite natural for people to feel distrust in that reality.

My theory is that the conspiracy theories used to be smart but are getting dumber. There was a lot of alpha in conspiracy theories when a generation of smart young Americans were posting online because they were locked out of power and party jobs. A lot of those posters are being assimilated now into high-profile jobs (the Trump admin is full of posters), but there’s still this meme floating around that conspiracies are true. So now you have Tucker and Candace and BlueAnon and all sorts of nonsense grifting lowbies. Same as it ever was, not different in some respect from the medieval mob.

Remember when Netanyahu was rumored to have died in an Iranian airstrike and that coffee-shop video was widely thought to be AI?

Yeah, pneumonia was known as "the old man's friend" because that was what finished off old people in the past. I still wouldn't put a minor stroke out of the picture, though.

Please note all the "hoax" in the list you gave. The problem is now that there is no debunking. Oh, turns out that rumour was only a rumour/a hoax? Doesn't matter, plenty of people will continue to pass it around as Gospel truth (there seem to be a hard core of people who totally believe Trump raped 12 year old girls alongside Epstein, for example).

I think that's right but a lot of the credulity in conspiracy theories came about because so many of them turned out to be true. I remember when Hillary was caught on camera having a seizure and was thrown into her limosine "like a side of beef," then they said it was just a minor case of pneumonia but not the contagious kind that would have put anyone in danger during the photo-op she did to explain she was alright. Looking back on it, ten years later, maybe it was all fine, Hillary doesn't appear to have died. But how do you live through that and not start to wonder if the conspiracies are true?

The idea that Mitch was near-death was plausible. In fact, it’s still possible that this happened and he recovered and that’s why they’re posting about it now. Pneumonia, right?

Yeah he was probably seriously ill in the hospital and I haven't seen any commentary refuting that - the conspiracy theory is that he was dead or brain-dead and it wasn't commented.

List of conspiracy theories.

Look at this almost all of these are things that people KNEW were fake at the time. They weren't conspiracy theories where something was being hidden, it's that the dominant narrative was ass. The biggest exception is the Mandalay Bay shooting....but nobody has any firm theory with any evidence behind it or anything beyond "that was weird af" and pure speculation.

This probably extends to your next point - conspiracy theories are getting dumber because stuff that would previously be a "conspiracy theory" (like MK Ultra) has enough penetrance that anybody interested in knowing or learning about them does.

Although plenty of conspiracy theories were always super dumb - ex: moon landing faked.

Iran war picks up again

The US said it launched a fresh wave of strikes on over 100 targets in Iran after Tehran struck a ship passing through the Strait of Hormuz, one month after the MOU to end the conflict.

Iran said it closed the waterway until further notice and warned of a severe response to US aggression. And within hours of the US strikes, Iran said they had hit a US base in Jordan, while the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait and Bahrain intercepted missiles and drones from Iran.

And Israel keeps striking southern Lebanon, despite the MOU.

Setting aside the many rounds of grifts talks, there's something to be said about great power adjacent warfare in 2026. Like Afghanistan and Ukraine, Iran is looking like this distinctive category of forever conflicts. Protracted, managed stalemates where neither side is willing to commit the resources and manpower towards a decisive victory, yet neither is prepared to accept political humiliation by surrendering. In Ukraine, Russia lacks the conventional strength for total conquest, while the West supplies enough aid to prevent collapse but not enough for a full on Ukrainian breakthrough.

I actually bought the last round of 'talks'. Now I'm blackpilled, we might be lucky if we get out of this in less than 20 years.

The Hormuz Strait is OPEN, and will remain OPEN, with or without Iran. We are reinstating the THE IRANIAN BLOCKADE, so named because it is only stopping Iran’s ships or customers from entering or leaving. All other countries will have fair and open use of the Strait. The U.S.A. will be, from this point forward, known as “THE GUARDIAN OF THE HORMUZ STRAIT,” but as such, and as a matter of FAIRNESS, will be reimbursed, at the rate of 20% on all cargo shipped, for any and all costs necessary to do the job of providing safety and security to this very volatile section of the World. The process and formation will begin immediately. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP

So...yeah.

I don't even know what to say at this point. Are we just doing memes? Are we trying to make a deal work by making the mullah's demand for $1mm/ship look reasonable by comparison?

I doubt the goal is to actually collect that revenue, but these two objectives:

  1. Shame the countries (European, mostly) that refused to join into committing some ships,
  2. Dispell the idea that Iran is controlling the Strait since they demand tolls or collaboration; if the US is able to demand tolls instead then the US is demonstrating it is in control. Who this demonstration is for, Iran, American voters, etc... I'm not sure.

There's a lot of haranguing about who "won" and who "lost", as though there is some pigeonhole principle with those two possibilities. It's entirely possible that the US did not (or will not) accomplish its objectives (paying costs along the way) while Iran also was badly damaged. War is generally a negative-sum affair. That is not to say that some years from now, we will look back and think that such a case became reality; either side could still sufficiently "win". Just to say that it's also possible that neither party really "wins".

Very much agreed. I think people are brain-rotted by analogies that compare war to something like sports, where there's a clear winner and loser. It might be better to compare it to something like a riot, where there's a lot of chaos and no clear rules.

The second cliche I reach for when discussing war (the first obviously being Clausewitz) is the old saw: "Athens recovered quickly from its defeat in the Peloponnesian War, Sparta was destroyed by its victory."

The mou basically offered to pay of Iran to let the war just go away. It wasn't a total US surrender but still a pretty sweet deal for Iran. But it seems like Iran has soundly refused the offer. Now there's no choice but to fight.

There's no proof, but I believe that likely the US and gulf states have put together a reasonably sized blockade running fleet, with the understanding that some of the ships are going to get shot. But I also think nighttime transit within a convoy is mostly, but not completely, safe. The open daytime transits in the past few weeks were more of a show of force rather than a necessity to transport oil.

If true this would mean that Iran's leverage is greatly reduced, and the us will be free to engage in a war of attrition with Iran without too much worry. Even if so, I also think the US strategy has been quite incoherent.

The open daytime transits in the past few weeks were more of a show of force rather than a necessity to transport oil.

And also a chance to give Iran a chance to prove that it would adhere to a settlement by not shooting at them. Iran proved the opposite.

And Israel keeps striking southern Lebanon, despite the MOU.

And Hizbullah keeps striking Israel from Lebanese territory, and Lebanon keeps not stopping them.

The frustrating thing to me is that this is all so tied up in American electoral politics.

I'm firmly of the opinion that we should escalate the war in Iran until we win it. The cost in treasure and lives would be far less than in Afghanistan or Iraq and for a much more worthy cause, and many of the people I know in the military would absolutely love to get in there.

Unfortunately, there are midterms coming up! The US is largely incapable of pursuing long-term thinking (at least in the open), because any short-term sacrifice will be parlayed into an election loss for the party in power and the long-term plan will be discarded or reversed.

It seems to me that Trump actually wants to win this war. That's why the MOU and the negotiations have largely been a sham. They are not intended to work. They are intended to pacify people until the votes are in. Trump went for a cease-fire because it would lower gas prices, end of story, that's literally all most voters know or care about the war. And after the midterms pass, I expect him to use the overwhelming might of the US military to violently pursue his goals once again, and more power to him.

I don't have specific analysis to back this up, it's just how the overall picture looks to me.

The frustrating thing to me is that this is all so tied up in American electoral politics.

It's also tied up in narrow legalism. The Trump admin claimed they had legal authority to wage war for 60 days without talking to Congress about it. The ceasefire leading to the MOU came at 60 days. Now they're claiming that war was concluded and this is a brand new war. Expect a similar result if we make it another 60 days.

What's frustrating to me is the failure to think about the world that is reflected in so much of the analysis of the war.

Trump chose to start the war the way he did, with no warning and no lead up. This delivered certain advantages to the United States and Israel, allowing them to kill the former Ayatollah and replace him with his gay son, along with various other high level regime figures who were behaving normally and not under threat of assassination.

The cost of this was that there was no sale to the American people. No effort to convince the American people that the sacrifice was worth it. The assumption from the administration was that the US public was so used to being at war with some ragheads or other that people would just accept the war, like my wife getting a Poshmark package and assuming she must have bought something and forgotten about it. And for the most part they seem to be right, the American public will just accept that I guess we're in a war now and deal with the consequences. What they won't do is pay the bill.

Support for the war in public polling peaked at net -10 right at the start of the war, and currently sits at net -21. For comparison, approval of Iraq at this stage was flipped, with 56% in favor. What can we expect when the war was never justified publicly, when the aims have shifted constantly, when it's been over or won or subject to a ceasefire so many times already?

Foreign policy "Realism" is increasingly revealed as Idealism with the serial number sanded off, the realists idealize a world where "the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must," and throw tantrums whenever real life gets in the way.

The cost in treasure and lives would be far less than in Afghanistan or Iraq

The Iranians aren't Iraqis and it's not 2003 anymore. The wars against Afghanistan and Iraq were the US hammering soft targets who were unprepared and ill-equipped. Iraq was open plains, suitable for mechanized offensives. The Taliban in Afghanistan didn't have any advanced weapons whatsoever. Iran has advanced weapons, mountains and marshes plus fairly competent soldiers.

Iran is well-prepared, their whole military strategy is designed to counter America. Plus Iran is just a whole lot bigger than Iraq or Afghanistan. Since Iran is 3x Iraq's population, US casualties should be at least 3x higher even if Iranians were at the same tier as Iraqis, which they aren't.

