The problem is that "liberalism" has decided that it needs to focus on promoting the masculine virtues in women through "Lean in" culture, physically badass women in popular entertainment etc.
This is actually a good point, although I think about it a little bit differently. There is only one set of virtues for both sexes - be it stoic virtues like wisdom, courage, justice and temperance or Christian heavenly virtues (the opposite of deadly sins) like humility, chastity, temperance, charity, kindness, patience and diligence.
Some of these virtues are gender coded, because they are more important for a given sex. For instance if large majority of women lost courage, it would be bad but manageable. But if most men lost their courage, it could be disastrous as they would fail in their role as protectors. The same let's say with kindness for women in their role of mothers and nurturers etc. But it does not mean that men should not be kind or that women should not be courageous.
What I actually think is that leftism completely warped the notion of virtues, and promotes sins instead. It literally promotes for mothers to kill their unborn babies, it promotes pride for gays, it promotes lust as a new norm and it promotes racial revenge and anger, it promotes stupidity as opposed to wisdom where women cannot be given any advise also called as mansplaining. The same goes for "boss babe" narrative - if she was a man, he would be seen as an unhinged petty tyrant, not as a brave man tempered by patience and wisdom worthy to be followed. So "epicurean liberalism" produces emasculated and emotional men as well as toxically masculine women.
In a sense it is inevitable result of leftist analysis of reducing everything to power struggle. If feminists view masculinity as strong and oppressive, while femininity was historically weak and unable to resist, they just want to flip the script, and thus they embody their warped sense of masculinity as source of power. I found this always as a weak point of many of the leftist narratives. For instance - if you are a black woman who believes that white people have privilege, does it not mean that from a pragmatic standpoint you should strive to marry a white husband, so your children can partake in power of whiteness, while black husband will only cause them more misery and adversity? It is self-defeating in that way.
It depends on what you mean by Capitalism. I heard Marxists excusing failure of Stalinists planned economy, because it was actually a state Capitalism and thus not true Socialism.
To me the word Capitalism is often used as anything opposing to fabled Socialism so that Socialism does not have to be defined, it is something like a unicorn. Funnily enough, it is a very postmodern way of looking at things - socialism and capitalism are Hegelian opposites and they need to be abolished in order to usher an era of communism. Which I think is a very unhelpful way of looking at things. It would be like adopting some heretical doctrine of Heaven on Earth (Communism) as some ultimate utopia, and then declaring everything else as Hell on Earth (Capitalism), until we come to finally immanentize the eschaton in some Gnostic way. Just a bunch of nonsense.
My opinion is that Jews are a sort of "Schrodinger's race" in modern American society. Sometimes they're a separate ethnic group, sometimes they're not.
This "schrodingerism" goes even deeper. At face value, Israel is absolutely an archetype of your cookie-cutter ethnonationalist state. Their declaration of independence from 1948 officially calls it as a Jewish state. It also gives a lot of authority to religions, for instance Israel does not recognize secular marriage, thus effectively banning any gay marriage- as no faith in Israel officiates such unions. And on the other hand you have your modern leftist progressives shilling for it anyways.
In a sense this is remarkable achievement of Jews and their version of nationalism - Zionism. Their early leaders ranged from your cookie-cutter 19h century progressives like Theodore Herzl, socialists like David Ben Gurion, as well as "fascists" - or ultranationalists if you will - like Menachim Begin, a proud member of Irgun and youth leader of Betar movement. And yet the latter two both served as prime ministers of Israel. Despite ideological differences, all of them were able to work together toward the national project of Israel: Herzl was an example of your educated international elite, making diplomatic deals with power brokers of his time. Ben Gurion was your charismatic labor leader organizing Jews all around the world. Not many of Jewish refugees and young settlers had any experience with agriculture and hard labor, and yet Ben Gurion motivated them toward creating Jewish working class in order to form a complete nation - as opposed to some sort of Oligarchy like South Africa, where elite Jews rule over native Arabs in some sort of apartheid - with his slogan of one more acre, one more goat. And of course Begin was your enforcer, willing to do the dirty work during wars and times of conflict.
