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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   29309 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 4, 2024

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This has been going through a number of the podcast & youtube circles I listen to, and there's a few points made by some of them that I've pretty much come around to.

First, that as one put it, Sweet Baby Inc. is just successful Feminist Frequency. This bit of "Gamergate 2.0" just serves to illustrate that the gamers lost in the original.

Not that it was ever really a battle worth winning. That's the second point. "The only thing faker than Trump was Gamergate," as a podcaster put it. Because video games — like movies, comic books, football, etc. — are just an escapist "release valve" keeping people idle and passive. That the attitude of the Gamergaters — including the current anti-SBI crowd — is really just "burn my society down around me, I'm fine with that, just so long as you let me have this little corner of escapism."

It's treating a symptom (a potentially useful one at that) instead of going at the disease. I remember one of the videos had clips from one of SBI's top people, which included what was basically encouragement of a "nice video game studio you've got here; shame if someone were to call it sexist/racist/homophobic/transphobic" strategy. But why does that strategy work to begin with? Another reason firms like SBI work is ESG scores and the corresponding low-interest money. Why is that a thing? Because our society lets fat-cat finance capitalists like Larry Fink go unstopped.

Without video games, or Marvel movies, or football to keep them passive, maybe young men would start getting up off their butts and get active. Don't "fight" to take back gaming or comic books, fight to take back your country, to take back Western Civilization. Because there won't be anyone trying to "wokify" your little hobby once the Woke have been crushed utterly.

Without video games, or Marvel movies, or football to keep them passive, maybe young men would start getting up off their butts and get active. Don't "fight" to take back gaming or comic books, fight to take back your country, to take back Western Civilization. Because there won't be anyone trying to "wokify" your little hobby once the Woke have been crushed utterly.

What do you think they are fighting when they are fighting for escapism to be free from wokeness? What the hell is "Woke" anyway?

I'll spit out a definition and see what happens. Woke is anti-enlightenment. We owe so much of modern way of living to enlightenment ideas. We owe Western Civilization to its ideas.

One of the things that has allowed Western Civilization ideas become so prevalent even outside its modern central nation state of US is entertainment in any of its forms. Books, Movies and now in this modern age Games. The centerpoint of this latest gamer drama is a Brazilian guy that noticed that consulting company that does sensitivity reading inject anti-enlightenment ideas into the stories. So he recommends against the games, closes down the public forum and writes a note full of the shibboleths that woke tries to accuse anyone who contradicts them.

This is the culture war in its essence, the fight of anti-enlightenment ideas that has infected the western civilization and is about to kill the host. The pathway it uses to infect others are media in any of its forms. It started with a slow burn of entertainment and education but it is continuing infecting our institutions. Because when it kills the host then we are back in the middleages with how people are governed, like the non-western civilizations... Russia, China, Large parts of the middle-east and most of Africa.

We owe so much of modern way of living to enlightenment ideas.

Yes, and (outside of technology), that's a bad thing.

We owe Western Civilization to its ideas.

Hard disagree. To quote Scott's "How the West Was Won":

I worry that Caplan is eliding the important summoner/demon distinction. This is an easy distinction to miss, since demons often kill their summoners and wear their skin. But in this case, he’s become hopelessly confused without it.

I am pretty sure there was, at one point, such a thing as western civilization. I think it included things like dancing around maypoles and copying Latin manuscripts. At some point Thor might have been involved. That civilization is dead. It summoned an alien entity from beyond the void which devoured its summoner and is proceeding to eat the rest of the world.

"Western Civilization" is Greek philosophy meeting Abrahamic theology. It is what used to be called "Christendom." The "Enlightenment" is what's killing it (I don't think it's quite as dead as Scott believes).

Because when it kills the host then we are back in the middleages with how people are governed

I'm a monarchist, and a supporter of hereditary aristocracy. "Middle ages government with modern technology" is pretty much my entire goal and political project. While most Americans' visions of the future seem shaped by (some subset of) Star Trek (with some going further to Banks' "Culture"), I'm sitting off in the distance with Battletech, 40k, Dune, Legend of the Galactic Heroes, Crest of the Stars, and so on.

