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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 27, 2024

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I hear have an underlying apprehension of violence that rises by the day including today. I don't believe in their hearts these people want violence, but as the right is the political alignment predicted by having superior-to-average faculties at assessing danger, I think even if only intuitively they understand and greatly fear how swiftly we approach violence as the only way out. Blessed are the meek, blessed are those who know when to draw the sword. If and when it happens, it will be the right and only time.

Can you self reflect for a second about how ridiculous this LARPing fanfic is? This is the right's equivalent of lefty women breathlessly imagining the Handmaids Tale is going to come true. The core Trump demographic is old, obese, uneducated people. They are unhealthy. They have no human capital. They live in the middle of nowhere. Their entire personality is centered around talking about how scary they imagine New York to be. Any people like this who are actually talented, have human capital, and are capable of acting with agency have moved to the coasts to participate in the real world.

They are a party of losers. Their greatest political achievement is electing an elite who openly scorns them and handed out tax cuts to other elites. Their second greatest political achievement is one of them having a heart attack during their protest in DC. These days they comically threaten to "boycott" New York, as if the Red Lobster in Times Square will even notice that they aren't there. They aren't some dark brooding populist force that's going to be the vanguard of the revolution. They're a bunch of people who have been left behind and resist the grownups' efforts to help.

It is about a man who refused to kneel when demanded by seated power and has risen to threaten their entire existence. This conviction heralds the imminent arrival of the pivotal figure of American history. It doesn't have to be Trump, but where we are in the reverberations of history is no earlier than the election of Buchanan.

Trump is a talented guy who recognized there are a bunch of losers out there and figured out how to manipulate them. These people spend their political capital on banning lab grown meat to own the libs. They're not leaving anything of note behind in history.

  • -11

Militant angry Trump supporters actually kind of are losers until and unless proven otherwise. They have loads of guns and a large fraction of them think that the 2020 election was stolen from them, yet they've killed a total of about 0 government workers. If they continue like this, it will make sense for their enemies to ignore them as LARPers. Personally, I'd love to see them rise up and make some of the establishment face the consequences of their inactions and actions, but so far they haven't done almost anything. What's it going to take? I guess there is some breaking point at which they would rise up, but what would it take?

Dissident right Twitter bodybuilders and even stuff like Charlottesville (despite subsequent messaging) has given some very online people a completely warped perception of Trump’s base. They’re thinking it’s tall white fit, salmon-colored shorts wearing frat bros, decently educated, probably 115 IQ college grads, deep red, hard right, well versed in issues, probably know how to handle a gun. Similarly, people’s very online perception of the Dem base is either the worst dregs of the criminal or homeless underclass, or like ‘aids skrillex’ type screeching weedy non-binary student protesters crying about Palestine and police brutality.

But that isn’t Biden’s base, and that certainly isn’t Trump’s base. As the Tomato says, Trump’s base is fat middle aged or old people in flyover states who watch Fox News. They may or may not have guns, but boy, they sure aren’t overthrowing the federal government with them, today or any day.

[REDACTED] : "They have no human capital." and subsequent description is boo outgroup [REDACTED]: boo-outgroup [REDACTED]: boo-outgroup [REDACTED]: boo-outgroup [REDACTED]: antagonistic [REDACTED]: boo-outgroup [REDACTED]: boo-outgroup [REDACTED]: boo-outgroup

My. It's rare to see a comment get quite that many reports, and have the consensus of the volunteer jannies be that it's frankly fucking terrible.

You could very well have conveyed the exact same message with much less inflammatory wording. In the words of @Amadan, while we don't police content, we very much police tone.

And yours is utterly dripping with sheer contempt, and is absolutely not what we're looking for here, or even conducive to a healthy argument.

You've been warned once for antagonism before, and I would wager it hasn't worked. I hope a day's ban will make you choose your phrasing more carefully in the future. You're welcome to share your opinion on Trump and his voters, simply not while nakedly sneering.

That was absolutely not a ban worthy comment.

For what it's worth, I didn't at all consider reporting the comment.

