StJohnOfPatmos
10hr ago
I wouldn't underestimate the rough parts of the white working class
Is the murderer in Adolescence supposed to be working class? I haven't watched it but the kid looks clearly middle-class coded, he doesn't have a working class affect or style of dress at all.
Regardless, it's somewhat silly to say "look, poor whites can be scum too" when that's never really been denied by anyone and when current violence increases and specific types of crime are almost exclusively linked to Peckham, Brixton and Birmingham and other areas with a specific demographic profile. Acid attacks are not being committed by white working class boys, nor is it white working class culture that promotes music and culture glorifying stabbing your rivals to death and posting it on social media to gloat about.
We also already have ample media about white working class criminality and violence - This is England, Peaky Blinders, all of Guy Ritchie's filmography, etc. so it's not like there's some kind of awareness being raised.
StJohnOfPatmos
10hr ago
Yes I agree, I was oversimplifying for sure.
It's interesting to note how since the dawn of settled civilisation, there has been a clear understanding of the reciprocal nature of rights and responsibilities - you can't vote unless you serve in the Athenian army, you can't pursue a career as a Roman magistrate without financing public infrastructure, you can't hold a title of nobility unless you also physically fight on the battlefield when the king summons you to, etc.
Liberalism's lean into universalist perspectives on societies and the nature of civic cohesion completely shattered this extremely meaningful relationship of the individual to the collective - the very last gasp of this traditional understanding of civics might have been JFK's "ask what you can do for your country". Today, one can demand all rights with zero corresponding responsibilities - like the left-wing/communist alliance here in Vienna demanding full voting rights for any adult who lives here - no matter if they are citizens, net contributors to the welfare state, or if they can even speak German. They of course don't remotely understanding how this would be the deathknell of any kind of civic mindset and would rapidly push society into the same tribal ingroupings based on family, clan, ethnicity and faith that have dominated virtually all societies on Earth outside of highly structured civilisations.
StJohnOfPatmos
11hr ago
The foundational lines of thought behind 19th century patriarchal paternalism and modern feminism are closely linked since they are both inherently bourgeois philosophies that emerged among the upper segments of wealthy, educated society as a reaction to social upheaval from the lower classes - patriarchs wanted to preserve their class standing by limiting bourgeois female interaction with the plebs, while early feminists saw early signs of social mobility and were so outraged at the thought that a man of a lower social status could have the right to vote that they concluded "we need a bourgeois chauvinism but for the girls". Look at some of the earliest suffrage posters and pamphlets - they all engage in a degree of extreme classism that we would consider almost anarcho-capitalist today.
The outcomes only differ in the sense that both have an opposing foregone conclusion - patriarchy highlights women's deficiencies and concludes "hence, men should be in charge", while feminism highlights women's deficiencies and concludes "hence, women should be in charge". The step-by-step thought processes are remarkably similar.
StJohnOfPatmos
12hr ago
That's exactly why there is shock factor. It does happen though just infrequently.
The entire premise of the show and it's deranged state-led promotion by the UK government is specifically and explicitly axed around the depicted story being part of a "wider epidemic", at no moment whatsoever is the public treatment of it related to how "infrequent" such events are. There is no shock factor at play aside from the simulated shock of "behind every sweet white boy is a deranged sexist murderer" - which is of course demonstrably false.
StJohnOfPatmos
12hr ago
One of the unspoken pillars of feminist thought is that members of the female sex are perpetual children and members of the male sex are perpetual adults, with corresponding levels of responsibility and agency. Of course, this is systematically denied by feminists (aside from rare gems like Paglia), but is self-evident in the practical outcomes of their ideology.
The treatment we received as 10-year old boys in school after having roughhoused around a bit or done harmless pranks was always extremely stern and guilt-laden - compared to female college students have hysterical breakdowns and being coddled in manners virtually indistinguishable from how you treat crying toddlers.
