*ahem, ahem* [gets ready to speak in MLK voice]: "I have a dream that, one day, the world will accept that an autistic, semi-polygamous Alt-Righter who makes genius music videos; and a well-bred 2nd generation Tamilian faggot-chad who nerds out about esoteric algebraic theorems; can, indeed, be BFFs. I have a dream that their commonalities – being frustrated late-Millennials, born and raised in the American Southwest, with 95%ile openness, and hatred of longhouse morality – should be exalted and that their brotherhood shall be publicly celebrated without ostracism or sanction. I have a dream that they would find a common cause in mercilessly tearing apart the Civil Rights regime, and in bringing a liberating breath once again the to BarstoolBro forces of this beautiful country we call America..."
Jun 22Liked by Walt Bismarck, Kryptogal (Kate, if you like)
I have also considered privatized marriage contracts but this will quickly erode due to hardwired sympathy for women. They prefer to work outside of formal authority which is why rape has been replaced by more nebulous sexual assault, why women often take to social media or whisper rather than using the legal system to adjudicate justice. The legal system will cave to their pressure. Wherever there is formal power, women will find a way through the informal. This is not a criticism. It’s a compliment. I respect the ability.
Jun 22Liked by Kryptogal (Kate, if you like), Walt Bismarck
Interesting thoughts, as ever. I'd like to respond at more length to your broader ideological and policy proposals at some point, but for now it should suffice to say I think you're going somewhere directionally worthwhile even as many of the specifics (eg privatizing marriage) strike me as both impractical and undesirable. That is: I don't think barstool conservatism should define the conversation, but it should have a place in it.
You articulate the complications of a position like mine well. You're correct to perceive that your developing network is unusually well-positioned to serve as, as you say, honest brokers between me and social conservatives, and that has an important part in the ecosystem. You're building something worth paying attention to, and I'll be fascinated to see how it develops. In coalitional terms, things are inevitably somewhat complicated. It's not quite as simple as "the trads have nothing to offer me and nothing in common with me"—there are certain currents of traditionalism I align quite well with—but I don't see good cause for a broad alliance with the right.
While I have deep frustrations with progressive culture, I have many individual progressive friends and don't write people in that culture off or work to alienate them any more than I do people in any other culture I have frustrations with. Just as I agree with many anti-woke critiques of progressives, I agree with many progressive critiques of the new right. Ultimately, my own coalition is and will be one of the center, picking compelling bits and pieces from everywhere they pop up and, as you say, working directionally where issues overlap. I want to see a vibrant center spring up in the same way you're working to build this corner of the right.
When it comes to gay adoption and surrogacy, I think there's productive conversation to be had between us, but yes, it's a spot where the stakes are high, the process is already extraordinarily complicated and draining, and I'm not going to be one to push it to become more so. Sidestepping the issue until it becomes salient is what I've historically done, but given my own life path I suspect it will be salient rather more often for me than I would plan around in the abstract. Still, I think something approximating that is a stable and useful approach.
More than a coalition where you can point to, say, you, me, and Greene and indicate that we're all on the same side in a common fight, I think it's more useful to picture a much broader set of bubbles, where each of us stands on good terms with some people the other has no way of reaching, and our remaining on good terms enables us to translate and collaborate as appropriate between those spheres. In other words, rather than one coalition I see us standing at mutually intelligible points on a broad spectrum, such that conversation and narrow, issue-specific collaboration are useful as we pull in our distinct directions.
Jun 22·edited Jun 22Liked by Kryptogal (Kate, if you like), Walt Bismarck
How dare you propose creative, exciting goals toward which we can work, and which offer a glimmer of hope for a better future? Even worse, you make these ideas appealing to a broad base of people, who might plausibly form a coalition capable of seizing and wielding the political power necessary to realize them.
If you were “Realistic,” you'd be posting Jeremiads telling us all that we're going to suffer and die and never live to see the better world (i.e. a punishing theocracy) that will maybe arise from our ashes and bones.
On privatizing marriage: might work in the American context, not the European one.
One of our biggest concerns is the Islam-issue. Privatizing marriage will be a huge boon to what we call “marital captivity” and to the Islamist radicals trying to destroy our culture.
At least in my country (Netherlands) secular ex-muslims, especially ex-muslim women have been the proudest and most consistent defenders of freedom in the face of tyranny across the board, while our largest “tradChristian” party has been on board with all the woke and climate madness.
Ergo: state enforcement of secular/liberal norms is right-coded with us, and of vital importance to save the continent.
Shows importance of context-based, coalitional approach
Well written, entertaining, humorous, white pilling, and strategically designed to attract both disaffected liberals/centrists and people at the right enough edge of the political spectrum they're in danger of falling off the cliff.
