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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 6, 2023

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Is ZHPL aware that in the US, a large reason for why people were rebellious in the late 60s was that the government was conscripting young men and sending them to fight half the world away in a very dangerous war that had little to do guaranteeing US national security?

No mention of that in his essay, according to him it's just "fuck you, dad".

He also repeats the common far-right idea that all major right-wing direct action is actually controlled by the Feds/the Jews as if this is an obvious fact and not something that needs evidence brought forth in its support.

And the intellectual content of the essay boils down to hoping for a revolutionary social shift that turns a large fraction of people in the West into anti-gay race realists who support Victorian-style gender roles. And when I say "race realists", that's actually the minimum of what he wants. I am guessing that he would prefer actual racists.

But he does not explain how this could possibly happen.

The emotional center of the essay is longing for the spirit of that time around 2016 when it seemed that maybe Trump would turn out to be capable of doing something other than just sitting around complaining on Twitter.

But again, there are no actionable ideas about how to bring that "spirit of '16" into being again.

And for me the essay wasn't even fun to read, it has a lot of Curtis Yarvin-esque beating around the bush.

Is ZHPL aware that in the US, a large reason for why people were rebellious in the late 60s was that the government was conscripting young men and sending them to fight half the world away in a very dangerous war that had little to do guaranteeing US national security?

Then they should have been even more rebellious during WW1, WW2 and Korea.

In fact young people supported the Vietnam War more than older people. https://www.pewresearch.org/2006/02/21/youth-and-war/

I think the upheaval in the 60s is more down to that being when the left had completed their ideological capture of academia. Storming a building or holding some historical artifacts hostage wasn't risky any more and in fact your professors probably supported it.

I don't know about Korea, but during both WW1 and WW2 there were huge anti-intervention political movements and tens of thousands of men attempted to evade the draft. I think that US resistance to the Vietnam War might just be more remembered because it is more recent and it was culturally connected to some extremely influential artistic movements such as rock. Also, by the time of the Vietnam War public attitudes had shifted to the point that trying to do a new version of the WW1-era Espionage and Sedition Acts to suppress dissent was not politically feasible - which I interpret not as a victory of leftism, but as a victory of liberalism. Also, the US government lost in Vietnam, which meant that unlike in those other wars, there was no afterglow of victory to cover up the ugly fact that the government had forced tens of thousands of people to go risk their lives over there against their will.

And for me the essay wasn't even fun to read, it has a lot of Curtis Yarvin-esque beating around the bush.

I'm not sure how much beating around the bush you can get when you say things like "You still have 42 million feral blacks milling around."

Agreed. I think I might have misused the phrase "beating around the bush". I thought it meant "be long-winded, take a long time to get to the point", but it seems that it might usually mean something more like "avoid directly saying something controversial".

And the intellectual content of the essay boils down to hoping for a revolutionary social shift that turns a large fraction of people in the West into anti-gay race realists who support Victorian-style gender roles. And when I say "race realists", that's actually the minimum of what he wants. I am guessing that he would prefer actual racists.

Exactly. He wants 19th century (at minimum) LGBTQ+ rights, women rights, religious freedom, race relations and, last but not least, worker rights. HP0 is, among other things, radical capitalism uber alles libertarian (except with no liberty except liberty for capitalist bosses).

As OP pointed, no one wants such society, least of all actual capitalists (who are safer and more prosperous than ever before and feel no need to downgrade modern rainbow capitalism to earlier model).

Nevertheless, HP0 feels about it strongly and when you remind him of actual Lovecraft's economic and social positions, when you remind him that Lovecraft was, by his standards, communist, he will instantly block you while shrieking in rage.

Yes, Lovecraft's main political interest was to preserve and continue to build on the Anglo cultural tradition that he loved and was obsessed with. He wanted a technocratic government that would manage the economy and run massive economic interventions as necessary to guarantee a minimum standard of living. In his social/economic views, he was much more of a fascist than a right-libertarian. He had a distaste for the businessman/entrepreneur mentality and thought that society should guarantee a place for at least some intellectual/artistic/cultural creators even if their work was not economically profitable. He wanted to protect what he viewed as Anglo civilization's high cultural achievements, its elite artistic and intellectual culture, against both the threat posed by business-minded mentality and the threat posed by the possibility of a communist revolution that would destroy that culture and replace it with mass culture. He supported FDR because he saw FDR as someone who would reform the system by making it less brutal, and in such a way as would protect it from being overthrown by communist revolution.