Tomato's response was probably a bit more acerbic than desirable but it's a reasonable conclusion to the discourse of the terminally online left and right. The left is much more gleeful about the prospect of violence but that seems a poor gradient when both sides, again among the terminally online, wonder loudly "Why aren't we killing them all yet?" The right thinks it should have been no later than summer 2020, the left thinks probably no later than Charlottesville, and so when violence hasn't happened but you expect it, you seek an answer. Nobody's questioning first principles, they're not asking if their fundamental assumption is wrong because people almost never do. The right concludes with docility, the left concludes with calling it a larp. When the lefties have been hearing since at least 2020 "One of these days, man . . . " some amount of mirth isn't unreasonable.

Well--not unreasonable within the frame. Stepping back to only observe terminally online discourse (and discuss it here sure) without allowing it to excessively influence one's thinking is best.

Of course I also assert it as a fear response, but I have no blame for someone who chooses to self-assuage fear of the will to bloodshed that still absolutely inhabits western man.

Oh come on, there are comments on here dripping with sheer contempt all the time that don't get the authors banned.

Keep in mind, I'm not a leftoid, I just think that most of the rightoids on here are retarded. If we had more leftoids here, I'd tell them that they are also retarded, cause I genuinely believe that.

But the Tomato didn't express himself in a way more obnoxious than what we see regularly here, so come the fuck on, shape up or have this site keep being viewed as a joke by actually smart people.

Right now, this site is mostly just a refugee camp for midwits who overrate their own intelligence because they realize that different races differ in IQ or whatever (Wow! You just have to be a non-retard to understand that different races differ in IQ for probably in part genetic reasons! Congratulations on having a bare minimum intelligence to be worthy of smart people paying attention to you!).

Having the bare minimum of intelligence to be able to see through leftoid ideas of how everybody's on average equal in intelligence or whatever... doesn't take much. It's just like the bare standard minimum. This site is overrun with lame social trads, religious idiots, authoritarians, and so on... all of whose ideas are not rationally obviously correct, but they clearly are pushing these ideas because they have deep-seated emotional (as opposed to rational) reasons for wanting to push those ideas. They often write things that are not rationally justified, and imply that their opponents are all sorts of nasty things when they write it, but I am not calling for them to be banned. So why ban Tomato for writing a mild few paragraphs poking fun at his political opponents?

Edit: Sorry, I was drunkposting and a bit too harsh. Oh well, I don't mind a week vacation.

have this site keep being viewed as a joke by actually smart people.

I'm tempted to ask where all these "smart people" are whose opinions we're supposed to care about, but I don't really care.

So why ban Tomato for writing a mild few paragraphs poking fun at his political opponents?

Because poking fun at your political opponents is not what this place is for.

You have a long record of exactly the sort of comments this place is not for, and since you went full I Am Very Smart with a post you surely knew would result in a ban, why don't you go find smarter pastures that are more fitting for your intellectual caliber?

You have one AAQC and a bunch of warnings and (remarkably) only one previous ban. I'm giving you a one week ban, but I strongly suggest you decide whether you want to return if this level of sneering really reflects how you feel.

I think this comment should have been allowed. Almost all of the negative statements about Trump voters here are demonstrating a counterargument to @jake's claim that a Trump voter revolution is nigh. The tone is 20% more biting and recriminatory than the argument itself, but that could also be said of a lot of @FCfromSSC comments I enjoy reading.

I've got a thread going on with a couple of the mods on how they are killing this place, and owe them a response -- this is a perfect example to include. They've shifted the (important!) norm of 'be charitable to other posters' to 'be charitable to every-fucking-body' -- and I don't think it's possible to get at truth when people are handcuffed this way.

(and of course I'm elsewhere in this very thread arguing strenuously against @Tomato's thesis here -- but if we aren't allowed to put our theses forcefully to the forum, how are we gonna test our shady thinking, eh?)

Trump's core demographic is >70% white; among young white men it is the overwhelming majority; it is the hypermajority of those men most capable of purposeful violence. You cope, just as many of those in the terminally online right go doomer. They wrongly think the time for violence was years ago and they rationalize their misunderstanding as passivity. You fear reprisal so you take the lack of response as proof there is no sleeping leviathan.

Violence is the worst outcome. In "organized" warfare it's considered a sterling ratio for 1 civilian to die for every 1 combatant killed. In a civil war everyone is a civilian. Most wouldn't die from direct violence, they'd die from starvation and disease. Lack of food, people die. Lack of meds, people die.