So, of course, the black pill Christian Right people are trying to engagement farm off your work and shit on it without trying to understand nuance, subtext, or the intersectional differences within generations that make very small sample sizes useless. They watched the Jordan Peterson vs. Cathy Newman interview and went, I want to be Cathy Newman here (albeit sniping from afar).
Jun 22·edited Jun 22Liked by Kryptogal (Kate, if you like)
Great post overall. The main thing I would add is the need to recognize that church and religion are excellent facilitating institutions for the heteronormative family-focused lifestyle that you correctly advocate for the majority of the population. In a world where most people are "normies" that prioritize family formation and stability over promiscuity, the vast majority of the population should be religious and attending church. And indeed history shows us that these two things tend to correlate pretty highly.
I think this is the main dividing line you might have to try and navigate, the continuing conflict between the idea that most people should not be "degenerates" but it's okay for a few "elites" to be. Even if we accept that premise as true, the elites need to shut the fuck up about it, maintain a pretense of *not* being degenerates, and preach anti-degenerate values. No one is going to accept being told "well you see, I'm a glamorous elite so I get to be a fuckboy, but you need to stay in your place and never have fun because you're a peasant."
In practice this would mean letting the tradcons/religious people win and conceding to their values in the public square. The objection people are going to raise with "barstool conservatism," which I think has some merit, is that you're ultimately encouraging men to play around and put off family formation, which you acknowledge yourself is anti-social behavior.
Personally, I would say, how about the elites just not be degenerates either? Obviously you would still have defectors, but I don't see why this can't be the standard to which people are generally held. It would certainly be a lot simpler than trying to mainstream a double standard. I don't accept that it is impossible for someone to be both wealthy/high-status and sexually faithful. I think that's a claim that would only be made by people for whom it is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
>But to do this effectively our prospective coalition needs to figure out ways of moving past intractable conflicts on very spicy topics like gay adoption and surrogacy. And I won’t pretend to have a good answer here.<
Yeah, I expect this to be a deal-breaker for a lot of people, myself included. In the same way that I do not believe "gay marriage" is a valid concept, I don't believe "gay adoption" or surrogacy are acceptable either. Trying to toe some kind of line where we work out who the "Good Gays" are is obviously unworkable. The reality is that trade-offs must be made and you cannot have a contradiction in social standards. If you continue to legitimize "gay marriage" and "gay families," you will by necessity undermine actual families as the social standard to which everyone aspires. Likewise, if you are successfully able to restore natural family as an ideal, it is inevitable that people will become hostile to "gay family" as a result.
I think eventually people will need to confront the truth that a genuine inability to engage in heterosexual behavior is a severe disorder, something akin to a disability. It is not a harmless "identity." It belongs in the company of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, not in that of sex and race. This will severely upset people and will be a difficult pill to swallow, but it is also true. No one would pretend that other forms of sterility are not deleterious conditions to have. In this way, normalizing "gay marriage" is similar to acceptance of transgenderism; you're feeding into people's delusions as a form of "treatment" rather than being honest about the nature of their condition.
With all of that being said, sure, as long as there's a common enemy, there's no reason right-wingers and gays can't work together. It's just important to recognize the reality that "gay adoption" is probably never going to be accepted by the right in the same way that it is by the left, and a world in which the right is ascendant is almost certain to be a world which is more hostile to the idea.
Any thinking person in America in 2024 understands that it's patently obvious that homosexuality is not remotely comparable to schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or anything else of that ilk in the DSM. A gay bar has regular old pop music playing, people dancing, and at the worst some people doing key bumps in the bathroom or acting uncomfortably queeny; a schizo bar would be a madhouse, pun intended: a sanatorium with no oversight and lots of alcohol. Everyone understands that these are clearly different, in the same way that everyone would rather have a gay roommate or sibling than a schizophrenic one.
And in an era when it's possible to gestate a child with genetic input from two sperm or two ova (which has been successfully accomplished for mice, I believe) in a synthetic womb (probably a possibility within a decade or so), the objection that homosexuality is a genetic dead end will lose basically all of its juice and you'll be left wanting for any reproduction-based arguments against it. Since you and people like you certainly won't give up the ghost in trying to punish and immiserate gays at that point, you might as well just make the arguments now that you would make then so that we can actually get to the nub of the issue.
>Any thinking person in America in 2024 understands that it's patently obvious that homosexuality is not remotely comparable to schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or anything else of that ilk in the DSM.<
This is clearly not true or else we wouldn't be having these discussions.