What is the US military supposed to do? More bombing? The last waves of bombing didn't really work, bombing doesn't really work in general as a war-winner, except as a way to weaken a target for a ground campaign. Only special circumstances make bombing effective.

A ground invasion would be a giant million-man extravaganza. That's the whole US Army, Marines and a good chunk of the national guard. How are they even supposed to get in enough supplies when all nearby US bases are being bombed? First Iran's missile and drone forces need to be suppressed which the US hasn't been able to do. If they couldn't do that during the last few months of bombing, why would they be able to do so now or after the mid-terms?

The US military couldn't do much substantial damage to the Houthis in Yemen a couple years back, they'll just bounce off Iran in the same way.

I don't disagree with much of this. But I think the US goals in Iran would be much more modest than the occupation and nation building we saw in Iraq/Afghanistan.

I'm sure there's a plan that's in development for e.g. seizing Kharg Island, and I think there's a good chance that Trump gives the go ahead some time in the next few months. There are also likely plans for direct action against specific sites related to nuclear enrichment and the like. We already had a test run for insertion/recovery into the country with the missions to retrieve those pilots, and they went as well as could be expected.

But there's also unconventional warfare, which takes much longer but may eventually bear fruit (assuming it's even happening, but I think that's a fair assumption). This may even be the main effort, with the bombings, economic sanctions, etc. serving to shape the environment. But we won't learn about all that until the declassified retrospectives are published in a few decades.

What is the US military supposed to do? More bombing?

Iran is, unlike Iraq and Afghanistan, developed industrial country.

World #12 in electricity production

World #10 in steel production

World #6 in cement production

World #18 in motor vehicle production

etc, etc...

Serious war against Iran would entail dusting out WW2 playbook and go for full strategic campaign - blockade of the country plus destruction of industrial base. Unlike WW2 times, precision bombing means not "hit the tight quarter of the right city" but "hit the right pane of the right window of the right building" and industrial plants are not something that can be hidden.

But it will still mean multi year prolonged campaign, and it would mean 6-7 figure of Iranians dying, unlike in WW2 times streamed online, and this would not be seen by the world as spreading freedom, democracy and human rights.

So the best case scenario for the US hawks is a mass casualty and refugee event caused by crippling strikes on infrastructure.

The war goals achieved by this event are the dissolution of the current Iran regime which will potentially prevent Iran from making Nukes. Beyond that there are no guarantees without actual boots on the ground nor are there any relevant beneficial effects for anyone that is not deeply invested in the interest of the state of Israel and its hegemony in the middle East. All anyone gets is cost.

best case scenario

Definitely not what Eetan said. Best case might be something like: the costs of war for Iran lead to internal regime change that replaces the theocracy with technocratic moderates. Or something along those lines.

What Eetan described is probably closer to a below average but survivable outcome that would achieve some US goals at a moderately high cost.

So the revised best case scenario is that with very minimal 'cost of war' for Iran, the regime crumbles. I don't find that scenario very likely and I don't believe the hawks proposing boots on the ground believe so either. But one can always hope.

which will potentially prevent Iran from making Nukes.

Yeah, that's the only goal potentially making the war worth fighting. But it IS a rather big deal.

It's a big deal for a US foreign policy that's predicated on certain ideological priors that maintain that Iran is an existential threat. I don't find those priors very convincing.

With or without a nuke, Iran is not an existential threat to the United States. However, the fallout (more figurative than literal, but some literal) from the nuclear destruction of Tel Aviv would be rather ugly, compared to the current war.

much more worthy cause

What exactly is this worthy cause? Consolidating control of the sandbox? Greater Israel? Something else?

Iran is in open warfare with the US and its allies, and has been for decades.

It's also run by a radical religious sect that honest-to-God believes a nuclear war is necessary to bring about the return of their messiah. Depending how credibly you take that belief, they are arguably an existential threat to humanity if they acquire nuclear weapons.

Edit: to be clear, I don't necessarily mean this is sufficient reason for the war, just that it's much more convincing to me then the reasons for Iraq and Afghanistan

believes a nuclear war is necessary to bring about the return of their messiah.

This is news to me, do you have more information? Is this something specific to Shiism?

It's a specific sect of Shiism called Twelver Shia. They believe that the twelfth Imam, Muhammed al-Mahdi, is miraculously still alive, and that he will return to bring in an eternity of peace and prosperity (and global Muslim rule of course). However, for this to happen certain signs must take place, including an apocalyptic war and the destruction of Israel.

Technically, quite a lot of Shia groups believe in the return of the Mahdi, but Iranian Twelvers in the IRGC are particularly radical, and believe they are required to proactively pave the way for his return.

What exactly is this worthy cause? Consolidating control of the sandbox? Greater Israel? Something else?

Yes, at least according to large part of USG decision makers, the Holy Land is what is it all about. Something hard to really grok for aspiring rationalist types, but this is really the best explanation for this mess.

If it was really all about oil, you would not see even one tenth of part of IRL Middle Eastern drama - US would just do business with anyone willing to pump and sell the black goo. See, for example, Africa - Nigeria, Angola, Congo etc are as riven with intractable conflicts, but The Free World(TM) is not tempted to intervene.

See recently deceased Lindsey Graham as typical example

There is no one to say Kaddish for Lindsey Graham. He had no wife. He had no children. He dedicated his entire life, mostly for us. We are his children.

Lindsey loved the Jews more than the Jews loved themselves. He traveled the world, from country to country, and fought like a lion for the State of Israel. He wasn't even Jewish himself. He simply believed with all his heart, with all his might, that it was the right thing to do.

Absurd and theologically confused of course, but I’m curious what /u/FlailingAce meant.

Despite Iran’s pronouncements that the straits are closed, many ships are continuing to cross them. We know that during the last closure the US military escorted many ships through (while maintaining a blockade on Iran itself). Iran it turns out doesn’t have the capability to actually close the straits, just to threaten to do so. Increasingly hollow threats as sanctions, the blockade, war inflation, and US strikes erode their ability to project even a little force.

Now even according to the New York Times, Iranian officials are divided because the Supreme Leader remains absent. Iran is apparently deeply divided on whether to continue the war or not — far from the situation predicted by war critics that Trump’s strikes would simply ensure Iran was united around fighting America until the bitter end.

this distinctive category of forever conflicts

This isn’t forever war, this is just war. The Iran War has only for a few months, most of that under ceasefire — this is totally historically normal. The Ukrainian War has stalled out but 4 years is also not an exceptional length by the standards of war. The major forever wars of recent years were America’s misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, which were totally different models. Trump doesn’t have NGOs on the ground teaching Iranian clerics to embrace hashtag Black Girl Magic.

Now I'm blackpilled, we might be lucky if we get out of this in less than 20 years.

Iran won’t last that long. Inflation and sanctions are already crippling their economy and their ability to stay fed.

So.. the Straits of Hormuz are actually open and Iran is just talking shit? There is no threat to shipping, nobody is paying tolls, insurance rates are not being jacked up, oil prices are not being affected, a US military presence is not necessary because the Iranian military no longer exists, and this is all fake news, we can go home and declare victory and ignore anything Iran says about shipping?

That is fantastic news!

I think it's a bit of both. Going by the data here: https://portwatch.imf.org/pages/cb5856222a5b4105adc6ee7e880a1730 the number of cargo ships crossing the straits are still far below pre war, but also significantly above the zero where it was at the start of the war. Iran can still significantly threaten traffic, but they can't shut it down entirely like they claim. The US also has the power to escort individual ships though, but it comes at a great cost. For what it's worth, oil futures are now back down to roughly what they were before the war.

You're going to have to look closer at your source next time. It's data only goes up to the fifth of july.

I did see that. It's just that, for obvious reasons, there aren't any sources with up-to-the-minute data on an active war zone. You''ll have to be patient for the data to arrive.

If you did see it then I don't understand why you presented data from a week ago, when iran wasn't shooting at tankers, as if it were representative of now, when iran is shooting at tankers.

Even if they weren't actively shooting a week ago, there was no permanent peace treaty and the risk was still very real. https://hormuzstraitmonitor.com/ says there's also some shipping in the last 24 hours. No idea how accurate that is though.

I feel like you're trying to worm your way out of the fact you presented week old data as if it were representative of now.

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The straits are open, but at higher risk than they were before the war. Iran can hit ships, and occasionally does. I don't think anyone's paying tolls except those using the Iran route to pick up Iranian oil, and I'm not sure about them. Not sure about insurance; most of the non-Iran traffic seems to be Gulf-owned ships which are presumably locally insured, though the Greeks still seem to be in there too.

Frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!

during the last closure the US military escorted many ships

The problem is that we don’t really know if this is true or not. The Admin has an interest in pretending that this is occurring, both to buffer the economy and sow confusion in Iran.

Iran is apparently deeply divided

We also don’t know if this is part of Iran’s negotiation tactic, allowing them to renege on previous promises while blaming it on a rogue faction, like how America can blame things on Israel while also having the ability to stop them at threat of force.

NGOs on the ground teaching Iranian clerics to embrace hashtag Black Girl Magic

This is not typically the criticism of our previous excursions, but that they cost trillions of dollars and led to many casualties and caused other problems down the road. All the black girl magic in the world likely did not exceed $100mil.

The problem is that we don’t really know if this is true or not. The Admin has an interest in pretending that this is occurring, both to buffer the economy and sow confusion in Iran.

