site banner
PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   27143 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 6, 2023

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

5
Top New Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

That’s a vile thing to write. It’s a vile thing to contemplate. And that’s the difference between the spirit of ‘68 and the spirit of ‘16. The latter is born of a willingness to confront the ugliness and the foul consequences of the spirit of ‘68. That’s why it trades principally in “hate facts.” The spirit of ‘16 knows that black IQ is on average one standard deviation lower than white. It knows that despite making up just 13% of the population blacks commit 60% of homicides. It knows the average gay man has over 100 different sexual partners in his life, and the outliers may have thousands, and that what gay marriage is really talking about is men brutally fucking each other in the ass; It knows that 100% of homosexual adoption is child sexual exploitation. The spirit of ‘16 knows that gender confirmation surgery is adult genital mutilation. It knows that a trans woman is a man who gets off on the idea of himself as a woman, so he has a surgeon cut a bloody gash between his legs, which smells like a septic tank for the rest of his life. The spirit of ‘16 knows that the vast majority of homosexuals, male and female, were sexually abused as children, because homosexuals are vampires who “reproduce” through sexual molestation. This is only the tip of the iceberg, (or the icestein, or the icenthal, if you prefer.)

And the rest isn't actually that much better... Accusing the opposition side of pedophilia, like somehow Chicago Black Panthers are somehow aligned with French intellectuals on child age of consent laws. It's got more than factual error problems, it's basically a shameless bash of the other side and doing so by making some terrible arguments at that.

the average gay man doesn't have anywhere near 100 sexual partners in his life

What's the right number? I suspect the distribution is bimodal, with one peak around where hetero males are, and another peak way out there - maybe over 100, if tales told on the internet to be believed (yes, I know, but these tales are way different from hetero men tales, by orders of magnitude).

It's a power law distribution, same as for straight men and women. The exponent, however, is, different, leading to a fatter tail and a significant minority (~10%) of three figure sexual partners, and a small number who have four figures.

10% seems really high. Source?

Edit: gattsuru’s source has an interquartile range of 7 to 100, so that’d be 25% over 100. Huh.

See https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3334840/

They don't give the exact distribution. But they do offer the median number of lifetime sexual partners for MSM of all ages: 45, with a range [0-9005] (I'm skeptical that someone was assiduously counting their unique partners up to 9005, which is a new partner per day for almost thirty years). The median is actually higher than I expected.

Yeah, just saw gattsuru’s link, with the 75% mark at 100. Learn something every day, I guess.

One thing he does note is that it's from an urban area, which likely skews results. However, the Seattle metropolitan area is probably closer to the US as a whole than it is Folsom Street, so I'd say it's probably a mild overstatement, which aligns with my original 10% guesstimate.

Most meaningful studies I can find give a median closer to 10-25, which is significantly higher than heterosexual couples but not by an order of magnitude or more. You can find some higher estimates, but the highest numbers (100+) are generally selecting from prostitutes, brothel workers, and bathhouse addicts in San Francisco (see Bell and Weinberg, often referenced by anti-gay groups, which was almost 1/4th prostitutes), and those in the 50+ range usually reflect heavily urbanized areas and less severe but-still-significant selection pressures.

((There are some issues with the lower-end of the scales; these end up distorted by younger people who haven't had sex with any men yet and may not ever, which gets into some complicated philosophical questions. Some studies, especially earlier studies lump in bisexuals with gay men, and more recently there's the complex question of non-practicing or at least not-practicing-with-partners gay men. And obviously the lifetime sexual partner count of a specific person at a specific time can be different than the total number they'll have over their lifetime, though overlooking that difference is present in AFAIK all data sources.))

Some people suspect that this number has skyrocketed very recently, in the current day usually pointing to grindr. You can get 70ish by selecting solely from people using grindr, but I'm... skeptical that this is closer to Average Gay than to the San Francisco Bathhouse Fanatic.

The high ends are pretty extreme and bad in a lot of ways and it's definitely a chart with a long tail, but even most people who style themselves as mansluts don't get or even aim anywhere near there. Beyond the sheer logistical problems (insert Clerks joke here), it's literally a full-time job, and once you've found a good top there's a lot of good arguments against going back to the the sea.

The very high ends do exist and there are people who make it a major life's goal to get their body count as high as possible. For pragmatic reasons that's a lot more oral (and I suspect that they aren't the most precise about avoiding repeat customers or 'donations'), but as weird as the 2k+ numbers when examined closely are, they're not obviously lizardman numbers, and not just because most furry scalies are tops that don't really kink onto this stuff.

Wait, is there a reason why are most scalies are tops?

Why would it be a full-time job? If you're a person that doesn't do committed relationships, and given an active sex life of ~30 years, having just one partner a month - which doesn't sound like a full time job at all - would already take you to 360 partners. Of course, that's over the (active) lifetime, so median would be half of that? Still 180. All you need is a culture that allows you to hook up with a new partner at least once a month and of course the availability of the new partners. I think currently, grindr or other ways, that isn't much of a problem? Of course, that assumes a person absolutely averse to long-term relationships (which btw is the opposite of almost every homosexual person I've ever met, but I don't pretend my sample is in any way representative) and if you look at all the population the key metric would be how many are actually long-term and short-term people. But by itself, "it's a full-time job" doesn't seem to hold water here.

The high ends mentioned here are in the thousands, not the hundreds.

For many of the men at that high end, it likely is a literal full-time job.

It's not so much time spent sucking dick directly, so much as the availability of new partners that's a pretty significant limitation, especially if you aren't extremely open in your standards and preferences and/or living in a gay mecca. It's not my thing, but the amount of effort involving in setting up mushes, orgies, or just convenient conventions where there's going to be a lot of room parties is kinda surprisingly difficult! Other just redirect their career around opportunities, like working in a travel-focused field with a lot of on-location downtime.

The things that ZHP and others want - abolishing women's suffrage, pushing all gays back into the closet, racial segregation - are political non-starters, and not just in America: these positions would be completely insane to advocate for in most countries.

Most Western countries perhaps, but the world is bigger than that.

The way Western countries are going, policies don't need to be advocated to a larger audience. Gathering a few families with 4+ children and setting them up in a given area should give you essentially the same thing. Nobody can stop White Flight. The difficulty is really on everything else. What are you willing to give up to live in racial segregation, etc?

So who exactly is the target audience here except the terminally online?

People like you apparently, never seen that website before you posted it.

Nobody can stop White Flight.

I think they'd try if the trickle became a deluge. I'm reminded of how difficult it is to give up US citizenship (to avoid paying tax while living overseas). Basically you used to need to pay US$2k+ and prove 5 years of IRS tax compliance. Also exit taxes if you own more than $2 million.

I think they'd try if the trickle became a deluge.

If the trickle becomes a deluge then the country will be in such a state that they won't have much capacity to go after dissidents.

I’d say it’s part of that general constellation of long form ‘magazines’ on the dissident right, it has some moderately prominent meme figures like Michael Anton, BAP, Moldbug, Anna from RSP who have written for it.

These are all ersatz-places because Twitter, where these people congregate, is bad for long form content (even with the character limit removed). Thus these blogs need to exist for essayposting. Reminds me of how good we have it here, where such a thing is unnecessary.

I don’t think ZHPL is necessarily wrong here. There are plenty of historic examples of society rejecting previously held beliefs. Rome embraced Catholicity and ended up rejecting homosexuality and banning crucifixion. Weimar Germany was a pretty libertine society with open homosexuality and cross dressing. Embrace of Islam curbed the excesses of Persia.

People respond to the movements that are alpha-masculine and forcefully say “this is what we’re doing now. Get on board”. The Catholic willing to die rather than bend the knee, the Muslim willing to fight, kill and die for Islam, the German paramilitary groups willing to get down and dirty — these can have a profound effect on how the rest of the society sees social issues. I think it’s the very act of being willing to confront society head-on without hesitation. People will always follow the strong willing to lead.

“When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse.”

Yeah, there’s no guarantee that people correctly assess which horse is strong. Or that willingness to lead actually implies strength.

People's opinion don't matter, only power matters, and will is a necessary prerequisite to it and one of the main deciders of who endures.

If an organized minority group faces an opposition that does not believe in its own legitimacy, they win, even if their ideas are unpopular. There is endless historical precedent of that.

Few wanted bolchevism, few wanted Mussolini. But that does not enter into it. Will is not the only component of political strength, but it is an important one.

Be that as it may, it’s not what OP was arguing with

People will always follow the strong willing to lead.

Nobody can stop White Flight.

Don't confuse people who want to escape a shithole, ruined by woke policies, with people who want to found a rebirth of Pureblood Aryan Nation. There are a lot of the former that won't want anything to do with the latter. Even wider - a lot of people who object to child transitions, kid drag shows and other insanities don't actually mind if two adult dudes fuck each other, if they'd like so. The interests of these groups can be aligned while the environment is so insanely skewed that their differences are immaterial, but that doesn't mean they share the same core values with regard to aryan stuff.

There are a lot of the former that won't want anything to do with the latter. Even wider - a lot of people who object to child transitions, kid drag shows and other insanities don't actually mind if two adult dudes fuck each other, if they'd like so.

Well they can join the pro-homo commune if that's a central value to them. I don't see a way to rollback the Progress™ to LGB without the T, a sort of 2000s conservatism, without risking the Progress to re-roll back in immediately, like it already did in the 2010s.

I think a lot of people don't care that much about the 'two adults behind closed doors' problem, but the community has moved way past that a long time ago.

None of the things that you characterize as 'insanities' would exist if their perpetrators were shamed into the 'closet', or better, if they were not able to propagate the very idea of them.

Again, nobody will choose to isolate themselves into enclaves or move to less-technologically-advanced countries if they did not feel strongly about any of these issues.

I don't expect this to happen before some major political changes, perhaps a full-on Covid-style ban on freedom of association, ban on homeschooling, massive zoning changes... Could take 5 years like it could take 20.

Well they can join the pro-homo commune if that's a central value to them.

That's the point, it's almost never is a central value either way. Shaming homoes into the closet is not something most people would put any serious effort into, and specifically making the community as welcome to homoes as humanly possible would not be a valuable effort for most either. "I DNGAF" would be the most common position by now, I suspect. 2 centuries ago it might be different, but by now it'd be no more interesting either way than, say, dudes that jerk off to tentacle porn. Not something worth the effort either way.

None of the things that you characterize as 'insanities' would exist if their perpetrators were shamed into the 'closet', or better, if they were not able to propagate the very idea of them.

This may be true, but in a useless way. There are a lot of hypothetical worlds where it wouldn't happen. If Al Qaeda took over the US, it wouldn't happen. If Soviet Union took over the world, it wouldn't happen. If we didn't have democracy or free speech, it wouldn't happen. Etc. etc. The problem here is not to find one hypothetical world where it wouldn't happen, that's easy. The problem is to find one where it didn't happen but some other things that we still want to happen happened. And that's a much more complex question.

Again, nobody will choose to isolate themselves into enclaves or move to less-technologically-advanced countries if they did not feel strongly about any of these issues.

Well, Amish do exist, and they seem to have mostly sustainable model of existence, given two things are true: a) they don't want to have absolutely any influence at all with the outside world and no contact with it as much as possible and b) the outside world is fine with them existing. You don't really need to move anywhere for the former - there are enough remote places in the US where nobody would care much what's going on in there if it stays in there - but for the latter, especially if you're dealing with globalist totalitarian ideology and you let it win, you'd have to move very, very far.

That's the point, it's almost never is a central value either way. Shaming homoes into the closet is not something most people would put any serious effort into, and specifically making the community as welcome to homoes as humanly possible would not be a valuable effort for most either.

Wouldn't a commune explicitly founded for (white) adults with 4+ children pretty much have roughly ~0% out-of-the-closet homosexuals? This was the premise :

Gathering a few families with 4+ children and setting them up in a given area should give you essentially the same thing.

Not something worth the effort either way.

Literally 0 additional effort to what is arguably a pretty arduous task.

You don't really need to move anywhere for the former - there are enough remote places in the US where nobody would care much what's going on in there if it stays in there - but for the latter, especially if you're dealing with globalist totalitarian ideology and you let it win, you'd have to move very, very far.

Idk how much the 'globalist totalitarian ideology' can win if they can't get their people to breed and even go out of their way to sterilize their own members. Moving anywhere is still a much easier endeavor than whatever is required in the short-term to get rid of the regime.

And, I think it’s notable to point out, red tribe hardliner normies who think homosexuality is wrong, climate change doesn’t exist, public schooling should be significantly reduced in spread, the COVID vaccine was harmful, etc- most of these people are not aryan race warriors. Rebirthing the pure blood aryan nation is a minority of a minority of a minority.

The apparent "Spirit of 68" was mostly a tiny vanguard getting signal boosted by a very sympathetic media, academia, and bureaucracy. The "Spirit of 16" never existed. Rather than a fervor that swept the nation, it felt more like a small, intense, yet frail flame that could be snuffed out at any moment due to overwhelming headwinds from the pro-68er institutional powers. Those headwinds successfully prevented the 16er movement from growing strong enough to convince normies to trade their 68er moral framework for an alt-right one.