It is already quite possible for homosexuals to reproduce via surrogacy (or if you're a lesbian, via a sperm donor). You will notice from my post that I remain opposed to things like "gay marriage" in spite of this. So I have no idea why you are going on about "genetic dead ends" and "synthetic wombs."
Yeah, I guess my implication there was that you weren't really thinking about how gays and schizophrenics actually operate and instead were leaning on definitions in place of real-life experience to form an impression of gays, so in that regard you're not really a thinking person but rather an overthinking person.
You mentioned explicitly that an inability to engage in heterosexual behavior is the basis of classifying homosexuality as a "severe disorder." On what basis is reluctance to have heterosexual sex an indicator of mental illness other than the basis that reproduction is a fundamental aspect of human personhood and so unwillingness to do it is a biological or even moral deficiency? Having low sex drive is not a severe disorder, by any definition widely held by, yes, thinking people, most likely on the basis that it doesn't preclude reproduction wholesale. My point is that any belief that homosexuality is disordered because it doesn't facilitate reproduction will be obviated by technological progress that makes it possible for gays or lesbians to conceive children without the aid of a person of the opposite sex.
"other than the basis that reproduction is a fundamental aspect of human personhood"
Oh, you mean *other* than that? Well gee, other than that, not much I guess! That's a pretty huge exception to make.
Here's one way to think about it. If I were a "heterosexual" man but possessed a psychological condition in which I could only tolerate having anal sex with women, not vaginal, would anyone pretend that there is nothing wrong with me? Would we really sit here and say that this is normal, healthy, etc.?
This is apparently the condition that gay men have: They can only have sex with assholes, not vaginas. Yet for some reason, we specify that the assholes are male rather than female, and all of a sudden the whole thing gets a pass. Elaborate copes must be constructed in order to construe this condition as being exactly the same as normal sexual function.
If you want to compare being gay to just having a low sex drive, I mean sure, I'd take that comparison. The difference is that we don't turn a low sex drive into a new identity category, invent a new form of "marriage" for it, etc. It's just something weird that people have that they deal with, we don't allow it to rewrite the social fabric.
These analogies both reveal more than you want them to, and none of it is unfavorable to gays.
Once again, I would advise you to stop making pronouncements based upon what you make words do on a page: gay men are not attracted to anuses, and this is obvious to everyone who knows gay men. The fact that homosexual males are not interested in anal sex with women is proof of that fact and demonstrates that it's an attraction to *men* that gays have, not an attraction to the anus. I will clue you in on the fact that a lot less of the sex that goes on in a typical gay relationship is anal than you might expect, which further reinforces the point.
As for the analogy to asexuals, that also proves too much. You're correct that we didn't invent a new category of marriage for people with low sex drives or people who don't want to conceive children (although the term "Josephite marriage" exists, but those are really rare and mostly theoretical). In fact, we let any two adults marry *without ever peering behind the curtain and inquiring about their sex practices, reproductive or otherwise*. Evidently, no legislature in American history has ever thought that the fundamental procreative purpose of marriage was important enough to warrant asking couples about their sex practices and making sure they were trying to conceive. But that's my point: we've never even tried to enforce procreative sex practices in straight marriages and we should apply the same standard to gay marriages: an inability (or unwillingness, which is in some ways more morally opprobrious) to procreate doesn't call a marriage's validity into question.
>Once again, I would advise you to stop making pronouncements based upon what you make words do on a page: gay men are not attracted to anuses, and this is obvious to everyone who knows gay men.<
Okay, I've definitely been fooled then I suppose. We can re-word my example to instead read: "If I were a "heterosexual" man but possessed a psychological condition in which I could not tolerate vaginal sex, and could only engage in sexual activities with women via other means, would anyone pretend that this is normal and that there is nothing wrong with me?"
Expanding the scope from "anus" out to "every body part except vagina" really does not change the underlying point.
>Evidently, no legislature in American history has ever thought that the fundamental procreative purpose of marriage was important enough to warrant asking couples about their sex practices and making sure they were trying to conceive.<
Are you arguing that marriage and procreation have nothing to do with each other?
If you continue to legitimize "gay marriage" and "gay families," you will by necessity undermine actual families as the social standard to which everyone aspires. Likewise, if you are successfully able to restore natural family as an ideal, it is inevitable that people will become hostile to "gay family" as a result.
Given that Utah legalized gay marriage and banned anti-gay discrimination in 2015 (while at the same time giving wide protections to the rights of religious people and organizations, in what I believe is a model piece of compromise legislation) while still maintaining a high birth rate and a very family-focused culture, I agree that the two aren't at odds at all. I have a couple gay friends in Utah (admittedly not ones who are very queeny or act their homosexuality out in attention-seeking ways) and they say that the environment there is very friendly and that to a degree the pro-family Mormon ethos extends to them as well.