Yes we do. Independent trackers commercial AIS and satellite images show ships crossing the strait. It’s not as many as before the war and it’s not zero. These are not unfalsifiable claims, a lot of this stuff is verifiable and public.

Moreover, who would these lies be intended to confuse? The Iranians? If Iran cannot even tell when ships are crossing the straits, then they do not have control over the straits. So even if we accept your premise as true, it’s not looking good for Iranian power.

The ships we see going through are for Iran-allied countries, eg China. I don’t think the US military would be escorting ships carrying oil for China.

Is anyone keeping track anywhere? Is there a graph? Does it say anywhere which ships get through every day and who they work for? Did you check this yourself?

I dont know if the poster is checking, but it is absolutely the case that tanker movements are being obsessively tracked.

The US has a blockade on. Ships are not passing through without American power. Your alternative explanation that we have to disbelieve everything coming out of America and accept Iran’s explanations instead is totally unconvincing.

https://x.com/CENTCOM/status/2059310640037269628?lang=en

It’s Iran and CENTCOM vs Trump admin. But Trump Admin is pretty much always lying. So why would you trust the Admin on this? Ships destined for China may be passing through without escort as part of an American-Chinese deal. Do you really think America would blockade things destined for China? How do you think China would reply to that?

CENTCOM five hours ago affirming that Iran does not control the strait:

https://x.com/centcom/status/2076278945993888116?s=46

Here is CENTCOM validating my earlier claim:

https://x.com/centcom/status/2075325424591044956?s=46

What you have posted is cherry-picked from a day when the US military was not actively safeguarding ships and used that as proof that they never did at all. (Which in fact that tweet in tacitly confirms as a real operation.)

The "earlier claim" tweet was written right after the MOU ended (june 17th to July 8th). Your OP assertion is "we know that during the last closure the US military escorted many ships through". The "since early May" in the CENTCOM tweet may be doing a lot of work here: do they mean that, technically speaking, between early May and until June 8th there were escorted ships, all of which occurred during the MOU phase? If they mean, as the phrase suggests (versus what it technically includes), that there were ships passing through in early May, this would go against CENTCOM’s May 26 post:

🚫CLAIM: Recent media reporting claims that the U.S. Navy has restarted escorting or assisting commercial vessels during transits through the Strait of Hormuz. FALSE.

✅TRUTH: Project Freedom has not resumed, and U.S. forces are not currently escorting commercial vessels through the Strait of Hormuz.

I mean, at least one of their posts must be misleading. They are correcting the claim that America is escorting ships (on May 26) with “project freedom has not resumed”. But project freedom stopped on May 5th. So this tweet suggests that from the 5th to at least the 26th, there were no escorted ships.

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Moreover, who would these lies be intended to confuse?

Oil futures algo bots, of course.

I'm gonna go ahead and maintain my stance against a hundred million dollars spent on black girl magic.

This is an incredible shitshow and, yes, seemingly the standard for modern wars. I've said before that the MOU is a sign of the US accepting the failure of Epic Fury and military defeat and cutting losses (contra my initial expectations; tbh that was impressive, if anything – Russia also miscalculated, but can't even cut losses). But well, nothing (except self-respect and reason, perhaps) could prevent the US from retroactively revoking this acceptance and just relaunching the war. Opening the Strait by force is going to be as hard as before, the oil supply crunch won't get any better, interceptors and standoff munitions didn't magically regenerate in the meantime, but it didn't become any easier for Iran either. Will the Regime finally Collapse under the pressure? Doubt. Will it accept less favorable terms of peace, now that American resolve is reaffirmed? More plausible but I think their payoff matrix is unchanged (they need to secure and fund post-war military deterrence in the presence of Israel, they can't trust the US or Israel), and that dominates their analysis. Will we see escalation, maybe even ground operation? Seems remote…

I suspect one big factor of why Trump feels like he can afford this (and why he doubted that enough to authorize the MOU before) is that the oil demand is proving to be sustainably low, and that's mostly due to China sharply dropping their oil imports and thus not competing for a volume to the tune of 5.5-6 millions of barrels per day, roughly 2 Japans' worth, vastly more than what they were getting from Iran and Venezuela combined. For all of Trump's gratitude, this is not charity from his "friend" Xi, of course. The best analysis of what's happening that I've seen is here, in short:

  • cost-sensitive private refineries
  • end of stockpiling
  • some private drawdowns

They may also be releasing their SPRs, but that's not clear, nor is the volume of this buffer; I've seen numbers from 1.2 to 2 billion barrels. Combined with domestic production of ≈4.3mbd and some 6.4mbd of remaining imports, they can presumably keep this up for years. Their strategic objective is removing oil import dependence anyway (much to the chargin of Malacca blockade enthusiasts). There may be backchannel verbal agreements too. So Trump can assume that there won't be a sudden spike to $150+ per barrel, gas pump voter outrage and other externalities of the closed Strait.

Another factor is that there's a planetary bull run driven by AI and upstream HPC hardware supply chain, where oil-importing Asians are all winning massively, the US is getting huge capital inflows, and that's papering over bad war news. American dominance in AI, demonstrated with Claude Fable release drama, is also being rapidly converted to diplomatic leverage over the squeezed NATO allies.

So if Trump's thinking is dominated by things like midterms, he might just figure it's better not to be a loser.

Still, energy inflation is really bad, already 15.8% year-on-year in OECD. The war will continue to function as a tax on global growth, worse for some (Europe) than others, for the foreseeable future.

They may also be releasing their SPRs, but that's not clear, nor is the volume of this buffer; I've seen numbers from 1.2 to 2 billion barrels. Combined with domestic production of ≈4.3mbd and some 6.4mbd of remaining imports, they can presumably keep this up for years. Their strategic objective is removing oil import dependence anyway (much to the chargin of Malacca blockade enthusiasts). There may be backchannel verbal agreements too. So Trump can assume that there won't be a sudden spike to $150+ per barrel, gas pump voter outrage and other externalities of the closed Strait.

Another factor is that there's a planetary bull run driven by AI and upstream HPC hardware supply chain, where oil-importing Asians are all winning massively, the US is getting huge capital inflows, and that's papering over bad war news. American dominance in AI, demonstrated with Claude Fable release drama, is also being rapidly converted to diplomatic leverage over the squeezed NATO allies.

Another factor is that Asian oil importers have been dumping Treasuries like crazy, pushing yields up on the long term bonds. Oil prices haven't spiked but yields on the 10 year and 30 year are already rapidly approaching multi-decade highs.

I've said before that the MOU is a sign of the US accepting the failure of Epic Fury and military defeat and cutting losses (contra my initial expectations; tbh that was impressive, if anything – Russia also miscalculated, but can't even cut losses). But well, nothing (except self-respect and reason, perhaps) could prevent the US from retroactively revoking this acceptance and just relaunching the war.

A few months ago war critics told me that America lost so badly it would accept whatever terms that the Iranians offered. Now that that hasn’t happened, they say that the US lost so badly it must have changed its mind about surrendering.

The rest of your post in fact makes a case I was arguing months ago: that the global supply chain was more resilient than critics supposed and that Iran’s leverage over the strait was not that great.

The much more plausible explanation, which I have not had to alter over the past few months, which looks better and better with age, is this: America decisively crippled Iran’s nuclear capabilities and Military Industrial Complex; Iran has been badly weakened, maybe fatally; Iran does not control the straits and cannot chase America out of the straits; America is in a dominant position. Iran will never toll the straits, they will never acquire nuclear weapons, their military strikes will become increasingly ineffective, their country will suffer from inflation and sanctions, they have no trump card to play, and the only question left is how badly they will surrender.

The US accepted an MOU that people swore amounted to total victory for Iran. Then [B]Iran[/B] through its actions demonstrated it didn't think the MOU was total victory. Iran still thinks it can get unconditional surrender -- the US goes away, Iran tolls the straits, Iranian proxies attack Israel and Israel just takes it, and Iran gets back to the job of building a nuke for Tel Aviv. The US does not appear to be interested in this deal, but neither is it interested in invading Iran. So we've got this dynamic stalemate. Iran can't keep the straits closed, but the US can't keep them 100% safe either. Every time Iran attacks shipped, they get bombed more.

Iran can still win, though. They can simply outlast Trump, and then President AOC or Al-Sayed gives them everything they want. This does assume Trump doesn't decide to do a decisive attack, or if he tries Congress and the courts stop them.

I think the US is going to "lose" this war, because ultimately Trump is better off losing than winning. The consequences of a US victory are either a US-led occupation of Iran, or a Houthis-on-the-Hormuz failed state under circumstances where it is obviously Trump's fault. Both of these are worse, in US domestic political terms, than declaring victory and going home (even if the declaration of victory is non-credible outside the MAGA filter bubble). If Trump's economic team were competent enough to impose export controls on US crude oil in a way which limited the impact on pump prices, then making Iran Iran's neighbours' problem is the obviously correct America First policy.

Iran, even with nukes and intermediate-range ballistic missiles, is a threat to America's no-longer-needed proxies in the Middle East, not to America.

A few months ago war critics told me that America lost so badly it would accept whatever terms that the Iranians offered.

My position was that America lost badly enough in the first round that they wouldn’t be able to afford to leave it at that. I had been expecting this resumption for some time.

Your prediction was the set of every possible outcome? Congratulations on your predictive powers

How is that every possible outcome? That’s one outcome!

A few months ago war critics told me that America lost so badly it would accept whatever terms that the Iranians offered. Now that that hasn’t happened, they say that the US lost so badly it must have changed its mind about surrendering.

