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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 16, 2023

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Are you sure you aren’t painting your ideological enemies as objectively immoral losers predestined to have bad lives — and who do not have sex — because these emotionally repulsive characteristics overpower the logical mind? Meaning you no longer need to do the dirty work of considering their line of reasoning or rebuffing their values?

I think people who share socially excommunicable things online have crossed a selection effect filter, and as such are not representative of the median case. Consider porn: despite the fact that 90% of young men watch porn, only the most deranged person online will like and share X-rated posts under their real name. The online presence of these people do not tell you the median life of a porn-viewer, which is decidedly median. This applies to a whole array of things. The people who pine for a white-only nation are either going to post anonymously somewhere, not post at all, or have given up on a normal social life and no longer care about anonymity.

But there are some ways to decipher what these people are like. The “leaders” of the movement who de-anonymize themselves range from run-of-the-mill (Jason Kessler) to the most accomplished you can be as a liberal arts student (Richard Spencer and Costin Alamariu). When Tucker Carlson’s writer Blake Neff was doxxed, and mind you he may have had the most influential job of any conservative writer in America, we learned that he would post racist trolls anonymously in his free time (“Black doods staying inside playing Call of Duty is probably one of the biggest factors keeping crime down”, this ridiculous kind of stuff).

It's important to distinguish here between racism and white nationalism. The former is a proposition one can believe personally and it is or isn't true, whatever. Run your life according to it, you will benefit if it is true, regardless of what anyone else believes.

The latter requires recruiting a supermajority of white people to your cause, a cause obviously doomed once one observes the beliefs of most wealthy successful young whites. It only works as a magical thinking conspiracy theory, as a belief in the Emperor Nero escaped to the East and returning with a great army. It benefits you zero unless everyone believes in it too.

@Folamh3 summarized it well here.

But in general I like @ThenElection 's point here

The most socially attuned straight white men treat wokeness as a man in the 1950s would treat Christianity. Mouth the platitudes, make sure to turn up to the expected group ceremonies, avoid socializing with people who loudly reject it, and certainly don't angrily denounce it yourself. But never go too far in that direction: someone performing a public display of self-flagellation will always be considered a weirdo, no matter how motivated it is by his dedication to righteousness.

The idea of a silent hidden unfalsifiable majority that believes in what you believe strikes me as rather too self serving to be real.