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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   29602 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 2, 2023

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I took one semester of anthropology courses in college and that was enough to tell me I don't want to return to a hunter-gatherer level of civilization.

There are plenty of forests available to you if you do want that. Until then, please stop trying to destroy my civilization.

In the first place, the deconstruction and seizure of institutional power did not reduce us to hunter-gatherers when blues did it, so there's no reason it should do so were Reds to reciprocate.

Secondly, we were here first.

Secondly, we were here first

Given that the first Blues came over on the Mayflower, I doubt that.

Seriously, (unless you believe one of the more radical anti-semitic conspiracy theories) the rise of wokism did not involve a hostile takeover of any institutions - the top universities and most prestigious newspapers in America were run by Yankees and Quakers in 1776, and are run by Yankees, Quakers, and Yankee-aligned secular Jews now. If you do the genealogical research, you will find that most of the individuals in charge are drawn from the same families. (Descendants of PMC Holocaust-era refugees excepted). The rise of wokism (beginning with the Civil Rights movement and the Sexual Revolution, and continuing through 1990's PC and ultimately the current Great Awokening) happened by some combination of conversion and generational replacement. There are several important books still to be written about how and why this happened - Moldbug certainly has a book-length treatment spread over multiple long blog posts, but I don't think his thesis (on my reading, that Yankees were always like this, they just increased in power slowly until they they didn't have to compromise with reality any more) is correct, and his presentation leaves a lot to be desired.

It is worth remembering the background though - in the period 1945-75,

  • The atom bomb appeared to render everything we knew about war obsolete (and therefore most of what we knew about masculine virtue)
  • The combination of the pill and cheap antibiotics capable of treating the then-common STDs appeared to render everything we knew about sexual morality obsolete (and therefore most of what we knew about feminine virtue)
  • The mass adoption of fridges, gas cookers, and washing machines really did render everything we knew about domesticity obsolete (and therefore the rest of what we knew about feminine virtue)
  • The mass adoption of private cars really did render everything we knew about human geography obsolete (and therefore most of what we knew about well-functioning communities).
  • By-and-large, this was also the period where intelligent, educated people stopped actually believing their religion, even if they didn't abandon it altogether.

Some form of moral upheaval was probably inevitable.

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