I don't think ZHPL is (purely) grifting here though. Right-wing anger has been simmering since the Tea Party (earlier?) and Trumpism was its most recent eruption. Trust in the soap box and ballot box have been eroded by these failures. ZHPL is exhorting right wingers to resist demoralization and prepare for the next opportunity. I'm not terminally online (I don't use any social media), but I am doing most of the things he encourages right wingers to do, and if there were any actual opportunity to wrest control of the country from my enemies, I'd participate somehow. Perhaps he's trying to convince young men disappointed by the failure of Trumpism not to simply check out and take the blue pill.

what gay marriage is really talking about is men brutally fucking each other in the ass

Not necessarily, and indeed I think what (early) gay marriage was really talking about was Dan Savage's "monogamish"; 'sure, we're officially linked, but that doesn't mean we can't have fun on the side, either individually or together'. I think gay marriage now has indeed become the mainstream ideology that advocates like Andrew Sullivan were hoping for, and that it's also become a minority thing (I don't have figures to hand and should probably go get them): that is, gays and lesbians who want to marry do so and have the picket fence lifestyle, but a lot more have no desire to do so and prefer the chance to have multiple partners with no strings attached or in a poly sort of loose arrangement. See the criticism of Pete and Chasten for not being 'real' gays: too white, too conventional, straight-passing.

In ‘77, a depravity of French intellectuals (this is the technical term for a group of French intellectuals, like a school of fish, or a parliament of owls) all signed a petition to remove the age of consent in France. This is a very old and crucial leftist revolutionary idea, that the nuclear family is the source of all social oppression, that children should be raised by the state, and that the sexual use of children should be democratized and open to everyone.

The bones of this is correct. That's why those of us who were around for the 70s, even as young children, do have memories of the cultural atmosphere at the time, and why (for instance) I'm very cynical about ages of consent and MAPs etc. Paedophiles have been running campaigns for decades about their 'orientation' and trying to link it to gay rights, and that's why a lot of the gay rights activists back then got ensnared in "sure, free love for kids, children are sexual beings too" due to the whole mindset of pulling down the old ways, the old conventions, burn society down and build it back up to be better and freer. Take away the taboos and stigma around sex, and this false idea of childhood innocence, and we'd all be better off:

Our idealistic vision involved creating a new sexual democracy, without homophobia, misogyny, racism and class privilege. Erotic shame and guilt would be banished. There would be sexual freedom and human rights for everyone – gay, bi and straight. Our message was "innovate, don't assimilate".

[Gay Liberation Front] GLF's critique of straight society amounted to more than condemning violations of gay civil rights and campaigning for equal treatment. Revolutionary not reformist, our goal was an end to "male chauvinism" and the "gender system".

Of course, this meant that in later years, they had to walk a lot of it back:

Tatchell has written an obituary in The Independent for Paedophile Information Exchange founder Ian Dunn. He later stated:

I had no idea that [Middleton] was involved in paedophilia advocacy when I was asked to write my essay. ... When I was invited to write a chapter, I was told it was a book about children's rights and asked if I could write about the age of consent. It seemed a reasonable request at the time. My chapter in the book did not endorse child sex. It merely questioned whether 16 was the appropriate legal age of consent. Different people mature at different ages. There are many countries that have diverse ages of consent, some higher and some lower than 16. I did not advocate the abolition of the age of consent or specify at what age sex should become lawful. I was not aware of who the other authors were or what they wrote until the book was published. I would not have agreed to be in the book if I had known. ... There is nothing in my contribution that even remotely condones child sex abuse. ...

Neither I nor most other people had any knowledge of [Dunn's] link with [Paedophile Information Exchange] at the time. I only found out many years after I wrote his obituary. I would not have written it if I had known about his PIE work.

In July 2021, in an article by Hayley Dixon, Melanie Newman and Julie Bindel for the Daily Telegraph, it emerged that a positive review attributed to Peter Tatchell of the same pro-paedophila book – Betrayal of Youth: Radical Perspectives on Childhood Sexuality, Intergenerational Sex and the Social Oppression of Children and Young People – appeared in the June 1987 edition of 7 Days, the newsletter of the Communist Party of Great Britain.

In 1997 Tatchell wrote a letter to The Guardian, defending an academic book about "boy-love", calling the work "courageous", before writing:

The positive nature of some child–adult sexual relationships is not confined to non-Western cultures. Several of my friends—gay and straight, male and female—had sex with adults from the ages of nine to 13. None feel they were abused. All say it was their conscious choice and gave them great joy. While it may be impossible to condone paedophilia, it is time society acknowledged the truth that not all sex involving children is unwanted, abusive and harmful.

On Tatchell's personal website he clarifies,

My Guardian letter cited examples of youths in Papuan tribes and some of my friends who, when they were under 16, had sex with adults (over 18s), but who do not feel they were harmed. I was not endorsing their viewpoint but merely stating that they had a different perspective from the mainstream opinion about inter-generational sex. They have every right for their perspective to be heard.

I wonder if the online right intellecto-sphere will ever figure out that Trump wasn't for them.

As I recall, Jack Donovan was never on the Trump train.

Who’s that?

As someone who doesn’t hang out on Twitter, I only really hear about the biggest and/or most mainstream names.

Jack Donovan is a writer and Norse viking LARPer located at a kind of unique intersection of manosphere, white nationalism and the alt right. He wrote a book called the Way of Men and has a few others. He's also an 'androphile', which is totally different to being gay because he's bald and muscular and wears lots of leather and sunglasses, or something. If he sounds a bit ridiculous, he is, but he also seems pretty bright and makes some good points and does that in way fewer words than many other online commentators.

He's also an 'androphile', which is totally different to being gay because he's bald and muscular and wears lots of leather and sunglasses, or something.

Rob Halford would like to see you in the hall.

Credit where it's due; Donovan has stated that he uses the term androphile mostly as a way to distinguish himself from mainstream 'gay.' It's a cultural distinction which I find fairly common amongst gay men who fall outside of the bi-coast metropolitan social sphere.

I think Donovan fell off because his brand of manly men doing man men things got its doors blown off by the likes of Jocko Wilink and other Professional Veterans who not only tell the same style of stories, but have the personal experience and street cred to back it up.

Yes, that is in fact, the joke - homosexuals already have a fairly significant subculture built around overt masculinity, and Donovan's efforts in that department don't actually make him different. So his insistence that he is Not Like The Other Gays is somewhat feeble. If he gets credit for anything, it's that he seems to have realized this and has retreated from the word, but as another gay man who also doesn't feel comfortable in gay society, I still think it's very funny.

I think Donovan fell off because his brand of manly men doing man men things got its doors blown off by the likes of Jocko Wilink and other Professional Veterans who not only tell the same style of stories, but have the personal experience and street cred to back it up.

Donovan was never going to have mass appeal - he was too gay, too weird, too unaware of his own silliness, and too politically toxic. That's fine - at the end of the day, he's a fag that managed to turn himself into a man, while Jocko Willink is a warrior that turned himself into a podcaster.

I wonder if the online right intellecto-sphere will ever figure out that Trump wasn't for them.

Trump was needed to show that "the narrative" could be countered on the biggest stage, which would inspire craftier right-ward politicians in the future who better understand how to leverage political mechanisms in their favor. The question that remains to be answered is: Will a smarter Trumpism appeal to the same wide base that loves Trump, or do they uniquely love the "dumb" version that is Trump's persona?

I know very smart college-educated people who loooove the way he trolls and, rather than looking forward to the smarter next-gen Trumps, look suspiciously on anyone who isn't exactly in the Trump mold. These people have already largely lost any faith in saving the western political system, so they aren't concerned like I am with civics and compromises for a saner future. They want it to burn, as if that will improve anything.

Right, DeSantis was smart Trump, the guy was citing Michael Anton in interviews, clearly well credentialed etc. And people don’t like him. It’s precisely Trump’s low brow, anti-intellectual, vaguely amused nonchalance that his fans like about him. Trump’s the guy at the bar commenting on something saying “ah, it’s all bullshit anyway” (on everything, because Trump cares as much about his opinions on trans bathroom stuff as he did about his opinions on the relationship between Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart, which is to say he cares enough to have one and to announce it, but not much more). Trump DGAF, meanwhile the ‘dissident right’ guy is schizo-lecturing people about the nietzschean significance of the preset moment and the ‘new right’ Rufo-type guy is rambling about Adorno and critical theory.

But even beyond young, highly educated rightists, the reality is that most Trump supporters don’t want the colossal sociocultural changes sought by a lot of the very online right, in both its more moderate and more extreme variants. Most are boomers whose ideal culture is America like 30 years ago, not Europe under Papal Christendom, or on the steppe in the Bronze Age.

Right, DeSantis was smart Trump,

I really have to disagree here. DeSantis had none of Trump's charisma, but more importantly he was a creature of the Establishment GOP. The more sophisticated Pro-Trump conservatives took one look at him and who was giving him money before immediately tossing him to the side. They saw him as an attempt to draw support back to the establishment by catering to more superficial issues - "wokeness" is the kind of thing you can oppose without actually changing or conflicting with existing power-structures due to how nebulous it is. On the other hand, attacking outsourcing, the forever wars and illegal immigration places you squarely in opposition to existing power structures. "Well credentialed" is also utterly meaningless - what credentials does he have that match up to Trump's CV?

I don't think you've got an accurate picture of what the Trump base likes about him if you think that it was the low-brow, anti-intellectual aspects of Trump's presentation that drew them to him. He absolutely used that perception to draw voters to him in some ways, but it was less because he appeared to be anti-intellectual and more because it helped to establish him as the outgroup of those same people who had continually sold his prospective voterbase down the river. That was effective campaigning and was likely responsible for some percentage of his support (he also earned some voters solely through personal charisma, like the woman who called in to a political debate show just to say that she was voting for Trump because he was hot and none of the other candidates were manly enough) but it wasn't his main draw. It was his steadfast repudiation of the conventional political consensus on topics like outsourcing and immigration rather than any aspect of his presentation.

But even beyond young, highly educated rightists, the reality is that most Trump supporters don’t want the colossal sociocultural changes sought by a lot of the very online right, in both its more moderate and more extreme variants. Most are boomers whose ideal culture is America like 30 years ago, not Europe under Papal Christendom, or on the steppe in the Bronze Age.

You're totally right here though.

They were so desperately hungry for any politician to even somewhat reflect their desires that they fell on the promise of Trump like starved animals on a steak. Even if Trump is only 10% of what they want, it's still more than most other presidents.

what gay marriage is really talking about is men brutally fucking each other in the ass

yeschad

The spirit of ‘16 knows that the vast majority of homosexuals, male and female, were sexually abused as children, because homosexuals are vampires who “reproduce” through sexual molestation. This is only the tip of the iceberg, (or the icestein, or the icenthal, if you prefer.)

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0145213415003828

Proportionally few boys were the subject of official notifications for sexual abuse (14.8% of maltreated boys, and 1.4% of the birth population); proportionally very few of these sexually abused boys (3%) went on to become sexual offenders; and, contrary to findings typically reported in retrospective clinical studies, proportionally few sexual offenders (4%) had a confirmed history of sexual abuse. Poly-victimization (exposure to multiple types of maltreatment) was significantly associated with sexual offending, violent offending, and general (nonsexual, nonviolent) offending. We found no specific association between sexual abuse and sexual offending, and nor did we find any association between sexual abuse and sexual offending specifically within the poly-victimized group. The total number of sexual abuse notifications did make a small unique contribution to the variance in sexual offending compared to other offending. Implications concerning maltreated boys and male sexual offenders are discussed.

It is the possibility of smashing their idols, of redacting and retracting the belief in liberty, equality, and fraternity.

It's not clear to me that those aren't the value of the American right, at least since they kicked the Royalists up to British North America. The differences between the mainstream American right and the mainstream American left are marginal:

Liberty: The right tends to put more emphasis on negative freedom rather than positive freedom. There have been times when, on social issues, the right has been sceptical of particular cases of negative freedom, but the basic assumption of the US right has almost always been individualist rather than paternalist; things like the Religious Right and the anti-woke movement have to justify themselves in terms of "This person's exercise of liberty X actually affects our liberty Y," which is fundamentally different from, "God says no" or "The man in Whitehall knows best."

Equality: Equality of opportunity (not in the silly sense of an equal chance, but in terms of equal legal rights and no unjustified discrimination) is the ideology of just about every last American. American conservatives might argue about the existence of certain types of discrimination or whether some particular case of discrimination is justified, but equality has always been integrally part of the American right's ideology, if not their practice. Of course, there will be the aberrant Nietzschean, Dominionist, Blood and Soil nationalist etc., but they are as alien to the American right as a working class Stalinist in the US left.

Fraternity: The US is unusual in being founded on an ideology (classical liberalism) and with the supposition that religion, ethnicity etc. are personal and/or local, rather than an integral part of the federal state. Trump is fraternal with gay people, trans people, hispanics, blacks etc. Some of his best friends are black. Some of his biggest supporters are hispanics. Friendship across race, religion, and "lifestyles" is as American as apple pie, and as American conservative as loving the US military, which itself has been multiracially fraternal for as long as most people can remember.

As you suggest, for the terminally online, it might seem like a different kind of conservativism had an ascendency in 2016. However, in fact, Trump and Trumpism was just mainstream US conservativism with balls. The average Trump supporter is as fundamentally opposed to reactionaries, Nazis, and the like as the average Hillary supporter.

I think you are conflating current popular views and ideology at the foundation of the US. It is written, of course, that all men are created equal, but this obviously meant something different then, because in America from 18 century up to 20th century there was explicit legal inequality between sexes, races and even economic classes. That was not because of some mistake or for the lack of alternative, but because of conscious policies that aimed to achieve outcomes that were deemed more important than the ideal of liberty.