As I said, the whole thing is remarkable example of modern ethnogenesis and state building, that puts all other romantic national awakenings in 19th century Europe to shame - including reviving liturgical Hebrew as an official modern language by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda and of course carving patch of foreign land as their own. It would be as if some forgotten tribe of Romans in Romania and Greece created a modern Roman Republic somewhere south of Rome in Italy, using Latin as their official language.
As with many other things, there is a lot of admiration even when it comes to enemies of Zionism, Israel and Jews. They really achieved something unique, including ability to unite disparate ideologies that ultimately ended up benefiting their national cause. I'd say that people like Fuentes would salivate if they could create something like US version of Christian nationalism akin to Zionism.
georgioz
21hr ago
Sure, you can put it into the general deindustrialization narrative where corporations outsource their work. But the difference is, that there is a danger even for domestic corporations. One huge canary in the coalmine is the current state of gaming industry, where large woke studios such as Ubisoft experienced similar decline in sales often attributed to "woke" influences. As a result we see a lot of foreign studios such as Chinese giant Tencent producing successful games replacing these domestic behemoths. One other example is Japanese studio Square Enix axing their western branches lately.
So my argument is that overall "get woke go broke" narrative pushed by executives and other managers can have rippling effects for general more conservative workforce let's say.
georgioz
22hr ago
You might say "this won't affect you if you don't work in the liberal arts" but it does, because it then affects all culture everywhere. And yes, for a long time it was like we couldn't talk about it for fear of retribution. Hell, it's telling that all of his sources still want to stay anonymous, even when they've moved on to other industries. It must have been a huge effort to find any real data and sources for all this stuff.
I agree. One example is that as of 2025 Hollywood experienced the lowest grossing October since 1997. And that is in nominal dollar terms not counting for inflation. And even that is worsened by the phenomenon of runaway production, where a lot of movies are produced outside of LA and California and it is even worse for other productions such as TV shows. This is the result of years of bad movies, which has huge impacts for other professions - stuntmen, people constructing sets, technicians and thousands of other people completely outside of Culture War origin of the current malaise in Hollywood.
There was actually one part of the piece where he mentions it in passing:
So it came as a bit of a shock when David Austin Walsh, a Yale postdoc and left-wing Twitter personality, decided to detonate any chance he had at a career with a single tweet.
“I’m 35 years old, I’m 4+ years post-Ph.D, and—quite frankly—I’m also a white dude,” he wrote on X. “Combine those factors together and I’m for all intents and purposes unemployable as a 20th-century American historian.”
The pile-on was swift and vicious. “You are all just laughable,” wrote The New York Times’ Nikole Hannah-Jones. “Have you seen the data on professorships?” “White males are 30 percent of the US population but nearly 40 percent of faculty,” tweeted a tenured professor at GWU. “Hard to make the case for systemic discrimination.”
So maybe there is some space to hate Nikole Hannah-Joneses of this world, who adopt sneering and mocking attitude toward plight of straight white millennial men? It was probably closest the author came to blaming somebody other than Boomer/Gen X executives implementing these DEI policies.
Apparently Josh Hawley wrote a book called Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs. According to AI, in this book Hawley extols more conservative path for men, rejecting "epicurean liberalism" and embracing masculine roles and archetypes such as builder, warrior, father etc. So I think it is a lament that liberals reject men and masculinity, and thus shove men toward more conservative path in order to succeed.
I wholeheartedly agree, although even this may be a different game. There is a strategy of clip farming, where you may look like a moron in a debate, but as long as you can produce couple of viral 20 second clips, you may have been successful in your mission when it comes to certain audience. Here it would be something like Fuentes admitting that he is a racist or whatever.
Like Fuentes said, Morgan is tabloid journalist. All he needs is to create controversy and produce some smears and he may be "successful" in this specific subgame despite losing the overall 2 hour debate. If it is a viable long-term strategy is questionable, but at least it worked for years when it comes to Fuentes alone.
georgioz
1d ago
I don't know exactly how Fuentes genuinely feels about blacks. From what I've seen of his speeches, it's something like "Blacks are mostly low-IQ animals and they need to be controlled, but some of them are okay." Which is racist by any reasonable definition. But he's still perturbing Morgan's assumptions by saying (a) no, I don't hate every single black person, and (b) black people can also recognize and be concerned about uncomfortable truths.