StJohnOfPatmos
12hr ago
I actually think the very fact that they're brute-forcing the show into Parliamentary discussions and mandatory school screenings shows how little juice they've got left and how frightfully they are clinging on to whatever avenues of power they still have a monopoly on. The worlds of legacy entertainment and education are some of the strongest bastions of the liberal project, so they're tripling down on that power because they can feel it vanishing elsewhere.
If one has an anti-liberal stake in the culture war, one can actually only welcome this move - mandatory school screenings of anti-white male propaganda will only further alienate and enrage British boys, further teaching them that liberal project sees them as potential murderers who are guilty until proven innocent. If I were a double agent nestled within Starmer's cabinet, but secretly working for the Reform Party, this is exactly the kind of "let's pour oil onto the fire" move that I would suggest in order to guarantee that any British man under 30 feels permanently alienated from the Labour party.
StJohnOfPatmos
1d ago
The funding comes from member states. If Germany doesn't play along with Brussels, it's Brussels that's in danger, not the other way around.
StJohnOfPatmos
2d ago
Yes, I think EU leadership is banking on kicking the can down the road by all means in the hope that some Covid-level event will resurge and they can resurrect the police state atmosphere of the lockdowns, rallying society behind them by means of alarmism and fear. This is probably also a central function of their warmongering towards Russia - creating a siege mentality in which large swaths of the political spectrum can be labeled treasonous and banished from open discourse, probably even moving towards arrests, party bans and other forms of persecution by use of emergency powers if it really gets to the point where EU soldiers are deployed to Ukraine.
I think I'm marginally less blackpilled than you concerning demographics, the true tipping point for most Western European countries is probably still 3-4 decades away from now, which is a lot of time for upsets and shifts to happen. The EU really is a paper tiger when it comes to actually enforcing it's own internal laws, if major countries decide to opt out from certain treaties and pacts like the Dublin Agreement, there is functionally nothing Brussels can do aside from rhetorical scolding - it's not like they can send policemen to arrest Denmark's cabinet or Victor Orban. Since the Great Recession and the ensuing Eurocrisis, the EU has mainly been surviving based off of Germany's economic dominance and its internal long-lasting political dominance by status quo oriented establishment parties like the SPD and CDU. Now that these certainties are fracturing, I don't find it difficult to envision a completely neutered EU that increasingly behaves like the League of Nations, proclaiming edicts that no one feels any pressure to follow anymore since there's no actual punishment for transgressing them.
This is, of course, a cautiously optimistic view that banks on certain key elements of the democratic process being maintained and allowing for far-right victories to happen.
StJohnOfPatmos
2d ago
EU Leadership is playing with fire and still does not want to see the writing on the wall - the genie on anti-liberal politics has been let out of the bottle and is no longer just tethered to charismatic individual politicians who can galvanise a few percent of electors at the margins of society. 3 decades ago, it needed extremely adept figures within far-right parties to elevate their results to national relevance, like Jörg Haider in Austria. Today, just being the designated "anti-system" party nets you an instant 10-20% of voters across Europe. Their support has at this point very little to do with personality cults (which was what carried figures like Haider or Jean-Marie Le Pen back in the good old days) and is almost entirely axed around concrete policy goals and fundamental mistrust towards the establishment.
While Marine Le Pen is certainly upset about the verdict essentially being a judicial coup depriving her of a very probable presidential victory, I doubt the atmosphere within the RN as a whole is beset with gloom and defeatism at the moment. They are by now the largest single political party in France both in polling and in parliamentary representation, the most popular with the working class by far, are making massive inroads into the rural vote to take advantage of a fractured and exhausted centre-right, and are competitive with the far-left for capturing the youth vote. Compared to their predicament just a decade ago (when they were already surging heavily), the Rassemblement National has become a well-oiled machine with legions of young recruits hailing from increasingly polite and respectable backgrounds - a massive long-term lifeline for parties that traditionally were forced to recruit their party apparatchiks from dubious backgrounds due to a lack of "normal" people wanting to be seen alongside neo-nazis and such. Successor figures like Jordan Bardella are the targets of unrelenting mockery and derision by the French Left, yet they underestimate that despite his relative inexperience and lack of political seasoning, he still polls considerably higher in popularity than both Macron and Mélenchon - and was able to convince 37% of voters to support his party in this past summer's parliamentary election.
https://fr.statista.com/statistiques/1473435/cote-taux-popularite-jordan-bardella/
https://fr.statista.com/statistiques/1473510/cote-taux-popularite-jean-luc-melenchon/
All in all, I doubt this verdict will have the intended result of meaningfully weakening the European far-right; rather, it will just be another stepping stone in the polarisation of our societies, yet another heightening of the liberal project's progressively undeniable internal contradictions, bringing us yet another inch closer to the precipice - when will we jump?