Well if we are ignoring the superficial political alignments you are essentially getting that end result. Feodalism is the end goal of todays elite when they travel to Davos for the WEF summit. The the mainstream wokism only purpose is to subjugate the plebs allow the elites to become rentseekers. To discuss the finer points enlightenment has given or not given the modern world is pointless since the "inferential distance" is so big between us.

Well if we are ignoring the superficial political alignments you are essentially getting that end result.

Except that what you call "superficial political alignments" is the survival of what I consider "my people." My problem is that today's elites are both lousy "aristocrats" and, more importantly, hostile to the continued existence of my tribe. Hence, the need for a real aristocracy — a warrior elite, as all real aristocratic classes have been at their start — to kill the pretenders and take power.

(Edit: removed bits that were from wrong thread)

Well the modern aristocracy keeps "their people" on top by suggesting that Asians are "white adjacent" when applying to universities and making BIPOC the benchmark for affirmative admission, miseducates the black youth by saying that math requiring correct answers is racist(so they can't succeed when they get older) and so on. If you look closely by the elites woke policy outcomes and if they don't benefit you are not part of the elite. You'll end up paying rent like the rest. Sure violent uprising could happen but chances that you end up being warrior elite from behind they keyboard are slim.

Because there won't be anyone trying to "wokify" your little hobby once the Woke have been crushed utterly.

Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy? Let's gameplan it. If you could wave your magic wand and get masses of people to follow your guidelines. What kind of scchedule / timeline / milestones are we looking at?

Is there killing? Brainwashing? New laws? Revoking of old laws? What institutions are torn down and which remain?

Let's gameplan it.

I'm not sure I can go into much detail; not without going beyond the limits of what this place allows.

But the ideal scenario, as for methods, is Caesarism — we get an Augustus seizing power. Worst-case scenario, then, is probably Boojahideen — the Left gets to see what an actual "Christian Taliban" looks like.

Is there killing?

Definitely. The question is how much will be necessary.

Brainwashing?

Russell conjugation: I educate, you indoctrinate, they brainwash.

New laws? Revoking of old laws?

Both, and massively so.

What institutions are torn down and which remain?

As with Augustus, the surface forms of some old institutions would probably survive, but the substance would be radically replaced.

For example, with academia, our Caesar's actions should fall somewhere between Henry VIII's Dissolution of the Monasteries and 1960s Suharto.

Is this meant to appeal to conservatives?

Who do you mean by "conservatives"?

The GOP establishment, for whom lower taxes on Big Business is priority one?

The "I didn't leave the Left, the Left left me" trailing edge of the perpetual revolution, who want to go, as Neema Parvini puts it, "back to Fresh Prince"? Or the Obama voter who's now voting Republican because they have nostalgia for the 2009-2010 "post-racial moment" and think that rationing covid vaccines by race is a step too far?

The "conservatism" that Michael Malice called "progressivism driving the speed limit"? The one of which Robert Lewis Dabney wrote in 1871:

This is a party which never conserves anything. Its history has been that it demurs to each aggression of the progressive party, and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of growling, but always acquiesces at last in the innovation. What was the resisted novelty of yesterday is to-day one of the accepted principles of conservatism; it is now conservative only in affecting to resist the next innovation, which will to-morrow be forced upon its timidity, and will be succeeded by some third revolution, to be denounced and then adopted in its turn.

American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition. It remains behind it, but never retards it, and always advances near its leader.

Or maybe there's the "paleoconservatives," perhaps the sort about whom Wikipedia says:

Samuel T. Francis, Thomas Fleming, and some other paleoconservatives de-emphasized the conservative part of the paleoconservative label, saying that they do not want the status quo preserved.[15][16] Fleming and Paul Gottfried called such thinking "stupid tenacity" and described it as "a series of trenches dug in defense of last year's revolution".

As one of the Brits at the Lotus Eaters podcast put it recently (this is from my imperfect memory), "we live in a revolutionary time, so any 'conservative' opposition must actually be counter-revolutionary."

So, do I expect to appeal to the temperamentally conservative sort who stands athwart history yelling "slow down just a little"? No.

Do I expect it to appeal to the people who hold to some standard beyond a mere affection for the status quo? Who believe there's precious little left to conserve, and that every day we keep on "playing the game" by the current rules we see a tiny bit more of it chipped away? Who see that, much like planting a tree, the best time to "flip the table" was 30 years ago (or more); the second best time is today?

Perhaps.

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