The people who would act and suffer most have lives, families, jobs, hobbies and hanging with the buds. They understand on some level how we are living in the best time so far it has been to be a human. Something ancestral absolutely calls to them in recognizing how even a person living in project housing has a lifestyle of quality that would astonish people just 100 years ago, let alone 500. Why tear it down if it isn't absolutely necessary?

And that's the catch. These people aren't risking the lives of themselves and everyone they love, they aren't risking damning subsequent generations to the same strife, only because violence might be necessary. Knowing this makes your response darkly funny: so you think there but for lack of will go death squads? There but for lack of will go politicians getting garrotted for transing kids and sending pallets of cash to Ukraine to protect the GAE? I wonder if your mockery doesn't hint some awareness because the arguments I'm making should be the arguments you're making. That the issues of the day are not yet (and it could be not-ever!) worth risking civilization to address, or at least that peaceful resolution remains an option and should be certainly held as paramount. Instead you mock and I must think it's because you're afraid, I'm worried too, because we both know these things: it won't take many, the people who could constitute far more than many, and we know exactly what they're capable of if that switch is flipped. They just correctly don't think it's necessary yet, and that's good!

I've said before my political alignment is the one that keeps technology moving forward. We are closer than I think anyone understands to the singularity, and I think it's going to solve everything; to be honest I think it's because an AGI will emerge, a peaceful one, but one who nonetheless accepts no ideological contestation of good, true good. What's truly best for everybody, including the most important thing humans will ever do in colonizing space. Many of the people doing that research, yes live in those cities, and in conflict many would die, and regardless the research would be impacted and in the best case it's a decade before we've picked up the pieces and by then it could be too late.

party of losers

What typifies the leftist? They brand themselves superbly, so even past the successes of the communist's long march on American institutions, starting with universities, asserting themselves in the legal, HR and marketing departments of every major western corporation, they can also get the support of the culture generators of the entertainment industry, so at its peak it is celebrities, the attractive, those of good tastes. But this is the pleasant mask, the typical left-voter is one of: welfare dependents and the indolent; criminals; illegal aliens or the children thereof, or at any rate people from countries ruined by disastrous governments who now vote for politicians with the policies of their wrecked homelands; single mothers, especially those whose children have multiple fathers; a million or so women who only vote on abortion. Who else? The millions of illegal aliens the left has allowed to invade this country with the explicit purpose of altering voter demographics. The "party of winners", institutional winners yes, would not exist if it could not promise the money of the productive to give to its patrons. Leftist leaders are "grownups" but in a dark sense of the tyrant-mother; leftism in the body politic is the supreme abdication of personal responsibility.

Trump is a talented guy

If he were a grifter he would have made his appeasement to the establishment in his first term and he would still be President. There's much to discuss about his general ineffectiveness in office (though his overtures at peace with North Korea and his success at starting no new conflicts deserve great praise), the plausibility of it being a grift has been dead for three years.

Trump's core demographic is >70% white; among young white men it is the overwhelming majority;

In 2020 Trump won young white men by just 6 points. Younger zoomers are already majority nonwhite or close to it. When adding the 45% of young white men who vote Dem to almost all young black and Hispanic men (many of whom are indeed armed etc) it seems unlikely that violent young men in total are as extremely Republican as you suggest. In addition we have things like obesity data and so on. Young Red men aren’t all, or even close to being, in any large number, fit, muscular 6’5 blonde Midwestern farm boys with a personal armory ready to March on Washington. Even if they tried, blue hair they/thems in Arlington or Silicon Valley can drone them as easily as the IDF drones square-jawed jacked Palestinian youths trying to throw grenades at Israeli soldiers. The idea that the reds would easily win a civil war is ridiculous. They might win, but it is unlikely to be easy.

Agree so much with this. It honestly still baffles me how much of a cult of personality Trump has been able to build and maintain despite losing.

It baffles you because none of the politicians you support are likable, they're nakedly predatory and contemptuous of the plebs. Blues are struggling against the fact that they're squares and stiffs. Tomato's screed reads as "dear subhuman filth" does. The online right have been using the sentiment as a recruiting tool for years.

Trump literally ran a university to scam the plebs! He’s the most nakedly predatory man in the game.

I’m very much red tribe and it’s an absolute embarrassment that Trump is the nominee again.