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Notes -
Can you tell me what you're doing? Can you explain how the motte has helped you do it? Can you point to something you've learned by engaging with people who don't just disagree with you on "issues", but spend enormous effort trying to lie and manipulate you like certain users do? (you can guess who I mean)
Just give me some hope there's a meaning in any of this. Because I read your "moment of crisis," and you were right about all of it. Everyone who said you were wrong or exaggerating was proven to be lying just because they didn't want you to take action.
Building a family. Having kids, building a good marriage with my wife, doing what I can to make us as secure in the future as possible.
Helping to build up my extended family. Trying to build good relationships with my nieces and nephews. I am pretty well established as the cool uncle, and I'm trying to leverage that to have a significant and positive impact on their lives.
Cementing myself into my community. For me, this mainly means church, and my friends from church.
Building my relationship with God, so that I have something firm to stand on regardless of what else happens, and thus avoid madness.
Beyond that, acquiring wealth, resources, tools. Learning skills, trying to improve the skills my career is built on.
Beyond that, I've made a hobby of weapons development. My goal is to contribute to the general thrust laid out by Defense Distributed, to make gun control entirely impossible by developing methods for manufacturing effective weapons out of uncontrollable materials. This has worked well enough for me and for others that it has entirely shifted my view of the 2A debate from "we have to fight or they'll beat us" to "they have zero conception of how utterly fucked their entire project is." There's multiple entire branches of strategy people haven't even considered tapping yet, ripe for the picking, from stuff that's just immediately delightful for gun culture types to stuff that I don't talk about because I think doing so would be legitimately dangerous. The mainstream debate and the structures attempting to enforce the issues are so far out of touch with the realities of the situation that their ignorance is probably actively dangerous to our society's continued function.
Having a hobby on this end also exposes me to the activist element of the gun culture, which is doing very, very well for itself in a quite hostile environment. The level of contempt they inculcate for federal authorities and for the Blue machine generally is always heartening to see.
The motte has, I think, helped me understand the Culture War, and perhaps more importantly, has helped me achieve a number of philosophical insights that have helped me better understand and accept the realities of life generally. These enable me to engage with the culture war with a great deal more equanimity than I used to possess. I am pretty sure I have a fair idea of where this is all going, which cuts out a lot of the worry and has allowed me to think through, precommit on, and make peace with some of the more bitter aspects during moments of calm. This is greatly preferable to attempting to do so in the heat of the moment.
There's more to say here, but it is very late, and I am very tired. Perhaps later.
And it is not about gun issue alone. The best and brightest's understanding of crucial science, technology, energy, military, health, environment etc. issues is on the same level. Evil masterminds exist only in movies and comic books.
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