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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 29, 2024

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IMO the divergence can be explained through nature (biology). Men are the stress-resilient, systems-oriented, conflict-oriented gender. Women are the nurturing gender, which must remain less stressed to raise healthy children, and remain more innocent (or naive) to identify and bond with her child. It just so happens that politics is a stressful systems-oriented conflict. Yet political propagandists takes advantage of the female nurturing instinct to recruit supporters. Women today are less maternal than ever before, but the instinct doesn’t go away —“nature, uh, finds a way”. That outlet is nurturing the environment, or minorities, or animals, other women. If there is someone suffering and painted as an in-group member, women are there to nurture them. So much of the anti-white and anti-male ideology winds up creating an outgroup connotation to the real ingroup, and studies indeed show that white liberals empathize less with their own race and have a net unfavorable rating for whites (iirc). You can modify a person’s in group and out group through propaganda.

Pro-life may appear at first glance to be the nurturing position to take, but it’s really an abstract idea: the invisible lifeform you cannot sense is actually a child. It’s hard to empathize with an abstract idea, but easy to empathize with a suffering woman, whose face, voice, and story you can sense. Women primarily operate through this social dimension, through personal sensation. (If you are a woman who does not operate this way, statistically you are less likely to raise psychologically healthy children, who require the one-on-one motherly social interface to learn about the world. And you are probably less adept at make-up, which reduces your chance of obtaining a partner).

I don't know why but I laughed on the train as I read the last few sentences of your post. I heard it internally as that Public Service Message that used to begin "If you or someone you love has a problem..."

Sorry, carry on.