I did comment somewhere some time ago that you were highly amusing to read but sounded a bit lunatic in your "policy maker play pretend". Now i see you are not joking. It took outlining these principles in an article to make me understand you do actually mean business. I keep writing ad nauseum that the purpose of the right should be to form better elites, not to convince the massess. If we fix or replace the elites, the flock will follow. In other words, writing here IS important because affluent or extremely talented people can be reading, and any of these who disagree with the mainstream are moving from reddit and twitter to substack. Well done Walt, i whole-heartedly agree with your points. Brilliant post!
Most of this sounds fine, I'm not sure to what extent it's actually culturally feasible for a long time but it's still nice conceptually. I think sexbots are going to fuck over the dating market even more though by making women uncompetitive, so we will probably just end up with both sexes being uninterested in each other.
I'm doubtful of sexbots for the same reason that the sex dolls that already exist aren't popular; it's cringe as fuck and everyone knows it. There is real social prestige in having sex with actual women that cannot be replicated by a robot, no matter how lifelike. Anyone that uses a sexbot as a substitute for dating will be labeled as a loser forever, and these are mostly all the guys that are already losers that spend all their time watching porn instead of dating. I don't think advances in sexbot technology will do much to change that.
I think that's true but if they're high quality enough they will start being purchased by "non-losers" and become more prestigious over time. Also if the majority of men are already "loser incels" it becomes much less shameful since there is a relatively smaller number of people looking down on you.
I disagree. If this were true, people like Andrew Tate would have sex dolls and would be showing them off. I don't think the number of men who are "loser incels" will change much based on sexbot technology. Think about it this way: Even if we had realistic sexbots available right now, would the average man still want to have sex with actual women, if he could? The answer is obviously yes. You might engage in both dating real women *and* using your sexbot on the side, in the same way that many men today are not incels but still watch porn. But one would not preclude the other.
Another way to think about it is that we do already have something very similar to sexbots. They're called prostitutes. And again, we can observe that high-status men have not simply abandoned all other women in favor of this option, despite the fact that they could obviously do so given their wealth. Some of them do use the services of prostitutes sometimes, but they don't just abandon "normal" dating and relationships either. These are different things that are done for different reasons.
@metaronin is working on gynoids that are intelligent and can act completely like a human woman (except more easygoing and agreeable so ultimately superior). Lots of other people too, companion bots will probably take only slightly longer than robot butlers. There's a big difference between that and a sex doll, which is basically just a fancy toy.
"The private marital contract should then be held as a sacred and inviolable institution in our society.
...
You can also have parallel contracts for mistresses etc. that ensure women on the side receive adequate protection and make the culture around this practice less seedy."
This is many of the same problems as your "women should be able to get alimony if you've been dating for awhile."
Ultimately, the state is enforcing this stuff. If you don't pay your alimony or child support they garnish your wages and imprison you. For any "private marriage contract" to be enforceable the state would need to enforce it (and if its not enforceable what the hell is it anyway). This is part of why we have standard marriage contracts, because if the state is committed to the costs of enforcement it needs to go into it knowing what it's going to enforce. Having potentially infinite variety and liability for infinite possible marriage contracts isn't workable.
Making "we dated for awhile" or "concubine" contracts legal just makes this all even worse. It's a bloody mess. It seems like "I want a harem" is a big driver of this thought process.
Ultimately, I think we just need to get rid of alimony and child support (marital assets should be split based on the income each brought in, not automatically 50/50). That state should be paying non-working married women with children a "salary" based on her husbands income and # of kids. If the marriage breaks up then they retain that salary for X% the length of the marriage (not this salary would also count towards determining marital assets). If the state is paying your last wife it won't pay your new wife until that ends, so you can't go hoping around.
We want incentives to be married not punishments for divorce (which are often uncollectible anyway), and this can work into solving multiple issues (incentives to have more children, ending the marriage penalty and 100% marginal tax rates on the middle class).
Privatized marriage: poly-marriages are toxic and should be illegal. Gays should not be allowed to adopt children. Ban surrogate pregnancy.
Everything good in this world can be summed up in one organizing ideal: Beauty🌸 .
-Beauty, excellence etc… destroys the myth of equality without being rude.
-Beauty requires health. Health requires a clean environment & food system.
-We want beautiful people to have more children! - promote beautiful white families with 3 children. Start small. (This takes care of the problem of marriage morality & allows lesser people to escape social norms they don’t qualify for.