Equality means many different things now. Hence I specified equality of opportunity and explained some of what that means.

The legal inequality between races was decided at a state level. The legal inequality between men and women was justified based on what people thought were relevant differences - just as one would draw today between children and adults. I'm not so familiar with the details of the economic distinctions, but I imagine that these were justified in terms of a conflict between liberty and equality - which doesn't mean that equality was a value of the American founders, just one that had to be traded-off against things like liberty.

To see how the egalitarianism (in this sense) of the Founders was significant, consider how there was no special place for aristocrats in the US political system - a great break with the norm in Europe. The idea that Joe the Plumber could rise to be of the equal legal status as George Washington was a revolutionary egalitarian idea. No royal family, obviously. In fact, in legal principle, this was possible even if Joe the Plumber was black. The values of the Founders were radically unReactionary and unAlt Right, which doesn't mean that they were left wing in the modern sense either.

It's true that there have been changes in the meanings of these terms, but when you ask the average Trumpist what's important to them, equality in the sense I specified is very important. They might not say "equality", but their attitudes towards elites, snobs, aristocrats etc. will reveal their values.

So why does the terminally online alt-right link itself to Trump so much? I remember in 2016 when the left accused Trump and his followers of being white supremacists, misogynists, homophobic, far-right fascists and the response from them was that Trump wasn't any of those things; what the right movement stood against was The Establishment. I remember Trump waving the LGBT flag and being proud of receiving support from Blacks and Latinos.

I personally thought the accusations of Nazism towards the Trump movement were an exaggeration, but now ZHP and his ilk are saying, no, the left was right, we are all of bad the things they said we were. Things the average Westerner would consider not only to be morally repugnant, but the very values of the most reviled enemy in recent history. Debate between a Democrat and a Republican is possible because at heart they both share similar core values and goals; but is there even a point to debating those that admit to views that are the complete antithesis of Western civilisation?

So why does the terminally online alt-right link itself to Trump so much?

Hard to tell if it was cynical (link to a popular movement) or fantasist ("Finally, our God Emperor is here!") And in a movement known for not speaking plainly, perhaps it was natural for them to assume that Trump was more alt right than he was saying. As you say, that would mean a hilarious convergence between what the alt right and the ctrl left (and mainstream left in many cases) was saying about Trump.

These tendencies might arise in many movements, but I wonder if there's a particular tension for fascist/Nazi/some reactionary types. Their whole ideology is full of worshipping strength, winners, superior men... And yet their movements, since 1945, have been marginalised, weak, and pushed around with ease. They often have some inclination towards "Justice is the advantage of stronger," yet the fascists were weaker than the bourgeois liberal democracies (and even more shamefully, the savage commies) in WWII. It's one thing to believe that the white race is superior in war, but fascists? Losers, literally.

So, in 2016, Trump doesn't just talk about winning and being strong, but actually wins, despite being brash and outspoken. He outrages the people who push around the alt right and defeats the former in a contest. Moreover, he does so despite being tarred with the alt right brush by the people who dominate the alt righters every day. Under such circumstances, it doesn't seem strange that the alt right would be inclined to genuinely believe that Trump was their God Emperor. That's the best reconstruction that I can make of the spirit behind this fashwave song, which I rather like despite not being either alt right or pro-Trump:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=mC5HmxVxOAw

Ctrl left

Okay, that’s the first time I’ve heard that one, but it kind of works.

https://www.lbc.co.uk/radio/presenters/maajid-nawaz/maajid-the-left-is-no-longer-liberal/

It’s been around since at least 2016. I swear I’ve heard it earlier than that but not sure from where…

I remember hearing it get kicked around quite a bit during gamergate.

Obviously one side of this is just that the alt-right contains multitudes.

Beyond that I do think there is a shift where up until 2016ish the grey tribe still basically agreed with the blue tribe in terms of end goals/reality, but mostly was breaking off/frustrated by SJW/WOKE cultural stuff. They did not want trad wives, where totally convinced that racism was wrong and evil, would consider themselves true LGBT allies, and where broadly in favor of hedonistic modernity. It seems to me that there has specifically been a shift in this group, where, as they became more contrarian and more ostracized by society for not getting with the program they gradually started to question a lot of these core assumption. The liberal framework that 99% of grey tribe people grew up with, that reality had a liberal bias, is mostly gone now and a lot of what we are seeing is the breakdown of that veneer of scientific authority. Ultimately, people change, and to me the online-alt-right looks like a reaction to excesses on the part of the left more than anything.

I’m as grey tribe as they come and to me the pendulum has swung firmly the other way. I’ve come from being sympathetic to the right in ‘16, to seeing it as my complete ideological opponent. I started as an edgy online atheist watching Creationism Debunked videos, got into the Intellectual Dark Web, cheered when the libs lost in ‘16, only to realise that maybe the so-called SJWs might have had a point when the hardcore Christian Right took over the movement.

The latter were the same people I was opposed to at the start of my political journey; anti-science, anti-intellectual, dogmatic theocrats who want to suppress anything that doesn’t agree with their outdated religious views. They’ve just repackaged the old stodgy pearl-clutching views we used to mock in the Bush era as somehow “based and redpilled”. They just stole the colours of the cool, rebellious counter-culture to make the grey tribe forget they used to be their ideological opponent.

So why does the terminally online alt-right link itself to Trump so much?

It's funny.

The terminally online right, much like the terminally online left, does not actually have a principled set of ideas that they're operating on. They don't have a central governing ethos, there is no set of principles to live by. There are vibes and there is owning the left. The more trad you are the better your vibes, and the more you own the libs the more trad you are. Does trad actually mean owning property, having a loving family, being kind, respectful, and upright in your moral beliefs? No! It means posting memes about "tfw no land" or "tfw no tradwife" or "tfw cities bad" or some such nonsense. Trump makes the left mad. Therefore Trump good. Do no further analysis than this. Go far enough right and you get to the wignats who call him ZionDon or whatever because he doesn't want to "gas the kikes race war now" and even they will laugh at the orange man's antics because he makes the left mad, and making the left mad is pretty much all the terminally online right actually believes in.

A simplistic theory, but there's something to be said for it.

Does trad actually mean owning property, having a loving family, being kind, respectful, and upright in your moral beliefs? No!

Shoot, I guess I've been doing it wrong, because the general trad discourse strongly encouraged me to stop being a single hedonist, get married, buy a house, have kids, and get serious about religion and stronger social bonds to my community.

Well at least now you know and can divorce your wife, sell your house, abandon your kids, and focus on what really matters. Getting a good like/retweet ratio.

This is pretty much correct. The entire political online discourse is now "what can I do/say/believe that will make my outgroup mad?"

The last several years are best modelled as a massive, distributed search for ways to hurt the outgroup as badly as possible without getting in too much trouble.

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.

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.

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".

children raised by two same-sex parents have equal or better life outcomes to straight parents

What evidence have you seen that makes this a matter of "fact" to you? From my understanding, the studies that show this are about as high a quality as studies on trans-youth medicine, relying on parental-reports of well-being and slanted samples.

Meanwhile, studies on heterosexual couples show that mothers and fathers parent differently and children living with unrelated adults suffer from increased stress measured by cortisol levels.

Children living with nonrelatives, stepfathers and half-siblings (stepfather has children by the stepchild’s mother), or single parents without kin support had higher average levels of cortisol than children living with both parents, single mothers with kin support, or grandparents. A further test of this hypothesis is provided by comparison of step- and genetic children residing in the same households. Stepchildren had higher average cortisol levels than their half-siblings residing in the same household who were genetic offspring of both parents (Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology, page 565.)

Parents and Stepparents even abuse and murder children in different ways:

Stepparents commit filicide at higher rates than do genetic parents. According to M. Daly and M. I. Wilson (1994), motivational differences generate differences in the methods by which stepparents and genetic parents kill a child. Using Canadian and British national-level databases, Daly and Wilson (1994) found that stepfathers were more likely than genetic fathers to commit filicide by beating and bludgeoning, arguably revealing step-parental feelings of bitterness and resentment not present to the same degree in genetic fathers. Genetic fathers, in contrast, were more likely than stepfathers to commit filicide by shooting or asphyxiation, methods which often produce a relatively quick and painless death. We sought to replicate and extend these findings using a United States national-level database of over 400,000 homicides. Results replicate those of Daly and Wilson(1994) for genetic fathers and stepfathers. In addition, we identified similar differences in the methods by which stepmothers and genetic mothers committed filicide.

Given this, my prior would be that a kid raised in a Same Sex household, where they are by default unrelated to at least one parent, would have poorer outcomes than kids raised by straight parents (where a larger percentage are raised by two related parents.) What have you seen that makes you confident otherwise?

It's fine to have a prior, but when presented evidence otherwise, you should be willing to change your mind. That's what it means to have a prior, it doesn't mean planting your feet by a particular number.

Yes, please present me with that evidence? The whole comment was a request for the iron clad evidence.

You literally linked to such evidence in your post, just to dismiss it because it didn't fit your prior.

Plus, the whole point of Bayesianism is that there is no 'ironclad evidence'. You accumulate a lot of little bits of evidence that revise your opinion one way or another. That evidence can be anecdotes or case studies, or it can be more robust scientific meta-analyses.

Are you referring to me linking to "A Review and Critique of Research on Same-Sex Parenting and Adoption?" Because that is a literature review on the research of Same Sex parenting. I didn't dismiss it, it was my supporting document. You don't need to read the whole thing, just the abstract provides a basic gist:

Studies conducted within the past 10 years that compared child outcomes for children of same-sex and heterosexual adoptive parents were reviewed. Numerous methodological limitations were identified that make it very difficult to make an accurate assessment of the effect of parental sexual orientation across adoptive families. Because of sampling limitations, we still know very little about family functioning among same-sex adoptive families with low or moderate incomes, those with several children, or those with older children, including adolescents or how family functioning may change over time. There remains a need for high-quality research on same-sex families, especially families with gay fathers and with lower income.

Most of the time, the choice is not between "stepparents" and "parents", though. It is between "stepparents" and "orphanage", or rarely between "orphanage" and "parents" in cases of abuse by the latter. I haven't looked at the data of abuse in institutions but I assume it is worse than adopted families.

Please show me where all the orphanages are hiding in the US. But yes, I would assume that the further you get away from the "Biological mother and father raised me" the further you would get from the ideal childhood. I'm not sure what point you think you are making.

My point is step-parent outcomes are usually still better than any realistic alternative. Furthermore, the poster above you claimed same-sex couples are better parents on average than straight couples, which is not the same as step-parents vs. biological parents. Notably, the entire clump of "straight step-parents" is in the latter group in jewdefender's argument but the former group in your comparison.

Do you mean adoptive parents instead of stepparents? The alternative to having stepparents is your biological parent(s) staying single after they get divorced or are widowed.

The only way you’d end up being raised by just a stepparent is if both your biological parents died after at least one of them had remarried. Even then, stepparents don’t have any inherent legal rights as parents to their stepchildren. For a stepparent to be recognised as a legal parent of their stepchild requires the involvement of the court, just like any other potential guardian of an orphan. Such children often end up living with another biological relative like a grandparent, aunt, or uncle.

The court would consider a bunch of factors to determine if leaving the child in the care of their stepparent is appropriate. Things like the child’s age, their relationship with the stepparent, the feasibility of the stepparent being able to provide for the child by themselves, whether the stepparent is suitable to raise kids in general, the amount of time the child has spent living with their stepparent, the stepparent’s interest in caring for the child, etc. This would all have to be stacked up against any potential biological relatives caring for the child.

Yes, I mean adoptive parents.

Well then you and @OracleOutlook have been, at least in part, talking past each other. His original comment and the studies he linked are about stepparents not adoptive parents.

I'm asking OP to defend one of the consensus-building statements he made, "there are a lot factual errors: ... children raised by two same-sex parents have equal or better life outcomes to straight parents." I'm not arguing for any particular policy regarding where to put kids once one or more of their parents are unwilling or unable to raise them.

OP is not going to defend his statements, he never does. OP is actually far right and I'm sure he thanks you for your service. You just keep walking into it, people.

What evidence have you seen that makes this a matter of "fact" to you? From my understanding, the studies that show this are about as high a quality as studies on trans-youth medicine, relying on parental-reports of well-being and slanted samples.

I wouldn't be too surprised, tbh, if adopted children to gay couples showed better outcomes than an average child over the whole population. The reason is very simple - adoption is a selective process. Any adoption agency that isn't completely dissolved in wokeness and just melts with "awwww gays!" seeing any same sex couple, would require people to have stable relationship, clean home, decent income, etc. It's not that such people can't be abusive or just bad parents - it's just that the incidence in this cohort would likely be lower than over the whole population, where any couple with functioning plumbing can have as many kids as they feel like.

More interesting study would be comparing outcomes to adoptions of the similar social and financial stature, between same sex and hetero couples. But this may require a sample size that may be difficult to collect. We have less than 10 years when same-sex adoption has been fully legal, way too early to measure the outcomes.

