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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 29, 2024

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My suspicion is that Korea is just a sucky place due to their lifestyle and that places which are sucky for fixable-seeming reasons(Koreans could just not do the things that make them miserable if they could figure out the coordination problem) are drawn to radical and generally bad ideas. You used to see it a lot with communism; tsarist Russia was genuinely worse off than its neighbors even if everyone expected it to catch up eventually. I'd hazard a guess that Korea has built-in antibodies to communism for obvious neighbor-related reasons and that it has no such antibodies to feminism, allowing it to run wild into radical man-hating.

In other words, Korean gender wars are a side-effect of the same factors driving down the birth rate. And I've pointed out before that people don't have kids if they expect it to be a miserable experience all around which for Koreans is a very reasonable and grounded expectation. I like to compare to rednecks in America who absolutely love being parents and have a replacement fertility. My tribe's TFR advantage isn't because of our better family values, it's because we expect to actually like it(well, kind of- I'm talking about the broader red tribe here and not about tradcaths specifically, that TFR is probably due to conservative family values).

and that it has no such antibodies to feminism [other than that mandatory military service thing], allowing it to run wild into radical man-hating.

Yes, that's called "being a fully mechanized nation". Most Western powers ran into this somewhere around the 1900s, and women were first granted rights above and beyond men (as in, "rights without corresponding responsibilities") in those nations around that time- you see that with the right to vote most prominently [without the corresponding duty to be drafted into a war they voted themselves into, something we see in Ukraine today], but prohibition and minimum-age requirements for brides are their doing as well.

I think the pedofascist was/is trivially correct when he made the point that these policies, from the start, are properly viewed as radical man-hating; tearing down the places they'll go after work and putting ever-increasing caps on the quality of women they can afford with no suitable substitute are not exactly pro-man things (worth noting 1984 begins with a description of "the only woman a middle-class income affords the average man is an ugly, infertile, prostitute", and then Winston finds a secretly-transgender [from a biological standpoint] woman who he has wild sex with before the Gender Police torture them to ego death; I believe Orwell predicted modern gender politics to a tee). In that light, first-wave feminists must have been motivated by the same hatred/anger that motivates third-wave feminists (and the white-knights for each wave similarly motivated), and it's always the legitimately transgender individuals that are used as tokens by said women only to later suffer from it (in this case, "the 1% of women who actually are competitive with the men want the right to pursue those opportunities"- something that would fit under the trans umbrella as 1900-1950s society would have understood it; today, the genders are reversed, where men are demanding the opportunities and privileges of women).

[Further effort post: the concept of transgenderism is coherent from a strictly biological standpoint, and our instinctive grouping of all non-straight-as-in-established-man-on-youngest-possible-woman sexuality into "biology should not predict this behavior therefore the people that do these things are malfunctioning" is also coherent, but the people who are transgender under this definition are not the people most people would claim it is today!]

But if the complete obviation of the biological male gender role was such an impending disaster, what let us avoid those consequences for so long? Well, the post-war WW2 boom pushed the economic balance in the West far enough towards men that it was the women who couldn't meaningfully co-ordinate to soak up so much wealth, but that was over by 1980 and the problem our great-grandparents failed to solve has returned to haunt us once again.

Korea, then, is experiencing this for the first time, in full force, being that they have only just made it to full mechanization (they weren't in a position to benefit from post-WW2 booms especially thanks to that civil war)... and being a US-occupied nation means they have to deal with the US' cultural outlook/propaganda, which is currently tilted in the gynosupremacist direction. It's probably worth considering how the Japanese managed to avoid this problem, but I think that was because they mechanized in that boom time and managed to lock in a "the genders aren't actually at war with each other" mindset (and their rule-following did the rest) [but they still haven't dodged the problem, because all the good gender relations propaganda in the world can't actually solve a problem of 996/economics].

The Koreans, by contrast, didn't make it in time- but they also happen to be blazing a trail (being a smaller nation) whose trajectory men (and women) in the wider West would be wise to observe, regardless of whether it fixes the problem or conclusively demonstrates it's not fixable.

And I've pointed out before that people don't have kids if they expect it to be a miserable experience all around which for Koreans is a very reasonable and grounded expectation.

I think it is true for Americans as well; states that have successfully kept angry/neurotic women from destroying the rights of parents to allow their children to enjoy life as much appear to have higher TFRs, even though their average income would take even more of a hit by having kids. Sadly I can't find a by-state breakdown of TFR for 1920 to prove that, so my evidence for that ends at the car seat thing.

without the corresponding duty to be drafted into a war they voted themselves into, something we see in Ukraine today

It sounds like a very American thing, to assume that all wars are something you vote yourself into.

I don't think Americans think that about most wars we get involved with, either. There's rarely a chance to vote against them.