Goodguy
10d ago
The US is self-sufficient in almost everything. It does not need to trade with China in order to remain a great power.
It has been a long time since I read Nietzsche in length, but from what I recall, I think it's worth noting that Nietzsche's ideas about slave and master morality were complex. On one level he despised slave morality, yet he also clearly saw its strength, its success at shaping values. What he called slave morality is the actual master morality of our time, and he knew it. He admired the power of Christian priests to overthrow the ancient world's moral order, their tremendous ability to transmute values within themselves and dominate the world with their new values like some sort of superhumans from a Dune novel. This somewhat echoes what @functor said below about how slave morality is an elite phenomenon.
The so-called slave morality is completely dominant in our time. I do not know about other parts of the world, but in the West is difficult to find anyone who is not genuinely mentally deranged and/or deeply ostracized by mainstream society who truly believes that it is good for the strong to dominate the weak - truly believes, not just as an fun intellectual exercise, a vice-signalling online grift, or a fetish. So-called slave morality completely penetrates both the left and the right in the West. This is why outside of a few online ranters with Greek statue avatars, who I'm not sure even actually believe in what they say and in real life are probably mostly very nerdy people who are either grifting or desperately trying to compensate for their lack of power in the real world, almost everyone on both the left and the right believes in the vision of the plucky oppressed rebels overthrowing the evil empire. The left and the right just disagree on who the rebels are, and who the empire is.
And this is not surprising. The left and the right grew up on the same movies, and popular movies are about plucky underdogs fighting evil empires. This moral framework has almost completely won. It utterly dominates our civilization, it shapes most people's consciousness on a deep level. The so-called master morality has been driven from the field and only survives as the suppressed shadow of the "slave" morality. The so-called "master" morality survives in hiding in obscure crevices of consciousness and among freaks and obvious sociopaths. It persists psychologically in the great appeal that antihero narratives have for moderns, the sex-and-violence Game of Thrones depictions of lustfully and openly wicked people which serve to still satisfy some of that ancient craving for master morality, a craving that likely cannot go away as long as humans remain human. This is also the reason why sociopathic gangsters are so popular in our media - the mafioso, the inner-city gangbanger, and so on. We still have a need to psychologically engage with "master" morality, but almost none of us actually believe in it on a deep level.
No politician can expect to win more than a small fraction of the public's support by running on a ticket of "it is good and beautiful that the strong dominate the weak". Even Adolf Hitler did not campaign politically on master morality, he campaigned on the notion that Germans were plucky underdogs who should overthrow the supposed oppressive evil empire of the Jews, the French, the British, the Bolsheviks and so on. In other words, even the most prominent far-right politician of the last 100 years ran his politics based on slave morality, on the same script of plucky rebels going up against an evil empire, not based on some sort of "master morality" appeal to the beauty of the savage and dominant aristocrat.
Wokism is a "slave morality" phenomenon, but as Nietzsche would have understood, it is also a master morality: it insists on its values, it revels in dominating its enemies, it seeks to conquer, it seeks to stamp its values on the entire world, it believes utterly in its right to rule and to destroy its enemies. Today's right-wing populism is also almost entirely a "slave morality" phenomenon just as much as wokism is. Outside of some narrow highly online circles, the modern right-wing populist does not believe that he has an aristocratic right to rule through strength and beauty. He believes that evil aristocrats have taken over society and that the "good people" have to fight against the "evil people" to overthrow their domination. Ironically, right-wing populism has not so much that masterful steel in its backbone that wokism does, it is not as much of a master morality. But then, it is young in its current open form. Modern right-wing populism is ideologically almost exactly the same as it was in the 90s, the difference is that now it has breached the containment walls of polite conservatism and escaped the online forums and small clusters of paleoconservative fandom to which it was largely confined in the 90s. So it is possible that right-wing populism, too, will at some point become more psychologically confident in itself. I don't really see it moving in that direction right now, but much can change very rapidly in politics. One thing I'm fairly sure about, though, is that it will not take the form of actual ancient-style master morality. If Hitler's political movement didn't, then it is extremely unlikely that any of today's right-wingers will do it.
Goodguy
18d ago
My take is that those who don't have to spend 9 months pregnant if they wish to perpetuate the species don't really have much right to complain about low fertility rates.
Goodguy
24d ago
I haven't watched the debate, so take this with a grain of salt.
I think it's easy to rhetorically defeat an opponent whose main argument against you is moral by simply rejecting his moral frame. So if Morgan was unprepared to focus on logical arguments instead of moral ones, that's incompetent of Morgan. I don't have Fuentes' level of quick rhetorical thinking and experience with public speaking, and I think even I could defeat a moralizing opponent in such a situation without too much trouble.
That said, I think that in the long term possible public support of Fuentes has a pretty hard cap, and he will find it difficult to ever truly turn his movement into something mainstream, so I'm not sure that these easy wins really amount to much in the grand scheme of things.
I don't think it's realistically possible to openly say that women should lose the right to vote and ever achieve any sort of dominant position in politics in a Western country. Women's suffrage is, barring a massive civilization-altering catastrophe of some sort or the kind of genuinely total demographic replacement that great replacement theory people worry about, never going to be repealed in the West in any sort of foreseeable future. And if Sharia law supporting Muslims become the majority in the US somehow, they're not going to support Fuentes types either, despite agreeing with them about women and Jews, and white groypers are not going to be happy in such a future.
At best, Fuentes can stay what he is now, a gadfly and proselytizer, maybe a relatively minor player in the entire right-wing coalition, but groyper influence in politics will not grow above a certain threshold.
Fuentes also, despite his quite formidable rhetorical abilities, has plenty of weaknesses that can be exploited by a competent opponent. He just hasn't gone up against one yet on any sort of big stage, at least as far as I know.
Goodguy
1mo ago
Say what you will about psychology, but if I submitted an essay based on Biblical inerrancy to a geology class, I would justifiably expect a low score.
That said, I haven't read the essay, and I should in order to really judge it based on anything other than what other people say about it. Also, in the context of the humanities at least, a 0 should probably rarely be given out for any essay that actually took effort to write. And the possible bias of the grader does matter.
Goodguy
1mo ago
No idea, but I imagine that I might get pretty angry if I helped US forces in a war zone but was then not immediately given US citizenship in return and instead had to spend years navigating asylum and visa application processes. This, even if I had never been promised citizenship, as this man of course was not, since I would feel slighted.
Goodguy
1mo ago
“There is a biochemical link between exposure to sunlight and sexual urges.. that’s why you have Latin lovers”
There might be something to this. My libido often goes way up if I spend time outside on a hot day, and it's not just because there are many scantily clad women walking around.
Goodguy
2mo ago
I'm just pointing out that I don't think erwgv3g34's statement is accurate. He did not specify anything about an age group when he claimed that the typical man disgusts the typical woman, etc.
Also, I'm not pressuring men to settle. I myself, for better or for worse, do not settle in this regard.
Is there a problem here for many men? Sure. But I don't think it's nearly as extreme as erwgv3g34 thinks it is.
Goodguy
2mo ago
The only way the average man gets laid on a regular basis if a woman is coerced into fucking him through some combination of physical force, legal authority, social pressure , religious indoctrination, and economic privation.
This is a big claim. Neither my anecdotal observation nor the data that I've seen supports it. According to this 2020 survey only 31% of US men are single. Now, out of the 69% of men who are not single, of course some fraction is partnered with women are either not having sex with them or are only having sex with them for reasons other than being attracted to them. I contend, based on anecdotal observation, that this fraction is not large. If you believe otherwise, perhaps you can put forward some data to support the claim.
However, no matter how large the fraction is, keep in mind that out of the US men who are single, there is also a fraction who would not be single if they lowered their standards.
Goodguy
2mo ago
That's just to be expected. Americans want more from their government than it provides and the party that controls the White House is the biggest symbol of the government, so in midterm elections it's more common for the party that controls the White House to lose than it is for it to win.
Goodguy
2mo ago
The causality here is tricky to figure out. Immigrants from ethnic backgrounds that are outside of the US mainstream have always, I think, tended to settle predominantly in urban areas, and urban areas are where most innovation happens.
Goodguy
2mo ago
Are the actual transcripts available somewhere, or do we only have Politico's excerpts and commentary?
From what I understand, Mussolini's fascism wasn't particularly racist by the standards of the time, at least not until his Italy had become utterly dependent on Nazi Germany during the war and he gave Hitler some racist policies as a concession.
I'm very far from an expert on Italian fascism, but to the extent that I know anything about it, to me it seems characterized by being a strongly collectivist nationalist ideology that is both a response to and a rejection of both capitalism and communism. This is reflected in Mussolini's own path of having been a socialist when younger, then turning away from mainstream socialism because he disliked its internationalism and was more interested in making Italy great again.
