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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   28496 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 2, 2024

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I wouldn't recommend doing the exact same thing, no. One theme I was surprised to find when I looked up a lot of early anti-communist material was the regular return to the idea of a threat to our women (Marx himself tries to dispute this in The Communist Manifesto - it seems like "they will socialise your wife!" was an accusation with some traction), and I'd guess messaging that invokes a kind of male chivalry is an adaptation to a male-only electorate. If the demographic I'm trying to convince includes women, I would probably take a different tack.

In other words, you're right that it's highly contextual - in general it seems like the strategy for anti-communists is to associate communism with other bad things as much as possible (atheism, envy, rapaciousness, poverty, lack of patriotism, etc.), and for communists is to associate communism with good things (equality, fairness, economic growth, anti-fascism, etc.). The objective merits of communist policies is rather beside the point. The key question is what you can plausibly tie communism to in the minds of the public.

The brief period of "abolish the family, socialize sexual access for all!" after the Russian revolution is really understudied. Lenin cracked down on it alongside the counter-revolution of "he who does not work shall not eat", but just like in Spain there was a brief but real complete social takeover by that faction of the left I'd probably get modded for naming and linking to

Here you’ll get modded for not speaking plainly.

Hard to separate from the regular rape and pillage of the enemy in wartime in the few places it happened.

I think his Spain example is anarchist Catalonia, which started out commie-controlled and later got beat up by the nationalists. There was rape and pillage of nuns but it doesn’t seem connected to the free love thing.

Well, they got beat up by the other Republicans first. The whole split between "we must deepen the revolution by rooting out and destroying all social norms" vs "hey we need the gun factories to work, you can lynch the manager's family later"

I mean, eventually they revised history to blame the purges on the Soviet handlers targeting trotskyist deviationists or whatever, but before Stalin fell out of Western intellectual favor in the 50s the anarchists were denounced as traitors even by their friends. Which is why Orwell couldn't get Homage published by the UK communist press.

(Was it Hemingway whose anarchist buddies got executed by the Republic, and he wrote some excuse of the "can't help breaking a few eggs" sort?)

None of this should imply any sort of sympathy towards either the anarchists or republicans: it was just two groups of monsters devouring each other. If it hadn't been for the need to fight Franco, the leftist government would have happily kept allowing the anarchists to torture and murder every class enemy of the new regime, from nuns to families.

I'd say it's indistinguishable; communism comes from treating your neighbor as the enemy (whereas capitalism's strength is forcing the majority of human beings to serve their neighbor to get ahead- which predicts most people who are communists are net takers, and this is what we observe more generally).

Same thing for police excusing criminal activity provided the perpetrators pass a paper bag test; the "enemy" in this case are the natives the crime is happening to.

Get modded on the Motte? I think you can plainly name groups you think do bad things around here. The bar is apparently at or below SecureSignals, so reddit-forbidden levels of wrongthink seem to be allowed.

Short list of some modern ones: Noah berlatsky, Sophie Lewis, jacob breslow, Katie Cruz, Allyn Walker, Randy Wicker, etc.

I've ragged on the pedophiles there more than the family abolitionists, but mostly because there's so many of the latter in academia that it's impossible to keep track: it's basically the default position now. Didn't include obvious examples like Vaush and "Ana Valens" because that would of course be called nutpucking or whatever.
Also despite their irl relevance in destroying communities, I didn't include any of the revcom Antifa lumpenprole "spiteful mutant" demographic, because most don't have any coherent policy statements.

The general theme is "after the revolution we can destroy the last of existing society and rebuild it to satisfy our fetishes." They make up a big chunk of the low level propagandists in communist revolutions for the usual party loyalty reasons, but inevitably get purged once the state has to deal with the consequences (in the Soviet case, an unmanageable number of orphans from post-war free-love couplings)

The west is in an usual situation where these types get to run a permanent social revolution because the real one never happens, and the damage they do is (currently) being absorbed by the surplus produced by capitalism.
For example, you are all paying every gay men tens of thousands of dollars a year to take AIDs prevention drugs, and that's why your "health insurance" is so high. Whereas Cuba's public health system doesn't do that because there is no surplus.

Thanks for this explanation.

