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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31654 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 9, 2023

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Im a little hungover and decided to open up my phone.

No of course not. A poor maga voice in the rust belt matters more than some Indian aristocrats in global affairs. That’s the way the world works. Between a combination of hbd being real (so Africa will never matter) and people respecting history that America inherited and carried western civilization.

America has an internal cultural war but it’s our war to fight internally. The rest of you just get to cheer on a side. And I don’t think it’s as one sided as it feels like some times. Elon Musks did not choose the maga side (whatever that means) because he thinks it’s a loser despite elites on the other side capturing nearly every elite institution. He’s generally not a loser.

And yes maga and pcm would reunite the second they think their dominance is under threat. Losing to the other sucks but losing to China is even worse.

A plumber in Grand Rapids Michigan cares as much as a NYT Ivy League columnist that an American matters more than a x,y,z aristocrat somewhere else and if that ever got challenged they would unite.

Musk is on team "Maga" for the same reason 1st and 2nd generation immigrants to the west tend to be anti-woke. They came to the place for the blackjack and hookers and here you have it some of the natives want to ban day drinking and titty bars.

America has an internal cultural war but it’s our war to fight internally.

It's not an internal culture war when America is the largest cultural exporter in the world, it's become a global culture war. Those fights are being exported all over the globe. There were BLM protests in places like Finland and Ireland. The rest of the world (or the West, at least) is part of the fight now whether you or they want it or not.

Partial agree with the caveat that it goes both ways- Ireland has BLM protests but Africa has mega churches that wouldn’t look out of place in a sun belt suburb, country music jumped the language barrier, and rodeo is proportionately more popular in Brazil than the USA. Really there’s a fight between the NYC cultural package and the Texas cultural package and it very well could go either way.

We really would benefit from having LW-style separate upvotes for liking and agreeing.

Well you should like it too (assuming that’s your meaning) it’s not like western civ is bad and we have to carry and promote that.

Nah, I viscerally dislike the image of either maga or wokes (or their unholy union) asserting dominance over humanity. But more importantly I reject your claim to stewardship of the West – and the self-serving belief in this stewardship being beneficial for the West or for the rest. You're going to hell in a handbasket, taking us with you, and not letting anyone leave.

The latest drama is a case in point. Bostrom is part of the best that the West has to offer. He has developed his views in Sweden and in England. It takes the black-obsessed, anti-intellectual American purity spiral to drag him through the mud. You folks aren't really Western, at least not post-Enlightenment West, you're something new and simultaneously ancient – simpler, stronger, cruder, driven by primitive taboos and collective hysterias, and unlike similar archaic resurgencies in other places, entirely invulnerable to reality checks. Carl Jung would attribute this to «spiritual negrification», and Hlynka would boast (perhaps misleadingly) of being an «inbred degenerate» and Scott would speak of Moloch, but there's little point: might as well blame Tezcatlipoca. Drag Queen Story Hour isn't a Western thing, and Megachurches are even less so, and you're right they do have more in common than they have with Western debauchery and religion, respectively. To the extent that you define the West with your gimmicky fascinations, you brutalize it. And you take pride in your dominant brutality. This, too, is ancient.

You should have had a few more centuries of isolationism to figure out some bearable attitude. It's too bad that history is ending in this generation, under your yoke.

You folks aren't really Western, at least not post-Enlightenment West, you're something new and simultaneously ancient – simpler, stronger, cruder, driven by primitive taboos and collective hysterias, and unlike similar archaic resurgencies in other places, entirely invulnerable to reality checks.

Reminds me of that book review of The Dawn of Everything on ACX, where the author described the "sapience trap"(?) as being, in all likelihood, a sociality trap where reputation was the biggest currency of all.

You folks aren't really Western, at least not post-Enlightenment West

And we would also benefit from having a special BASED upvote.

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