That's exactly what had happened, though. The US accepted and signed very unflattering terms. You don't get to change history by having a temper tantrum. All you attest to is that the US is even less trustworthy than was commonly believed, and Trump is basically not the kind of creature capable of representing a state with a consistent policy and commitments, but just a dude doing whatever. As I've said 2 weeks ago:

Operation Epic Fury had been declared Over in early May already, by the Secretary of State, who doesn't have remotely Trump's reputation. The US and Iran have signed - not announced, not "leaked" – an MOU which is clearly an admission of defeat relative to any claimed early-war objective of the US, and a bunch of obvious Ws for Iran. Could Trump ignore it all, restart the war, and actually beat Iran this time? Quite possibly. Such things happen in history. But that'd be another, separate war. The terms accepted now suggest the US was pretty desperate for an off-ramp.

This seems as true as it was then.

that the global supply chain was more resilient than critics supposed

The point I'm making is that the global supply chain's resilience, which your war is dependent upon, is subsidized by the PRC, and the US had no reason to assume this goodwill at the start.

The much more plausible explanation, which I have not had to alter over the past few months

Ok? What was even the point of the MOU then, in your opinion?

That's exactly what had happened, though. The US accepted and signed very unflattering terms.

Did they sign unflattering terms or did they agree to things they would never have to act on because Iran, Israel, or the US would promptly renege?

America killed Iran’s leadership and bombed their factories, which means Iran won. Because they control the straits of Hormuz, which allows them to cripple global trade, although that hasn’t happened because of the Chinese, who support Iran. It’s all very simple. The Americans lost so humiliatingly that they signed an embarrassing surrender deal, which proves they lost, even though they aren’t following it right now, which also proves they lost. It’s all very simple. The important point is that Donald Trump is evil, but he lost because he’s stupid, but he’s also too evil to care, but he’s also too stupid to know he lost, but he also refuses to accept that he lost because he’s so evil. It’s a very simple explanation. If the US starts to appear as though it’s winning, it’s actually a separate second war that bears no relation to the first war. Who can really say. Iran might not have a navy or Air Force or nukes, their leaders were all killed and now the IRGC is divided about how to proceed, they can’t control the straits and they are under tremendous economic strain, but when you think about it they refuse to surrender and isn’t that the same as winning?

The US accepted and signed very unflattering terms.

At the time I pointed out that America wouldn’t pay Iran any money unless they cooperated, and now what’s happened? Does it feel like Iran is in control? Does it look like Iran is in control?

America killed Iran’s leadership and bombed their factories, which means Iran won

We've been over this. Yes, killing people and bombing shit does not constitute a strategic victory, although your culture might be too unrefined to grasp such a sophisticated post-Bronze Age notion. Read the community note here, for example.

You really try to sneer, but it's clear you're mad.

The important point is that Donald Trump is evil, but he lost because he’s stupid, but he’s also too evil to care, but he’s also too stupid to know he lost, but he also refuses to accept that he lost because he’s so evil. It’s a very simple explanation

That's not the only point, but it's a simple and true explanation, consistent with all of Donald Trump's actions over his entire career, from big to small, from wars to his pathetic whiny entitlement; and the reason you're mad is that you don't want to recognize what loyalty to this creature says about yourself. Trump provides you with vicarious fulfillment of fantasies about bullying and revenge, so you're invested in overlooking his missteps.

It's interesting, Shakes, that you regress to this reduced vocabulary and simplistic sentences, essentially triumphalist grunts, when you get excited and angry. Like here:

America is building an economy in space. We have rockets that catch themselves in the air and wifi where there are no cell towers. We revolutionized energy, we export energy now. We are leading the AI superrace. We still have the strongest navy and the strongest planes in the world. Europe is falling behind. China can't catch up. We are building a next-generation tech stack the entire world will rely on and nobody else is close to catching up. It's an American century.

It's… Trumpian. Strongest planes. Winning bigly. Killed their leaders. Have you noticed? Or is it affected?

“You mad, bro? You mad bro?” Too bad I was kind of looking forward to arguing again. Until next time!

You're as bad as Dase about taking advantage of your many AAQCs to occasionally descend into juvenile neener-neenering like this. Don't do this or I will send you both to bed without your suppers.

“Bed without suppers”? You can’t follow your own rules while you enforce them, you want to insult me and then hide behind your jannie hat. Go fuck yourself. Nobody cares about your AAQCs or your bans, and I’ll happily eat one to tell you off. We don’t need to be tone-policed by someone who can’t even police himself, a rude and nasty person.

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For the record, I was enjoying reading both your and @DaseindustriesLtd's takes!

I think of it as a fun ongoing debate tbh

You flinch away from self-reflection, which is in character, of course.

Guy who can’t face the inconsistency of his predictions telling me to self-reflect

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I still predict boots on the ground eventually. Trump does not have the temperament or neural plasticity to change course.

I doubt it. He values American lives. Causing collapse of Iran is more plausible. Depopulated country has no resources to pursue nuclear program.

I think there’s a small chance he uses nuclear weapons.

No need to use nuclear weapons. Just need to change tactics. He has access to some of the best twisted mentats of the CIA - they could devise a way to wage the war in such a way that to break the spirit and maximize sectarian strife.

A tactic of announcing targets and delivering on them every day - like today we kill Revolutionary Guard personnel, tomorrow we set fires to oil wells, next day power plants. Tell in advance where they will be but choose such locations that whatever forces Iran could scramble couldn't get there in time. And hit them if they try.

Your goals moves from military victory to creating a total feeling of helplessness. Take the tactics pimps use to break the girls and scale them to country size.

Iran is too big to invade - but this also means it is too big to secure.

Your goals moves from military victory to creating a total feeling of helplessness. Take the tactics pimps use to break the girls and scale them to country size.

The first tactic pimps use is target selection, not breaking girls - to a first approximation you can only profitably turn out a girl who was broken to begin with. If the mullahocracy was that kind of girl, I doubt they would have lasted as long as they did.

That’s what they’re doing now and it isn’t working. Everything military is hardened under rock. You can make the civilian population suffer but it won’t stop the shooting. And the gulf states and Burgerland have a lot more shiny things in the region to break than Iran does.

Regarding looksmaxxing and body modifications, I would like to present a case of someone who does not indentify as a looksmaxxer, but nevertheless has made a career out of making sweeping, permanent modifications to his looks. Specifically, I would like to talk about f1nn5ter, a Youtuber and Twitch streamer who started out making Minecraft videos, but quickly transitioned (figuratively at first) into just-chatting light fetish content, eventually culminating in a femboy focused only fans account.

You see, f1nn5ter, was incredibly good at passing as a woman. He could do his makeup, put on fake breasts, and do his hair. Once he was done, especially in the right lighting, you would be hard pressed to tell the he was actually a man until you heard his voice. He quickly gained a following that absolutely loved this. A solid mixture of LGBT, trans-folk, people not quite sure if they were trans or not, and several who gained some amount of sexual pleasure from seeing him dress up as a woman and act all bratty and submissive on stream. It turned out that some of his fans were willing to pay a lot of money to keep him that way, and so the crossdressing became an increasingly permanent feature of the stream. Over time, the streamer became increasingly involved with trans advocacy, gained a trans girl(?)friend, started microdosing estrogen, and eventually fully transitioned (literally this time) to genderfluid(?), meaning that his/her/their pronouns are subject to change constantly.

Recently, F1nn took a step up by undergoing face feminization surgery. Essentially shaving off some of his bones in the face in order to appear more feminine. As a reminder, he already passed quite well. Here is a tweet he made 3 years ago (without the fake breasts), before officially starting hormones and transitioning.

The culture war angle is two-fold: First, it seems weird that people go so hard on clavicular when stuff like this is accepted (at least by the online left). Prior to transitioning, the guy experimented with estrogen with no guidance from a doctor just to try and look more androgynous. Now, he underwent surgery, risking complications and a long recovery period just to appear slightly more female. But this is apparently okay because trans. I am split on this. On the one hand, I think this promotes a dangerous lifestyle. A slippery slope of increasingly significant medical procedures just to make yourself look slightly closer to your ideal. Never accepting yourself as you are, always chasing perfection. He apparently considered straight up getting bones removed, although the surgeon talked him out of it for the time being. On the other hand, I think the transhumanist angle here is quite cool and that surgeries like this are a good thing if they dramatically improve your life.

My second issue is with the pronouns. Reading the subreddit, people don't just use his pronouns interchangeably. They use them interchangeably within the same sentences. "She uses he/him pronouns!" is an actual serious quote from there. While I find it impressive from a writing perspective (and interesting as a kind of performance art) that you can still sort of follow along if you know what they are doing, I think this is kind of insane. Like, a frequent talking point from trans activists is that the pronoun thing is easy. But once you start throwing nonbinaries, questioners, and genderfluids into the mix this stops being the case. Having three or more sets of pronouns that you swap between at your leisure and just expect others to adhere to strikes me as sadistic. A kind of dominance play in which you take pleasure in observing others put all their effort into following your rules.

Of course, F1nn is not a good trans representative, being a pornstar and all, but I do think he represents a good part of why the online trans communities seem so weird. This kind of rhetoric and advocacy is not exactly uncommon on the internet, and it is hard to look at it and not see some kind of social contagion or slippery slope when all people do is encourage it.

There are lots of (right wing) people who would agree this youtuber is unhealthy. The reason mainstream left-wingers don't is just because of politics. The only asymmetry is that more people attack Clav. Part of this is that he is far more popular (than this youtuber I hadn't heard of before). The other part is that there is no high-status anti-feminist messaging in culture.

