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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   33047 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 24, 2023

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I think they’ll ultimately win. It’s just that really they’re still in the foundation stage of the movement. Almost any real political upheaval is a generations-long process of first creating a philosophy and ethos and then unify around that philosophy and work to implement it. But if you’d have judged the communist movement by what it was in 1870 when it was first taking shape, you wouldn’t have predicted the Russian revolution. The tumultuous nature of the current generation of reactionaries doesn’t mean much because I believe it will eventually settle on an ethos that will be United enough to win real power.

It seems to me that it's the fraction of angry young men you have on your side that matters more than the absolute number. If your side has all the kids, then you will have disproportionate power regardless of how many octogenarians hate your guts.

Is there really? Old men don't fight wars, the octogenarian legions might look mighty in a democracy, but if you're angry enough all the old people yelling doesn't matter if you're holding the gun.

Indeed. Also, the armies, police forces and militias that successfully put down rebellions of angry young men in the past were themselves recruited from huge pools of young men living in fecund societies. And also, fecund but stable societies in the past drew their stability from masses of married or at least paired-up young men having an investment in the future stability of that society. In demographically imploding atomized societies, there won't be many of them around either, so the two factors cancel each other out.

I doubt that failed anti-government rebellions were ever normally put down by men in the 50-60 or 40-60 age bracket.

Is that right though? Actual boomers are well into the senior citizen bracket, and I think there was a bit of a baby bump for millenials/early zoomers which gives them a pretty big numbers advantage over genX.

We are smarter and would win in a fight obviously -- but honestly most of that generation seems if not on board with the status quo much too coddled to do anything about it.

That comparison isn't really between revolutionary societies to current western societies. It's between pretty much every other society, nearly all of them (revolutionary and otherwise) in the past and most of them in the present, to current western societies.

Angry young men is a bit ambiguous, though, and I'm not sure the "angry young men" of today are comparable to those of the past. Before, the rabble were employed as productive labor in critical economic activities and had broader real-life social connections with one another. Now, at best they're criminals, and at worst they're living in their parents' basements addicted to porn and video games. The past cohort was a much more fertile ground for revolutionary impulses and organizations to develop.

I also suspect that due to selection effects (or lack thereof) for the last several generations the average quality of young men qua young men is simply lower.

People also go on about testosterone but didn't Scott write something questioning that?

I wonder how it's going to pan out with the current demographic trends. Past societies weren't really getting the old/young ratios to properly test this theory. How is it going to feel to be young in a society where every young voice gets shouted down by a hundred angry grandpas?

I mean, Japan is ahead of the West and the ruling party is as strong as ever.

Yeah, but Japan is the poster child of "falling fertility rates" and the infamous work culture there probably won't last much longer than its elderly population.

I would guess an uneasy detente until one group of kids decides to stop respecting their elders and bowls them all over.

Generation X already got this.

All of the antivaxxers, former alt-right, chuds I know are having kids.

It's pretty safe to say that a majority of the white kids being born now have right-wing parents, and if the current anti-white family culture persists, new heterosexual white pairing will be a far-right exception.

Now I also expect some of these to seek more hospitable lands in Asia.

There seems to be a short windows before the current Jan6 activists dwindle, but there should be decent returns on a balkanization strategy, simply making White Flight official.

The question is, united how? I hope the comparisons to the Russian Revolution aren't followed to their conclusion, where the dissident right winds up putting a Stalin type in power, believing it to be their salvation.

It's my sincere hope we get a Sulla instead, if that only buys us a generation or two before we get a Caesar instead. I mean, read this and try not to get excited.

In total control of Rome and most of Italy, Sulla instituted a series of proscriptions (a program of executing those whom he perceived as enemies of the state and confiscating their property).

Proscribing or outlawing every one of those whom he perceived to have acted against the best interests of the Republic while he was in the East, Sulla ordered some 1,500 nobles (i.e., senators and equites) executed, although it is estimated that as many as 9,000 people were killed.[40] The purge went on for several months. Possibly to protect himself from future political retribution, Sulla had the sons and grandsons of the proscribed banned from running for political office, a restriction not removed for over 30 years.

