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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   4643 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 28, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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To @100ProofTollBooth, @2rafa, and the others:

What, really, nobody can come up with anything other than some form of "join a religious group (for instrumental reasons, even if you don't believe) and hunker down" Benedict Option, where you just try to avoid being crushed utterly until… what, Judgement Day?

Say what you will about @FCfromSSC's usual over-optimistic canned response ("Just defy the Federal government, brah. They can't do anything to you if you don't accept their legitimacy; the bullets in that FBI agent's gun will bounce off you once you stop respecting Federal authority!"), it's at least a proposal for winning, as opposed to merely slowing the losses and trying to avoid total defeat (and poorly, at that).

  1. In several of your other replies, you bring up demographics. I'd take the optimistic viewpoint that demographics are always in favor of those who are both pro-natal and able to raise their children with stability into adulthood. On the left, it's fair to say that those with the means are often minimally natal (single kids) or actively anti-natal. The new NPR lady has a bunch of tweets about the "moral hazard" of bringing children into the world. Those without the means to raise children, the accidentally pregnant a lot of the time lower class of any and all colors, don't tend to place their children in a position to thrive in life, let along seize the reins of power. The most well organized of those - evangelicals - are broadly in agreement with my social policies. So, I'm counting a lot of wins. I don't see the 35 year old purple-hair DEI consultants married to bicurious cucks suddenly deciding to raise a brood of their own. They may try to indoctrinate my kids, but see more about that below.

The current PMC populated by boomers, some Gen-Xers, and woke millenials is, historically speaking, a weird outlier. That the PMC even exists, let alone the level of power and influence it enjoys, is a direct byproduct of the amazing economic conditions from 1945-2005. DEI departments and woke education master's degree holders only exist in a society that has so much extra wealth that these people can do their non-jobs and not starve. In a real economic depression, a lot of them get canned quick. In a period of re-expanding growth, you'll see the actually productive surpass them and, frankly, hold a louder microphone. Examples: Mr. Musk and Mr. Thiel.

Returning to the primary point, who are those communities who have both the fecundity and financial-ity (i really wanted to rhyme to work, sorry) to build the next leaders of society? Well, we already told you.

  1. You bring up the "that's a lot of ifs" argument quite a bit. I'd say that any large scale strategy is predicated on risk-adjusted decisions about how to allocate resources and then conduct operations. If you're waiting for an absolutely bulletproof plan that is blindingly obvious in its multi-decade efficacy, I think you might want to talk to some dead Chinese fellows about how that works out.

  2. "The state is coming for your kids and will also maybe kill you." Although a bit dramatic, I agree with you. I have faith that that tide will turn back and, in some pockets, already has. Glen Youngkin won in VA largely because he said "Hey, stop teaching kids woke stuff in public school." The college protests of late are also great fuel to the fire for school choice and hefty parental veto rights. The most indoctrinated kids are paralyzingly anxious and fail to continue to exert the same level of cultural influence their parents did. If working more than 3 hours a day creates "trauma" for you, I'm not worried about you outbuilding me.

  3. "What if it is already too late and we're fucked." Well, then we're fucked. And I get to die and go home to Jesus, which is already the point. I know that's an argumentative cop out and I truly am sorry for it, but when people keep going down the recursive rabbit hole of "what if you're wrong about that? and that? and that?" Then, I guess if so many of my past, present, and future assumptions are all horribly flawed, I deserve the apocalypse. The Good News (read that capitalization carefully!) is that I, like Lizzy Warren, Have A Plan For That.

Glen Youngkin won in VA largely because he said "Hey, stop teaching kids woke stuff in public school."

Maybe, but I think there's a difference between "stop teaching woke stuff" and "stop copying the Catholic Church's playbook". I seem to recall a significant rape scandal at that time (the school administration was just relocating the boy-in-a-skirt rapist from school to school, then the cops arrested the victim's fathers when they dared to complain)?

There's a lot of tolerance for the former and most parents don't really care all that much about it (considering how averse they seem to be in terms of trying to reclaim their rights). Heck, even a "we're so powerful we won't even bother to cover up the fact that trans rapists are A-OK in our books" has only so far prompted the election of one more sympathetic governor; if that's the full extent of parental organization and power here, well...

You don’t do it waiting for judgment day, you do it so that when the opportunity arises, and it may well do, you can eventually seize power. Not of the whole country, but of some kind of defensible territory. Look at the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. The Jews waited 2000 years. But if you have a tight knit group, with money, that practices endogamy, that produces children, eventually you may well have the opportunity to exercise some kind of power. And on a more practical and immediate note, it also allows you to impose your own kind of order on a community, preserving a space for yourself and people like you even as the wider nation might shift radically.

The Jews waited 2000 years.

And how many other minority groups ended up assimilating and dying out? There's a survivorship bias here.

But if you have a tight knit group, with money, that practices endogamy, that produces children,

That's a lot of "ifs." Especially the money part, these days; but also endogamy (few manage it, and are often under suspicion, save maybe the Hasidim — who have the advantages of being Jewish — and the Amish — who are seen as "quaint" and harmless) and producing children.

it also allows you to impose your own kind of order on a community,

Only as much as the broader society allows you to.

preserving a space for yourself and people like you

Until the government decides to crush your communities, arrest your leaders, and take and "residential school" indoctrinate/assimilate your children.

Fine, yeah. But consider how many times the Soviet Union used extremely harsh measures to try to eradicate ethnic identity and still failed at doing so. Nothing is guaranteed. But the option is still better than either (a) fighting impotently and getting crushed or (b) doing nothing and guaranteeing failure.

Again, the only alternative is coup-complete and in that case the far right just doesn’t have the necessary amount of elite human capital versus the center and left as Tracing and others have (in my opinion) persuasively argued.

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