A lot of feminism's revealed core (that men are fundamentally bad/dangerous, sex is harmful and degrading to women, anti-man family courts, etc.) is not disputed by the conservative Right. It would take hard reactionary anti-feminism politization -- trans insanity but reversed -- to get sizable support for Clav's looksmaxxing (and the worldview that he signal-boosts).

I don't follow f1nn very closely so this is all stuff I've picked up secondhand in the instances when trans Twitter gets really mad at her for reasons I don't understand. It's funny that you see the pronouns thing as "a dominance play" on f1nn's part because the view in some corners of trans femme Twitter is that it's a kind of degrading concession to a cis audience to accept any and all pronouns and she should get some self respect and insist on she/her.

This is not something I know much about but sometimes other trans women who have done sex work will write about how what is desired from men who are into hiring trans women is a mix of sex characteristics and that they enjoy seeing the "transformation". I've heard it said that once they get surgeries and have been on hormones for years the demand goes way down because they're less of a novelty.

F1nn5ter is probably the highest paid trans sex worker of all time and while she has a more mixed audience for the streams where she does makeup and stuff my guess is the money comes from men who buy her porn. For that reason I think we might learn a lot more about what men desire in trans women, then about the typical trans woman, by analyzing f1nn.

There is a strange tension in contemporary western culture. On the one hand we are bombarded with platitudes about how the good life consists of being free to be yourself, i.e. the postmodern ethic of self-actualization. On the other hand when your desires clash with who you actually are in reality and you for instance end up with body dysphoria, we are told that if you think people should be themselves, you are a horrible reactionary bigot and paradoxically get accused of not letting people be themselves. Ironically the same people who make such accusation often have little issue with telling bodybuilders on gear or transhumanists that they are insane and should accept their natural body (which is correct in my opinion, I'd just like them to extend this to gender related transhumanism as well).

I think a key to understanding this problem is that there is an unspoken assumption that your true self is primarily to be found in your desires. This is interestingly a complete inversion of the more negative view of the "passions" which most premodern Western thinkers had (both pagan and Christian). Traditionally passions are considered to be fleeting, unstable and for a good life one needs to learn how to control the passions lest the passions control you. I don't know much about eastern thought, but my superficial stereotype of Buddhism also includes a negative view of the passions. Much philosophical work has been done and is being done with regards to the question of what a self is or whether a self even exists and I will not make a judgment on that question in this comment, but at least I agree with the ancients that the passions are a particularly implausible and silly candidate for locating one's self.

This unspoken interpretation of self-actualization as maximally indulging ones passions is in my opinion the cause of much of the cultural woes of contemporary Western society. Passions being fleeting, unstable and insatiable, it is no coincidence that our culture is reaching ever sillier ways of actualizing ones true self. "The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing". Once we get people telling us that amputating perfectly healthy parts of their body is the only way they will ever be able to really be themselves or pursuing literal vampirism to extend oneself throughout time, we should maybe pause and think what on earth went wrong in our culture. I believe to recover from this madness we need to regain a sense of some sort of human nature and when our passions point at things that are at odds with human nature, one's true self is to be found in human nature and not in said passions. Things only get their beauty and meaning and identity from their place as a part of a meaningful whole. In other words, we need to recover the value of limits, moderation and propriety, but limits are anathema to a Left that seeks to emancipate us from all hierarchy and a Techno-Right that wants to move fast and break things.

From the Centuries of Meditations by Thomas Traherne:

"His Power bounded, greater is in might,
Than if let loose, ‘twere wholly infinite.
He could have made an endless sea by this,
But then it had not been a sea of bliss.
Did waters from the centre to the skies
Ascend, ’twould drown whatever else we prize.
The ocean bounded in a finite shore,
Is better far because it is no more.
No use nor glory would in that be seen,
His power made it endless in esteem.
Had not the Sun been bounded in its sphere,
Did all the world in one fair flame appear,
And were that flame a real Infinite
’Twould yield no profit, splendor, nor delight.
Its corps confined, and beams extended be
Effects of Wisdom in the Deity.
One star made infinite would all exclude,
An earth made infinite could ne’er be viewed:
But one being fashioned for the other’s sake,
He, bounding all, did all most useful make
And which is best, in profit and delight
Tho’ not in bulk, they all are infinite."

On the one hand we are bombarded with platitudes about how the good life consists of being free to be yourself, i.e. the postmodern ethic of self-actualization.

This was never the case. If you decided to be gun loving religious republican, you were never celebrated for your unique identity. As usual, it was word game since start where the only legitimate identity is the progressive one, every other identity is unauthentic, performative and driven by false consciousness and internalized isms and phobias such racism, misogyny and whatnot. As James Lindsay said, activists share your vocabulary but not your dictionary. It goes with all other words including the words I used, but also words like ally, representation, violence, inclusion or even democracy and myriads of other words.

As someone who has massively struggled with how I look in a non-trans way;

On the other hand when your desires clash with who you actually are in reality and you for instance end up with body dysphoria, we are told that if you think people should be themselves, you are a horrible reactionary bigot and paradoxically get accused of not letting people be themselves.

This could not be less true for me and my experiences. If you have problems with yourself aesthetically, you are roundly shamed for trying to get help in fixing them. Vanity is bad! And vanity operations and cosmetic surgery are superfluous! And shameful! You need to go to therapy to have some boring middle aged woman who could not be more removed from current culture talk at you until you agree there's nothing wrong with you just to make her shut up!

Becoming okay with being your ugly self is the ONLY option presented to you if you have non-trans related dysmorphia. Anything else and you're being shallow, you're being vain. And nobody cares what you look like! (This is the biggest lie of all time, I get treated MUCH MUCH better by randos ever since I fixed myself up and became beautiful.)

I dislike trans healthcare because if I had claimed to be trans, I would have been immediately shuttled off down a route of all the surgery and other interventions I wanted. But because I don't want to grow fried-egg man-tits and cut my dick off, I got nothing but being told to make peace with an ugly body I despised.

Yeah I was thinking mostly of trans stuff when I said that. I agree with you that our culture is very hypocritical and incoherent when it comes to this, which is the very tension I was trying to point out. Which is why the very sentence after the one you quote says:

Ironically the same people who make such accusation often have little issue with telling bodybuilders on gear or transhumanists that they are insane and should accept their natural body (which is correct in my opinion, I'd just like them to extend this to gender related transhumanism as well).

I'm happy to add ugly men to that list (or ugly women when they can't frame their vanity as transgressive feminism trying to dismantle the patriarchy trying to control their sexuality or something like that). I have no clue what your personal struggles were of course, but I will say fixing some sort of obvious deformity or a scar or something to me is qualitatively very different than trying to look like another gender, trying to look half your age or trying to have cartoon action figure musculature or unnatural gigantic boobs or something. Depending on the specifics I might well still come down on the "make peace with the body you were given" side, but I have much more sympathy for somebody who feels insecure about some unattractive feature of their body and just wants to look normal, compared to people who want to look like a transhuman abomination.

I think a key to understanding this problem is that there is an unspoken assumption that your true self is primarily to be found in your desires.

This is the one-sentence explanation, and it is both simple and correct.

The implied theory behind most 'authenticity' talk today is that you simply are your desires. No line can be drawn between the self and its desires.

It is probably worth reflecting at some point, actually, on how this outright contradicts pretty much every major spiritual tradition in the world. You are not your desires, and the more you follow them, the more you become a slave to them. Maybe an effortpost for another day.

I think this is less about "looksmaxxing" and more f1nn5ter just gradually realizing that 1) she is trans (and apparently autistic based on some youtube vid titles), 2) wants to be the Gen Z soft porn equivalent of someone like Natalie Mars and 3) has the means and genetics to actually achieve that. Ie. she wants to be a trans pornstar onlyfans ”influencer” who actually passes and looks pretty at the first glance instead of immediately triggering "this is weird, ugly and creeps me the fuck out"-reflex in people.

This does have an interesting intersection with the pronoun discussion: What would the anti-trans people call someone who looks like a woman, in the future presumably sounds like a woman, acts like an autistic woman but has a penis? I’m on neither side but my immediate instinct is to go with ”she”, at least if I don’t hear her voice, because my brain first sees a cute girl-next-door before conscious thought comes into the picture.

acts like an autistic woman

That's a whole other question, because autism in women allegedly presents differently than autism in men. If you mean the kind of trans autistic person who has male-coded interests, then that is not behaving like an autistic woman, that is behaving like an autistic man who happens to also identify as a trans woman.

Ah, no. Typical autistic MTFs are a whole different thing. I do mean actual autistic women (who I happen to know a couple of IRL).

I’m not saying they’d pass like one after extended discussion but in casual contact that might well happen (provided they actually tried).

"Acts like an autistic woman" is the, er, rub. I don't know that I've ever actually encountered this. IME, they code as autistic men. In theory, the internet is the perfect venue to be your true self without anyone getting hung up on your physical attributes but I frequently find I clock a transwoman online the instant I see a female pronoun.

"Wait, this nerd is a she? Oh, ok."

Of course, it's hard to estimate how many have slipped under the radar. But I've yet to have the experience of concluding someone was a woman, and then being surprised to learn they were born a man.

Related is the "What is a woman?" question. Normally used to dunk on leftists, it can be used in a ship-of-Theseus sense. When have you undergone enough hormonal replacement, voice training, and surgeries to be more female than male?