One way to put it is the difference between patriotism and chauvinism: one is expression of sympathy or love or other positive emotion toward your group, while the other is declaration of superiority. In that sense you just ascribe positive or even negative attributes to your identity which does not preclude doing the same for other groups. You may still like jazz, black basketball players etc. It is just a view from the standpoint of other culture.
From my meager experience with Fuentes during latest slew of interviews, this is what he preaches: Multiculturalism is over. Even the mild one such as "judge based on content of character and not based on your skin". Whites should stick together, foster positive relation toward their white identity and become a tribe. This will be especially important as whites will become minority majority. They do not have to be necessarily hostile to other groups, they can let's say be allies toward East Asians, especially if there is a common interest let's say when it comes to education reforms etc. But they should acknowledge that they are distinct group with their own history, culture, religion etc.
Paradoxically this is what Fuentes also says about other groups, especially blacks and Jews. They are Americans, but they also have their tribal/national identity which enables them to band together and promote these interests. Whites should do the same. In this sense I do understand why people adhering to liberal worldview such as James Lindsay call people like Fuentes as "woke right". Although it is interesting that they do not have the same label for other people such as Ben Shapiro, who is also on the right and who also has tribal identity which is sometimes in conflict with general liberal ethos.
georgioz
1d ago
I think this is the result of different strategies that Morgan and Fuentes had with this interview. Fuentes came there with his bloodsport debate style, which is about listening to your opponent and constructing arguments. Morgan came there with tabloid style gotcha questions, moralizing and shaming/guilting - complete with random segues and topic switching whenever he thinks that he got what he wanted.
It was also seen specifically with the part you mentioned, when Fuentes obviously sarcastically admitted that he is "Holocaust maximalist". Morgan did not listen to Fuentes in order to form his own counterargument, he jumped into a gotcha of we know how many Jews were slaughtered. It's at least 6 million. Uh, what's interesting to me is that you appear to now concede that. Which may be news to your regular viewers. So again, even if Morgan thought that Fuentes offered a concession, he immediately went on attack satisfied that he proved Fuentes as a liar for his viewers. It is a different style of discussion, not a debate.
In a sense it was a battle of styles with each side utilizing different tactics, it was almost like a parallel streams with little to no substantive engagement from any side.
I do not know what else should he do especially in the face of "school shooter" argument being such a tangent. Fuentes wanted to say that his argument of 5% blacks being murderers is vastly larger than whatever proportion of whites are mass shooters, which supported his earlier argument of how white people should avoid black people or whatever. Fuentes explained himself clearly at least twice: first by saying that it is something like 0,0000001% and second by literally asking Morgan to calculate "number of all white people as a denominator vs number of white school shooters as numerator". Morgan did not understand what was asked of him.
Maybe this is too mathy language for some people to get, but it was as easy as elementary statistics goes.
Do you mean that PUA guides are all about how to get a virtuous wife you can marry, so you can live together happily ever after, instead of guides of how to become an ultimate womanizer with three digit body count? Maybe they have too bad of a reputation.
georgioz
1d ago
Yes, he was such a genuine "liker" of women, like when he knowingly slept with his own daughter Leonilda in threesome with her mother, who was his previous lover. Excuse me if I do not share this vision of love and respect for the gentle sex. If anything, it is vastly more degenerate than that of Don Juan.
One theory I also heard about, is not to bring those women back home permanently. Maybe you are a digital nomad who just lives in some tax heaven like Panama or Philippines and make yourself home there including your wife/concubines. Definitely a degenerate life, but not unlike sailors of old.
And now take a look at Casanova again. He's in an entirely different ballpark. The average loser can't get people to finance their university degree, can't get a wealthy patron to enable them, can't trick people into believing they are medical experts, and especially not for months at a time. It just doesn't work. Casanova used a wide array of social trickery far beyond the small, formalized PUA playbook, and expertly switched it around to whatever was needed for whatever he wanted to do at the moment. This included seducing women, but was not limited to it, and even on this particular topic he generally was more versatile. He's a con artist.