This part of the review goes over research on comparing adoptions with adoptions:

If one looks on the surface, findings are mixed with respect to family functioning or children’s internalizing and externalizing behaviors. With respect to family functioning, there are few studies, but Erich, Leung, and Kindle (2005) found lower family functioning (d ¼ 0.14) for SSA parents in spite of those parents having advantages in terms of social support and education. After some, but not all, of the relevant variables were controlled, even lower levels of family functioning were found (d ¼ 0.36, p < .07) for the gay and lesbian adoptive families. Even though that discrepancy represented a small to medium effect, its nonsignificance (p < .07) permitted Ryan (2007) and Averett et al. (2009) to argue for the no difference hypothesis. Nevertheless, there were several other factors that were more influential for predicting family functioning than parental sexual orientation. Averett et al. (2009) also examined family functioning and found lower levels for same-sex families of younger (d ¼ 0.14) and older (d ¼ 0.27) chil- dren. Thus, with respect to family functioning, it appears that SSA families are experiencing lower functioning, but the effect sizes are small to medium at most, usually not significant given the small sample sizes involved. There is some evi- dence that same-sex families may do better with younger children than older children with respect to family functioning.

In part 3 of this report, outcomes for children adopted by same-sex parents are considered. Studies conducted within the past 10 years that compared child out- comes for children of same-sex and heterosexual adoptive parents were reviewed. Numerous methodological limitations were identified that make it very difficult to make an accurate assessment of the impact of parental sexual orientation across adoptive families. Samples were often small and nonrandom. Some ‘‘same-sex’’ adoptive or foster parents may be mother–adult daughter heterosexual dyads. Important variables were often overlooked, including social desirability response bias. None of the studies assessed child outcomes in terms of delayed gratification, self-control, impulsivity, emotional self-regulation, or time preference. Most par- ticipating gay and lesbian families were from the socioeconomic elite of U.S. society. Most studies involved the adoption of young children, under the age of six years. Because of numerous methodological limitations, it might be best to hesitate to draw much in the way of firm conclusions from the available research. We still know very little about family functioning among same-sex families with low or moderate incomes, those with several children, or those with older chil- dren, including adolescents. Some important child outcomes (e.g., substance abuse, sexual orientation, educational progress) may not become relevant or apparent until an adopted child reaches adolescence. Within the limited available studies, it appears that same-sex families may report slightly lower levels of family functioning, especially with respect to older adopted children, but most studies have found few differences in children’s internalizing or externalizing behaviors as reported by parents. Two studies appear to have found opposing longitudinal trends in which children in heterosexual adoptive families fared better over time while children in SSA families fared worse. Small to moderate effect size differ- ences were observed in terms of children’s gender role behaviors and attitudes, probably reflecting less traditional gender role attitudes among same-sex parents compared to heterosexual parents.

So mostly you nailed it when you said it was too early. A lot of the negative factors that we would measure couldn't manifest in the literature for a while. Couples adopt kids under 6 years of age, but things like academic excellence, teenage drug and sex habits, etc are things that can only be measured from kids 14+.

However, I am not sure that the average adoptive parent provides better outcomes than average natal parents. When looking at mixed families of adopted and biological children, adopted children receive more attention but have worse outcomes. Could this effect partially negate the socioeconomic effect?

I mean there’s also the question of ‘are gay parents an even more selected group than adoptive parents’- is there something about gay adoption which sets them apart other than the obvious(could it be that gay adoptive parents are more pro-natal than adoptive parents generally because there’s less cultural expectation for them to have children? Maybe something of that sort).

Your links are comparing natal parents to step-parents, not adoptive parents; a single mother remarrying is completely a different environment compared to two infertile parents deciding to adopt and raise a child from infancy. Adoptive children seem to have poorer physical health but greater parental support than biological children, interestingly enough.

Also if a gay couple adopts a child, it’s not as if the child is being deprived of a mother and a father; the alternative to the gay couple is the child being raised in an orphanage and then going from foster home to foster home.

And in case you suggest it, I’m not sure a closeted gay biological parent in a sham straight marriage is preferable long-term to a stable gay marriage either.

I’m not sure a closeted gay biological parent in a sham straight marriage is preferable long-term to a stable gay marriage either.

In a modern, Western society...especially with gayness being heritable...I agree with you, here. You had a lot more support for the gay, closeted man or woman and a lot more pressure to be closeted fifty years ago, let alone a hundred years ago.

I just want to know what caused the OP to know for a fact that children raised by homosexual couples fair better than children raised by heterosexual couples. My latter links explain my priors, not the base argument itself in an apple to apples comparison of homosexual vs heterosexual child rearing. My first link is a literature review of the research comparing heterosexual and homosexual parenting, ultimately finding it insufficiently powered as a whole to answer the question.

But some additional topics:

I knew that adoptive children have greater parental support but worse outcomes. It seems more of a useful datapoint for HBD and the nature vs nurture debate.

It doesn't usually go "gay couple adopts a child," the more common arrangement is gay parent brings biological kid from prior relationship into new gay marriage.

It's not so much about the inevitable "some kids end up in less ideal situations, and we make do" but rather what we take as an ideal. Our ideals will influence the decisions we make and the societal outcomes for kids overall. If the ideal is Gay Space Communism, where every child is birthed in an artificial womb and assigned to a polycule or raised in a state facility, would that child have a better outcome than a kid raised in a traditional extended family unit of biologically related people? Which should we encourage more of with our cultural storytelling and social practices?

Also if a gay couple adopts a child, it’s not as if the child is being deprived of a mother and a father; the alternative to the gay couple is the child being raised in an orphanage and then going from foster home to foster home.

That would be true if there was any shortage of prospective adoptive parents, but IIRC there’s not- any baby up for adoption has someone to adopt them, who’s probably been on a waiting list for a while.

My understanding is that while there is not a shortage of prospective adoptive parents for babies, there is one for children.

My understanding is that while that is partially true, it leaves out that many of these children are not particularly adoptable for one reason or another(severe trauma, disability, what have you, even leaving out that many children in foster care aren’t even theoretically available for adoption because CPS hopes to eventually reunite them with bio parents) and that gay prospective parents are not lining up to adopt them any more than infertile heterosexuals are anyways.

Whomever ZHPL is, his writing reads like a crazy political grifter. There was a lot of text, but what was all that text even trying to say? I feel like he barely even tried to tie thought threads together. For example, he went from "in 1968, leftism was taking over the world", then in the next sentence said that almost a full decade later, French intellectuals baned age of consent. Am I supposed to think something about this? Am I supposed to think that one event led to the other? Can he even try to convince me of this instead of just assuming I already agree? 9 years later, people in France did something. Okay. Maybe there's a connection I'm not seeing. If so, prove it.

I won't defend this writer, but I think sometimes you leave steps out because they're fairly obvious and well connected.

It's pretty well known that the sexual revolution of the 1960s led to a lot of pedo stuff. Alan Ginsburg was a member of NAMBLA. Lolita was considered a classic. Roman Polanski was Humbert Humbert in real life and the French celebrated and protected him.

At some point we had a rollback on underage sex towards a new Schelling point focused on consent but it took a couple decades to get there.

Today, of course, we see a strange bifurcation where 23 year old women are incapable of consenting to sex with a 40 year old man, but its okay to subject young children to intense discussions and demonstrations of sexuality. Perhaps he's trying to invoke all of that. I don't know. His writing is vile.

It's pretty well known that the sexual revolution of the 1960s led to a lot of pedo stuff

That seems kinda like consensus-building, to me. That's clearly what ZHPL is trying to say, but it's a very controversial statement. Very many people around here are trying to connect both present-day and past leftism to pedophilia, and even though I can't stand the left, I can't stand when people try to make that connection even more. I find it insulting that ZHPL justs waves his hand in that general direction and is like "people got into leftism in 1968, and than all of a sudden 9 years later: BAM! age of consent was revoked (in France)". It's almost comical.

Alan Ginsburg was a member of NAMBLA. Lolita was considered a classic. Roman Polanski was Humbert Humbert in real life and the French celebrated and protected him.

There are pedophiles everywhere. You know the arguments: The plural of "anecdote" isn't data. Chinese Robber Fallacy, etc.
I hate when people try to say the Right is full of pedophiles because some priests molest kids and some backwoods rednecks are inbred, so I also hate it when people gesture at the left for similar things.

Today, of course, we see a strange bifurcation where 23 year old women are incapable of consenting to sex with a 40 year old man, but its okay to subject young children to intense discussions and demonstrations of sexuality. Perhaps he's trying to invoke all of that. I don't know. His writing is vile.

I have no argument with you on most of this paragraph, especially with regards to the strange bifurcation existing in leftist thought.
Though I may slightly disagree with you about whether most leftists are okay with "demonstrations" of sexuality for minors. They definitely are okay with "discussions" with minors, and I think they go too far there, but I don't know if they're really mostly down with "demonstrations". Other than the aforementioned pedophiles, who as I mentioned before are everywhere and on all sides.

Here is a quick rundown of some infamous 20th century French philosophers

Queer-theory jeopardy

Some videos of French intellectuals going on TV to celebrate having sex with children/teenagers.

An undergraduate paper on the subject

One excerpt of interest p35:

As sexuality—feminine, homosexual, and otherwise—coursed through public discourse in the early 1970s, a group of men styling themselves as twentieth century Marquise de Sades or Dom Jauns began to publish pedophilic literature and receive recognition in literary circles. These men—Tony Duvert and Gabriel Matzneff—were both little known writers before they made their careers between 1973 and 1975 releasing celebrated novels and essays that described affairs with minors in detail. Matzneff’s Les moins de seize ans (The Under Sixteens) lauds sex with adolescents as an act of sexual liberation to protest the moral order and publishes letters from his young lovers as proof of their enjoyment.

Matzneff was welcomed on the television show Apostrophes in 1975 to promote the book and articulate an ethics of individual development that arose out of the sex lives of minors. For him, the “strength and novelty of the affective and sexual impulses” of “children between ten and sixteen” opened a “fertile” field of sexual possibilities—both with people of their own age or an older lover—that would allow them to “discover themselves, the beauty and richness of the world and its creation.”

Is any of this supposed to contradict what I said in my last post?

There are pedophiles everywhere. You know the arguments: The plural of "anecdote" isn't data. Chinese Robber Fallacy, etc.

There are a lot fewer proud pedophiles selling diaries of their titillating pedophile adventures on French TV (or any other TV as far as I know) today than in the 70s.

Who do you see on this list of 'mixed-age sex' supporters ?

Perhaps you were trying to get with a philosophy/sociology major and you've heard of Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Louis Aragon, Roland Barthes, Louis Althusser, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre?

Who I do not see are people like Alain de Benoist, considered influential with the alt-right movement in the United States. Or his buddies Jean-Yves Le Gallou, Yvan Blot, and Henry de Lesquen.

Oh, I believe some are, the opposite would be surprising. But as you say, antisemites are stupid, their opinions tired and not worth discussing. But there's always some guy trying to bring them up.

I was on the fence on the question of whether you're some alt-right alt, but I think you managed to convince me in a single line, thanks!

More comments

I don't think I could really say much better than what @Goodguy has said in response to you. Go talk to him.

But I'll say one more thing, less directed to you than to all of the Mottezians who just loooove to spend all their time all day thinking about how much the left is full of pedophiles who can't wait to start molesting kids:
Do you know how irritating it is to have to defend a group of people whom you despise, against people who also despise those people but despise them for stupid reasons? People who want to think the left is full of pedophiles and therefore should be hated for that reason are watering down actual arguments against leftists. There's plenty of reasons to be against the left. Your efforts are better spent on those causes, and will do more to hinder leftism than this pedophilia bent.

Thank you for saying it.

The part that frustrates me is that “watering down” isn’t necessarily true. Weak men are superweapons, and all that. They just…don’t belong here.

You’re doing God’s work.

People who want to think the left is full of pedophiles and therefore should be hated for that reason are watering down actual arguments against leftists.

This is not my argument.

My argument was that :

1- major leftist intellectuals of the 70s, during which the infamous Sexual Revolution was proclaimed, were either pedophiles or very close friends with open pedophiles (kid-diddling diary-publishing kind of open pedophiles)

2- these people and their students are still quoted, studied in humanities departments all over the West producing the rank-and-file of the regime, among which some of the people you will (have to) trust your children to

If a guy was showing you his vacation pictures in bed with children in Thailand and then persuasively told you to essentially blow up all existing rules in your society because 'dude Christianity is so oppressive and man parents can't tell you what to do'.

Would you do it?

This is apparently more or less what happened to several Western countries in the 70s.

More comments

But I'll say one more thing, less directed to you than to all of the Mottezians who just loooove to spend all their time all day thinking about how much the left is full of pedophiles who can't wait to start molesting kids:

I don't know man. It seems like you aren't responding to what people are actually posting.

I tried to steelman HP0 talking about how the left of the 1970s did sometimes celebrate pedophilia. But I explicitly said that the modern left does not.

You ignored the modern part, and tried to defend the 1970s left with a "few bad apples" and "both sides" argument that as @PierreMenard has pointed out doesn't bear weight.

Why not just admit that, yeah, some 1970s leftist intellectuals believed it was sophisticated and cool to have sex with teenagers? Unlike Catholic priests or whatever, they weren't flawed sinners who slipped up. They thought what they were doing was a Good Thing. This is a legit difference between the left and the right at the time.

None of this makes HP0 less vile, it doesn't make him right about anything, and it doesn't really have much of an impact on the modern culture war except by insinuation. But the limited point still stands.

More comments

A bunch of ancient Greeks liked having sex with boys. Does that mean that all ancient Greek social/political/economic views are suspect?

George Washington and Thomas Jefferson held people captive and forced them to work by threat of violence. Does that mean that all of their social/political/economic views are suspect?