I know the most hardcore anti-transers will say the only thing that matters is your birth sex. But as you said, the heuristic for most people is just "Does she appear female?" Which lends some credence to the Judith Butler theory that gender is primarily a performance and thus "Am I a man or a woman" is determined by the actor and the audience.

I know the most hardcore anti-transers will say the only thing that matters is your birth sex.

The median position if I had to vaguely estimate society's views. Certainly not the median position on reddit or other online spaces which are far outside the cultural mainstream.

This might be a matter of social circle. Most people I have met care way more about your presentation than your birth sex. If they get to know you as a woman and believe you are a woman, then the revelation that you are actually trans won't make them suddenly think of you as male. The only exception are anti-trans activists.

What kind of social circle is this? It sounds like one profoundly unrepresentative of Western society as a whole.

Mostly young people who are too concerned about their own circumstances to really care about other people's pronouns. They just want to live and let live, and only struggles with trans stuff insofar as the presentation of the trans person is clearly different from their claimed gender (admittedly happens more than you would think), or if the trans person somehow makes their life worse. Also older leftists, but their stance is obvious.

I know the most hardcore anti-transers will say the only thing that matters is your birth sex.

Are you sure that is the position of the most hardcore? Might be the plurality position.

Well, that's the thing. "Looking like a woman" is a heuristic, not a definition. It's reasonable to assume that something that walks like a duck and talks like a duck is a duck. But the existence of entities that resemble ducks but are not in fact ducks doesn't mean that our definition of the word "duck" is lacking: it just means that the heuristic we were using sometimes produces false positives, and that's okay. Heuristics by their very nature are imperfect. Definitions, by contrast, are supposed to be definitive. "Anyone who looks like a woman is a woman" is a bad definition by virtue of being circular, and it wouldn't even satisfy most trans activists as it makes trans identification contingent on passing. It also leads to absurd conclusions, like the idea that a man wearing makeup and a wig becomes a woman by so doing, but then reverts back to being a man once he takes them off.

I mean as a transhumanist but also as a liberalist, tbh I'm all for this. People can do anything they want with their pronouns inside the bubble that they created, maintain and advertise. There is a case to be made for the corrosive influence of media fame, but I don't see the pronoun thing here. If you follow f1, I can only assume you know what they're about. At any rate, nobody forces you to be there, it's not a public space, and no benefit is even accrued from your presence so that you may be pushed into obligation.

I'd slightly rephrase the saying: As it harm none against their intent, without their knowledge, or out of coercion, do what you will. Intentionally and knowingly allowing yourself to be harmed should not bar others from action, and I assume this clarification was only left out of the law because the thought of people harming themselves intentionally as a moral argument was considered too absurd.

I agree, and Clavicular. The problems are 1) being promoted to people, especially kids, over more "normal" celebrities; and 2) being motivated to push beyond where they'd naturally stop, in ways they end up regretting. Both mainly caused by social media.

What is normal? What is the ideal path for each individual? I don't think either of these influencers are normal, but neither do I think the ideas of anyone I've seen promote censorship. Even good-intentioned censors: determining what is best for others is hard, hence why I think softer methods are better (for starters, not promoting these influencers to children against the wishes of their own parents; censoring them from children is OK, but shouldn't be necessary).

Intentionally and knowingly allowing yourself to be harmed should not bar others from action

I would caveat, only when it is beyond reasonable doubt against your sane interests, because what defines harm? For example, suicide treatment that someone may enter initially voluntarily is OK, because the people who it saved believe so, but people who diligently consistently want to die should be entitled to MAID. Or in this case, both trans and looksmaxxing adults should be allowed gender-affirming care, with a bit of friction to ensure it's what they really want (unless obvious); because it's their choice, and there's a not-insignificant chance they won't regret it.

I think the main risk is in advertising the lifestyle to others through success and streams. There seems to be a subculture where the ideal body is one you can only achieve through chemical modification, often without the aid of a doctor. Specifically people who don't qualify for gender dysphoria taking estrogen in order to appear more androgynous and attain the ideal femboy physique for longer. It bothers me that this kind of thing seems widely accepted within these spaces, and is not challenged by leftists outside them.

It's not specific to the femboys; how many of those bodybuilder influencers are on steroids? You think those instagram girlies haven't had any work done?

There tends to at least be some degree of pushback within those circles. Even amongst bodybuilders, being on steroids is not uncontroversial.

Well yes, I agree that they lie about being on steroids. But plenty of those physiques are not available naturally.

Anyone making money off being visibly jacked and isn't subject to a drug testing regime is roided, especially if they say they are not.

To be honest, if I had a body a bit (a lot) more suited to this, I might be into it myself, lol. It's incredibly unclear to me to what extent this is an existing impulse being revealed by new affordances or something being carved by a hyperstimulating media landscape. It's also possible to me that the vast majority of human culture is already something that was carved by the vast forces of yesteryear. So I don't know. But at the end of the day, I'm libertarian enough that I'll come down on the side of "state funded trans healthcare should be rare and gated and proven by unbiased studies or not available at all; and estrogen, puberty blockers and appearance surgeries should be regulated, reviewed, generic, and over the counter." Every generation has something they are silly about to the point of harm. It's still not gonna be as bad as cigarettes or opiates.

First, it seems weird that people go so hard on clavicular when stuff like this is accepted (at least by the online left).

The online left's problem with Clavicular is that he's part of the manosphere. That is the bottom line and his surgeries are ancillary to it, at most. It's just terrible optics for progressive gender values when a neurotic out-and-out misogynist influencer faces little trouble picking up young attractive women in Miami. Acknowledging this would vindicate incels, in their mind.

Of course, F1nn is not a good trans representative, being a pornstar and all, but I do think he represents a good part of why the online trans communities seem so weird.

It is disturbing and it comes with the territory. Social reinforcement, financial incentive and ideological capture create a feedback loop where "just a little more feminisation" becomes the rational next step. Add in a heavy dose of victim complex, and toxic acceptance of the most extreme variety of "self-expression" becomes necessary to prove the concept. ""Look man, no offense, but that sounds unhinged" sounds awfully close to what the transphobes tell me all the time. How can I repeat that line while being trans myself?"

It's just terrible optics for progressive gender values when a neurotic out-and-out misogynist influencer faces little trouble picking up young attractive women in Miami.

Was the progressive claim really that misogynists find it impossible to get laid? Birth rates in socially conservative countries and communities clearly prove that to be incorrect regardless of what ‘Clavicular’ is doing.

To me it seems like the idea that, say, the existence of a happy nuclear family with two dads raising well adjusted and successful children ‘disproves’ social conservatism with regards to family formation.

We can go even broader. There are people who get away with socially deleterious behavior all the time. Think of the famous shopping cart greentext. At some point the argument is implicitly ‘do [x prosocial behavior] even if some other people get away with not doing it’, whatever the behavior is and whether or not you agree with the specifics of the argument.

I think that the issue is of a different kind, something James Lindsay refers to as "woke right". It means that ideologically it actually agrees with left narratives, it only turns them on their head. Patriarchy oppresses women? Yes and it is a good thing, be a chad like Tate and deal with the hoes and their white knights like rabble they are. Radical feminists rave about beauty hierarchies and pretty privilege? Fat activists talk about how fat people are oppressed? That is true, be beautiful and openly sneer and mog all the ugly degenerates, objectify everybody.

This woke right shit is literal heresy to leftwing activism, it can accept all the premises and just declares "and it is good". Hierarchies are not unjust, they are natural. Systems of oppression should not be dismantled, you should strive to play the game and be on top. It is woke version of satanism, that is why it actually cuts more deeply - mostly because the leftwing ideology actually gives them ammo, they agree that all these things bring privilege. Leftists just assume that people will intuitively say that having privilege is bad, and that people will automatically cheer for the underdog - without actually explaining why. It is actually a big weakness, Lindsay likened it to vampire ideology: you have to invite it to have power of guilt and shame over you. If you make yourself immune to it and openly laugh at it and if you are able to live through cancellations and struggle sessions, you are beyond their reach. It has no longer any power over you.

Leftwing activists are much more likely subject to be subverted into these movements as they are primed to the language, these movements are more dangerous to them than let's say libertarians or neoliberals etc.

Birth rates in socially conservative countries and communities clearly prove that to be incorrect regardless of what ‘Clavicular’ is doing.

Feminists have no trouble squaring this particular circle- they just claim that those women don't have any choice. Yes, this can extend to pretending to believe that groups of normal people in the continental united states are actually living in caves in Afghanistan.

Was the progressive claim really that misogynists find it impossible to get laid?

I'd say it was the converse - that most men who can't get laid can't get laid because they are misogynist. Not even feminists are sufficiently disconnected from reality not to notice that some misogynists are getting laid.

Denying that "chicks dig jerks" has been a feminist staple for decades, yes.

IMO the polarised nature of the discourse guarantees an endless enfilade of bad takes deployed as gotchas. Gen Z seems to have way more social outcasts than their parents' generation, and almost no one knows how to discuss the phenomenon without ruffling feathers.

"This is why no one likes you!"

"Well what about Brad? Everyone likes him!"

A lot of TRP is just crude locker room talk. Some interesting pattern recognition mixed with some bullshit. You still have to observe the world for yourself and decide which parts actually align with reality. Realistically, an average man can meet the standards of his looksmatch, but he usually has to put in the legwork in the initial stages. Failing repeatedly at that breeds bitterness, which then turns into a self-fulfilling prophecy and repels potential partners. A character flaw? Maybe. At the same time, there is an undercurrent of progressive platitudes that insists that in a western style dating environment, women would claw off their fingers before dating a Trump voting man. Both things can be true. Unlikeable vibes make dating much harder, and plenty of women still date objectively shitty men.