StJohnOfPatmos
7d ago
"Wollt ihr den totalen Krieg?" - Robert Habeck, 2025
Jokes aside, I think you're right that there will be more escalation and use of dirty tricks and institutional malpractice - Romania seems to be the EU's current testing ground for how openly they can get away with an outright, unambiguous coup d'état. It feels very Weimarian in the sense that not even the liberal order really believes in liberalism (separation of powers, due process, free and fair elections) anymore, just maintaining power by increasingly draconian means.
Whether violence will ramp up to the level you predict remains to be seen, I think the liberal establishment can influence these things semi-indirectly by just bombarding the population with alarmism and moral hysteria until some of the more deranged and disaffected listeners decide they need to get on the right side of History by stabbing an AfD politician (this is essentially already happening since a while and seems like the only logical conclusion of the "Nie wieder!" sloganeering anyway) - is the endpoint of all this civil war?
StJohnOfPatmos
7d ago
You can take a kind of functionalist position and say that Democratic politicians are what they do, and so in 2020 they were radical trans ideologues. Sure.
Honest question : how else would you qualify someone's politics, other than by their voluntary political actions?
StJohnOfPatmos
7d ago
There's a perception that Democratic politicians are particularly fringe or loony with respect to trans issues or immigration and in general they're not.
Maybe on a personal level, but as political figures, there was and largely still is an absolute consensus within the Democratic party on these issues or at least the supposed core beliefs underlying them. The fact that there is a diversity hire Supreme Court Justice who was literally unable to define the word "woman" during her Senate hearings and was voted in unanimously by the Democrats should attest to this. I'm sure quite a few Senators privately think she's a moron, but their political actions are what determines their politics, not what might be whispered behind closed doors.
But for Americans who personally know racists or look on social media and see examples of politicians who are overtly racist it's uniformly Republicans.
If you define racism as "being resentful of black people", sure. But if I consider racism as any undue or malicious injection of race as a marker of superiority or inferiority as pertaining to a political issue, it's most certainly been the left-liberal wing of the spectrum that's by far the most common offender. I actually remember very little hostile discussions of race in Western politics growing up - there was a kind of consensus that fixating on race was low-class skinhead behaviour and that the most one should do is be courteous and non-judgemental. Every now and then you'd get a "George Bush doesn't care about black people" moment, but those seemed more like rebellious provocations and tabloid scandals than any kind of real societal divide. Here in Europe, the big topic around race 15+ years ago was football fans making monkey noises when black players of the opposing team were on the field - again, condemned as low class, provincial behaviour mainly driven by stupidity and a lack of education rather than any kind of malice or "institutional oppression".
StJohnOfPatmos
7d ago
I agree with everything you say, but it seems obvious that this entire liberal consensus perspective and method of curtailing dissent hinges on having a critical mass of support - you downplay the electorate's power in this process, and I agree that institutions are the bigger players here, but there are still points of contact between the two. Think of the absolute fiasco for the progressive project that happened when those Ivy League Deans - all women who were very obviously hired for diversity points and were completely unable to handle the gravity of the situation - were questioned by Congress and unable to deny even the most outrageous accusations against the campus culture they fostered because the institutional jargon they use to defend it only worsens their case in the eyes of the public.