Casanova wrote his memoir exactly as PUA masters sell their courses. He "inspired" millions of middling losers with his tidbits of wisdom in his memoir, shit like Be flame not the moth or Praise the beautiful for their intelligence and the intelligent for their beauty. He was the OG pickup artist, not a middling wannabe art dabbler. Anyway, my original point is that this whole culture is nothing new and it exists for centuries and millennia.
His sons are what would give me pause but I can't recall what context they were brought up in. I'd hope young kids could be kept out of it.
The context was Morgan saying how Fuentes was antisemite, Fuentes said it was because Morgan is a boomer and he is representing a new young wave. Morgan then said that his sons are around Fuentes's age, and that they are empathetic and good people very unlike Fuentes. So now I guess it would be fine to have Morgan's sons under microscope and digging up any potential problematic antisemitic, misogynistic and racist behavior if they are such exemplars of uprightness. From now on to forever.
Assume Nick Fuentes was some rando leftist, like Ta-Nehisi Coates, would it be fair to bring up things his dad said about politics when asking about his own left radical views?
No. I think that it is a distraction and a low blow. I think it is a normal gentlemen's agreement not to bring family into such a debate, even if people brought their family up before themselves. Morgan himself said that he has literally thousands of interviews. Fuentes has thousands, maybe even tens of thousands of hours of his show. It may be that both of them mentioned their family at some point, but still it should be a taboo. Maybe it is my sensibility here, but coming after someone's family to win debate points is absolutely vile tactics.
Especially here, Morgan got what he wanted, which was Fuentes admitting that he is a racist. Morgan just wanted to go one step further somehow proving that Funetes's dad is racist based on this one clip. It is such a stupid shit to pull off - maybe Fuentes hates his father and he would gladly smear him. His father was not there to defend himself about such a wild speculation and accusation. It is just not right.
georgioz
4d ago
And? Are you for or against that? I'd wager by your logic Celia Walden is now a fair game for all crazy groypers now, and it is all Morgan's fault for bringing her up in the past. In my eyes it is a low blow.
georgioz
4d ago
Is there no PUA guide that walks western passport bros on how to get a concubine in Africa or other 3rd world country for what would basically be a can of beans at home, utilizing desperate material conditions for their benefit? Again I am no expert, but I am quite confident that such a thing has to exist.
Fuentes made it Morgan's business by putting it out there.
Also around year ago there was a crazy guy who showed up in front of Fuentes's house with a gun. After the police was called, the guy was shot to death in Fuentes's backyard only to be found, that he actually murdered his roommate in other city before appearing at Fuentes's doorstep . Yeah, it is a complete mystery why Fuentes wants to keep his father's name out, when there are literal crazies looking for victims.
By the way Piers Morgan also mentioned his wife Celia Walden numerous times on his show. He literally mentioned his sons during this show, showcasing how empathetic and upright they are. Does this mean that Morgan's family is now fair game for any future discussion with him? Anybody can now demand Morgan to explain unempathetic behavior of his sons, dig up their racist tweets, or maybe showing how one of them visited a strip club or something like that, they are now cleaned for the chopping block - right?
Oh an it is not to get under Morgan's skin, it is just to have an honest discussion about what he said and an opportunity for Morgan to expand on hist stance. He may be asked about his wife or sons and their misdeeds five times in one interview even if he is visibly uncomfortable. In the end it is he who brought up his sons and wife into public spotlight.
Solely beguiling women without also having access to some genuine advantages such as high social standing, wealth or power was near-impossible before the sexual revolution due to guarding behaviour by males in her social circles.
Pickup artists are predators. They do not have to go after the most secure and difficult prey. While in the past it may be so that women had in general more protection from their families, they were also more gullible in absence of internet and other channels. There were widows, women with sick parents etc. In addition even if men held dominion over their women, then the path led through those. You could just get into a good grace of dominant men in order to get to women in their care.
Plus again, you have a very self-defeating definition of Pickup Artist. It seems to exclude any man who either starts or during his life gains status, wealth, social trickery or any other resource. What is your stance then? That "true" pickup artists are only losers who never start or end with money and status and who never get laid?