No, not necessarily, unless we're talking specifically about social/political/economical views regarding sexual mores. ie you can make a reasonable argument that somebody supports importing enslaved young boys because they have a history of pursuing having sex with young boys

In the case of these French leftists, we have a combination of people who advocated changing French laws regarding the age of consent/sexuality in general and people who were going on vacation to Tunisia or other foreign countries to have sex with young boys (and girls).

In some cases, some of these people explicitly argued that they wanted an existing oppressive social and legal system changed in order to make it more convenient and less risky to fulfill their sexual desires. This ended up being called the Sexual Revolution.

My point is that it makes no sense to say that leftism as a whole is suspect because some leftists are pedophiles.

As for the Sexual Revolution specifically, I am sure that you could have removed every single leftist pedophile who existed back then and the Sexual Revolution would still have happened almost entirely the same as it actually happened historically.

My point is that it makes no sense to say that leftism as a whole is suspect because some leftists are pedophiles.

Well you've successfully defeated the argument that I was not making, thank you for correcting the record.

As for the Sexual Revolution specifically, I am sure that you could have removed every single leftist pedophile who existed back then and the Sexual Revolution would still have happened almost entirely the same as it actually happened historically.

Of course if you only remove the pedophiles you're not resolving 100% of the issue. If American universities started purging pro-pedophile thinkers from their programs like European institutions Russian-related material after 2022, there would be a lot less progressive propaganda going around.

As the meme goes, 'first they came for the pedophiles, and I did not speak out, because I was not a pedophile...'

'(...) then they stopped coming because every problem had basically been resolved'.

More comments

I agree with you broadly but:

George Washington and Thomas Jefferson held people captive and forced them to work by threat of violence. Does that mean all of their social/political/economic views are suspect as a result?

I have absolutely encountered people making basically this argument.

Sure, but I think that they are wrong. And I think that the same argument, but used against leftists, is also wrong.

There are pedophiles everywhere. You know the arguments: The plural of "anecdote" isn't data. Chinese Robber Fallacy, etc. I hate when people try to say the Right is full of pedophiles because some priests molest kids and some backwoods rednecks are inbred, so I also hate it when people gesture at the left for similar things.

It's not about the pedophilia. It's about the acceptance of pedophilia. Obviously, actual practice of pedophilia is not tied to any particular political orientation.

Furthermore, I am not talking about the modern-left which (drag queen story hour aside) is strongly anti-pedophilia.

I am talking about the confused atmosphere of the 1960s and 1970s where there was sort of an anything goes atmosphere. Hip people thought it was sort of okay for a 13 year old girl to explore her sexuality with Roman Polanski. Alan Ginsburg was a non-ironic member of NAMBLA and a celebrated member of leftist society. At the time, the left was pushing the sexual frontier in all areas, and children weren't off limits.

It's not about the pedophilia. It's about the acceptance of pedophilia.

Where you see any "acceptance" of pedophilia?

I am talking about the confused atmosphere of the 1960s and 1970s where there was sort of an anything goes atmosphere. Hip people thought it was sort of okay for a 13 year old girl to explore her sexuality with Roman Polanski. Alan Ginsburg was a non-ironic member of NAMBLA and a celebrated member of leftist society. At the time, the left was pushing the sexual frontier in all areas, and children weren't off limits.

Yes, and these people lost as decisively you can lose.

Laws about age of consent, underage sex and child porn are tightened every day, pedophiles are the most hated people in the world, anyone accused of being "pedo" is considered to be devil in human form and treated likewise.

The future is not free love hippy commune where anything goes. The future is "age gap" enshrined in laws and total internet and AI censorship/ban to protect children. If it saves one (pixelated) child, it is worth it!

Where you see any "acceptance" of pedophilia?

Well out of the intellectuals of the 20th century, I believe American college students are a lot less exposed to Hitler's ideas on men, women and children than on those of Foucault, Deleuze, Sartre, Beauvoir, etc.

Yes, and these people lost as decisively you can lose.

Why all the outrage about the so-called 'don't say gay' Florida bill then? Why do teachers feel entitled to talk about sex with children? Why are kids getting brought to drag shows?

Why are kids made to make decisions about their genitals and whether they should undergo normal puberty or not?

Why such concern about books banned from school libraries ? No, they are not talking about Henry Ford's or Charles Murray's writings, but here is an example :

Some people have called the book sexually explicit, while other parents said they want to see their kids exposed to people from all walks of life.

Why do school libraries need explicit sexual material?

I’d bet against that first one. World history is required for most (all?) majors, while continental philosophy is not. Hitler was a shitty excuse for an intellectual, but he sure drew an audience.

As for modern legislation, are you sure you’ve got the right bill? The “don’t say gay one” made some rather sweeping statements about things which I would not classify as “talking about sex.”

Edit: including things other than sex. Mea culpa.

I don't think American college professors ever bring up Hitler's ideas about family and fertility as possible inspirations while addressing contemporary issues like the drop in birth rates. I'm pretty confident that at least some college professors quote the various continental philosophers as support for one or the other of their arguments.

The “don’t say gay one” made some rather sweeping statements about things which I would not classify as “talking about sex.”

Right there in #3 clearly has the "sexual" keyword.

Prohibiting classroom instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity in K-3 or if not developmentally appropriate. This is a central example of erasure.

Taking a random article quoting opponents of the bills:

Title: 'Don't Say Gay' bill would limit discussion of sexuality

Proposed legislation in Florida would restrict how teachers can discuss sexuality

critics — who've dubbed the proposal the "Don't Say Gay" bill — argue that it will strip protections from LGBTQ kids

The group Equality Florida

"This legislation is meant to stigmatize LGBTQ people, isolate LGBTQ kids, and make teachers fearful of providing a safe, inclusive classroom," the group said in a statement. "The existence of LGBTQ students and parents is not a taboo topic

Now, what are LGBT kids?

LGBT is an initialism that stands for "lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender".

Perhaps we need to dig further to understand what exactly that means for kids.

Wikipedia asserts:

A lesbian is a homosexual woman or girl.[3][4][5]

Now the first quote from a regular dictionary does not have the word girl in it. I was able to peruse the 3rd quote and it does not cover the 'girl' portion. Now we have to rely on some book published by a Bonnie Zimmerman, on which Wikipedia relies to assert that girls can be lesbians just like women.

Interestingly there is still some debate in the talk page on this subject:

Wrong definition

A lesbian is a non man who loves non men, not only a woman who loves women, non binary and other non men identifying people can be lesbians.

We should stick to what the WP:BESTSOURCES say on the matter. As of writing this comment we are using the definition from Oxford Reference's Dictionary of Psychology, and Zimmerman's encyclopedia on lesbian histories and cultures. The sources you are referencing here include an opinion piece in a student magazine and a blog post in a "peer led support and advocacy organisation".

Are we seriously trying to suggest someone biologically male who does not ID as a woman in any capacity can be a “lesbian” just because they ID as non-binary?? Is this for real??!! I thought this crap only existed on Tumblr!

...

Changing the definition The article defines lesbian as a homosexual woman or girl, but that isn't really reflective of how the term is used widely since lesbian also encompasses homoromantic women and girls, and the article acknowledges as much a bit later.

A lesbian is a homosexual woman or girl. The word is also used for women in relation to their sexual identity or sexual behavior, regardless of sexual orientation, or as an adjective to characterize or associate nouns with female homosexuality or same-sex attraction.

This is all very confused but from what I can gather, the word 'attraction' seems to play a major role in all of this, as I assume they are not expecting these so-called LGBT kids to be engaging in homosexual, genital-engaging practices to prove their membership?

Now, why have a specific term for a child that is supposedly 'attracted to the same gender' (or sex depending on who's talking)? Children can be obsessed with things such as robots, dinosaurs, cars, princesses, unicorns, mermaids... Should we automatically sign them up to for example for the unicorn lovers, the 'cloppers community'? Should we let adults come up to these specifically designated children and allow them to explain how cloppers identify themselves, which codes they use to communicate, how cloppers manage to pleasure themselves with the object of their desire...? Or does this seem absurd, weird, perhaps disgusting to an unenlightened audience?

I imagine it would take serious amounts of propaganda for such an audience to see it as completely natural for the adults they placed in charge of looking after their children to be okay with this ordeal.

How many of these kids just 'kinda liked unicorns' because one of their friends has a cool hat with unicorns on them?

How many of these kids won't even dare bring their cool unicorn hat to school anymore, because they're afraid of getting cornered by the middle-aged woman with problem glasses and froth at the mouth who just can't wait to tell them how 'cloppers' express love?

More comments

Why do school libraries need explicit sexual material?

There are probably hundreds, if not thousands of books in every single school library with graphic descriptions of physical violence, blood, gore, and destruction. Yet, somehow, reading about two gay people having sex is more explicit? As long as kids can check out a book and read about the aftermath of World War II in Europe, the world won't end if they get some masturbation instructions as well.

I don't condone the type of atrocity porn that the holocaust memorial enthusiasts like to propagate either.

the world won't end if they get some masturbation instructions as well.

My understanding is that the books that parents are actually upset about are more like instructions on how to get your genitals cut or how to get the latest fancy sexually-transmitted disease in the least reproductively productive way possible.

Sex and violence are very different things, and we protect children from them in very different ways. Primarily in that depicting violence isn't violent, whereas depicting sex is sexual.

More comments

Well out of the intellectuals of the 20th century, I believe American college students are a lot less exposed to Hitler's ideas on men, women and children than on those of Foucault, Deleuze, Sartre, Beauvoir, etc.

The current year is 2023. 20th century is over, and ideas of French intellectuals (at least concerning sexual liberation) are as popular and influential as Hitler's ideas.

Why all the outrage about the so-called 'don't say gay' Florida bill then? Why do teachers feel entitled to talk about sex with children?

The teachers do not want children to have sex, they want them to explore their "gender identity", possibly all the way to gender transition, which is the most thorough desexualization since the Skoptsy were a thing.

David Cole (of impeccable alt-right credentials) puts it here much better.

This debate doesn’t need your strategizing. Stopping trans propaganda in schools sells itself; your catchy slogans aren’t needed, Don Draper.

Last week I described the educators who labor quietly and single-mindedly to further the tranny agenda as “worker bees.” They’re successful because like all worker bees, they’re banal. Yes, we all love to mock those “libs of TikTok” videos of freakish tattooed teachers with pierced septums. But they’re the minority. Think of every pro-CRT, pro-tranny school-board member you’ve seen. They’re ordinary people you wouldn’t notice at the grocery store.

They’re invisible, doing their work out-of-sight. They’re predominantly women, and they’re not trying to have sex with kids. They’re working with quiet, fanatical dedication to remake how children see gender and themselves, in service of an ideology, not their own personal sexual desires.

...

Why are kids getting brought to drag shows?

To own the cons. Hard to imagine something less sexually arousing and stimulating than "drag queen hours."

Why such concern about books banned from school libraries ?

Because it is, in our digital age, completely pointless political football on both sides. 90% of children are not going to read any books, and the 10% who want, can have any book in the world at their fingertips.

BTW, in the good old times in the fifties, after hunting Soviet spies, libraries were one of McCarthy's concerns. Looking for unamerican books in libraries was one of his pastimes.

"CITIZENS! Do you know there are COMMUNIST books in AMERICAN libraries? What are you going to do about this menace?"

This is forgotten now, but this was the major thing he was known for in his time and what elicited such strong reaction among the public.

Well, the reaction was less "I am American, I will never read any unamerican books!", and more "I am American, no Irish drunken swine is going to dictate to me what books I can read!"

which is the most thorough desexualization since the Skoptsy were a thing.

Fascinating; I thought eunuchs and castrati were the pinnacle of that movement, but then again the two are not that similar either to each other or to the Skoptsyists.

I suggest "Junior Anti-Sex League" as a working title for how progressives operate with respect to sex (tradcons do this too, but while the end result is currently the same, they started with entirely different reasoning, so it's more a 'happy' accident they currently behave the same).

Hard to imagine something less sexually arousing and stimulating than "drag queen hours."

Especially since 99-100% of the participants are straight, drag queens are [intentionally] aesthetically unpleasing, and children are generally smart enough to prefer beautiful things to ugly ones. Of course, there is already a significant amount of documentation about what is sexually arousing to straight tween/teenagers- it usually begins with the words "Dear Penthouse," or, more recently, a 6-digit code to a particular website. None of them involve drag queens, or so I'm told.

The teachers do not want children to have sex, they want them to explore their "gender identity", possibly all the way to gender transition, which is the most thorough desexualization since the Skoptsy were a thing.

Some don't, some do. The teachers harping over gender theory certainly got their ideas from people who at least studied under people who were either kiddy-diddlers of the kind of Gabriel Matzneff or very close friends of them. The fact that these ideas come from these people is not unrelated to the fact that adults are reaching out to children to sensitize them to these behaviors.

Hard to imagine something less sexually arousing and stimulating than "drag queen hours."

Yes, totally normal behavior. If you see a group of Nazi war criminals dressed up in Nazi garb playing war with plastic guns and the neighborhood's children, should that concern the average Jewish pacifist?

The history channel seems to think it should. Idk about the gender theory academia and the people in charge of the 'LGBT youth' groups.

How the Hitler Youth Turned a Generation of Kids Into Nazis

libraries were one of McCarthy's concerns.

It appears to me that McCarthy was right. Where else but libraries did the teachers get their ideas of transidentity?