A Dean of Harvard getting easily out-dribbled rhetorically by some Republican congresswoman seemed unthinkable even 15 years ago (or maybe I just have rose-tinted glasses of the Democratic coalition before Obama), but the liberal project has allowed their own echo chamber to become so narrow and restrictive that they have no idea how stupid and hypocritical they sound to anyone outside of it - all while doing all in their power to push as many people out of said space as possible. There's also just been a massive cratering in terms of intellectual standards, which I guess was to be expected of any environment that punishes skepticism.
Regardless, Trump's rather decisive re-election (and it's equally significant flip side, the electorate's clear disapproval of Kamala Harris) should have been the writing on the wall for how useless this style of politics has become - the liberal establishment still has a lot of strings it can pull, but these strings are increasingly being stress-tested, dismantled, and in some cases, outright disregarded by the current administration. By keeping up this arrogant and deliberately antagonistic style, the establishment seems to be heading for a scorched Earth policy rather than any serious attempt to recapture their lost electorate - how long will it last?
StJohnOfPatmos
7d ago
I think I should have been more specific - I'm not really talking about wokeness or cancel culture as it's existed in the past decade per se, I agree that's it's on a downward trend and that many people are now much more comfortable with opting out of progressive discourse or openly critiquing it. Especially today, "cancelling" someone carries much less weight than it did years ago, because there's now a massive contingency of the population that considers being "anti-woke" as it's own social identity and relishes in provoking and triggering the progressive project. You can quite literally make a career off being cancelled today, and the only ones who seem to truly suffer from cancellation anymore are left-liberal people enmeshed in progressive media and activism (which in turn gives the anti-woke crowd even more incentive to keep the siege atmosphere within the Left going and watch them tear each other apart).
What I'm trying to get at feels more like a kind of bitterness or "lashing out" of the liberal project towards its supposed own subjects. The pretence of being a self-justified, End of History blueprint for civilisation that wins based on the superior civic and economic model it offers compared to the dark and tyrannical systems of "the past" seems to be evaporating - all they still offer is the rhetorical comfort of being on "the good side" and how this fulfils some supposed higher historical purpose. They no longer have a believable hegemony in assuring a high standard of living, personal liberties (I think they truly do not understand how much of an anti-system awakening the pandemic was for many people), or embodying the will of the people (Migration being the most obvious case, but also Von der Leyen being weaselled into the leadership of the EU despite not being on the ballot) - so being on "the good side" seems to have next to zero actual advantages aside from validating bourgeois sensibilities and assuring you'll be invited to the next dinner party.
StJohnOfPatmos
7d ago
I agree to an extent. I've had many discussions specifically around Ukraine where even non-opinionated mentions of basic facts - like how the country has always had an extreme cultural and political rift between it's Western and Eastern regions - will garner accusations of relativising Putin or "playing into his hands".
I think you're right in the sense that the subtext is always "you don't want to be on that side, outside of polite society, do you now?" Unfortunately for them, this kind of threat of social exclusion only really works if you want to be socially included to begin with, and if the power relations are sufficiently one-sided. But why would I want to be included in a social paradigm that treats me as lesser and deserving of retribution for my gender and skin colour, all while failing to deliver on the basic quality-of-life promises of it's post-war social contract? At least pre-Trump and wokeness, there was one clear side of the sociopolitical spectrum that was cooler, younger, made better art, etc. none of which is really the case anymore.
I'm very curious to see how this continues - already, the AFD is inching towards overtaking the CDU in the polls and becoming the largest party in Germany, at which point virtually every single major player in the EU (not counting Spain since it's irrelevant) will have far-right electorates. The fever must break at some point, right? Or is the doubling-down going to turn into a tripling-down?
StJohnOfPatmos
7d ago
Here in Europe, I actually think it’s worse than ever. Maybe it’s the war atmosphere our media and elite are desperate to drum up.
I'm increasingly fascinated by how counter-productive the current modus operandi of political discourse within the Left and Liberal wings of Western society has become.
When in a political discussion, I try to rarely make sloganeering arguments - very few buzzwords, no contentious examples, generally attempting to keep a big picture in mind, clearly distinguishing between what I believe to be a core principle and what I think could be a likely hypothesis, etc. Of course I sometimes take the bait or let spite and Schadenfreude get the better of me, but generally I think I'm pretty good at discussing politics and have been able to have nice and constructive conversations with people across the political spectrum : I think it's precisely because of the rather tentative way I go about defending or questioning ideas that the discussions almost always conclude on a cordial tone, completely irrespective of how close we are ideologically or if anyone involved was really convinced of the other's perspective.