So again - who is PUA artist in your eyes? I just googled for the list of most famous modern Pickup Artists, not that I know any of them:
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Julien Blanc
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Ross Jeffries
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Mark Manson
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Erik von Markovik
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Neil Strauss
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Roosh V
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Eric Weber
According to AI, the average net worth of all of those is in range of millions of dollars, often due to their courses etc. Are they by your definition not Pickup Artists - because the can get to fuck women solely based on their fame and wealth?
Secondly, Casanova is someone with a high enough social standing & wealth that his family could afford to send him to study law at a university, at a time when such education was extremely rare. That tells you a lot more about his background than just saying his parents were "two actors". He also is a classic general-purpose con artist, as evidenced by the wikipedia entry you cite yourself. He not only regularly, successfully impersonated aristocracry, he also directly tricked aristocrats themselves. And he evidently was genuinely rich, even if it was ill-gotten & regularly frivolled away. Obviously, such a person can take advantage of a similar playbook as the actual aristocrats.
What? Casanova was as poor as it gets at least in Venetia. He got his degree thanks to a priest who noticed him at age 9 in poor boarding school while his widowed mother was "acting" somewhere in Russia. He showed enough aptitude for Latin and other subjects to pass for priesthood education at age 12. He received his degree at age 15, not at all anything special - something like degree from some degree mill, such as University of Phoenix today.
Nevertheless I agree with the statement that he was well "educated" by experience for life as a con artist, ranging from his actor parents through talking his way through life hardship in his early teens which translated later to his life. Which is exactly what PUA lifestyle is about, isn't it?
He didn't walk into a bar at night negging unaccompanied women until they sleep with him. He publicly displayed his wealth and status to the entire greater circle of people around the women, would woo the men around her as well, often played a long game over months that included ripping off entire social groups for money by claiming access to secret, useful knowledge. It's certainly more similar to PUA than the classic, far more common aristocrat, in that it includes social trickery aimed at women, but yet again structurally very different and far more complicated.
No, he applied wide range of PUA strategies. When he wanted to bang nuns, he applied his meager theological knowledge. When he wanted to bang Madame d’Urfé and get her money, he pretended to be an occult master. He was exactly what you in your original reply mentioned as:
PUA is based on the idea of a stranger seducting women entirely with social trickery.
Anyways, the point is that PUA is nothing new. You discarded pirates, conquistatdors, minor nobles and other players as somehow unfairly using status and violence to bang hundreds of women in order to be "true" PUA artists. Now you discard Casanova and his ilk for applying social trickery and beguiling his victims from being the same. So what is PUA artist? Only those who fail in life or in seduction of women using their perceived status, money, power, social wit and any other trick that can get them to score? It does not make any sense.
georgioz
4d ago
These were not whores, just regular girls. A can of beans was not payment for sex for a prostitute, but elaborate ploy in game of affection, accompanied with promises of eternal love and poetry from a married husband, who was set to leave day after tomorrow back to his family in USA to be demobilized. It was a game.
How naive are you? Or maybe even better - how cynical are you in your pretentiousness?
In the same way inviting some local girl for a drink while flashing you borrowed Omega watches and designer cloths bought on credit works right now in a bar. A promise of stability and bright future of plenty of money/food if only they fuck you, and then discarding them like a dirty rag.
By the way, this whole PUA topic is disgusting to me as I am Christian. But there has to be some reality check.
PUA as a phenomenon specifically entails men codifying pick-up artistry and teaching it to other men.
Sure. Let me know what you think about OG PUA master named Giacomo Casanova I mentioned in my other reply. Does he fit your criteria of womanizing teacher?
Plus how does picking and fucking desperate girls not fit the disgusting PUA style? I know of a guy who back in oughts created a bot contacting all the women on dating platform with a rude message akin to - hey do you want to fuck - as an experiment. He had maybe 1 in a 1000 response, some of them even from very attractive girls, although I'd wager they were all crazy. Maybe in their manic phase of BPD or some other shit. I know of a guy from the West who rented an expensive car back in early 1990s, and who went on fucking spree in Eastern Europe for pennies, and he even evaded having his teeth kicked in by local village heroes, mostly by copious amount of bribes and rounds paid. But hey, what works works - right?
Yes, but they do not perform them in their land as marriages in Israel are officiated by religious authorities. A very ingenious way to solve the problem if you ask me.
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