Really what we want is a world view of vitalism. Something right wing & even normie liberal types can aspire to.
Imagine if the states competed on who has the lowest obesity numbers & who has the most triumphant art & architecture! This is how Renaissance Italy saw their city states competing for excellence.
Is there any article that sets out barstool conservatism's positions on foreign policy and economics? Is there a "vision" for the nation's future? I find the fourteen principles to be fascinating, but it kind of seemed like the policy positions were more focused on domestic culture and sanding off the sharp edges of the right. That is very valuable, but just wondering what the goal of this platform is with regard to setting out a trajectory and instilling a sense of shared legacy for its adherents?
*ahem, ahem* [gets ready to speak in MLK voice]: "I have a dream that, one day, the world will accept that an autistic, semi-polygamous Alt-Righter who makes genius music videos; and a well-bred 2nd generation Tamilian faggot-chad who nerds out about esoteric algebraic theorems; can, indeed, be BFFs. I have a dream that their commonalities – being frustrated late-Millennials, born and raised in the American Southwest, with 95%ile openness, and hatred of longhouse morality – should be exalted and that their brotherhood shall be publicly celebrated without ostracism or sanction. I have a dream that they would find a common cause in mercilessly tearing apart the Civil Rights regime, and in bringing a liberating breath once again the to BarstoolBro forces of this beautiful country we call America..."
Powerful words, thank you for sharing.
I have also considered privatized marriage contracts but this will quickly erode due to hardwired sympathy for women. They prefer to work outside of formal authority which is why rape has been replaced by more nebulous sexual assault, why women often take to social media or whisper rather than using the legal system to adjudicate justice. The legal system will cave to their pressure. Wherever there is formal power, women will find a way through the informal. This is not a criticism. It’s a compliment. I respect the ability.
"Sacred and inviolable..." Have you been reading the Meiji constitution?
probably was downstream of something related to that in a subconscious way tbh
Interesting thoughts, as ever. I'd like to respond at more length to your broader ideological and policy proposals at some point, but for now it should suffice to say I think you're going somewhere directionally worthwhile even as many of the specifics (eg privatizing marriage) strike me as both impractical and undesirable. That is: I don't think barstool conservatism should define the conversation, but it should have a place in it.
You articulate the complications of a position like mine well. You're correct to perceive that your developing network is unusually well-positioned to serve as, as you say, honest brokers between me and social conservatives, and that has an important part in the ecosystem. You're building something worth paying attention to, and I'll be fascinated to see how it develops. In coalitional terms, things are inevitably somewhat complicated. It's not quite as simple as "the trads have nothing to offer me and nothing in common with me"—there are certain currents of traditionalism I align quite well with—but I don't see good cause for a broad alliance with the right.
While I have deep frustrations with progressive culture, I have many individual progressive friends and don't write people in that culture off or work to alienate them any more than I do people in any other culture I have frustrations with. Just as I agree with many anti-woke critiques of progressives, I agree with many progressive critiques of the new right. Ultimately, my own coalition is and will be one of the center, picking compelling bits and pieces from everywhere they pop up and, as you say, working directionally where issues overlap. I want to see a vibrant center spring up in the same way you're working to build this corner of the right.
When it comes to gay adoption and surrogacy, I think there's productive conversation to be had between us, but yes, it's a spot where the stakes are high, the process is already extraordinarily complicated and draining, and I'm not going to be one to push it to become more so. Sidestepping the issue until it becomes salient is what I've historically done, but given my own life path I suspect it will be salient rather more often for me than I would plan around in the abstract. Still, I think something approximating that is a stable and useful approach.
More than a coalition where you can point to, say, you, me, and Greene and indicate that we're all on the same side in a common fight, I think it's more useful to picture a much broader set of bubbles, where each of us stands on good terms with some people the other has no way of reaching, and our remaining on good terms enables us to translate and collaborate as appropriate between those spheres. In other words, rather than one coalition I see us standing at mutually intelligible points on a broad spectrum, such that conversation and narrow, issue-specific collaboration are useful as we pull in our distinct directions.
How dare you propose creative, exciting goals toward which we can work, and which offer a glimmer of hope for a better future? Even worse, you make these ideas appealing to a broad base of people, who might plausibly form a coalition capable of seizing and wielding the political power necessary to realize them.
If you were “Realistic,” you'd be posting Jeremiads telling us all that we're going to suffer and die and never live to see the better world (i.e. a punishing theocracy) that will maybe arise from our ashes and bones.
On privatizing marriage: might work in the American context, not the European one.
One of our biggest concerns is the Islam-issue. Privatizing marriage will be a huge boon to what we call “marital captivity” and to the Islamist radicals trying to destroy our culture.
