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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 2, 2023

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Your winning strategy is Waco. It doesn't work because the Feds eventually come to shoot at your women and children with incendiary ammunition. And if you resist that's proof you deserved it.

You're not allowed to escape the system.

And the reply is that if you're worrying about what is "allowed" you've already failed. The correct answer will always be "Let them come."

If you want to die stupid, maybe.

The correct answer will always be "Let them come."

Tell it to David Koresh's crispy corpse.

So what, let's just have Waco then. A 1000 Waco if needed.

To all the Republicans who think the elections were stolen. So what? Be better. Cheat twice as well as them. Biden gets 80 million votes? Get Trump 160 million votes. Have news anchors read 'the real voting results comrade' at gunpoint on Election Day. Next time you feel like waltzing into the Capitol and having a gay little BBQ, actually do something. They shoot one of yours? Shoot two of them. Burn down the whole place. You will get years in prison anyway.

Some of us are hoping it doesn't come to that. Peace is valuable, and not easily repaired once broken.

A more hopeful option is a strategy of large-scale defiance of federal law, "sanctuary" cities and states, in hopes of forcing sufficient concessions by fiat accompli. The name of the game is brinksmanship, and the first side to start large-scale violence quite possibly loses.

the first side to start large-scale violence quite possibly loses.

What is the threshold you have in mind, and why is the Summer of 2020 below that threshold?

A fair point. Allow me to rephrase: large-scale, cross-tribal, lethal violence. Summer of 2020 was mostly blue-tribe-on-blue-tribe, and the incidents that weren't were thankfully isolated. While the violence we did get was very bad and appears to have done catastrophic long-term damage to our society, it has not yet resulted in a spiral of retaliatory terrorism and murder.

Yes, what people presenting solutions don't want to see is that there's a meta-rule built into society which simply says "you lose", and until that's removed nothing will work. But it's a major blackpill so of course few want to see it.

Yes, what people presenting solutions don't want to see is that there's a meta-rule built into society which simply says "you lose", and until that's removed nothing will work

This is a lie told to you by your Marxist college professors.

The truth is that you were always were going to lose, and yet that this has never been an obstacle to making things "work". Your Marxist college professor wants you to believe that you can make things better by tearing society down not because it was true but because he/she/xe wanted your help. It is a fundamental law of the universe that you can not "win" only "break even", or "delay the inevitable". Accordingly the best any of us can hope for is to delay the inevitable. The enemy always wins and we still to fight him.

Only a true liberal would would be so arrogant and culturally ignorant to believe in the possibility of a final victory this side of Armageddon.

This is a lie told to you by your Marxist college professors.

No. I actually didn't have any Marxist college professors, at least none who were out about it in class.

Only a true liberal would would be so arrogant and culturally ignorant to believe in the possibility of a final victory this side of Armageddon.

Thermodynamics doesn't really apply here. In the long term we get the heat death of the universe. In the short term -- and human lifetimes are extremely short term, with all of human history being short term -- we can win or lose. There is no law of the universe that says the left must win; it's an entirely human law.

It is a fundamental law of the universe that you can not "win" only "break even", or "delay the inevitable".

What does "final" mean? If they keep increasing their power until the fact that their system simply cannot work becomes evident and civilization falls, that's final enough. Sure, after the collapse human society will probably rebuild, but that is no comfort to me, who will not live that long (I likely will not live long enough to even see the collapse, despite their best efforts).

The point isn't to independently escape the system but to change the system to allow for the enforcement of local norms. I don't personally agree with this idea (it would render the 14th Amendment largely useless), but that's what the OP was arguing.

You can solve this problem by ‘not hoarding machine guns’ and ‘not having underaged harems’.

The Branch Davidians were not "hoarding machine guns". The girls in the underaged harem were all burned alive in a fire that began immediately after federal agents launched pyrotechnic grenades into a highly flammable wooden structure, and then detained responding fire department vehicles until it was too late to do anything but cool the ashes, before engaging in an extensive coverup that nevertheless collapsed roughly a decade later.

I strongly oppose "christian" cults that discover that their leader needs to have a harem. I oppose government agents burning men, women and children alive to cover up a botched PR campaign a whole lot more.

Branch Davidians

Obligatory twitter thread for people who want to crawl into this rabbit hole.

