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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 22, 2024

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I noticed this yesterday as well. My wife was working from home, so we grabbed lunch together, and I just could not shut the fuck up about the Kremlinology of what exactly Nancy meant by the "easy way or the hard way" and the third shooter in Butler, and all sorts of other esoteric bullshit. All of this is interesting, but at some point, I need to just drop it and talk about what toy we're going to get the dog instead. My wife's patience for my babbling is near infinite, but I must be testing it at this point.

From the comments of "The wonderful clarity of white genocide":

The nation is the hand of the race, the family is the finger of the nation, the individual is the fingernail. If your vocation is to fight, tell your cow whatever it needs to hear while you avoid seeding its’ fallopian tubes and instead mine more minerals and prepare to fight. Otherwise, tell your cow whatever it needs to hear while spawning more overlords.

Don’t talk politics with your cow. At best, it confuses it, at worst, it makes it difficult for your cow to chew cud with the other cows, and cows need to be part of a herd.

The level of politics to talk with your cow is, America is good, we are an American family, nice things are good, criminals are bad because they ruin nice things, having nice things is the only valid virtue signal, tasteful religious displays on nice things are great, ugly religious and political displays on ugly things are stupid evil heresy, ignore any advice from the news and entertainment media because it’s a bunch of pedophiles raping each other.

If you want to argue that women are subhuman, or should be considered subhuman, you can actually do that if you want, provided you're willing to put the effort in to write it like everyone is reading; expending some effort into anticipating and addressing other perspectives, for example. What you can't do is post a low-effort quote that assumes women are in some way equivalent to cows as part of some ancillary point. Posts like this are not conducive to good discussion with people who disagree with you, and the assumptive close is generally not a communication strategy we encourage here.

Two AAQCs, but since then two previous warnings for the exact same infraction, and this isn't a particularly marginal example of rule-breaking. I'm giving you a three-day ban. Please take some time to consider how you're choosing to engage here, read the rules, and try to follow them better in the future.

Wow, this is one of the worst things I've ever read and I've been reading this forum since the ssc days.

Owning up to having sex with a cow is a weird flex.

I love seeing the flip side of the Law of Merited Impossibly coin.

The "Law of Merited Impossibility" can be summarized as: "It will never happen, and when it does, you bigots will deserve it." This phrase captures the idea that those advocating for certain social changes often dismiss concerns about potential negative consequences by asserting that such outcomes are impossible. However, if those feared outcomes do come to pass, they are then justified as deserved by those who opposed the changes.

I'm beginning to find my purpose on the Motte.

I'm glad you're having fun.

But I can't tell what you mean, and I think it would be a better comment if you spoke clearly. Perhaps there's some parallel in Derek Jeter's life you could use as a metaphor.

The Law of Merited Impossibility is usually defined as "it will never happen and it's a good thing it did" and is usually (here, at least) invoked against the Dems/Left, the Motte posters implying that the left claims there's no intention to genocide whites while cheering for reduced white percentages (for example).

I'm assuming FiveHourMarathon means to say that in a very similar way, the reactionary right claims that they do not seek to oppress women, only to restore them to their "good and natural role", while on Jim's blog they relate women to livestock.

Do admitted neoreactionaries actually claim they don't want to oppress women? And do normal tradcons claim women are cattle?

The answer to both questions would seem to be no. Harrison Butker didn't say women were cattle; he said being a stay at home mom was more valuable than having a career. And the dreaded Jim just openly admits that he thinks women need domestic violence to keep them in line.

the dreaded Jim

Quick aside but how old is Jim do we think? Is there a general best guess? According to something I read somewhere he has been pontificating about how much all the groups of people he hates are bad and responsible for all the problems in the world since at least the mid 1990s. Its insane to me that he may be in his 70s or even 80s and still doing this. If I could find a woman who loves me the way Jim hates women and black people I would be very happy.

I could find a woman who loves me the way Jim hates women and black people I would be very happy.

Gotta start using this- I’d previously used ‘find you someone who looks at you the way Bob menendez looks at foreign bribes’.

The only problem there is that your pool of people who would get that reference is limited to /pol/ and this forum.

The invokers of the Law of Merited Impossibility rarely bother to check whether the people saying the two contradictory things are actually the same people, in my experience.

Perhaps there's some parallel in Derek Jeter's life you could use as a metaphor.

I'm flattered you pay this much attention to my comments.

You write well.

I've figured out the Derek Jeter parallel!

From 1996-2003, the Yankees won four world series and two other pennants. They had the highest payroll in the game, and were frequently criticized for buying championships. But, Yankees fans protested, Jeter and Posada and Williams and Pettite and Rivera were all farmhands, the Yankees had really developed their way to a championship. Then in 2009, the Yankees incontestably and openly bought a championship, signing big time free agents who lead the way. Still, the Core Four of it all, but it's tough for any fan not to admit some truth to those allegations.

Similarly, right wingers get accused of misogyny all the time. For every policy choice, even if supported by many women, probably for drinking Diet Mountain Dew. I'm used to dismissing it.And normally it's bullshit. But then you see a post like /u/erwgv3g34 above, and it is the real honest-to-goodness article, self-justifying its own hatred by the Law of Merited Impossibility. The wokie says: "Nobody is getting fired for not going to a mandatory Diversity training, that isn't happening; but the fact that you're so upset about this shows how important a Mandatory Diversity Training is, in fact you probably shouldn't be employed if you find that objectionable." This comment says: "Women are too stupid, cow-like herd animals, to understand politics. You can tell because when they try to do politics, they don't understand how stupid and cow-like they are." It's rare to see it in the wild, because typically online the demand for crazed misogyny outstrips the supply, but it's tough to deny on that one.

The women in my life are even more interested than I am. My mother has gone from hating politics and "not being able to look at that man" to watching the RNC each night and watching most of Trump's speech while reading aloud twitter theories about Biden almost dying, while my girlfriend went from saying she won't vote in November to wondering aloud whether she should vote for Trump. She also says repeatedly that she hates Kamala Harris and she hopes this is not who we end up with for our first female president. And both are pretty upset about the Biden situation.

I'm not sure that bullet changed Trump, but from my bubble it sure seems like it changed some moderates and conservative never-Trumpers into Trump-boosters.

I also think a lot of discussions about Democratic attacks against Trump being applied to any Republican, while true, miss that Trump himself has a polarizing effect with conservative women and moderates above and beyond whatever Democratic messaging says about him. Democrats will say any Republican is Hitler, and Democrats will always believe them. The problem is with not repelling swing voters and conservative women. The hoes that need to not be scared are voters who would go for Mitt Romney or Ron DeSantis (my girlfriend sent me repeated messages about Ron DeSantis being well-spoken and successful before he flailed out of the primaries, and my mother says she really likes Vivek Ramaswamy) but don't like Trump because he's a philanderer who insults people. If he can stick to not being overly insulting, he can win in November.

I think most of the interest is just how weird the election cycle is. Most people aren’t actually interested in politics, they’re interested in political drama. Ask these women to name five policies they actually want and who’s advocating for that policy, and 9/10 people couldn’t do that. They like politics when it’s juicy and nobody knows what’s going to happen next. It’s almost a soap opera at this point. And women tend to eat that up.

I think my wife has even less resistance to this shit that I do. She brings up stuff even I never heard about. So at least I know I'm not tanking my marriage by being too online.