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That sounds like a description of modern incels (obviously we don't care that much about the floor of men who'd just never reproduce, we care that the number seems to be growing....)
But let's say we mean some people who haven't totally blackpilled themselves. Sure. It's a more viable demographic. But I wonder to what degree they aren't subject to similar problems like obesity. After all, what did they fail to start? School sports and all those other physical virtues?
I read her book, and I more or less agree tbh
No, I think you're thinking of the late USSR or Impeprial China and I'm thinking about a random awful African country.
Like, both have problems. But one collapsed and was replaced by a new, perhaps more viable model. The other just continues to dwell (or spiral) in a low-level equilibrium with no end in sight.
That's how I see it. Bad regimes and systems can persist for a long time without a real counter. When we're talking about some of the richest and most mature democracies with ever increasing government-corporate control of the digital infrastructure and their visible testing of means of curbing revolt (e.g. the attack against the bank accounts of trucker protestors)...
The public is way too divided and been trained to both hate each other and feel fatalist about a lot of this. They've already proven that plenty of them are for authoritarian tactics so long as it's framed correctly.
This is without even getting into more speculative (though unfortunately less speculative every day) uses of autonomous tech to put down prole revolts without even depending on the usual "class traitors" that make up the thin blue line.
The psychological fragility and neuroticism of the average leftist activist or booster doesn't mean the system is won't strike back. Quite the opposite
The system has its problems yes, but it uses panics like Andrew Tate to justify more control.
You point out that they're holding interventions with teenage boys. I'd note that they moved to curtail his influence online and he's literally on trial right now... In the meantime sixty different "experts" are probably calling for increased intervention against "misinformation" and "radicalism" and the social media sites are probably tuning their systems (we now know they have a lot of coordination with the government) to make sure it never happens again.
To emphasize the totality and...arbitrariness? A better word is escaping me, but the image that comes to mind is a scared cop shooting anything that moves
Correct. That the percentage is increasing is a cause for concern due to what it augurs for the future.
It's my contention that the structures and mores of society in the past allowed for a not-insignificant portion of men to flourish and otherwise achieve when they would not in the absence of those structures. We've destroyed those structures and actively stamp out any effort to replace them, which means that a bunch of men who could have grown and developed into productive, useful members of society simply have not.
The modern west is far closer to the USSR or Imperial China than a random awful African country. When your society is an empire there is a qualitative difference between it and smaller, less complex states. The same government that you see putting down prole revolts is increasingly fragile and failing, and I do not think that it will maintain that grip forever. What cannot be sustained will not be - and western imperial governments are currently unsustainable.
That has never been my contention - the system will actually strike back and with less subtlety and more force as it begins to fail. That's another one of those reliable indicators of imperial decline.
I agree that the government is going to crack down on things like this, but I don't think they're actually going to succeed at it. The actors in the system don't understand the position they're in and repeatedly act in ways that strengthen and bolster their opposition. A strong, secure government doesn't need to do this - but that's not what we have. Your metaphor for a scared cop is actually pretty good in my opinion, and I think that's an accurate perception... but at the same time this scared cop has a legitimate reason to be scared, even if he can't quite understand why.
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