90% of children are not going to read any books, and the 10% who want, can have any book in the world at their fingertips.

Amazon and other platforms are definitely removing different books depending on who is in charge.

The argument around CP reminds me a bit of the one about guns.

People who want more government action to restrict the thing in question often use a motte-and-bailey argument. The bailey is "we must do whatever it takes to save people from being shot / sexually abused, even if it means getting rid of the second amendment / imposing drastic censorship". The motte is "don't be crazy, we're reasonable people of course, we just want common-sense regulations".

Also, some of the people who want more government action are, whether they consciously realize this or not, probably not primarily motivated by a desire to save people. They want the gun restrictions or the censorship mainly because the gun rights / the free Internet is something that their political rivals enjoy and something that helps those political rivals.

Meanwhile what many people who want less government action actually believe, whether they consciously realize this or not, is "I think that some kids being molested and some people being shot is an unfortunate but acceptable price to pay for being able to resist the oppressive government and defend oneself / for having free speech / etc".

But to say that openly is generally not socially acceptable, so people pretend that it is possible to have the thing they want (the right to own guns, freedom from Internet censorship, etc.) without the downsides (people being shot, child abuse, etc.).

The 70's in the immediate post-Sexual Revolution era was also...just weird. Like yeah, you can name all the weirdo French intellectuals you want, but also, some of the biggest musicians in the world were dating 14-year-olds, and the work just kind of shrugged. Brooke Shields was being sexualized in a way that doesn't really happen in the same way anymore.

Like, you could've jailed every single French intellectual you mentioned and Led Zeppelin was still going to be sleeping w/15-year-old groupies, with no pushback from wider society.

What was really happening was a big shift in the Overton Window thanks to the pill and breaking of traditional sexual mores, and some ideas went out over the skis but eventually got brought back. It's only weirdo online right-wingers like ole' RH defending women teachers who sleep with their students, and the age of consent is getting raised basically worldwide, to line up with eighteen in most places.

Lolita was considered a classic

And Stephen Spielberg is obviously a nazi - he made Schindler's List.

Or, alternately, there is a difference between not only portraying something in media, but portraying it as a bad thing, and being in favour of that thing.

Despite the book's possible influence on the 1960s sexual revolution, the fact is that Lolita was written by a guy who left Russia to escape the Bolsheviks, did not consider himself a leftist, supported the US war effort in Vietnam, and disliked the 1960s protest movements in the West. Which is evidence against ZHPL's worldview of a right that is besieged by a monolithic left.

The right itself seems to have a decent number of people who fantasize about impregnating 14 year old barefoot trad wives on farmsteads. Based on this, I could easily make an argument that the right as a whole supports having sex with 14 year olds, but it would not be a very logical argument. A small number of people are not necessarily representative of a giant political movement.

The right itself seems to have a decent number of people who fantasize about impregnating 14 year old barefoot trad wives on farmsteads.

The weirdo Twitter right does. Normie republicans are more accepting of teen marriage than normie democrats, but not to the point of thinking it’s a good thing.

Normie republicans are more accepting of teen marriage than normie democrats, but not to the point of thinking it’s a good thing.

Now that you mention it, I wonder if it correlates with a working-class view that true "adulthood" starts after high school (18-ish), rather than after college (22-ish), which only around half of high school graduates enroll in.

I think that's possibly part of it, but also there's a view that self actualization is an inherently secondary goal and that marriage and family are universal goods.

And back to the 1950s (and earlier), when adulthood would commonly start closer to 14-16, common attitudes around the age of consent were naturally even lower.

It's mostly just market forces at work (which is why places that don't suffer as much from credentialism have more reasonable ages of functional majority), but the resulting segregation breeding contempt/self-justification of denial of development can sustain itself for quite some time.

Lolita was not in any sense a pro-pedo book. The entire point is unreliable narrators can obscure something horrific with a fancy prose style. Nabokov hits people over the head with this in the least subtle way possible, but somehow people still don't get it.

This was my takeaway as well, from listening to the audiobook (narrated by the fantastic Jeremy Irons, whose voice is now forever the canonical one of Humbert Humbert in my mind) a few years back. I could see how someone could construe it as pro-pedophilia, since people could construe any piece of text as being supportive of anything, but that's not the obvious interpretation. It also happens to be a masterpiece, merely on the quality of prose alone, IMHO, to the extent that I freely recommend it to people despite knowing the negative connotations associated with it.

A funny little anecdote: I was shopping for housing this past summer in the Boston area, and one of the places I was looking at in Cambridge was apparently in the building where Nabokov was residing when he wrote Lolita. The building has a little plaque in the lobby commemorating this, and the realtors pointed it out as well, presumably as one of those little intangible bonuses of a home. I have to wonder if this plaque and the information it concerns actually has a net negative effect on how attractive that building is for people to visit or live in. I ended up not moving there, but not for reasons relating to that plaque.

I'd also highly recommend Pale Fire: another masterpiece of his with top-tier prose, and it leans even more heavily into the unreliable narrator side of things and is more deeply textured. And you can recommend it to people without them thinking you're a pedophile.

Plus one for Pale Fire, such a creative and interesting book. I need to read the rest of his works at some point.

Could you please not quote the whole thing, but instead excerpt the most important sections?

It's very difficult for me to see this post as anything but bad faith apophasis.

We don't typically ban people based on their usernames (after all, what is in a name?) and yet yours is suspicious. Bare links are off-limits; you didn't post a bare link, but copy-pasting most of an article is a near cousin. So you wrote some commentary, but it hardly seems to be effortful commentary--just a dismissal: also suspicious. If someone said "tomorrow, a user is going to make a post that is 90% copy-pasted ZHPL, followed by 10% commentary that is at best a limp-wristed disavowal of the piece," what would I predict was the reason for the post? I would predict it was posted by a troll who either agrees with ZHPL but is pretending they don't, or disagrees with ZHPL but is fishing for damning and sneer-worthy responses from the Motte.

At minimum, this sort of thing is egregiously obnoxious. Please don't.

The pasted content would IMHO be ban-worthy in a comment, and the original content by the author seems rather low effort. I think in the ratsphere, when encountering a baseless claim, it is customary not to dismiss it with another baseless claim, but actually cite sources. If the OP had cut the citation two one or two sections and actually put in the work to source their counterclaims, this might be a good faith post. Well, unlike previously "critically cited" sites linked from the OP, at least ZHPL was linked by SSC in 2019 back when they were not an Alex Jones imitation. Still, this drivel is unlikely to spark any good-faith discussions.

If the OP spent equal effort to elaborately "critically" cite stuff from other political corners than the extreme right (say Hindu extremism, or anorexia boards or Putin fans or whatever), this would be some Bayesian evidence that they are not in it for posting the extreme right content.

Oh, no. I don’t miss the Hindu doom posting at all. But IIRC it was pretty singleminded too, so your reasoning stands.

Time for current culture war item, reviving 20 years old controversies in much different world.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is now a Christian

Some feel it as betrayal, some as vindication, but all see it as big thing. But is it a thing of any importance?

Reading through the manifesto, it seems strange. First, it does not contain the word "Jesus", not even once. Neither the word "salvation".

So what it talks about?

Threats to precious Western democracy, freedom, rules based international order and Judeo-Christian tradition

Part of the answer is global. Western civilisation is under threat from three different but related forces: the resurgence of great-power authoritarianism and expansionism in the forms of the Chinese Communist Party and Vladimir Putin’s Russia; the rise of global Islamism, which threatens to mobilise a vast population against the West; and the viral spread of woke ideology, which is eating into the moral fibre of the next generation.

But we can’t fight off these formidable forces unless we can answer the question: what is it that unites us? The response that “God is dead!” seems insufficient. So, too, does the attempt to find solace in “the rules-based liberal international order”. The only credible answer, I believe, lies in our desire to uphold the legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

historical facts as accurate as "Cleopatra was black"

To me, this freedom of conscience and speech is perhaps the greatest benefit of Western civilisation. It does not come naturally to man. It is the product of centuries of debate within Jewish and Christian communities.

and mid-life crisis. Permanent Middle Eastern crisis is child's play compared to eternally recurring middle life crisis.

Atheism failed to answer a simple question: what is the meaning and purpose of life?

So why Christianity?

In this nihilistic vacuum, the challenge before us becomes civilisational. We can’t withstand China, Russia and Iran if we can’t explain to our populations why it matters that we do. We can’t fight woke ideology if we can’t defend the civilisation that it is determined to destroy.

How is Christianity supposed to help in fighting "China, Russia and Iran" is left unclear. Of these coutries, Russia explicitly claims to fight for Christianity against Western Jewish Nazi homosexual Satanism.

How would AHA answer Putin, how would she prove that his interpretation of Christianity is wrong and her "Judo-Christian" faith is the true Christian tradition and true message of Jesus?

And for wokeism, Christianity hadn't proved not to be very effective in fighting it.

(and if you need Christianity do defeat something so absurd as wokeism, you already lost)

SENIOR: What would you like for your birthday, son?

JUNIOR: I want to chop off my dick, dad.

SENIOR: Do not do it, son!

JUNIOR: Why?

SENIOR: (long pause and head scratching) The Bible! The Bible forbids it, son!

JUNIOR: Where?

SENIOR: (fast and frantic searching through book) Wait, son! It must be here, somewhere!

That is why I no longer consider myself a Muslim apostate, but a lapsed atheist. Of course, I still have a great deal to learn about Christianity. I discover a little more at church each Sunday. But I have recognised, in my own long journey through a wilderness of fear and self-doubt, that there is a better way to manage the challenges of existence than either Islam or unbelief had to offer.

Curious what exact church AHA joined. Churches that simultaneously reject wokeism and support "civilization war" against Axis of Evil, churches that fly Ukraine, Israeli and Taiwan flags but lack rainbow, trans and BLM flags tend to be rather thin of the ground.

As always I'm thankful not to be cursed with such absurdities as a God-shaped hole, or a drive for someone to hand me "objective" meaning instead of being perfectly content in deriving my own as I see fit.

At any rate, I've never heard of this woman, even if I am familiar with the usual thought-leaders in the early 2000s New Atheism movement, even if that was before my time really. I don't mourn it, it managed to do its job before it died, or was subsumed into proto-Wokism as Scott suggests.

Frankly speaking, I find this intellectually dishonest and a bad idea overall, I doubt her beliefs are sincerely held, and I agree with you that Christianity, nor any other major religion, is a solution to the problems of modernity. Belief-in-belief rarely stands for much, and I regard anyone who can intentionally subvert their own cognition and better judgement of reality to adopt it with scorn. I respect people who take their religion seriously more than I do such wishy-washy Cultural Catholics, "moderate" Muslims and the like. If the clear and obvious demands of your religion are to go on Jihad against the infidels, then that's what you should do, even if I find that a terrible act. If you think your holy books are the Word of God, then why the fuck are you cherry picking the aspects you find convenient rather than doing your best to sincerely adopt all of it, even if it's incompatible with modern civilization?

At any rate, I think this is more of a grift/attempt at seeking attention from a C-list intellectual than anything worth taking seriously, but it is illustrative of a certain minority of people who decide that adopting the trappings of a religion and mouthing some of the lines might fill the void in their hearts. Won't work, and is a bad idea either way, while modern Western society is far from ideal, it's not going to be improved by a RETVRN.

At any rate, I've never heard of this woman, even if I am familiar with the usual thought-leaders in the early 2000s New Atheism movement, even if that was before my time really. I don't mourn it, it managed to do its job before it died, or was subsumed into proto-Wokism as Scott suggests.

If you missed the Great Atheist-Christian War of the noughties, you missed the peak of the internet. All went downhill since then.

And if you were there, you would know that the "proto-woke" side was the creationist intelligent design one.

At least the better part of them - while the dumb ones tried to scientifically prove that six day creation and Noah flood were literally real, the smarter were loud antiracists and antifascists who were roaring how Darwin was racist colonialist genocidist and how "Darwinism" is source of all evil in modern history.

You got things like From Darwin to Hitler, Darwin's Plantation: Evolution's Racist Roots or even this.

STALIN'S FAITH--WHAT WAS IT?

Often an individual's faith is firmly attached to a book of some kind. Muslims have the Koran; Hindus, their Veda; and Christians, the Bible. Writings of Confucius, Buddha, and indeed, Mao Tse-Tung, serve similar purposes for other groups. In Stalin's case, the writings of Marx, Engels, and Lenin incited him, but to stop here would be premature. There is one man-book amalgam which may have been even more determinative for Stalin, especially during his youthful, impressionable years.

The man was Charles Darwin.

The book--his The Origin of Species.

To document this, appeal is made first to a book published in Moscow entitled, Landmarks in the Life of Stalin. It was written during Stalin's "glory," and was designed to set him in a positive light. Note in the selection cited, that faith in Darwin and his "book" contrasts markedly with faith in a supreme being:

At a very early age, while still a pupil in the ecclesiastical school, Comrade Stalin developed a critical mind and revolutionary sentiments. He began to read Darwin and became an atheist.

G. Glurdjidze, a boyhood friend of Stalin's, relates:

"I began to speak of God, Joseph heard me out, and after a moment's silence, said: "'You know, they are fooling us, there is no God. . . .' "I was astonished at these words, I had never heard anything like it before. "'How can you say such things, Soso?' I exclaimed. "'I'll lend you a book to read; it will show you that the world and all living things are quite different from what you imagine, and all this talk about God is sheer nonsense,' Joseph said. "'What book is that?' I enquired. "'Darwin. You must read it,' Joseph impressed on me"

They failed to cancel Darwin and all of his work, but not for the lack of trying.

