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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 26, 2024

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The right is so pessimistic and honestly nihilistic for what's supposed to be the party of God and goodness and strength and masculinity.

I think that demoralization and stigmatization have just been that effective. It's hard for me to imagine creating a political organization that champions God, virtue, and masculinity that wouldn't immediately be tarred as anachronistic, hokey, and LARP-y not only by the unfriendly omnipresent progressive media machine, but worse still by conservatives themselves who, having been raised by that media machine, instinctively and reflexively cringe at any overt, unironic celebrations of their own values. It's a problem that I've been wrestling with solving for a while. For now, the only solution I can think of is to first have one's target audience unplug from the machine long enough to recover from irony poisoning before trying to pitch such an organization. But that's a tall order -- you'd have to replace it with something else, but large-scale dissident media efforts are not tolerated by the machine, and so you'd have to do stuff in meatspace, which essentially mean's you'd have to first create a physical intentional community. "Just start your own bank nation, bro."

Learning a second language seems to help. A lot of the brainwashing / cringe reflex is associated with particular turns of phrase, and I've found that expressing the same sentiment in a language you learned as an adult doesn't trip the same wires.