It has long been remarked that the Left has an issue with both internal and external discourse, pushing for alienating purity tests and distorting supposedly open discussions into show trials the moment an unsavoury subtext or implication can be gleaned from the other's words - no matter how minor or semantic. From a Marxist-Leninist perspective, this makes some sense to me as an internal approach to maintain ideological unity - it has a martial aspect to it that places a very high value on cohesion and loyalty, exactly what you want from an organised Vanguard movement waiting to strike. As an external form of discussion geared towards convincing the public at large or gaining new recruits to your cause, it's obviously abysmal and essentially filters out normal people in record speed.
As a former Marxist-Leninist myself, who was in such a "Vanguard party" in my home of Austria way back during Obama's second term/Trump's first years in office (and who now, over a decade later, feels more sympathy for Mussolini than Lenin), it's been interesting to see how this internal form of discourse (which I guess we now would call wokeism or cancel culture) has also completely taken over any approach to external messaging and discussing. When I was in a Marxist org over a decade ago, we would go to worker's clubs, employee's strikes, union meetings and such in the hope of recruiting or latently indoctrinating the working-class there. The explicit modus operandi that we were taught and regularly coached on was to insist on opinions of theirs that were bauchlinks - "left-wing by gut feeling", essentially. Even though by the mid 2010's most working-class people in Austria outside of some flagship unions were already comfortably captured by the far-right, we spoke to them exclusively through the lens of what we could agree on, not what they were wrong about believing. Of course, this made for a lot of friendly conversations and momentary feelings of having made progress. But in the end, these actions had next to zero effect since most of the Marxist org members were bourgeois students slobs and therefore neither trusted nor taken seriously by the workers, and we really didn't have a good answer on immigration and the refugee crisis (since we were wrong on this issue, as the Left still is today).
Still, this approach to engaging a political conversation seemed to me productive and understanding of how politics functions - you need to get people on your side. That's easier when you make them feel like you and they already believe alot of the same things.
I won't belabour how much cancel culture et all has ruined the Left and tarnished its public image - we all know. What's more interesting to me is that even among less overtly woke or even moderate/conservative liberals, there is a growing attitude of guilt by association and implication - and a pleasure to brand someone as far-right, a nazi, a "populist", especially if said person has any kind of public presence and influence. We see this across the UK, Germany, Austria, especially when it comes to Trump or Ukraine. It's practical effect is essentially them saying "please see yourself as our political opposition and consider yourself excluded from our political project" - the exact opposite of what you want to achieve in a political discussion! Joe Rogan has of course become the archetypal example of this. The list of influential people who became right-wingers because one side of the political spectrum welcomed them with few strings attached and the other told them they were irredeemable and devoid of decency is long and growing.
What's the idea behind this kind of discourse? It seems so alien to any kind of strategic understanding of politics and campaigning to me, especially now when the liberal order is more vulnerable than ever. Are they still this oblivious to the disillusionment and loss of trust in institutions that is well entrenched in Western society today? Is it some kind of some kind of moral self-validation first and foremost? Where does this desire to grow your own political opposition come from?
StJohnOfPatmos
20d ago
I think it's mainly over-diagnosis and excessively pathologising certain behaviour. Also parents don't want to turn down any kind of extra support they feel they are receiving.
StJohnOfPatmos
22d ago
Yeah that one might be a reach, but I'm sure we can find a more fitting example elsewhere in the Arthurian Romance
StJohnOfPatmos
22d ago
And the men that did engage in this were mostly fathers with daughters, not single men in the current sense of the word
As a matter of fact, single men were always a clear danger to traditional patriarchal conventions for the precise reason that their singlehood made them more willing and eager to break oppressive etiquette around courtship and partnering (both fathers approving, several months of courtship in the presence of chaperones, no sex before the marriage was contractually finalised and the wedding held, etc.) in order to gain immediate sexual access to a woman.
We have largely forgotten this today, but young men as a whole were systematically more socially liberal than young women well into the late 20th century! It's kind of obvious as to why : the father of a young woman at least theoretically cares about her wellbeing as his own kin, whereas the young man cares about getting in her pants and seeing how he feels the next morning.
Western literature is so chock-full of this that "single man transgresses patriarchal rule in order to bed woman" is basically a central, foundational trope of the Western canon :
- Iliad
- Romeo & Julia
- Faust
- Exodus 22 : 16 specifically highlights this situation and gives a legal obligation on it, implying it was common enough to require a one-size-fits-all law
- Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Those are just off the top of my head, I'm pretty sure the Decamerone and the Divine Comedy also have instances of this.
StJohnOfPatmos
27d ago
I agree with this, and it matches my experience with Arab immigrants - especially the younger refugees - very well, having lived in Paris and now in Vienna. Especially in France, there was a constant sense of indignation among them and the word "disrespect" was used liberally whenever any entitlement didn't materialise. (By far the most outrageous recurrent example of this was them rudely approaching girls to hit on, and when told there was no interest, claiming they were disrespectful - a hilarious inversion of what was going on).
This begs the question - why would they even come here if they are so supremely sensitive and accept nothing but total slavish obsequiousness from the side of the state and population? I have trouble forming a theory of mind for these people, there seems to be a total lack of reflection around the most basic elements of social organisation : why would someone who doesn't work and lives off of foreign countries' welfare systems be respected? How can one perceive oneself as "strong, virile, powerful" after leaving behind one's homeland and sheepishly fabricating stories of persecution (i.e., being a weak victim) in order to gain asylum? Is it all just downstream from an extreme mix of chauvinism and anti-intellectualism?
StJohnOfPatmos
28d ago
You're right, I overreacted - not offended, just kinda stunned. My bad.
I'm now also a bit confused since you're talking about the doctor who committed the Magdeburg attack, when that doesn't at all match the category I was describing - he was from a middle class Saudi Arabian background and definitely not receiving welfare. On the surface he's literally a model migrant - proudly secular, professionally educated and employed, clean record, etc. He also arrived in Germany by legal means long before the 2015 refugee crisis. What I was referring to are the vast bulk of uneducated, often rural refugees who enter illegally and then claim asylum in order to be allowed indefinite stay and financial assistance.
StJohnOfPatmos
28d ago
I know plenty of pothead layabouts here in Vienna that are chronically unemployed and while they aren't super happy with themselves, they definitely enjoy the subsidised social housing and the welfare checks that allow them to live like perpetual college students without having to work. I really don't see Middle Eastern culture as having a "provider masculinity" at all - its a culture infamous for creating failsons, momma's boys and general worthless biomass that just lingers and mills about aimlessly in public squares. The idea that an Afghan asylum seeker only values what he "achieved through hard work" is an insane projection of your post-Protestant American work ethic on a culture that largely runs on family clan handouts and being the right person's nephew. How one can see an ingrained value for hard work in some of the most nepotistic and unproductive societies on Earth confuses me - why do you think they came to Europe in the first place, if for not free shit?
StJohnOfPatmos
28d ago
There were explosive devices in his car that were supposed to render his body unidentifiable
Where are you reading this? Skimming German newspapers gives me nothing on explosives. Also the idea that his body would be unidentifiable to the point where no one could conclusively claim his identity is ridicoulous, and not how forensics nor modern surveillance technology operates. And the biggest question - who committed this false flag? State powers? The AfD? Right AFTER an election when it will have minimal impact? I'm not buying it.
I don't know if it's all that dominant on the right but one does come across quite a few "man up and do whatever your wife says like a REAL ALPHA would" takes from conservative media figures - they are right about men needing to accept that they are the foundation of responsibility and economic provision within family and society at large, but fail to understand that without corresponding power and rights, this just becomes a form of indentured servitude in which you're supposed to grin and bear any humiliation.
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