I don’t remember antiracism/anti fascism having much sway over the narrative. I’m sure some authors were trying to pick at Darwin from any angle, but the real emphasis was Biblical literalism, no? Hence “teach the controversy,” the relevant court cases, and so on.

The creationists ranting about ‘Darwinism causes x’ has to be seen in the context of, well, ranting about how Darwinism causes x. Yes, ‘belief in evolution was an inspiration for Hitler’ was one of a family of arguments they used about that, but the reason behind talking more about Darwin=Hitler than Darwin=Margaret Sanger is because Hitler is 1) recognizably evil and 2) the causal link there is easy to explain.

Remember that the whole Atheist Armageddon was started by Christians who were feeling emboldened in Dubya's time and began to push intelligent design into schools. It was symbolic thing like most things about school curriculum, but it spooked lots of people and provoked strong and unexpected reaction.

It was only secondary about Islam and Middle Eastern issues.

Why they chose this particular form of offensive? Did they really believed that evolution is cornerstone of atheism, did they believed that if they succesfully demolish "Darwinism" the whole tower of unbelief will collapse and whole nation will return to church?

They hadn't got their wish, but no one from this time had.

Interestingly enough, a lot of the pushback against trans only really started gaining ground once the gender/trans/DQSH stuff was pushed so egregiously as to break through into normie awareness. If it hadn't started hitting people close to home, it may have consolidated even more cultural power. Again, it's a case of a (different) group that was feeling emboldened in their time and tried to push for the complete educational/cultural victory.

And if you were there, you would know that the "proto-woke" side was the creationist intelligent design one.

idk, Scott makes a compelling case that the proto-woke side was the atheists. That coheres with my personal experience as well. https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/30/new-atheism-the-godlessness-that-failed/

proto-woke side was the atheists Well some of them at least. Like a third? Maybe a third-ish. There were the atheists who hated their dad and then there were the atheists who were too autistic so they made the unfortunate mistake of actually reading the bible. The atheism+ side disintegrated into a million little pieces mostly by canceling each other and purity spiraling, but not before killing the fun for everyone else.

To add to this, as one of the "dumb ones" on the pro-Christian side (though for the record I've never been a Young Earth Creationist) I don't recall seeing many people on the pro-religion side making arguments along the "evolution is racist" angle.

AHA absolutely was a major figure in the 2000s New Atheism / Counterjihad era (I associate her more with the latter than the former), though it's also possible she was more visible in Europe than in the US during the peak of her influence.

While I am personally sympathetic to rejecting Christianity, I still think your post is in large parts a "boo outgroup".

Also, not all of us were here since New Atheism. According to Wikipedia, AHA was a central figure in that movement, where she mostly criticized Islam, I guess?

I remember the lesser AHAs of the aughts too. Ibn Warraq, Irshad Manji. But haven't heard their names in years.

How is Christianity supposed to help in fighting "China, Russia and Iran" is left unclear. Of these coutries, Russia explicitly claims to fight for Christianity against Western Jewish Nazi homosexual Satanism.

How would AHA answer Putin, how would she prove that his interpretation of Christianity is wrong and her "Judo-Christian" faith is the true Christian tradition and true message of Jesus?

How did Protestants answer the Catholics?

SENIOR: (fast and frantic searching through book) Wait, son! It must be here, somewhere!

This sort of thing seems like how it'd go when you're positing an already moribund religion (and a weak proponent of that religion)

Do you think this is how the discussion would go in a traditional Islamic household?

So she wants cultural Christianity back? And this is converting?

I think stating that she goes to church, and emphasizing the religion's role in answering ultimate questions makes me think she's actually talking about converting.

Just about every Boomer Evangelical church I've seen is anti-woke and anti-axis of evil.

Just about every Boomer Evangelical church I've seen is anti-woke and anti-axis of evil.

Point taken, such people would support even Ukraine (if only because they still see Russia as communist), but these churches would demand confession of faith in literal resurrection of Jesus Christ and literal truth of the bible, not Dubya era National Review editorial.

They’re usually pretty chill if people are ‘struggling’ with their faith, I thought?

SENIOR: (long pause and head scratching) The Bible! The Bible forbids it, son!

JUNIOR: Where?

SENIOR: (fast and frantic searching through book) Wait, son! It must be here, somewhere!

Strawman Senior really, really doesn't know his Bible. Sad! It's on page 1 or maybe 2, depending on your copy.

Genesis 1:27

So God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him; male and female created He them.

As far as the text is concerned, there are just sexes, gender as a separate idea doesn't enter into the conversation. Under Levitical Law crossdressing is a capital crime.

There are plenty of infertile women and eunuchs (by birth and those made so by other humans) and men who lay with men (not recorded positively) throughout the Bible.

As far as self-mutilation is concerned, Jesus advises cutting off your own hands or feet or plucking out an eye if it leads you to sin, but this is after talking about tying a millstone to the neck + throwing into the sea to anyone who leads a child into sin. He does talk about making yourself a eunuch for the Kingdom of Heaven, but Origen, who is rumored to have taken it literally, says it would be very foolish to take this mechanically literally.

I'd be fascinated to see a thriving church (Nicene affirming, biologically reproductive, retaining generations, active missions) that is trans-affirming.

Nicene affirming, biologically reproductive, retaining generations, active missions

How many of these are there, though? Even the Mormons (who I understand don’t fully affirm the Nicene creed, but still) are facing a big drop off. Evangelicalism only does ‘OK’ because so many Catholics (and other Prots) continue to convert to it.

I dislike people dancing around the issue.

There is a massive population of white Americans, mainly Evangelicals, who had been indoctrinated with this meaningless Judeo-Christian gibberish that just means "everything good in the world". Invoking «Judeo-Christian» is the master key to getting their cooperation in literally any matter: they'll automatically recall "everything good" (freedom, democracy, tradition, civilization, antiwoke, diversity, LGBT rights, Christ, Rapture, our Middle Eastern allies – doesn't matter, details of what counts as goodness will be prompted by the context of the Current Year, they don't really have stable moral doctrines) and associate it with you, then go and kill or die for whatever cause you propose… Or, at least, that seems to be the theory driving Republican politics (and politicking on Republican-coded but in actuality bipartisan issues). The problem is that these people were a little bit too successfully dunked upon in years where great power conflict seemed less probable, and warm bodies less needed, than in the near future. They've been somewhat jaded and demoralized and alienated and their demographic representation has simply shrunk. New Atheism has been complicit in this.

So now we will be having New Atheist influencers peddling this stuff harder (and old fighters for Pure Reason like Gad Saad will be asked to pipe it down with habitual anti-whitey remarks). We'll also be seeing more "based" recruiting ads for the Army. As Trump has proven, the Republican base only asks for tokens of respect, nothing more, so I expect this vulgar pandering to work well.

So now we will be having New Atheist influencers peddling this stuff harder (and old fighters for Pure Reason like Gad Saad will be asked to pipe it down with habitual anti-whitey remarks).

Right on cue: now the problem isn't Whitey from Nebraska, it's unassimilable migration that is causing the Death Spiral of the West. These Jews adopting 2016 alt-right talking points for their immediate benefit aren't going to convince anyone.

Why not? Aren’t you glad they’ll use their unstoppable ‘narrative-crafting’ powers for the good of civilization?

I don’t see why a newly discovered personal stake in a subject should make one a hypocrite for changing one’s mind (and I don’t even know if this guy changed his mind, or if you just assimilate him to a collective, jewry).

Jews say things you disagree with: Perfidious, deceitful

Jews say things you agree with: trickery that won’t convince anyone

The irony (and I say this as someone who doesn’t like him) is that half the people clowning on Saad for saying hardcore white antisemitism still exists in the US are literally hardcore white antisemites such as yourself on dissident right Twitter. Saad says “yeah midwestern whites can still be antisemitic” and then some midwestern white American in the tweet replies says some implicit or explicit version of “this treacherous Jew is so wedded to his destructive leftism and hatred of whites that he doesn’t recognize that white antisemitism doesn’t even exist anymore”, which is an interesting way of disagreeing with him.

In the end, every donor cent that no longer goes to progressive causes is good for the American right. Getting upset about Jews turning against mass immigration because they have the temerity to acknowledge your own (real) contempt for them seems cheap. The only thing these dissident rightists would accept from Jews is crying, apologetic prostration along with maybe ritual suicide after tearfully admitting all the wrongs they have done to the Huwhite race.

Perfidious, deceitful

Gad Saad is unable to hide his contempt for ordinary white people, but in his next breath he's a stalwart defender of Western demographics. No he isn't, he's a Jewish ethnonationalist trying to give permission to White people to be racist towards Arabs on behalf of the war being fought by his tribe.

It's similar to the sentiment "Britain is finished if Jews no longer feel safe here". So Britain isn't finished when there are no more British, or when British are denied their identity and claim to particularity and self-advocacy. It's finished when Jews don't feel safe. When Gad Saad and Ben Shapiro start adopting these alt-right talking points, the Neocon grift is obvious.

I like Zach Snyder's film 300, but it's not lost on me that Hollywood producing such a sincerely fascist film took place at a moment time when many were beating the war-drum for America to go to war against the Persians. Fascism is a white interpretation of Socialism, and Neoconservatism is a Jewish interpretation of Fascism. The resurgence of 2003 neoconservatism with the assimilation of dissident right rhetoric is not something I agree with, even if they are able to say some things I agree with- no, I'm actually not falling for it and I can see clearly what they are doing. I strongly oppose the resurgence of 2003 neoconservatism. It's predictable they would try to steer the energy of the alt-right towards opposing their own enemies in endless Middle East conflict. But they won't allow that energy to be used to actually advoacte for white people.

Getting upset about Jews turning against mass immigration because they have the temerity to acknowledge your own (real) contempt for them seems cheap.

Jews are turning against mass immigration because they now perceive some parts of it to be against their own ethnic interests. So their (highly limited and far-too-late) turnaround is perfectly aligned with complaints about their behavior: they support what's in the interest of Jews, even at the expense of White people. When mass immigration is at the expense of White people but benefits Jews, they have no problem with it. Now they have a problem with it because of their war against the Arab world, and I'm supposed to pretend that this means their interests are now aligned with mine?

Nathan Cofnas is an example of a Jew engaging in some honest self-reflection (although he makes some dubious assumptions). Gad Saad and Ben Shapiro and others trying to make their religio-tribal war a matter of "Judeo-Christian civilization" hanging in the balance is perfidious and deceitful no matter how much alt-right window dressing they try to throw on top of it.

The irony (and I say this as someone who doesn’t like him) is that half the people clowning on Saad for saying hardcore white antisemitism still exists in the US are literally hardcore white antisemites such as yourself on dissident right Twitter.

Gad Saad felt compelled to dunk on the demographic that might be the most pro-Israel on the entire planet. Maybe it's Dissident Right Twitter's fault that Gad Saad hates the average White person from Arkansas. But Dissident Right twitter wasn't around for the 2003 Neoconservative era, where working class White Christians were helplessly manipulated into supporting Israel, and that didn't spare them from the ethnic contempt of Jews in academia, popular culture, and political policy. Their demographic decline has been celebrated.

When mass immigration is at the expense of White people but benefits Jews

How did the mass immigration of Muslims into Western Europe (or indeed Mexicans into the United States) benefit Jews? It is not enough to respond by citing Barbara Spectre or some other Jew saying that diversity keeps Jews safe or Tikkun Olam or something, I mean seriously, if you think it benefits me (a rich Jewish New York banker, the kind of person who matters in this thought experiment) then tell me how.

It seems rather more likely that Jews bought into the progressive, enlightenment, democratic narrative of universal progress upon which the United States was founded by gentile men. This is why there are also gentile whites of the kind who celebrate their own incoming minority status, for example, and indeed many of them.

I'm supposed to pretend that this means their interests are now aligned with mine?

Why do most white conservatives oppose mass immigration in practice? It’s not out of an esoteric quasi-spiritual reverence for Yamnaya ancestry or the legacy of Greece and Rome, or ethnic purity (and it mostly never was). It’s about the fact that they don’t want to live in a dirtier, poorer, more violent, culturally foreign society peopled largely by people who don’t like them (I don’t, for what it’s worth, think any large percentage American Jews ‘dislike’ whites).

That is the realization most anti-immigrant whites have had; that is what Saad seems to have had. His interests may or may not align with yours, certainly it’s unlikely they do on every issue. But if the issue is mass immigration from the Islamic world (which is by orders of magnitude the number one issue for the European right and Europe in general), then he and them would appear, on this issue, to want it to stop.

Well, as ever, the tragedy of Jewish assimilation is that we tried too hard and were too good at it. Too good at capitalism, too good at liberalism, too good at socialism. Jews took liberalism, fundamentally a gentile invention, too literally, bought into it too wholly, took its premises to their logical conclusions too honestly and too directly. I think of this often. Peter Singer, for better or worse, could only be Jewish; like Marx with Hegel, he is guilty only of extending a gentile ideology - that of Bentham and Mill - to its logical conclusions. It is no surprise that many of the ‘Jewish’ elites far rightists decry (along with many far right Jews like BAP and Moldbug) are only ‘half-Jewish’, because assimilation rates for secular Jews are at 70%+ and have been since at least the 1980s in the US, again in part it’s the extreme rate of Jewish assimilation that leads to such overrepresentation, because Jews had and have the temerity to get rich and then marry the existing elite rather than their own.