Perhaps the core concept of Italian fascism was the idea of using an extremely powerful nationalist state to overcome the conflict between capitalists and workers and forge both together into dynamic collaboration that could revitalize the nation without the total class upheaval or internationalism pursued by mainstream socialism.
Hitler pursued the same concept, and in that sense Nazi Germany was a fascist state. Both Mussolini's and Hitler's ideal was that the fascist party would become completely dominant over society and subordinate all other power groups - churches, capitalists, labor movements, intellectuals, etc. - to its own will. There could still be churches, capitalists, labor movements, and intellectuals, but they would be ruled by the party/the government (one and the same thing, in the fascist ideal). Any disagreements between those groups would be mediated by the government for the greater good of the nation, and the individual interests of the groups would not be allowed to interfere with the greater goal of making the nation strong.
The key ideological difference between fascism and Bolshevism was that fascism did not seek to do away with capitalism, only to utterly subordinate it to the government, and that fascism was explicitly nationalistic in a way that Bolshevism (while it often pursued nationalistic goals in practice) rejected thoroughly on the level of ideology.
Unlike traditionalist conservatism, fascism was also profoundly revolutionary in its ethos. It did not seek to conserve existing mentalities except to the degree that they would be pragmatically useful, it did not seek to return to a pre-modern way of being, it had little use for religion other than for pragmatic reasons, and it had no issues with technological progress. Like communism, it sought to create a new kind of man. It had totalizing ambitions. In the ideal fascist future, there would be no distinction between individuals, the party, and the state. In this perhaps it was influenced by the recent experience of total military mobilization during World War One. The fascist state perhaps sought a similar, but perpetual mobilization of all society in the service of the one goal of national strength, even in peacetime.
Another key characteristic of fascism was that it explicitly glorified struggle and conflict as a means of both spiritual and material renewal. Fascism considered peace to be a lower state of being and believed that man could only fully fulfill his potential in combat, whether literal or metaphorical. This is another key difference between fascism and communism. The professed ideal of communism was to bring about a new society in which class warfare had been overcome for the people's benefit. Communism glorified being a warrior for the sake of the cause, but the image of the ideal society that communism sold to people as its ultimate goal was a peaceful one. Fascism, on the other hand, considered war in itself to be a good thing, something that elevated and spiritually purified human beings. Communism, on the ideological level, claimed to seek to overcome social Darwinism. Fascism, on the other hand, considered social Darwinism to be inherently good - it just sought to reduce or at least master social Darwinism within the nation, in order to become better at social Darwinism in competition between nations.
There are various powerful political entities today that share some aspects of fascism, but none that I can think of really have the whole package.
The People's Republic of China shares fascism's characteristic of binding capitalists, workers, intellectuals and so on under an extremely powerful and nationalistic government that manages their conflicts for the supposed greater good. However, in its current form it does not actually have (although it might claim that it does) fascism's profoundly revolutionary ethos.
Trumpism also, to a much much lesser extent, shares the idea of binding capitalists, workers, intellectuals and so on under a strong nationalistic government that manages their conflicts for the supposed greater good and rejects both pure profit-seeking capitalism and the social upheaval of communism. Hence the ethos of right-wing populism, the tariffs, and so on. However, while Trumpism might in practice to some extent be collectivist, it does not explicitly glorify collectivism - on the contrary, no matter how collectivist some of its policies might be in practice, on the level of ideology (that is, on the level of the image that it seeks to convey) it actually glorifies individualism, or supposed individualism, and it glorifies small government no matter how much Trumpism in practice might actually strengthen the government. On the level of ideology, Trumpism promises to free society from the excesses of the left, not to subordinate individuals to an all-powerful state. The music of Trumpism also has strong notes of a desire to return to a supposedly better past. In this it differs from fascism. Fascism sought to make Italy great again, but just in the geopolitical, nationalist, and martial sense. In other words, it was nostalgic for the Roman Empire's martial ethos and geopolitical strength but as far as I know it did not want to return Italy to the social conditions of the Roman Empire, except insofar as the Roman Empire reflected its own goals of social strata united under a powerful state. Also, unlike fascism, Trumpism does not glorify endless combat and struggle. Trumpism instead claims that, with the problems caused by the left eliminated, society will just be nice and hunky-dory.
Goodguy
2mo ago
Materialist explanations are sufficient to explain how an entity can react to the environment and think, but it is not clear that they can explain subjective experience.
