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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 2, 2024

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The essay reminds me quite strongly of an old quote from the Swedish author Hjalmar Söderbergs best and most well-known work Doktor Glas:

"Ett nyfött barn är vedervärdigt. En dödsbädd gör sällan ett så ohyggligt intryck som en barnsbörd, denna förfärliga symfoni av skrik och smuts och blod."

"A newborn child is hideous. A deathbed seldom makes so terrible an impression as a childbirth, this horrific symphony of screams and filth and blood."

Pregnancy and childbirth truly are among the most hideous physical processes in existence. Everytime I watch a hospital series and a birth scene comes on, I feel the same revulsion as if they'd switched to a snuff film. It's telling that the Old Testament felt the need to explain pregnancy and childbirth as a punishment from God for an espeically egregious sin, and in a broader metaphysical sense the old story of the Apple of Knowledge and the plight of the female pelvis carries deep metaphorical truth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obstetrical_dilemma

This is an existential problem which haunts me, and more so than usual lately. I see no solution – that is to say, a solution which cuts to the heart of the matter – to this, short of maybe artifical wombs followed by abolishing women as a sex. That idea has a lot of merits, and it would make the natalist position a lot more appealing if we could at least make it less of a travesty to create new people; but it is also a pipe dream which will obviously never become reality. I am at least grateful for the fact that I was born a man, and that I was thus spared the fate of being a sacrificial lamb of human reproduction.

Despite all this, it's unfortunately difficult to feel particularily sorry for women. The Female of the Species is more deadly than the Male, as the good Kipling wrote, and through their harsh sexual selection women have created what they are now complaining about (this is, again in a metaphorical sense, the aforementioned sin for which they are now all collectively being punished). Men obviously fare only a little better in the equation. The truth is, my friends, we are dumb and evil animals and for that reason we all deserve to be miserable – and so we are.

I end with another classic Doktor Glas passage:

"Jag hade alltid känt ett stort förakt för de dåliga gossar, som brukade rita fula ord på väggarna och planken. Men i den stunden var det mig som om Gud själv hade ritat något fult på den blå vårhimmeln, och jag tror egentligen att det var då jag först började undra, om det verkligen fanns någon gud."

"I had always felt great contempt for the scoundrel boys who used to draw ugly words on walls and planks. But in that moment it seemed to me as if God himself had drawn something ugly on the blue spring sky, and I think it was a that moment I began to wonder, if there really was a God."

I do not wonder. There is no God. We are alone.

You've cheered me up immensely and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter! Swedes are delightful people, just rays of pure sunshine.

As blackpilled as I am, I think you're wrong, by the way. Not because of any ideological reason, but because living as if those things were true makes me less attractive to women, and as someone who likes women and is already quite challenged in that area, I'd like as few debuffs as possible.

The idea that anyone deserves anything at all was beaten out of me long ago. We may be dumb, evil animals, but even the dumb and the evil can be happy in their own way. Self-flagellation is only fun if there's an audience.

Posting a clip to a YouTube video calling something gibberish is not better than directly calling something gibberish. (Worse, because you made me go watch the clip to see what it is you're saying.)

Calling someone's post gibberish is pretty antagonistic, which means we're going to expect you to do more than just say so (with or without a YouTube video). Since I can read the post and understand what his point is (not saying I agree with it, nor am I judging the quality of his writing, just saying it is clearly not "gibberish"), you have failed to meet the threshold to justify such antagonism.

You have a bunch of AAQCs. You also have a bunch of warnings for this kind of low-effort insult and culture warring. The first gives you more slack for the latter, but it's not a one-for-one relationship where earning an AAQC gives you one free cheap shot. Please stop doing this or steeper consequences will ensue.