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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 28, 2026

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It's literally me.

Being a homeschooled kid for everything before college already put me on poor footing, but attending college in the mid-2010's meant:

  1. exposure to university- and media-driven feminist messaging implying that all approaches were inherently [suspect, predatory, unwanted; from hereon out, "predatory"]
  2. the looming threat of turbocharged MeToo accusations for any fumbled encounter Additionally, I made the mistakes of:
  3. listening to a shrink who I now would classify as "body-positive" who told me looks didn't matter much (I wish I had embraced self-hate earlier instead of accepting affirmations from deluded authorities; at least I'm not fat anymore)
  4. hanging out with a D&D group for my social needs, a group that, on retrospect, I realize was socially policed with terminally Tumblr-brained women who collected left-coded quirks like the cowed men who dated them collected Magic cards; this group introduced me to the memeplexes surrounding subreddits like /r/niceguys and /r/inceltears, which led me to believe that there was no winning, since per those memeplexes, things like "trying to not be a predator" and "complaining that there's no winning because you are branded a predator no matter what you do" are also reasons to be mocked and branded a predator. I still catch myself thinking like this.

Thanks to all these factors, the risks of any approach were exaggerated (or more conservatively, were implied to be exaggerated) by authorities and by the groups I chose to associate with.

At this point I'm a wizard and just hoping I'll get over the hurdle of self-preservation soon; I can't talk with shrinks about this because despite the seeming pointlessness of life, assuming I do find a purpose to living I am provisionally maintaining a stable job, and I'd like to keep it stable with no employment gaps or institutionalizations to my name.

If any staff member would like to ban me, I think I'm going to keep using this forum for venting, at least as context and drive permits, and that is trite.

I'm a lot older than you, and: It won't get better. The people who tell you it will are high-functioning, capable of navigating modern dating, and they pattern match "my life is intolerable" to "I feel you bro, it's been a few weeks since I got laid, too." The real world does not mete out suffering in a balanced way. And men in pain are not a problem modern society even acknowledges, let alone tries to solve. As you've mentioned, shrinks are legally mandated to make your life even worse if you're honest with them.

I have a few relatives who I stay alive for, but as I live a very unhealthy and sedentary lifestyle, I'm kind of looking forward to dying of a heart attack in a few years, alone as always. (Ironically, I do not think we're all going to get killed by AI.)

If any staff member would like to ban me, I think I'm going to keep using this forum for venting, at least as context and drive permits, and that is trite.

Why? Nothing you said seems remotely objectionable. You are sharing your experience, which is not against the rules.

Single-issue posting is against the rules, even if it's intermittent rather than constant. 1 2

You have to really stand out and be persistently obnoxious about it for us to invoke that rule. Everyone has their "thing" that they like to talk about - that is not what the single-issue posting rule prohibits.

Yeah. Seems a lot more targeted at stopping people airing intellectual Fetishes or 'Da Jews' posting than just preferring to contribute to certain types of conversations.

Fascinating, so rules as written yes, but rules as intended? Haven't the mods clarified many a time that they define single-issue posters as "obnoxious" and "non-stop". My model for this is that you'd have to cluster closer the SS, or EC (might be remembering wrong) style of posting rather than this fairly timid mostly-lurker that occasionally comes in to vent about how homeschooling + feminism + Leftism fucked up his brain. He is essentially not prolific enough, aggressive enough, or obnoxious enough to seriously catch mod attention on the topic.

Seems like a case of: "Rules are a blunt hammer, sometimes you need the enforcer to recognize when they should be applied" or that you can't make rules for every situation that are 100% effective.

the seeming pointlessness of life

This comment seems relevant.