Incidentally, have you actually been modded on reddit for accusing pedophiles from a century ago? Or I suppose modern youtubers on the infamous recent tack of "I thought they were very short sexy goblins".

So leftist pedo history doesn't repeat but it often rhymes?

The usual pattern is "that's a crazy conspiracy theory, all good leftists want to throw pedos into a woodchipper!", and then they get very angry when you show them evidence that the official John Hopkins position is now "destigmatize and accept this oppressed queer sexuality"

Bit too early for them to do "that's not happening and it's good that it is," so the programming defaults to the basic abuse routine. Same reaction as you used to get posting proof they genital surgery on kids was happening when the official position hadn't updated to "it's rare and also why do you care"

It's how you know you've hit a nerve of the blob.

Hm, I think you point at something correct, but I'd like to precisify it a bit more? It seems to me that there are at least three rough factions in this general area, which I'm going to name the Free Lovers, the Paedophiles, and the Family Abolitionists. There's overlap between all three camps, to a degree that should probably concern every non-paedophile here, but it makes sense to distinguish between them, to me.

The Free Lovers are straightforward enough - more sex, fewer rules, inhibition and repression are the enemies, marriage and monogamy are at best not for everyone and at worst inherently oppressive, patriarchal institutions. I don't think they're as large a force today as they were historically, but we can see their descendants around parts of the LGBT movement. Any time people start talking about sexual freedom or relational authenticity, they're likely drawing from this well. The core idea is that one's innate sexual desires are good and should be liberated, and ideologies that impose limits or controls on one's sexual behaviour are inherently oppressive. Normally the Free Lovers still accept some minimal limits around consent or harm, but when they don't, you get...

The Paedophiles, whose primary goal is, well, something I'm a little too delicate to discuss openly. Uncharitably they're just people with twisted fetishes who want to use children for their own satisfaction. Charitably, they have a high view of the agency and responsibility of children and think that children can meaningfully make sexual choices, and frequently other choices as well. For the most part this group are pariahs today, but again they had more influence historically (cf. that French petition in the 70s), and I think you can sometimes see some of their ideas transposed into non-sexual realms - think of e.g. David Runciman advocating lowering the voting age to six years old. (Disclaimer: I have no reason to think that Runciman himself has any inclination towards paedophilia or child abuse. He is merely an example of a 'serious' thinker with a high view of children's agency and moral responsibility.)

The Family Abolitionists believe that the family is an inherently damaging, controlling institution and want to abolish it in favour of some sort of shared or communal approach to child-rearing. The overlap with the Free Lovers' criticism of marriage is clear enough, as is a strategic alliance with the Paedophiles, for whom removing children for parents' protection, or sharing access to children, is desirable. Sophie Lewis is a good example. I don't think I'd agree that this is anything like 'the default position' now, but it's trendy and it sounds progressive, so nobody argues against it, but it's so obviously revolting or enraging to normal people that it has zero chance of happening outside the odd hippie commune. It's ideally placed to be an intellectual fad - it sounds radical, embracing it shows how edgy you are, but it will never happen and thus you will never be on the hook for anything.

Yes, it's demonstrably the case that even saying it's all the perfidious Jews is allowed, so I struggle to think of any group you couldn't safely name.

In this case I don't think he means the Jews, if only because I don't particularly associate them with the promiscuous free-love element of the left? Sexual liberation is definitely an element of many of these left-wing movements, and at times that has gone in grossly repulsive directions (I think particularly of the French petition half a century later), and I'm not surprised that it was around in Russia during the revolution, no more than I'm surprised that it's still around today, but I struggle to point to a single demographic that's clearly responsible.

This is why I like the rule against darkly hinting at things and instead being required to speak plainly. I also don't know who SteveKirk is hinting at. A group that briefly took over in Revolutionary Spain and Russia. "Free-love advocating Jews" doesn't match my understanding of Revolutionary Spain.

But I'm at a loss for which other group is possibly being called out here. Looney anarchists perhaps? Plenty of those in early revolutionary Russia and the brief existence of revolutionary Spain. But you could bitterly complain about anarchists (and jews and jewish anarchists) screwing up leftist revolutions and I don't suppose anyone would much care. Denouncing other sorts of leftists for screwing up leftism is very low hanging fruit.

The most famous free-love advocate in early SU - Alexandra Kollontai - was certainly not Jewish.

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