At least in my country (Netherlands) secular ex-muslims, especially ex-muslim women have been the proudest and most consistent defenders of freedom in the face of tyranny across the board, while our largest “tradChristian” party has been on board with all the woke and climate madness.
Ergo: state enforcement of secular/liberal norms is right-coded with us, and of vital importance to save the continent.
Shows importance of context-based, coalitional approach
Good point! Different sides of the political aisle promote social liquidation and self-suicide depending on local context.
Well written, entertaining, humorous, white pilling, and strategically designed to attract both disaffected liberals/centrists and people at the right enough edge of the political spectrum they're in danger of falling off the cliff.
So, of course, the black pill Christian Right people are trying to engagement farm off your work and shit on it without trying to understand nuance, subtext, or the intersectional differences within generations that make very small sample sizes useless. They watched the Jordan Peterson vs. Cathy Newman interview and went, I want to be Cathy Newman here (albeit sniping from afar).
I'm in the Greene camp, and I want to dislike this but can't.
Funny as ever. Didn't disagree with very much at all.
Still want some clarity on the age difference issue, and as you know I'm slightly harder on the 'homo question'.
But I think we need to make this spread, and call myself 'Barstool Right'.
I'm pretty religiously conservative, but I could work with this platform.
Great post overall. The main thing I would add is the need to recognize that church and religion are excellent facilitating institutions for the heteronormative family-focused lifestyle that you correctly advocate for the majority of the population. In a world where most people are "normies" that prioritize family formation and stability over promiscuity, the vast majority of the population should be religious and attending church. And indeed history shows us that these two things tend to correlate pretty highly.
I think this is the main dividing line you might have to try and navigate, the continuing conflict between the idea that most people should not be "degenerates" but it's okay for a few "elites" to be. Even if we accept that premise as true, the elites need to shut the fuck up about it, maintain a pretense of *not* being degenerates, and preach anti-degenerate values. No one is going to accept being told "well you see, I'm a glamorous elite so I get to be a fuckboy, but you need to stay in your place and never have fun because you're a peasant."
In practice this would mean letting the tradcons/religious people win and conceding to their values in the public square. The objection people are going to raise with "barstool conservatism," which I think has some merit, is that you're ultimately encouraging men to play around and put off family formation, which you acknowledge yourself is anti-social behavior.
Personally, I would say, how about the elites just not be degenerates either? Obviously you would still have defectors, but I don't see why this can't be the standard to which people are generally held. It would certainly be a lot simpler than trying to mainstream a double standard. I don't accept that it is impossible for someone to be both wealthy/high-status and sexually faithful. I think that's a claim that would only be made by people for whom it is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
>But to do this effectively our prospective coalition needs to figure out ways of moving past intractable conflicts on very spicy topics like gay adoption and surrogacy. And I won’t pretend to have a good answer here.<
Yeah, I expect this to be a deal-breaker for a lot of people, myself included. In the same way that I do not believe "gay marriage" is a valid concept, I don't believe "gay adoption" or surrogacy are acceptable either. Trying to toe some kind of line where we work out who the "Good Gays" are is obviously unworkable. The reality is that trade-offs must be made and you cannot have a contradiction in social standards. If you continue to legitimize "gay marriage" and "gay families," you will by necessity undermine actual families as the social standard to which everyone aspires. Likewise, if you are successfully able to restore natural family as an ideal, it is inevitable that people will become hostile to "gay family" as a result.
I think eventually people will need to confront the truth that a genuine inability to engage in heterosexual behavior is a severe disorder, something akin to a disability. It is not a harmless "identity." It belongs in the company of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, not in that of sex and race. This will severely upset people and will be a difficult pill to swallow, but it is also true. No one would pretend that other forms of sterility are not deleterious conditions to have. In this way, normalizing "gay marriage" is similar to acceptance of transgenderism; you're feeding into people's delusions as a form of "treatment" rather than being honest about the nature of their condition.
With all of that being said, sure, as long as there's a common enemy, there's no reason right-wingers and gays can't work together. It's just important to recognize the reality that "gay adoption" is probably never going to be accepted by the right in the same way that it is by the left, and a world in which the right is ascendant is almost certain to be a world which is more hostile to the idea.
Any thinking person in America in 2024 understands that it's patently obvious that homosexuality is not remotely comparable to schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or anything else of that ilk in the DSM. A gay bar has regular old pop music playing, people dancing, and at the worst some people doing key bumps in the bathroom or acting uncomfortably queeny; a schizo bar would be a madhouse, pun intended: a sanatorium with no oversight and lots of alcohol. Everyone understands that these are clearly different, in the same way that everyone would rather have a gay roommate or sibling than a schizophrenic one.
