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Brian Villanueva's avatar

"We can take the high road all we’d like, but that only works with people who see you as part of the same collective"

Sebastian Junger's book Tribe (paraphrase): "Anyone who thinks a nation isn't just a really large foxhole hasn't thought it through." (The Israelis learned this recently.) It's a great book.

"The biggest realization Americans must come to is that one side wants justice, while the other side seeks total victory."

Most conservatives and normies still live by Lockean, Enlightenment standards: justice is served by following particular procedures even if we don't like the outcome sometimes.

The postliberals have abandoned John Locke's value-neutral state and procedural justice in favor of outcomes: if bad people get hurt, regardless of how it happened, that's justice. To get back to Junger, this easily morphs into: justice is when my tribe benefits and yours gets screwed.

The Left embraced this accidently so you get the absurdity of uber-educated, white, liberals actively pushing for a race war. The Right is struggling still working the transition out. Deneen and Amari want a Catholic theocracy. Nick Fuentes wants a white ethno-state. Most normies just want a sane country back but a country (a tribe) requires a religio-philosophical grounding of some kind, which isn't provided by (or even possible within) a Lockean, value-neutral state. That's why postliberalism is rising across the entire Western political spectrum: Locke and Mill got run over by a bus driven by a nasty German named Nietzsche.

Many like to say that some external shock (currency collapse, strategic defeat) will solve this by forcing us to work together for survival. 30 years ago that may have been true; it's not today. A tribe that disagrees on "good", "evil", "sacred", and "profane" is no longer a single tribe. A crisis won't pull them together but drive them further apart. I want to be wrong about that for America. But all evidence indicates we're there. In the interest of lack of bloodshed, I would make a Hobbesian bargain with the woke, but they're totally incompetent (not surprising when your ideology ranks intersectional scores above SAT scores.) The religious integralists are competent but (Amari / Deneen fantasies aside) the lot of them would fit into a Starbucks. Which leaves Nick Fuentes and his ilk. Can someone please find me door #4, because 1-3 look pretty crappy.

BTW: Like the duck lady, I ended up with 5 roosters once. Huge fights and the hens wouldn't lay. 3 became target practice. Now I have lots of eggs.

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yolkipalki's avatar

No sweat. Sure are Haitians eating pets. I am always amazed at Americans being amazed by that. Ok, I am German and grew up in wealth never being hungry. But my mother was 15 when WWII ended and my father was 13. They told me what people were considering good food at that time and it grozed out me and my siblings. The worst part was my mother telling me about a teacher who caught flies and ate the yellow of them. Of course Haitians eat cats and dogs. Believe me there were no cats and dogs in Germany after WWII as pets. Only cats and dogs who were useful to either ward off thieves or to keep mice from eating grain. Haiti is a very hungry and poor place and you don´t lose such habits by moving to another place. Get over it. It is not a sign of special savagery but a sign of desperate poverty. The problem with liberals (same in Germany) is their rosy colored view of the world. Anyhow, of course we were savages when we moved to the bay area from Germany in 1969. I was in Kindergarden then and I was used to the savagery of German kids. Although Germany wasn´t hungry anymore still it was a fairly brutal place and I was used to endless fighting with boys of my age. The only kids who reciprocated and fought with me were black kids who - as I later learned - were bused in from Oakland. The white kids would cry and call for the teacher when I hit them as I was used to do in Germany. Endless complaints to my parents were the result. Same with my older brother who was in primary school. It is crazy to educate your kids to be sheep and then invite wolves. Germany is now like the bay area was in 1969. The Arabs from a war zone play the role that us kids played in the Bay area. I don´t blame the Haitians. I blame the white liberals who first emasculated the population and then call them racist when they can´t cope after being flooed with people from effectively a war zone.

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