Goodguy
2mo ago
If Thiel is worried about a one-world state, I find it rather strange that he has worked closely with the US national security / intelligence apparatus, which out of all currently existing political entities is probably the one that is most likely to bring about a one-world state and indeed is constantly working to extend Washington DC's domination to every corner of a planet. Not that I think that the US national security / intelligence apparatus has any serious chance of bringing about a one-world state, but it's more likely to do it than any other political entity I can think of. Does Thiel think that he can get on this giant tiger's back and steer its direction?
As for science and atheism being incompatible, it really depends on what Thiel means by atheism. Science is certainly not incompatible with rejection of organized religions like Christianity and Islam. But one could make an argument that, because of the hard problem of consciousness, science is incompatible with dogmatic materialism/physicalism.
I wish I could see a full transcript, it's hard to come to any conclusions without one.
Goodguy
2mo ago
I think the cost of plane tickets back in the day is exaggerated. Based on my reading, I think they were about 10 times more expensive than the most budget airline deals of today, but still affordable for the average upper middle class person. In the early 70s you would have paid the equivalent of about $1000-$1500 in today's money to fly from coast to coast in the US. So plane travel was not nearly as affordable for poor and lower middle class people as it is today, but it also wasn't something that only the upper class could afford.
I think providing a pathway for young men into adulthood can reduce violence, as long as it's a pathway into a healthy adulthood. However, history shows that often such pathways even if they work well to reduce intra-tribe violence, can either not affect or possibly even increase inter-tribe violence.
I'm actually ok with more cops patrolling the streets in violent neighborhoods. However, it has to be well-behaved police. In other words, you can't just open up the police force to hiring any random goon who wants to join. You have to actually expand the police force in a way that ensures that they retain decent standards of interacting with non-police and that there is strong oversight.
I agree with your desire to develop grassroots ways of helping troubled young men who might otherwise turn to violence.
The biggest problems with American-on-American violence come from young men in communities where criminality has become a way of life. Think, the stereotypical black inner city gangbanger or the stereotypical white or Hispanic roughneck, possibly a meth addict. I don't know how to reach these kinds of people when they're young, so that they choose different paths of life, but I'm open to suggestion. When men are very young and poor and find it almost impossible to conceive of ever getting anywhere decent in life, osmosis effects and peer pressure from their local criminal community can be very strong.
Goodguy
2mo ago
Yes, it's happened many times in history. In the US, most recently in the 1990s. Probably in large part due to better policing.
That "Old Right" conservatism was largely liberal by my standards. To the extent that some of them supported segregation based on race rather than more individual characteristics, I think they were illiberal. But liberalism, at least in my sense of the word, does not require that a country allow huge amounts of unvetted or barely-vetted foreigners to enter. Liberalism can be pragmatic, it just has to be fundamentally based on and strive for the ethos of judging people on their individual characteristics, and on meritocracy.
On a side note, this is where I disagree with the more right-libertarian interpretations of liberalism as being best served by hyper-capitalism. I appreciate capitalism, but capitalism as it exists, because of inheritance, is not a meritocracy.
Goodguy
2mo ago
I'm not claiming that "the boys need purpose" leads to Nazism. I'm just not sure that giving boys clear pathways to become part of society necessarily reduces violence.
Goodguy
2mo ago
Got it. Sorry for misreading your post.
But, cards on the table first - do you see the current "liberal order" of things to be all well and good?
No. Given the current different political groups that we have in the West, I think that the current liberal order is better on the whole than any new order that is actually likely to take power if the current liberal order is replaced. However, I believe that the current liberal order needs some modifications, as long as they're done in a way that doesn't destroy the core liberalness of it.
Goodguy
2mo ago
Agreed. Plenty of societies that had/have very clear pathways for boys to become part of society nonetheless had/have horrific levels of violence. Generally against their outgroups, but that's bad enough.
Nazi Germany had such pathways, and they were very clear.
Gangbangers in south Chicago have such pathways too. They do in a sense prize the stability of society above the autonomy of the individual, it's just that in their case their society consists of their gang.
Goodguy
2mo ago
Are you sure that you're not trying to slip collectivism and religion into your proposed solution to the problems caused by some young men's woes in the same kind of way that some climate change activists try to slip communism in with their proposed climate change solutions?
If I understand @DaseindustriesLtd correctly, he's not saying that China will steamroll the world, he's saying that the US will lose its position of clear dominance.
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