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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31540 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 16, 2023

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Laughing about the pussification of the Blue Tribe seems strange at a time when they run the world, are winning so much that they are tired of winning, and their opponents have basically given up to the point where their best hope is for the Blue Tribe to self-destruct in a woke-stupid dumpster fire (admittedly a highly plausible outcome). But the basic error isn't new - people were talking about how wealth made the British soft before, during, and after the peak extent of the British Empire. More recently, people were using "they/them army" memes to explain why Russia would win in Ukraine.

What's the alternative to laughing though? Aside from the Hemingway impression forever whispering sweet nothings to me from the sidelines.

Laughing about the pussification of the Blue Tribe seems strange at a time when they run the world, are winning so much that they are tired of winning

One angle of this is that the "winning" is the successful weaponization of said pussification. Crybullying. In other words, being a contemptible, pathetic pussy, and leaning hard into modern civilizational norms that reward being a pathetic pussy and deny any normal consequences. Attacking their social status is at least an actionable plan, until you can coordinate sufficient meanness to atomic wedgie the woke into oblivion.

Obviously there's a huge incentive to overgeneralize here, clearly there is more to Blue success than just sobbing about their sandy bussy until bureaucrats give in to their demands. But it's also not an imaginary phenomenon, it's an archetypal deployment of Slave Morality, which has a solid track record in the West. "Laughing at the pussification" seems useful to the extent that it's a search for an effective immune response to slave morality concern troll crybullying.

The crybullying only works at an individual level because the Blues have already won at the social level. Institutional rules that reward crybullying are imposed top-down by people who achieved power when the norms did not favour crybullying.

The bottom-up norms of the Blue Tribe treat white women’s tears - i.e. Blue elites and aspirant-elites crybullying each other - as almost as worthy of contempt as men’s tears.

Another way of thinking about it is that crybullying only works if you are a designated Blue client group. (The Red Tribe often try crybullying the Blues, and it doesn’t work). Crybullying culture only appeared when the Blues were powerful enough to have client groups.

The crybullying only works at an individual level because the Blues have already won at the social level.

I disagree. I think it works because it exploits values most people have - like compassion, justice, kindness, sense of belonging, desire to protect the weak - and weaponizes it to goals completely alien to these values. Most people do not have innate immunity for that, at least not yet. It's like the virus getting into the cell - it uses its own resources for the goals that have nothing to do with the goals the cell is for. Most non-tribers and red-tribers do not know what to do if somebody attacks them with "here's some oppressed people and either you do exactly what I say or you're the oppressor" - and most people do not want to be the oppressors. That's where the crybullying gets its power - from the desire of people to be good and fear of people to fail to be good, which is successfully weaponized.

The Red Tribe often try crybullying the Blues, and it doesn’t work

Because Red Tribe's values make for them very hard to weaponize compassion. The tribe that values individual strength, individual responsibility, individual merit and individual freedom would find it hard to convincingly pretend to be a helpless victim of circumstances and evil conspiracies. It's hard for them to pretend to be an innocent victim convincingly enough for the feelings of sympathy to overwhelm logical defenses. They are not ambush predators by nature. So copying a strategy that was not designed for them is not going to work very well. You can't have a spider and a hawk to hunt the same way.

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