TL;DR: the official line on Waco is as accurate as official line on ... anything else.

https://twitter.com/mattakersmusic/status/1528054223254040578

edit: link

I'm skeptical of anyone claiming CIA involvement, and deeply skeptical of connections to more general conspiracy theories like government mind control experiments, but a lot of the actual, documented evidence about interactions and specific government violations seems legit. I don't think there's any connection to a grand dramatic narrative in Waco. The government was looking to make an example of some weirdos for PR purposes, tried to manufacture a dramatic armed raid, fucked up, and then killed a whole lot of people in a plausibly-deniable way during the cover-up.

No need for any CIA stuff. Just ask anyone spouting the official line how the hell the government loses an entire door. The double front door to the compound is where the shooting started. The Davidians claim ATF shot first. ATF presented one of the doors, with bullet holes going out. The other door simply vanished.

So it's proven they lied for years about the incendiary nades but I should trust them not to plant machine guns on the premises and generally falsify more evidence why?

What about Ruby Ridge? Weaver survived and it was proven in court he didn't make a machine gun, that's not going to resurrect his wife.

No, you can't solve this problem by obeying the law. They'll find a reason to fuck with you, they don't give a shit whether you're guilty or not.

The Hasids do an excellent job, actually a perfect job of maintaining an insular community. Their strategies can be studied and copied. Their victories are stunning, they literally take hundreds of millions of the gentiles’ money and use it to indoctrinate their children into the Hasidic culture. There’s no reason why sufficiently motivated conservatives cannot begin to organize according to an Hasidic template.

In the early days of this site, there was an extremely interesting comment regarding one user's investigation into their ways to evade taxes in NYC, appropriate much more or the city budget money than commonly reported (by orders of magnitude, to the extent NYT investigation would be more of a coverup in comparison) and generally run things like a powerful mafia. He deleted it, unfortunately, and in private communication stated that on further reflection he'd rather support people abusing the system for valid darwinian ends than disgusting deracinated liberal NPC drones who believe they're fundamentally on its side and it only needs a little tuning (to wit, us).

I think he just got cold feet, perhaps because it dawned on him (or someone politely made him aware) he left traces of his sleuthing all over. It's honestly hard to never leave identifying traces.

Groups without the ability to inspire such mind-numbing fear are fucked. And I don't think anyone would fear a bunch of conservatives.

Groups without the ability to inspire such mind-numbing fear are fucked. And I don't think anyone would fear a bunch of conservatives.

What group? Hasids?

If so, they have indeed an advantage that other mafias, gangs and cartels cannot even dream about.

Italian Americans once tried to learn from the best and emulate their success. Unfortunately, too little and about a century too late.

I remember that. He worked in a federal department that handed out grants, I think by phone line. He looked into the businesses and they weren’t really eligible for them and many didn’t exist. Did you happen to screen shot that comment?

No, missed by like an hour. This reminded me, painfully, that one should never trust things on the Internet to not just disappear on you.

There are tools for continuous browser grabbing, implemented in different ways from caching to actual recording.

This reminded me, painfully, that one should never trust things on the Internet to not just disappear on you.

Everything lasts forever on the internet unless you actually need it - then it never existed in the first place.

I once had this weird theory that, whenever I embedded a video on Tumblr, it would bring more attention to YouTube's invisible police bots, eventually ensuring its takedown.

But the welfare office staff they're conning don't hate them or sit around the office all day talking about driving them into the sea. That makes a big difference.

Gentile conservatives who tried to do what they do would be instantly slapped with investigations from the state prosecutor and probably have their kids taken from them.

The Amish don’t. The broader fundamentalist Christian landscape in America is threatened with losing their children more often than average, but they don’t actually lose them that often(in part because they will just take their children and disappear when CPS is probably going to take them away, and social workers don’t get paid enough to attract the best and brightest). And of course, actually working for a living instead of living off of welfare fraud also helps a lot.

St. Mary’s, Kansas, is a majority traditionalist catholic town in the USA. By all accounts it’s a near theocracy and they get away with it. Heck even the FLDS(which violates significantly more laws) still runs their own towns and gets their kids back.

St. Mary’s, Kansas, is a majority traditionalist catholic town in the USA. By all accounts it’s a near theocracy and they get away with it.

What's this? That town doesn't sound familiar to me.

Cheers, that was an interesting read.

Change takes time. No one would be making such propaganda if advertisers were seriously boycotted and funders had legal protestors outside their businesses and activist-journalists phoned up all of their past classmates and partners fishing for reputational damage.

The Hasids also had their fare-share of rock-slinging a la David & the Goliath: https://www.nytimes.com/1978/12/03/archives/70-are-hurt-including-62-officers-as-hasidim-storm-a-police-station.html