The discourse rarely manages to hold both observations in its head at once.

Was the progressive claim really that misogynists find it impossible to get laid?

I'm old enough to remember when the stock piece of advice feminists offered to sexually frustrated straight men was "be more feminist" and "of course women like nice guys – that's why you can't get laid, because you're not one" and so on. "The reason Nice Guys™ can't get laid is because they don't Respecc Wahmen enough" was a core tenet of what Scott calls geek feminism, and still lives on in how progressives use the term "incel" as a term of abuse towards any man whose opinions are deemed insufficiently socially progressive. See this comment by a poster who expressly believes that any woman who dates a conservative man must be mentally ill and filled with unconscious self-loathing:

My subjective observation would be that that attitude - women are liars, women are picky, etc. - about women leaks out into interactions with them, and, understandably, they, or I supposed “we”, do not want to get romantically or sexually involved with someone who thinks so poorly of “us”... I would recommend that loveless men consider one solution to their lack of success in the dating market is to re-examine their overall attitude about women and see if that isn’t playing a part as to why women are not responding the way you want them to.

I devoted several comments to attempting to rebut this reasoning as facile.

Birth rates in socially conservative countries and communities clearly prove that to be incorrect regardless of what ‘Clavicular’ is doing.

In fairness, feminists might legitimately rebut that misogynists can only get laid in socially conservative countries where women are afforded very little freedom in their choice of sexual partners, and that in a free society no woman of sound mind would voluntarily choose to go to bed with a misogynist. They tend to get very defensive when you provide them with some examples of men with backwards attitudes to women who nevertheless have no trouble attracting them.

As I’ve said before, both the ‘geek feminists’ and a lot of the counter arguments are wrong here. The nerdy sexless man who starts reposting Andrew Tate (or indeed Clavicular) reels on main is not becoming more attractive to women by doing so. M

But a lot of the criticism of the ‘feminist’ viewpoint is straw or at least weak manning. The argument was not “an extremely hot, rich and charming man who is a misogynist can’t be sexually successful”. If you asked one of these feminists whether a billionaire who hated women could still get laid, they would obviously, presumably, have said ‘yes’.

The strongman of their argument (which I’m not committed to defending as their argument) was more like “sitting around hating women isn’t going to get you laid. Make more friends, build a larger social circle, speak to more women and it’s more likely to happen for you”, and for the average sexless man that is in fact excellent advice and probably far more helpful than hitting the gym and watching Clav streams.

[...] speak to more women and it’s more likely to happen for you”

Thing is, the absolute core of 'geek feminism' was directing young men not to do this. The single biggest complaint of geek women was getting swarmed by men b/c the gender ratios of geek subcultures were so skewed and therefore the 'advice' they repeated more than anything was:

'If I want to talk to you, if I want to do something with you, I will let you know. If you are coming up to me, or talking to me, and I haven't proactively expressed interest then you are probably harassing me'.

Which hit like a freight train to guys like me who already had trouble approaching women. That the girl talking to you doesn't like you and is smiling until you get the message and go away is essentially every man's worst nightmare, and geek feminism was broadcasting it (for somewhat understandable reasons) 24/7. It also meant that the only guys talking to these girls were the ones who didn't take no for an answer, which intensified everything.

Their entire narrative on this is constructed to act as a Kafka trap. If you as a man try following their advice, you already lost.

Thing is, the absolute core of 'geek feminism' was directing young men not to do this. The single biggest complaint of geek women was getting swarmed by men b/c the gender ratios of geek subcultures were so skewed and therefore the 'advice' they repeated more than anything was:

One of the few moment's I've ever had of existential horror was when I saw someone arguing that this habit from women in such spaces wasn't to police men's behavior but to brag to other women they were receiving attention from men.

If that’s already existentially horrifying, just wait until your pattern recognition kicks in and the wrongthinker within you starts Noticing a similar phenomenon when women complain about the streets not being safe to walk around in at night or bemoan their constant fear of getting raped (all the while voicing ardent support for moar third world migration and compassionate treatment of criminals).

Sorry to disappoint(?), but I'm already well down that hole with a shovel and yelling back up at you.

advice feminists offered to sexually frustrated straight men was "be more feminist"

My memory is this pre-dated the mass internet access of geek feminism and the blogosphere and goes back at least to the '90s and the idea of the New Man. I was too young to have any real awareness of gender discourse prior to that but I see traces of the same message in repeats of popular 1970s sitcoms too (Bob in The Likely Lads, or the daughter's boyfriend in Til Death Do Us Part).

Unfortunately, unlike The Last Psychiatrist's dictum that "if you're watching it it's meant for you", barring convoluted epicycles I think these messages were received and absorbed by exactly the sort they weren't meant for. The Scotts A of the world were never going to cat call women and become wife beaters, it just gave them another reason to feel anxious around women.

I'm old enough to remember when the stock piece of advice feminists offered to sexually frustrated straight men was "be more feminist" and "of course women like nice guys – that's why you can't get laid, because you're not one" and so on.

I actually do not remember such a time. In fact, what I remember was closer to "oh, you are a nice guy? What, do you want a cookie? That's called being a decent human being, women don't owe you anything for that." Do you have an example of what you're saying?

In "Radicalising the Romanceless", Scott provided a prime example:

Step I. Consume More Art By Women – I think it’s a good idea to make a deliberate year-long project of it at this time in your life, when you are trying to figure out how to relate to women better…Use woman-created media to to remind yourself that the world isn’t only about you + men + women who have/have not rejected you as a romantic partner.

Sometimes I wonder if the person who wrote this actually believed that consuming art by female artists would make a man more desirable to women, or if she was just trying to line the pockets of her fellow female creatives.

Step I. Consume More Art By Women

I have seen several thoroughly red-pilled guys offer the same advice. Chicklit, romance, and by-women-for-women erotica (which is a majority of textual erotica because men don't read while wanking) all provide a view of what women actually want which is a lot less filtered than you are going to find in explicit dating advice.

Admittedly a substantial fraction of it is "a man who is unreasonably rich, powerful or physically attractive expresses genuine interest in the girl next door" which is non-actionable to men reading it for research.

I think you're conflating two things here.

Your version of the author's claim: "you should read women to get laid"

The author's claim: "being a decent human being is helpful, but not sufficient, to finding love. Since you have difficulty treating women as people, you should read women to become a decent human being"

There's no implication that reading Gloria Steinem is going to get you laid. The claim is that it will make you better off and maybe move the needle on falling in love:

So let’s talk about some stuff you can do differently to improve your life and your chances of meeting someone you’d like to be with.

What is the purpose of reading women specifically?

But I think it’s a good idea to make a deliberate year-long project of it at this time in your life, when you are trying to figure out how to relate to women better.

Does this guarantee results?

If you meet a woman, and you kind of like her, and you are looking for something to talk about, try asking her “What are you reading or watching lately? Can you recommend me something?” If you listen to her, and then go and read or watch that thing, she may or may not date you in the end, but you will get infinity coolness points because this behavior by men is sadly all too rare.

To put it simply - the (geek?) feminist perspective on this is something like "you should be a decent human being, but nobody owes you anything for that, but it might lead to something." If you do follow this playbook and expect it to lead to sex and get frustrated if it doesn't, you aren't actually a decent human being, you are a nice guy (this is a term of art).

But this is the exact point of disagreement – I don't think there's any correlation between being a "decent guy" (read: feminist) and getting laid. It's trivial to find examples of men who aren't decent guys and yet have no trouble attracting women. So the advice is worse than useless.

You are still thinking that the respondent is giving advice on how to get laid. She is doing no such thing. The advice is, basically, on how to become a decent human being, which does not constitute any obligation on the part of any woman. You are so moidbrained that you can't imagine that someone would respond to this letter with anything other than advice on getting laid, and the respondent is so foidbrained that she doesn't see why someone might expect that there ought to be an effective strategy for getting laid and/or getting married.

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I can't name a specific example, but there was a whole thing with "Nice Guys(tm) are not actually nice" which, like many feminist trends, started with a legitimate complaint but then overextended massively into just punishing guys they didn't like.

It's just terrible optics for progressive gender values when a neurotic out-and-out misogynist influencer faces little trouble picking up young attractive women in Miami.

I've seen several compilation videos of him trying to pick up girls in assorted locales and striking out. Maybe it's a numbers game, but "little trouble" seems to be exactly what he's facing i.e. he's not effortlessly hoovering up pussy without a care.

I mean he doesn't succeed "all" the time and disgruntled people want to signal boost when he fails, but you can find lots of footage of him succeeding with no effort or when he shouldn't.

Notably, people online tend to claim that he has paid the people who it does work on.

Which is unsurprising if he is showing off his success on Youtube. The first approximation is that everyone you see on TV is being paid to be there, and the vast majority of them are in some sense professionals. (Back in the elder days of broadcast TV, the most notorious example was that the vast majority of contestants on game shows that were not as intellectually hardcore as Mastermind, Jeopardy or Millionaire were out-of-work actors). Big-budget pro Youtubers count as TV here.

If I wanted to create pro-quality footage of me successfully picking up girls, I would hire actresses to pretend to be picked up. The alternative involves spitting game while being followed around by a cameraman, which would make even normie chicks who were willing to be picked up for NSA sex run away.