Near the end of 81 BC, Sulla, true to his traditionalist sentiments, resigned his dictatorship, disbanded his legions and re-established normal consular government.

All that aside, it's hard to argue with his thesis. The America I knew as a child is utterly dead and destroyed. There is no saving it. The only hope to avoid the boot of people who hate me on my neck, and my descendant's neck, for all time is fedposts

try not to get excited

Can you explain why you think a massive political purge via execution of a ruler’s personal enemies would be something exciting?

Sulla is one of the most cursed figures in Roman history for a reason.

A new broom sweeps clean. I don’t want people executed, but I think a revolution that disempowers current elites cannot help but be a good thing as our current elites have no interest in solving real problems, instead, they’re busy arguing over fake problems and using said fake problems to expand the military state and social control over the population to absurd heights.

Just a random list, but these are some of the big problems not addressed: AI and technological unemployment, street crimes, spree shootings, income inequality, infrastructure, a shitty K-12 education system, college costs, pollution and global warming, and media/social media unitary censorship.

What we’re doing instead: micromanaging whether or not a state can ban porn-adjacent books from elementary school classrooms, trans rights, indoctrination into woke thinking, pride and race pride, and putting visibly trans people into positions of power or at least inviting them to the White House.

I don’t think anyone sane could possibly come to the conclusion that it’s better to have outdated, crumbling roads, but porn in school libraries, or street crime being less of and issue than proper pronoun etiquette, or accessible higher education being lower on the list than making sure that the White House has a resident military trans woman and invites more trans women to the White House.

IT’s anarcho-tyranny. We can’t or won’t solve real problems, so we’re busy remaking culture at gun point to be things that most people are ambivalent about if they don’t oppose it outright.

micromanaging whether or not a state can ban porn-adjacent books from elementary school classrooms

It cuts both ways, though. Assuming you're talking about Florida, I could easily argue that the state is spending too much effort micromanaging schools and waging a quixotic war on Disney for having the gall to publicly criticize that micromanagement, all the while the state has a murder rate higher than "woke" states like New York and California. If the elites are in control and can do whatever they want then the opposition is defined by what they're actually opposing, and choosing to oppose bullshit about trans people seems to be pretty low on the priority list apart from its value as culture war fodder.

I mean they are too. Nobody’s completely innocent here. The larger issue here is that the needs of the people won’t be met as long as the elites — in both parties— are more concerned about symbolic cultural issues than they are about meat and potatoes issues like a functioning school system, streets you can safely walk down at night, train tracks that don’t cause derailments, or subways and mass transit that aren’t mobile homeless hotels.

And I think removing the old guard (hopefully peacefully) will at least put the new guys on notice that they better get to work fixing things for average Americans need fixed. At this point, I’d much rather public schools be explicitly Christianized and Nationalist but teach kids how to read and write and do math at a level needed for 21st century living than have a woke school that produces functional illiteracy and innumeracy. I’d rather the flag be changed to some nationalist thing with an eagle and see a il dulce photograph in every building i& it meant not being afraid of street violence or spree shootings. Going down the list, honestly I don’t care about anything other than solving the real problems. If it takes a Sulla or Caesar or Mussolini to put American civilization back on track, then fine.

Fun aside: Sulla started out relatively poor, and only got wealth (and political power) after his mistress Nicopolis left him a sizeable inheritance. She herself was a former slave and earned her fortune through... prostitution.

Is the next Sulla currently out there dating an OnlyFans model?

The black son of that minor DR personality who married the only fans girl is going to be a caudillo?

He’s talking about Helios (or something like that), some twitter lowbie with like 1000 followers or something who fancied himself a big BAP guy who proposed to an OF e-girl with a huge diamond ring who he had never met and had on the day of the proposal uploaded IR porn and who had a half-Black kid. Everyone clowned on him and he’s never been seen on the site since.

I think he was one of the weird twitter pagans? I wasn’t really watching the drama. I just know he married an only fans girl and adopted her interracial baby.

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