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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023

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Many people have the thought while driving

What if I just turned my steering wheel left and veered into oncoming traffic? I turn left all the time... I don't even think about it... It's such a familiar thing... I could just turn left right now, and many people would be dead.

This is not a dangerous or concerning thought to have. It's just idle daydreaming, it doesn't mean that driving to work is a gateway to incels attacking people with a van.

If somebody has the motive to kill others for pleasure, everything else about them may still be relatable, but that doesn't matter. If you don't share in the motive, the relatability is superficial. If you do share in the motive... unfamiliarity with guns and cars is a very flimsy obstacle to obtaining the destruction you want. If you're willing to die for it, killing a lot of people is an option all us have.

This is not a dangerous or concerning thought to have. It's just idle daydreaming, it doesn't mean that driving to work is a gateway to incels attacking people with a van.

Ironically I think that one of the stronger bits of evidnce that we might actually be living in an "overly feminized" or "safteized" society is that the call of the void, the martyrs spark, or whatever you want to call it, is treated as this weird outlier rather than something that the average dude will have to deal with on a daily basis.

Probably it's downstream of the absence of male-only spaces. Most men realize, correctly, that you don't want to mention these things around women.

The psychiatric term is "intrusive thoughts" and Harvard estimates six million Americans have them; pop psychiatry sites seem to claim "everyone" has them, and I suspect the latter is at least closer to correct (at least lifetime). I'd be willing to bet women have such thoughts too but they're different in character.