So it helps that he's on twitch more than YouTube from my understanding, which means that more volume and less filtered content.

I'm no expert on the guy since most of my knowledge about him is served involuntarily, but I have seen stuff that credibly is authentic (for example: when they committed a crime and had to go court, the girl who was caught cheating on her bf with him on twitch, the time his fans were pissed because he made out with someone who was trans). Also sometimes it def looks like he's paying people to be there. Also he gets blown off. Def a mix, but anything who believes that girls in their late teens or early 20s don't eat that shit up missed a lot of formative experiences.

I'm actually not sure this is about trans or gender at all.

Finnster reminds me of nobody so much as Nikocado Avocado - somebody who put a huge amount of himself online, obtained a large and enthusiastic following, and became addicted to the likes. This then leads to the person sharing himself more and more, modifying and selling his body in order to gain more and more attention, no matter how permanent, unhealthy, or damaging.

It's tragic, and I feel awful for the people doing this to themselves, but ultimately I have more condemnation for the social media system they exist within, and even for the slavering audience.

This is the correct answer. f1nn5ter, Avocado and Clavicular himself are all particularly morbid examples of the perils of audience capture.

Nikocado Avocado was my first thought as well. It needs to be studied how someone who began with a seemingly normal personality and approachable demeanor could descend into such a grotesque, self destructive public spectacle for... clicks? The psychological arc is fascinating and deeply disturbing.

The closest example from the pre-social media times I can think of were probably carnival sideshow performers or certain extreme vaudeville acts, people who willingly turned their bodies and personal degradation into public entertainment for money and attention. But these people were usually born with a condition that led to their unfortunate appearance, and they had no better means of putting food on the table. I can't imagine someone having access to better choices and still choosing to go down this road.

Fortunately, Nikocado secretly lost weight years ago and got back his former weight.

We probably shouldn't be that surprised - the approval of the tribe is something humans are pretty-close-to-hardwired to crave, and the interaction of that instinct with social media can go very dark places. Would you rather be a famous freak, or a healthy, happy nobody? It's not surprising that young people in particular sometimes choose 'famous freak'.

(Apparently it is disputed just how much Gen Z kids want to be influencers or content creators, but even in the lower end, 5% of people is still enough to give you a big supply of freaks.)

I think age does come into it. Most of people doing this are kids, and people in their teens or early twenties often don't really understand lifelong consequences of their actions, especially when those actions are things like taking hormone treatments, getting surgery, or over-eating. Often it's only when you get a bit older and start to feel the creaks and pains that you realise you really do need to take care of your body. Still, if we combine big ambitions, insensitivity to or ignorance of consequences, a greater tendency to reckless behaviour, and brains being hacked by the virtual crowd, this is what you get.

When I was at school, there was usually a clown or a reckless attention-seeker in the class. Sometimes he (it was almost always a he) would pursue attention in obviously stupid, self-destructive ways. I remember a boy whose 'thing' was going up to to the fence during recess and throwing his packed lunch into the road, and watching it being run over by cars. Other students found it funny and cheered, so he kept doing it, day after day. I sometimes wonder how that guy felt a few hours later, as his stomach rumbled...

There's a social media element to it for sure, but there definitely is a trans element to it as well. I distinctly remember Philosophy Tube getting a visible bump in patreon subscriptions, and I think I recall someone going through other examples of suddenly trans influencers.

PhilosophyTube is the best example of a modern Patrick Bateman and it's not even close. It would be the perfect act in a modern rendition of American Psycho to weave in the alleged reason for his transition.

Do we really need like 3 top-level trans posts a week? And keep in mind this is coming from a horrible anti-trans bigot like me; I can only imagine how tiring this is for the other side. A biography of one random streamer doesn't seem postworthy. (When Asmongold or Hasan Piker goes trans, then you can @ me.)

So I'll admit I may have been too hasty in posting this, but I disagree that this guy is just a random streamer. For several years, he pulled in enough viewers to do collabs with various large streamers such as Mizkif and Belle delphine, his fan subreddit has almost 100k subscribers, and his posts are still on top of /r/egg_irl and /r/crossdressing, two very prominent trans related subs. He is one of the the biggest trans-focused content creators out there, and might be the most prominent trans-centric streamer that currently exists. Thus I find it reasonable to conclude that his is behavior somewhat representative of and condoned by online trans spaces which makes him relevant to the culture war.

A biography of one random streamer doesn't seem postworthy. (When Asmongold or Hasan Piker goes trans, then you can @ me.)

IIRC, F1nn5ter used to be sufficiently prominent to make the front page of Reddit on a semi-regular basis, just like Asmongold and Hasan. That's where I learned about this rigmarole.

Part of the explanation is this: Clavicular explicitly says that he does looksmaxxing to gain social and sexual status. Trans advocates, on the other hand, usually say that trans people transition to feel more comfortable with themselves, because they have intense dysphoria, etc.

Putting aside the question of whether the trans advocates' claim is accurate or not, cause that's a different topic... still, part of what is happening here is just that people tend to respond more positively to the "I am doing this because I am suffering psychologically" presentation than to the "I am doing this to for sex and money" presentation.

Of course, the reality is that Clavicular's story is that he too, as he freely admits, was suffering psychologically when he was younger. Suffering psychologically from being a nobody, from not getting girls. Not only that, but he is still suffering psychologically, as he freely admits, because his underlying personality is still that of a socially anxious introvert. He uses psychotropic drugs and the motivation of getting money to get himself to constantly go out and make influencer content.

But male desires for sex, money, and social status are widely seen as being somehow inherently wrong and disgusting. Not just on the left, but even by many people on the right. People tend to associate these pretty natural and understandable desires with the worst examples of what happens when psychologically disturbed people pursue them: rapists, social climbing sociopaths, sleazy business sharks, and so on.

A man wanting to become a woman, on the other hand, does not activate these associations. Becoming a woman might conceivably get a particularly sexually unsuccessful man more sex than he would have had otherwise, but becoming a woman is popularly conceived (whether accurately or not) as something that would make the sex that the person gives to others less dominant and aggressive. Becoming a woman is also not popularly thought of as something that would give the man more social status. Yes, there are cases of trans activists using trans issues as a way to status climb, but it is popularly understood that men on average have more social status than women and that most of the world's most powerful people are men. In reality, the average young woman probably has more social status than the average young man, but that might be a point that is too subtle for the average observer to grasp.

Another point is that: Yes, Clavicular in a sense is doing gender-affirming medical treatments just like some trans people do gender-affirming medical treatments. But he is going beyond gender-affirming treatments and doing gender-maxxing. So the trans equivalent to Clav isn't just a man who does some relatively light gender-affirming treatments to reduce the presentation of masculinity. It's a man who tries to turn himself into a female bimbo stereotype, with fake lashes, large fake breasts, and so on.

Personally, I find nothing wrong with that, whether it's the trans person doing it or Clavicular doing it. But I think that many people are weirded out by the monomaniacal maximalism and "trying to turn yourself into a superficial stereotype" aspects of it, similar as to how many people are weirded out by extreme bodybuilders.

Interesting. I always thought people like Clavicular are bad because they teach their (often young and impressionable) viewers to lead a lifestyle that is fundamentally unhealthy whilst avoiding things that would actually be good for them. But you are stating that the reason why most people think he is bad is because he is being public about his desires for women, money, and status.

I always thought people like Clavicular are bad because they teach their (often young and impressionable) viewers to lead a lifestyle that is fundamentally unhealthy whilst avoiding things that would actually be good for them.

That's another big reason why people think he is bad. I just didn't mention it.

First, it seems weird that people go so hard on clavicular when stuff like this is accepted (at least by the online left).

This is because the normies know about clavicular. Up until your post, I had been blissfully ignorant of this guy. I think they're both stupid, for the record.

Fair enough. He became quite big during covid, consistently pulling video views in the hundreds of thousands for years with what was really just clips from his stream. While his popularity has seemingly faded over the last three years or so, I would think this would be enough to justify some degree of mainstream appeal to him. At least amongst those on the internet.

The culture war angle is two-fold: First, it seems weird that people go so hard on clavicular when stuff like this is accepted (at least by the online left).

Easy to understand - F1nn let his face be remodeled by professionals, the best and the brightest experts, while Clavicular performs the looksmaxing care on himself with hammer in his own hands.

The same reason why suicide is discouraged, why stopping suicide and saving human life is one of main pretexts of rising internet censorship and gun control, while simultaneously Canadian care is spreading around the world.

Your face, your skull and your life do not belong to you, they belong to the experts. Trust the science, trust the experts, only they can decide, not dumb muggle like you.

Equivalent to Clavicular style looksmaxing in woke world is DIY gender affirming care, ranging from injecting yourself with various bathtub made substances to fully self performed gender affirming surgery.

But this is problematic.

Trans people have been going underground to access care for generations. But that doesn’t mean DIY networks are a large-scale strategic answer to transphobia.

This is not something praised and encouraged by mainstream left online and offline, this is domain of real hardcore underground very very far from public acceptance.

edit: links linked

Yeah, many people might not realize that Clav did the DIY stuff because of limited medical options and the fact that he used to have no money, not because he has anything against the idea of going to professionals.

This is not something praised and encouraged by mainstream left online and offline, this is domain of real hardcore underground very very far from public acceptance.

If you go on trans related subreddits, endorsements of DIY transitioning in the form of purchasing and administering hormones on your own are not that hard to find. The justification being that anything is better than nothing, and access to care where the poster lives is too limited. DIY surgery is definitely a level beyond that though.


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