This is the grand irony of rightist antisemitism. The greatest charge is hypocrisy, that Jews do unto others (diversity, moral degeneracy etc) what they do not do unto themselves. In reality, precisely the opposite is true, far from cynically exploiting Western enlightenment ideas, (Ashkenazi) Jews tried too hard to implement them. They gleefully expropriated Jewish capitalists in Russia, gleefully embraced the sexual revolution of Hugh Hefner et al (for all the kvetching about Jewish pornographers preying on innocent blonde girls, Jewish women are actually extremely overrepresented among female porn actresses (Casey Calvert, Abella Danger, Nina Hartley), it’s not as if they spared themselves sexual modernity), and gleefully promoted refugee rights, socialism and a generous peace with the Palestinians in Israel even after multiple humiliations (and were only, ultimately, rebuffed because they were demographically swamped by Sephardim, Mizrachim and 1/8 Jewish Soviet immigrants.

The problem, which I think we have always failed to understand, is that the gentile writers of the enlightenment were less revolutionary than they appear from their writings. They were thinking in the context of an established civilizational structure whose boundaries they wanted to test, but which they did not wholesale wish to upend - even if they wrote as such. Freed from the metaphorical and sometimes literal ghetto by this ideology, the mistake we made was thinking it was SO great that we should take these ideas of universalism, of rights, of equality, of peace, of personal and communal liberation to their logical conclusions. We didn’t understand that the gentiles, writing in the context of their own worldview, their own educations and faith and so on, did not mean that themselves.

I really think this is the tragedy of the Haskalah.

Come on now. Gad Saad's long-running beef with the archetypal "Roscoe" is entirely motivated by Roscoe being a rural white hick on whom it's acceptable, fashionable and fun to dunk, not by him buying into SS-style politics.

I don’t know who Saad is other than that I suppose I vaguely typecast him into that generic midwit-bait Israeli pseudointellectual category like Yuval Harari. Nevertheless, I thought the linked tweet did not seem particularly unreasonable.

Expecting Jews in general to become wignats overnight after brave DR types ‘call them out’ on apparent hypocrisy over ethnonationalism is clearly hostile. Here is Saad realizing, just as rightist whites (although far from all whites, of course) have, that mass immigration from the third world is a bad idea, and all SS can imply is that he only did it because he finally realized they’re a threat to him and his kind. This is true, but that same logic, of course, applies to many a gentile white anti-immigration activist too.

Ok but he's literally having some fixation on this Roscoe person, I had to check https://twitter.com/search?q=roscoe%20from%3Agadsaad&src=typed_query

I defer to you as someone with more knowledge of his posting history. Still, surely you understand my point? It's as if someone on the left says "well, you know it's just ridiculous to say that most progressives want children to be able to have gender reassignment surgery without their parents permission. Oh, me? Well, I actually do believe that, sure, I was speaking in general terms". This may be true, but it's still a strange argument, and one that would get rather a lot of pushback from many here.

So now we will be having New Atheist influencers peddling this stuff harder (and old fighters for Pure Reason like Gad Saad will be asked to pipe it down with habitual anti-whitey remarks). We'll also be seeing more "based" recruiting ads for the Army. As Trump has proven, the Republican base only asks for tokens of respect, nothing more, so I expect this vulgar pandering to work well.

That this is what they will be trying to do seems to be the consensus in the dissident sphere, whether it will work is a subject of some debate. Between the crazy activist types already being in positions of influence, and people already throwing jokes like "welp! there's white guys in military recruitment ads, looks like we're going to war!" around, the result doesn't look obvious to me. The failure of Bud Light to do damage control might be the blueprint for what's about to happen to the American establishment.

The problem is that these people were a little bit too successfully dunked upon in years where great power conflict seemed less probable, and warm bodies less needed, than in the near future.

Right, and the problem with reversing course is that while they don't require more than a few tokens of respect, the dunking may have gone so far that there might also be a "we're sorry" needed to bring them back into the fold. It's not a lot, but I doubt it's possible to provide without having the blue tribe rebel.

the result doesn't look obvious to me

It’s more of a dilemma, though. You might not want to join an institution that you perceive as hostile to you, but you also probably don’t want your military, which is also the most powerful military in the world, to be staffed by your enemies.

If the US military goes blue top to bottom, any kind of red tribe insurrection in the US becomes substantially more difficult.

In any case, all they need is Donald (upon returning to office if he makes it back) to say that they should join the military and it’ll be fine, as Dase said.

If the US military goes blue top to bottom, any kind of red tribe insurrection in the US becomes substantially more difficult.

Wouldn't you argue that optimizing for insurrection conditions, by adding your body to the mutiny pile at that, is a ludicrous political agenda in any case? I would. Like, this is some 1907 Russian sailor shit.

I don’t know if they still do, but a few years ago French nationalists were very concerned about the ever growing numbers of Maghrebi soldiers in the French military (it’s France, so data on how many there actually are is extremely scarce). Germans are constantly hand-wringing that the Bundeswehr essentially consists of BND/BfV agents and neo-Nazis with little in-between (but plenty of overlap). US red tribers have trusted certainly since the early-mid Cold War that the military is if not a conservative organ then certainly a red-adjacent organ, at least in the enlisted ranks.

but you also probably don’t want your military, which is also the most powerful military in the world, to be staffed by your enemies.

I might. What good does it do me to "staff" the military if people like me are cannon fodder, and all the officers are my enemies?

If the US military goes blue top to bottom, any kind of red tribe insurrection in the US becomes substantially more difficult.

Thing is - if they could achieve that, they already would have. Arguably that was the whole point of these weird woke military recruitment ads. The fact that they're reversing course shows it was not a viable strategy.

It's also interesting to consider if blue tribe grunts would even remain blue for very long, if they had to do a tour of duty in a war zone.

In any case, all they need is Donald (upon returning to office if he makes it back) to say that they should join the military and it’ll be fine, as Dase said.

Maybe, maybe not. Trump was also very pro-vaccine.

Trump was also very pro-vaccine.

Trump was out of office by the time the vaccine became widely available. I think the counterfactual where he’s constantly tweeting about how great the vaccine is and bragging about it in every daily press briefing is quite different.

Again, it's possible, but you're way to certain of this, and you're fatally misunderstanding the entire Trump phenomenon if you think this is a sure thing. It's not a cult of personality, he's popular because he's good at pandering. There was a brief period where it looked like his base might turn on him, and it was when he had some Iranian guy killed. Nothing came out of it, so people moved on, but I'm really not sure if he could get people to reenact the Bush era.

There was a brief period where it looked like his base might turn on him, and it was when he had some Iranian guy killed.

You mean the immensely popular decision that 85% of Trump’s voters approved of (vs 70% disapproval from Democrats)?

Very online dissident rightists aren’t ‘the base’, boomers in MAGA hats who care about Israel, abortion, bringing jobs back from Jyna, The Wall and trans bathroom policies are.

Again, you're talking about the attack itself, and I'm talking when people thought this meant another war.

More comments

One important difference today might be the lower percentage of young Americans eligible for military service. 77 percent of Americans age 17-24 can’t hack it, an increase from 71 percent six years ago.

That stat becomes a lot less alarming when you remember that 50% of Americans that age are women.

There is a massive population of white Americans, mainly Evangelicals, who had been indoctrinated with this meaningless Judeo-Christian gibberish that just means "everything good in the world".

Not only Americans, strongly Zionist Evangelical churches are spreading worldwide, from Brazil to Finland. One of lesser known American cultural exports.

Maybe the future is two moron mobs beating each other heads with rainbow and Israeli flags, all over the world, for all eternity.

So now we will be having New Atheist influencers peddling this stuff harder (and old fighters for Pure Reason like Gad Saad will be asked to pipe it down with habitual anti-whitey remarks). We'll also be seeing more "based" recruiting ads for the Army. As Trump has proven, the Republican base only asks for tokens of respect, nothing more, so I expect this vulgar pandering to work well.

We might also see greatest American allies moderating themselves and stopping spitting on and assaulting Christians in Israel, at least the American ones.

It is something going on for a long time against local Arab Christians, but recently Western and even American Christians became targets too and even Western press began noticing.

edit: more links

None of the reasons she gives for why she now considers herself a Christian are anything even close to "I have come to believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God and literally rose from the dead". In other words, by my outsider's understanding of Christianity, she is not a Christian.

I don't see why I would have to be a Christian in order to enjoy the various good ways in which Christianity changed Western Civilization. There is no contradiction when a man enjoys the fruits of democracy without also adopting an ancient Athenian's entire political worldview. It is fine to take the good things from Christianity but ignore the rest. Indeed, just as modern democracy is much more actually democratic than Athenian democracy, it is possible that we can figure out how to extend and improve on the benefits that Christianity brought to the West, but in a secular way. Indeed, I would say that this is already happening. In some ways modern secular societies are politically much more to my taste than the much more heavily Christian societies of, say, 100 years ago.

I guess she is saying that Western society needs some real spiritual belief to unite it against its enemies, but I don't see how one could manufacture such a belief on a mass scale and I don't think that it would be desirable even if one could. Part of what makes Western modernity good is the respect for truth as opposed to belief, and I think that adopting Christianity is in contradiction to this.

modern democracy is much more actually democratic than Athenian democracy

The Athenians took the word "democracy" to mean one thing, and modern Western politicians take it to mean [almost anything they want]. It's small-minded to claim one particular state of affairs is more "democratic" than another - very many political system can fairly lay claim to the term.

It's a defensible position to describe as "democratic" any that involves a reasonable number of people voting on what's to be done/whom to rule them.

Beyond those bare bones, it's like arguing which of Louisiana and Utah is the more American, or Pentecostalism and Anglicanism is the more Christian. Ie, a futile endeavour to rile up true believers

I am using the common notion of "more democratic" in which the larger a fraction of the population has the franchise, the more democratic the system is.

My understanding is that about 10-20% of ancient Athenians could vote, so by the common notion it was much less democratic than the modern US system, for example, in which maybe about 70-75% or so of the entire population can vote. I say about 70-75% based on some quick rough research about how many of the humans who live in the US are citizens older than 18, but I could be off a bit.

Would the USA be "more democratic" if toddlers could vote?

Obviously yes.

It wouldn’t be better, but it would be more democratic.

I guess she is saying that Western society needs some real spiritual belief to unite it against its enemies, but I don't see how one could manufacture such a belief on a mass scale

She doesn't think you can, which is why she abandoned secular humanism and New Atheism (which was very optimistic about how easy it is to do so). The point is to try to regenerate the old one. I think it's likely impossible too but it's a better bet.

Part of what makes Western modernity good is the respect for truth as opposed to belief

There're plenty of illusions in modern "rational" Western society too. Maybe it's pick your poison, because "a spectacularly unsuccessful Jewish agitator is looking out for you in heaven" as a belief system - at least the liberal version - is less worrisome than some of the secular nonsense I've seen.

Yeah, I'm not a Christian either but reading her article makes me go "Nicene Creed or GTFO..."

If New Atheism didn't die from Dawkins aging, Harris contracting terminal TDS, or Hitchens dying, this is certainly the final nail in the coffin.

Or it was never really alive as a "movement" in the first place. It was a bunch of people writing books at the same time.

It was a bunch of people writing books at the same time.

What's the difference between that and an intellectual movement?

A movement can start with a few people it has to have a living intellectual tradition or a way of life or unified purpose.

The New Atheists, in terms of beliefs, were not meaningfully separate from the ratskeps that preceded them/overlapped with them (is Matt Dillahunty a New Atheist?) and almost none of their stuff was really original nor did it create any sort of succeeding tradition imo. Atheism wasn't really even the central intellectual focus of most of them. Dawkins and Dennett had distinct and successful careers out of that and even Harris, who may have been the least prominent in his field before the association, admits he finds "atheism" a very limiting box. I don't think any of them have really engaged with any responses to them on the topic in further publications?

And, in terms of a movement to create a way of life, I don't know if I can say they utterly failed because they didn't really try. It's pretty telling that one of the moments of tension (Elevatorgate) led to an attempt to create a more substantive political philosophy for left-wing atheists and it didn't come from them.

Four people just happened to write books when the Anglo world was secularizing/dealing with 9/11 and so someone came up with a pithy title and then people tried to make it bigger than it is. Like if there were a couple of (very different) hot Indian directors and someone coined "New Bollywood" and everyone kept trying to make it more of a thing than it was. The BRICS of atheism.

Hmm, personally I think that sets too high a bar for constituting a "movement" at least in the intellectual or cultural sense. Sure, a handful of books doesn't constitute a political movement - for that you need crowds, voting, candidates (though note that this definition also means the "alt right", such as it ever was, was not a "movement") but I think the bar is different/lower for an intellectual or cultural movement.

It's a consistent cliché in intellectual history that some group strongly disavows belonging to a single movement, while then spending the next 200 years being taught and studied as one. French New Wave Cinema, the Vienna Circle, etc.

My suspicion is that, (if there are such things as essays and undergaduates a hundred years hence) a student writing in the future about how American religiosity collapsed to European levels in the first decades of the 21st century will mention "the new athiests". Before of course talking about the triumphant rise of Zensunni Catholocism in the 2030s, which fuelled the Butlerian Jihad.


What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats