https://youtube.com/shorts/vQOyDQiIkYc?feature=share4

I can't decide whether this is the worst WIAH take of all time or a perfect snapshot of Zoomers being nostalgic for a past they don't understand and never actually existed, which conservatives are guilty of doing over and over and over again.

Homer Simpson was a hilariously unqualified nuclear plant manager. He had a well-paying, upper-middle-class job that he would have never been able to obtain in the real world, and him botching it was part of the comedy. Back in the 90s, leftist rags used to complain about how unrealistic Homer Simpson's lifestyle was, and it was common for them to make other complaints about TV. TV shows portrayed upper-middle class life as normal, and critics of the West deservedly bitched about it nonstop.

And now Zoomers are looking at those same portrayals and going "ahhh, the good old days."

Quick thoughts on the LOTR video:

• If the Shire is England, Isengard is Germany, Rohan is Poland, Gondor is Austria, and Mordor is the Ottomans/Soviets... what are the equivalents to France and Iberia?

• It actually just occurred to me that if the Free Peoples of Middle-Earth are a stand-in for the Western European powers, making them less white and more woke isn't as much of a violation of the historical canon as people think. The Western European powers are all thalassocracies that gained their dominant position by absorbing vast swathes of non-white lands and cultures far outside the boundaries of Europe, much of which they successfully assimilated at least partially. Central and South America and the Philippines are all basically brown Spain. The Western Cape and the American South are basically black chavs and white toffs. Australia and North America are literally just Britain expanded to the scale of continents. So, the Free Peoples being steadily less white and more woke without sacrificing much more of their culture is about accurate, though it was done very clumsily by writers who don't understand the historic context for those changes (A Song of Ice and Fire did it much better -- brown people are a desert civilization, and black people come from the tropics).

• I'm not sure I agree with Rudyard that power makes most people evil when they weren't before. Most people have good and evil doing battle within their hearts, and evil happens to be more seductive, much easier to give into. In short, most people with power who do evil deeds, were evil (or rather, more predisposed to evil to begin with). Breaking Bad is a masterclass on how this happens -- if you watch closely, Walter White wasn't good in the beginning, just harmless. He was always the spiteful little gremlin he was as Heisenberg, he just didn't have the ability to do as much damage.

Technology has a consistent track record of simultaneously solving old problems and creating new ones, but on balance it solves far more problems than it creates. Especially over the long run, though the benefits of some technologies take generations to materialize (the printing press and the Protestant reformation for example).

In the here and now, I think that AI will undo a lot of the problems robotized industries created without having to undo the benefits we've gotten from them. Mechanizing industry has pushed the labor force into services, with the effect of both feminizing and detaching the working population from reality. AI ought to gut a lot of the service back-end so that it'll push society back towards good old fashioned grunt work (which we're desperately short on now), and in so doing it may provide the impetus needed to restore a more traditional family with breadwinners and homemakers.

I'm actually quite excited about the possibilities.

We can look at history to puzzle ways out of the current dating crisis. Rud looked at history and came up with the low-key hilarious conclusion that we should be banging our third cousins quite a long time ago (he seems to have abandoned that notion).

Myself, I had a look at Tim Marshall's study of primitive societies, and learned something that I think most of us on an intuitive level knew or suspected already: we're not just biased towards hypergamy (men too, don't pretend you'd settle for a 5 when a solid 8 wants you), but also exogamy. Women, also men, tend to favor mating far outside their tribe, with partners they find exotic.

In pre-industrial times you could just ride 300 miles and be the hot exotic stranger all the village girls want. The world is a lot smaller now, so your scope has to expand accordingly. I am, of course, talking about international dating. The infamous "mail-order brides", the main argument against which has usually been calling you names for going after them. The refuge of timid men and plain women screeching at anything that'll reduce their market value.

Some comments about "The Coming Far-Right Backlash":

• There's a ton of overlap between the four factions of the right, and realistically they will probably coalesce as they mature. Whatifalthist is essentially right that pure Libertarianism has no future, and it'll have to either coalition with the left, or with the Petersonians; but it already has enough overlap with both of them to integrate seamlessly. Personally, as someone of a libertarian persuasion, I think there should be a libertarian presence on both sides, though personally I side more with the Petersonians.

• Solutions exist to the current dating crisis for men other than instituting white Sharia and putting women in burkas, and history is a useful guide. I'll expound more on those in its own post.

• If one major problem society has is the lack of young men and the vitality they bring, do us thirty-somethings have a duty to take testosterone boosters?

• Rudy ironically showed a sterling example of the left being better at controlling the narrative by essentially buying their bullshit narrative of the 2020 election whole. A) J6 was not an attempted revolt. It wasn't even really a riot. We have the CCTV footage. It was literally an escorted trip around the capitol. B) The idea that there was nothing wrong with the election, nor any evidence of foul play, is pure gaslighting. I VIVIDLY remember the 4am vote dumps that were basically all for the Dems and put them ahead by basically the votes they were behind. I realize now that those were probably harvested ballots, which ought to be illegal but aren't. Certainly, though, they don't pass constitutional muster (for very good reason, the Constitution mandates there must be ONE single election day).

• I can't think of a single more alienating thing Rudy could have possibly said when talking about uniting the right, than calling it a New Deal. It's probably the Canadian in him that doesn't notice a problem, but I don't want anything I do associated with that detestable pinko FDR.

There's more, but a couple of other topics I feel deserve their own thread. This'll do for now. Overall, as usual not an absolute perfect take, but an excellent one.

I feel like Rudyard falls into the same "I don't want to look like a Nazi" trap that the Boomers themselves fell into by putting so much blame for today's problems on the 76 million Americans the baby boom generation produced, and hardly any at all on the four billion people that were born in poor countries scarcely able to feed themselves around the same time as the Gen X cohort.

The Boomers we're handed way too much success and used it unwisely, but when I think of what they could have done instead, what I mostly come up with is "the same, but less of it". But the problem with that particular solution is that America's fatal flaw has always been lacking nuance, so I'm not sure that it's fair to demand of the Boomers to show the kind of ideological restraint that virtually none of their forebears had.

The Ukraine war, I think, confirms that we will almost certainly not see a direct confrontation between great powers in the foreseeable future.

Rudyard has mentioned before that limited wars (as opposed to total wars) have been the norm rather than the exception throughout history, and from there surmised that we will see some sort of limited war between great powers, but there's little indication that'll actually be the case. The unspoken rules of war we've come up with since WWII is that nuclear powers do not directly confront one another, lest a misunderstanding escalates to nuclear destruction. Instead, they fight proxy wars, with one power attacking a minor third nation and the other one providing said nation basically unlimited aid. That's how we fought Vietnam, Korea, the Soviet Afghanistan war, and so on and so forth, and it's how we're fighting out the confrontation in Ukraine. Should Russia win, they'll continue to bully around neighboring non-NATO states and we'll likely continue to provide material support against them.

Limited wars are based on emerging gentleman's agreements, and this is the one the modern era has come up with. We may yet come up with another one eventually, but the world is massive. Other than China's single-minded obsession with Taiwan (which would inevitably bring it into conflict with the US if they actually attacked), I can't think of any other potential flashpoints that need to violate those rules.