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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 30, 2024

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Look at the conservative embrace of Sidney Sweeney or all the rightoid influencers on X who prominently display cleavage while opining on whatever issue: the new conservative messaging is "It's good for men to want to fuck real women," because too many other, weirder avenues have opened up in pop culture.

Speaking of Sweeney in particular, I encountered enthusiasm for her breasts by listening to the Critical Drinker's "Open Bar" stream while working. The open bar has some actual conservatives, but it seems to me that the core group is pretty clearly tits-and-beer liberals who have been left behind by the rapid advance of Social Justice ideology.

Is what you're seeing a shift in core conservatives, or is it a shift in the center as SJ evolution pushes an increasingly-broad spectrum of people into oppositional alliance?

Now that the left is so far down the sex-as-anything-but-breeding path, we can be more honest about the merits of good old-fashioned fucking.

I think this is pretty accurate, and I think I see it in a lot of other ways too. A lot of the old conflicts between Christian denominations have gone away, now that the central example of a doctrinal dispute has shifted from "what hierarchy do we answer to" to "does sin exist". Many such cases, as they say. Polarization is very, very real.

Is what you're seeing a shift in core conservatives, or is it a shift in the center as SJ evolution pushes an increasingly-broad spectrum of people into oppositional alliance?

Probably the center, but I think the right -- or, the people who have become "the right" since Trump -- have fewer intellectual obstacles in the way of embracing. Even the religious conservatives, who used to be the sexual scolds, have at the essence of their ethos the aggressive male sexual imperative of "be fruitful and multiply." They want to keep it in marriage, but if kids do not feel empowered to acknowledge the hormonal impulses that will lead them to marriage, it's a non-starter. I'm not sure the left has, at their essence, a procreative sexual ethos. They want to deconstruct all of the old natural impulses and replace them with new "enlightened" ones, which is the opposite of the innate physical urges.

Even the religious conservatives, who used to be the sexual scolds, have at the essence of their ethos the aggressive male sexual imperative of "be fruitful and multiply."

Let me posit an alternative explanation: The people who are temperamentally predisposed to becoming sexual scolds now do all their scolding under the woke umbrella by, say, complaining about the male gaze because video game characters look too pretty or whatever. Moralising busy-bodies who get off on telling other people what to do and think will seek out whatever ideological framework will let them do that most satisfyingly.