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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 4, 2024

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I wanted to write about the WPATH leaks: the cancers and the shrinks debating over how many of a 12 year old's "multiple personalities" need to be transsexual before they should give them hormones and surgery.

I wanted to write about a woman I know who just got a $90,000 government grant for her instagram hobby farm, alongside hundreds of other fake businesses like "the Black farmers collective." Taxpayers gave her more money than her business will ever have in revenue to play upper-middle-class status games while the few remaining real farmers around her are going out of business.

I wanted to write about watching my friend once again change all the grocery store tags because prices keep skyrocketing as talking heads insist we're imagining it all and everyone's actually getting super rich.

I wanted to write about my state banning non-"cage free" eggs and claiming it won't increase prices... because they negotiated a kickback deal with the remaining suppliers to eat the cost until after the '24 election, after which they can harvest their monopoly rents and some lobby group can release an official report claiming the price increases were unrelated.

I wanted to write about how my state house just banned natural gas hookups and enabled pressuring companies to drop service to existing customers.

I wanted to write about the people chanting "glory to the martyrs by any means necessary" while insisting nobody could possibly suspect them of supporting Hamas, with every leftist somehow getting an identical memo about how to provide cover for them.

But what's the point? Seriously, why even talk about this just to get gaslit by the people who are celebrating it at the same time as denying it's happening?
You could spend your entire life writing tens of thousands of words explaining and analyzing this insanity, and all it does it give the perpetrators the satisfaction of gloating about getting away with it.

What are we even doing here? Are we just going to keep doing it forever as the country goes completely insane?
Why? What possible good will it do? Is this whole place just a safety release valve to stop any pressure building up against the overton window slamming left faster than the eye can see?

Does anyone actually get any pleasure out of this? Does anyone think it's doing any good? Can anyone point to an example of it doing any good in the past? Has culture war discussion on the motte ever actually led to anyone solving culture war problems? The closest thing I can come up with are TracingWoodgrain's exposés, which while incredible have hardly moved the needle on public awareness.

Virtually all the energy expended here seems to be vented straight into the void, almost like it's deliberately set up to do so, keeping people arguing in circles until it's too late to do anything about it. And it's been going on for over a decade! When will it stop?

Edit:
I hope this example might get across what I mean. A few weeks ago I wasted time finding out about "multiplicity" (the new social contagion of kids who spend too much time on discord deciding they're all "plural systems" of different personalities). Did a bunch of research, got on a bunch of discords that use the "pluralkit" plugin, found examples of psychologists taking it seriously, started writing a post.
It turned out Gattsuru was already talking about it last year like it was just a normal thing that normies will learn to accept soon.
Yesterday we found out a bunch of WPATH associates all treat it like a legitimate and uncontroversial diagnosis that lots of their "trans kids" mysteriously have. It hardly made a splash in the news. Pretty soon people will be mocking anyone who cares about it.

I realized that any discussion I started on the motte would be pointless. It would just run the same circle of "noticing, denial, minimization, celebration, resigned acceptance" that literally all culture war events go through here.
What good would bringing it to anyone's attention do? Even the most bizarre event that would have been considered unimaginably stupid until the second it happens will just be rationalized away like it's no big deal.

But what's the point? Seriously, why even talk about this just to get gaslit by the people who are celebrating it at the same time as denying it's happening? You could spend your entire life writing tens of thousands of words explaining and analyzing this insanity, and all it does it give the perpetrators the satisfaction of gloating about getting away with it.

What are we even doing here? Are we just going to keep doing it forever as the country goes completely insane? Why? What possible good will it do? Is this whole place just a safety release valve to stop any pressure building up against the overton window slamming left faster than the eye can see?

Consider that in writing mindkilled screeds about how terrible everything is, you're probably part of the problem. Maybe engage in a bit of self-reflection. Consider compromise. Read the aspirational text at the top of the culture war thread. Do something that makes you happy. Touch grass?

More realistically, Trump gets elected, Republicans suddenly stop caring about deficit spending and cut taxes and voila - all of your problems are magically solved. Instead of crying about how bad everything is you'll be crowing about the liberal snowflakes losing their minds over Orange Man Bad and TDS.

Does anyone actually get any pleasure out of this? Does anyone think it's doing any good?

I used to. When the people like you were diluted by those who were well-meaning, who wanted to have actual conversations and maybe learn a thing or two from someone with a different perspective.

How about this? If you can manage to write a measured and polite post about any of the topics above, I'll respond in kind. If the though of trying to do that is so abhorrent, then maybe this isn't the place for you.

This, right here, is exactly the thing I was talking about.

My friend is feeding his new daughter on the free expired baby food he gets from his grocery store job, while this instagram play-farmer writes grants for more money than he makes in a year. And you think I need to "touch grass" if that bothers me, and that I'll suddenly stop caring if Trump is elected for some reason?

I don't believe your motivation for engaging is to discuss the culture war. I think you're waging it by manipulating people into passive acceptance.
How would you feel about writing a post about the WPATH leaks and letting other people respond to it, rather than the other way round? Would you be willing to try?

I don't believe your motivation for engaging is to discuss the culture war. I think you're waging it by manipulating people into passive acceptance.

I have spent a lot of time arguing with CPAR, and I assure you he is in fact here to discuss the culture war in good faith, and is not here to run a scam.

You are freewheeling. You have bitten off too large a chunk of the culture war to be chewed and swallowed, and you are metaphorically choking on it. What that looks like is a moment of crisis, where one is seized by the certainty that the present situation is absolutely intolerable, and that Something Must Be Done. I have experienced this myself, a number of times.

The Motte is not intended, nor is it fit, to Do Something. It does not exist to coordinate action, only discussion. The good the Motte has done is to allow people very different from each other to converse. That's it. It is not going to help your friend relying on expired baby food, nor is it going to deliver solutions to the problems you list in your OP. It never promised to, and was never intended to.

The horrors you are seeing are not new. Large segments of human experience have always been "intolerable", and despite this, have been tolerated by previous generations. Your great grandparents lived through a global economic collapse and trench warfare. The present situation is not even that bad, historically speaking, and we have so, so much further to fall.

The culture war is not going to stop soon. The part that has been going for a decade is only one battle; the actual war has been going at least since the 60s, and arguably since the 1600s. It is probably going to continue to impinge on your life and awareness in unpleasant ways for the rest of your life; if we are all very lucky, our children might potentially live to see the other side of it. You should attempt to make peace with that fact, because if you do not it is entirely possible that the culture war will drive you insane.

None of the above is an argument for quietism or surrender. There are many useful actions to take, many useful things to be done, many choices to be made, many strategies to pursue. It is, in fact, possible to Do Something, but it helps to have a clear idea of what one is trying to accomplish and what the actual effects of a given action are likely to be. Lashing out is not advisable, and is likely to be counterproductive. What the Motte can help with, for those with the patience to use it correctly, is to learn better about the realities of the situation, which makes productive action easier. I appreciate that this is not a satisfying answer, in an emotional sense. The truth rarely is.

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.

Can you tell me what you're doing?

  • 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.

Can you explain how the motte has helped you do it?

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.

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.

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.