And in an era when it's possible to gestate a child with genetic input from two sperm or two ova (which has been successfully accomplished for mice, I believe) in a synthetic womb (probably a possibility within a decade or so), the objection that homosexuality is a genetic dead end will lose basically all of its juice and you'll be left wanting for any reproduction-based arguments against it. Since you and people like you certainly won't give up the ghost in trying to punish and immiserate gays at that point, you might as well just make the arguments now that you would make then so that we can actually get to the nub of the issue.
>Any thinking person in America in 2024 understands that it's patently obvious that homosexuality is not remotely comparable to schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or anything else of that ilk in the DSM.<
This is clearly not true or else we wouldn't be having these discussions.
It is already quite possible for homosexuals to reproduce via surrogacy (or if you're a lesbian, via a sperm donor). You will notice from my post that I remain opposed to things like "gay marriage" in spite of this. So I have no idea why you are going on about "genetic dead ends" and "synthetic wombs."
Yeah, I guess my implication there was that you weren't really thinking about how gays and schizophrenics actually operate and instead were leaning on definitions in place of real-life experience to form an impression of gays, so in that regard you're not really a thinking person but rather an overthinking person.
You mentioned explicitly that an inability to engage in heterosexual behavior is the basis of classifying homosexuality as a "severe disorder." On what basis is reluctance to have heterosexual sex an indicator of mental illness other than the basis that reproduction is a fundamental aspect of human personhood and so unwillingness to do it is a biological or even moral deficiency? Having low sex drive is not a severe disorder, by any definition widely held by, yes, thinking people, most likely on the basis that it doesn't preclude reproduction wholesale. My point is that any belief that homosexuality is disordered because it doesn't facilitate reproduction will be obviated by technological progress that makes it possible for gays or lesbians to conceive children without the aid of a person of the opposite sex.
"other than the basis that reproduction is a fundamental aspect of human personhood"
Oh, you mean *other* than that? Well gee, other than that, not much I guess! That's a pretty huge exception to make.
Here's one way to think about it. If I were a "heterosexual" man but possessed a psychological condition in which I could only tolerate having anal sex with women, not vaginal, would anyone pretend that there is nothing wrong with me? Would we really sit here and say that this is normal, healthy, etc.?
This is apparently the condition that gay men have: They can only have sex with assholes, not vaginas. Yet for some reason, we specify that the assholes are male rather than female, and all of a sudden the whole thing gets a pass. Elaborate copes must be constructed in order to construe this condition as being exactly the same as normal sexual function.
If you want to compare being gay to just having a low sex drive, I mean sure, I'd take that comparison. The difference is that we don't turn a low sex drive into a new identity category, invent a new form of "marriage" for it, etc. It's just something weird that people have that they deal with, we don't allow it to rewrite the social fabric.
These analogies both reveal more than you want them to, and none of it is unfavorable to gays.
Once again, I would advise you to stop making pronouncements based upon what you make words do on a page: gay men are not attracted to anuses, and this is obvious to everyone who knows gay men. The fact that homosexual males are not interested in anal sex with women is proof of that fact and demonstrates that it's an attraction to *men* that gays have, not an attraction to the anus. I will clue you in on the fact that a lot less of the sex that goes on in a typical gay relationship is anal than you might expect, which further reinforces the point.
As for the analogy to asexuals, that also proves too much. You're correct that we didn't invent a new category of marriage for people with low sex drives or people who don't want to conceive children (although the term "Josephite marriage" exists, but those are really rare and mostly theoretical). In fact, we let any two adults marry *without ever peering behind the curtain and inquiring about their sex practices, reproductive or otherwise*. Evidently, no legislature in American history has ever thought that the fundamental procreative purpose of marriage was important enough to warrant asking couples about their sex practices and making sure they were trying to conceive. But that's my point: we've never even tried to enforce procreative sex practices in straight marriages and we should apply the same standard to gay marriages: an inability (or unwillingness, which is in some ways more morally opprobrious) to procreate doesn't call a marriage's validity into question.
>Once again, I would advise you to stop making pronouncements based upon what you make words do on a page: gay men are not attracted to anuses, and this is obvious to everyone who knows gay men.<
Okay, I've definitely been fooled then I suppose. We can re-word my example to instead read: "If I were a "heterosexual" man but possessed a psychological condition in which I could not tolerate vaginal sex, and could only engage in sexual activities with women via other means, would anyone pretend that this is normal and that there is nothing wrong with me?"
