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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 11, 2024

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An obscure figure from the old Alt Right takes the Hanania Pill.

The main reason I am posting this is not that, but to highlight his insider's history of the 2015-2017 era Alt Right which makes up much of an accompanying article.

1: Hanania's apparent survival of cancellation for past extremism via telling his story and disavowing his most extreme past views may have been quietly influential. This is the 2nd guy I've seen do it without even being forced to by exposure.

2: This guy claims to have been a quietly very influential figure and tells a story where his actions had a very outsized effect on the world. Maybe truly, maybe not. But his general account of events besides his own part in them is an insider's history of that much-mythologized period of the Alt Right, which was very influential and did have have a very outsized effect on the world, and his account seems to be a reasonably well-calibrated explanation of how their influence rippled into events.

Ultimately, the author appears most affected by how his hopes/expectations wrote a check that reality couldn’t cash when it comes to living in red-state country, especially for dating. This is something often seen in men who travel abroad looking for love/sex, but leaving disappointed that they only seem to attract bargirls and prostitutes—or nothing at all (or worse, they leave blissfully unaware that their “girlfriend” is but a bargirl or prostitute).

Sure, your greater wealth, worldliness, credentials, and especially height (in the international traveling case) will give you a leg-up upon the local men when it comes to female hypergamy and polygyny. Your status as an outsider might even stir up some additional curiosity and intrigue. However, girls will be coy and passive regardless of locale, so you must put in the… leg-work. The local girls, particularly the attractive ones, much less the ones who are both attractive and chaste, will hardly line-up to suck your dick and join your harem upon your arrival like a more explicit Axe commercial.

However, I give props to the author for putting his money where his mouth was, and giving it a go at living in red state country (at least for two years). Some other thoughts:

We’ve also passed Peak Woke, and cancel culture is on its last legs.

Yes, and Hunter/Trump will surely go to prison this time.

It turns out safety is mostly achieved by cultivating a boring and risk-averse culture optimized to meet the needs of smallminded and gossipy people who get don’t get excited about much other than college sports and weddings.

Former White Nationalist reinvents the hustle and bustle meme.

And the people who rise to the top of the food chain are never quite as inspirational as they are in places where things are actually happening. They stop being sharp or hungry really early on in life—it’s like they universally have “big fish in a small pond” energy. They work hard until they can coast off a sinecure, at which point they become totally unremarkable and function on autopilot for the rest of their life.

Well yeah, working hard until one can coast off a sinecure is a large motivation for working hard in the first place. Hence #fatFIRE, #chubbyFIRE and whatnot, all the way down to #leanFIRE and/or gasp a normal retirement (the horror).

Of course this revelation won’t come easy to an inexperienced young buck who’s only been with a handful of women. That hipster chick’s tattoos or stripper past or body count of 17 will likely intimidate you. But once you’re nearing 30 and have come into your own as a man, the same girl will seem an ingenue compared to your own triple digit past, while the churchy trad girls you once idealized as innocent little angels will instead seem like frigid judgmental viragoes who could never understand you.

This reeks like cope. Or perhaps: as you amass more sexual and life experiences, you cherish and appreciate the churchy trad girls all the more, and the thought of wifing up a tattoo’d hipster, former stripper, or a girl with a body count of 17 fills you with all the more disgust as your options widen and your desperation decreases.

In fact, many of them seemed hostile toward the very idea of someone moving around in the first place. When I first arrived a lot of people were genuinely incredulous that someone from another state would ever choose to live there, and thus regarded me with suspicion. Midwesterners seem not to like people who move. Many of my new social circle had never lived outside their immediate area and still were geographically very close to their parents.

*shocked pikachu*. People who are self-selected temperamentally and/or perhaps genetically to prefer their way of life and staying amongst themselves, and regard interloping outsiders with suspicion. Someone hasn’t read their Cochran and Harpending on the Amish.

To put it bluntly, most of my White neighbors and coworkers basically resembled hobbits. They had no ambition to them, nor any aspirations of greatness. Nor did they think about the world in a dynamic way—the more educated among them certainly stayed informed about the wider world, but they largely took it for granted that their immediate universe was a static place where nothing would ever happen.

Don’t these stupid midwestern hobbits know how much better life would be with elves telling them what to do and orcs providing some vibrancy?

Agreed, though, that a lot of white Americans are kind of like hobbits, in their lack of antibodies against general blank slatism, outgroup preferences, and progressive American culture. They might make a stink face at the young white male cosmopolitan who arrives in town for an extended study abroad program, but will root for outsiders and people that hate them when it comes to college football/basketball, the NFL, the NBA. Quokka would be the rationalist sphere term of art, here. “Cucks” might even apply. Relatedly, this has been touched upon in the Norf FC series of memes with regard to whites on the other side of the pond.

This is something often seen in men who travel abroad looking for love/sex, but leaving disappointed that they only seem to attract bargirls and prostitutes—or nothing at all

Another black pill; if you can't make it "here" (wherever that is), you can't make it anywhere; moving or traveling just means your failures move or travel with you.

This is true to an extent but sometimes it really is just the place. Personally every big move in my life has changed things up a lot (sometimes better sometimes worse).