Expanding the scope from "anus" out to "every body part except vagina" really does not change the underlying point.
>Evidently, no legislature in American history has ever thought that the fundamental procreative purpose of marriage was important enough to warrant asking couples about their sex practices and making sure they were trying to conceive.<
Are you arguing that marriage and procreation have nothing to do with each other?
If you continue to legitimize "gay marriage" and "gay families," you will by necessity undermine actual families as the social standard to which everyone aspires. Likewise, if you are successfully able to restore natural family as an ideal, it is inevitable that people will become hostile to "gay family" as a result.
Baseless
Given that Utah legalized gay marriage and banned anti-gay discrimination in 2015 (while at the same time giving wide protections to the rights of religious people and organizations, in what I believe is a model piece of compromise legislation) while still maintaining a high birth rate and a very family-focused culture, I agree that the two aren't at odds at all. I have a couple gay friends in Utah (admittedly not ones who are very queeny or act their homosexuality out in attention-seeking ways) and they say that the environment there is very friendly and that to a degree the pro-family Mormon ethos extends to them as well.
I did comment somewhere some time ago that you were highly amusing to read but sounded a bit lunatic in your "policy maker play pretend". Now i see you are not joking. It took outlining these principles in an article to make me understand you do actually mean business. I keep writing ad nauseum that the purpose of the right should be to form better elites, not to convince the massess. If we fix or replace the elites, the flock will follow. In other words, writing here IS important because affluent or extremely talented people can be reading, and any of these who disagree with the mainstream are moving from reddit and twitter to substack. Well done Walt, i whole-heartedly agree with your points. Brilliant post!
Most of this sounds fine, I'm not sure to what extent it's actually culturally feasible for a long time but it's still nice conceptually. I think sexbots are going to fuck over the dating market even more though by making women uncompetitive, so we will probably just end up with both sexes being uninterested in each other.
I'm doubtful of sexbots for the same reason that the sex dolls that already exist aren't popular; it's cringe as fuck and everyone knows it. There is real social prestige in having sex with actual women that cannot be replicated by a robot, no matter how lifelike. Anyone that uses a sexbot as a substitute for dating will be labeled as a loser forever, and these are mostly all the guys that are already losers that spend all their time watching porn instead of dating. I don't think advances in sexbot technology will do much to change that.
I think that's true but if they're high quality enough they will start being purchased by "non-losers" and become more prestigious over time. Also if the majority of men are already "loser incels" it becomes much less shameful since there is a relatively smaller number of people looking down on you.
I disagree. If this were true, people like Andrew Tate would have sex dolls and would be showing them off. I don't think the number of men who are "loser incels" will change much based on sexbot technology. Think about it this way: Even if we had realistic sexbots available right now, would the average man still want to have sex with actual women, if he could? The answer is obviously yes. You might engage in both dating real women *and* using your sexbot on the side, in the same way that many men today are not incels but still watch porn. But one would not preclude the other.
Another way to think about it is that we do already have something very similar to sexbots. They're called prostitutes. And again, we can observe that high-status men have not simply abandoned all other women in favor of this option, despite the fact that they could obviously do so given their wealth. Some of them do use the services of prostitutes sometimes, but they don't just abandon "normal" dating and relationships either. These are different things that are done for different reasons.
@metaronin is working on gynoids that are intelligent and can act completely like a human woman (except more easygoing and agreeable so ultimately superior). Lots of other people too, companion bots will probably take only slightly longer than robot butlers. There's a big difference between that and a sex doll, which is basically just a fancy toy.
"The private marital contract should then be held as a sacred and inviolable institution in our society.
...
You can also have parallel contracts for mistresses etc. that ensure women on the side receive adequate protection and make the culture around this practice less seedy."
This is many of the same problems as your "women should be able to get alimony if you've been dating for awhile."
Ultimately, the state is enforcing this stuff. If you don't pay your alimony or child support they garnish your wages and imprison you. For any "private marriage contract" to be enforceable the state would need to enforce it (and if its not enforceable what the hell is it anyway). This is part of why we have standard marriage contracts, because if the state is committed to the costs of enforcement it needs to go into it knowing what it's going to enforce. Having potentially infinite variety and liability for infinite possible marriage contracts isn't workable.
Making "we dated for awhile" or "concubine" contracts legal just makes this all even worse. It's a bloody mess. It seems like "I want a harem" is a big driver of this thought process.
Ultimately, I think we just need to get rid of alimony and child support (marital assets should be split based on the income each brought in, not automatically 50/50). That state should be paying non-working married women with children a "salary" based on her husbands income and # of kids. If the marriage breaks up then they retain that salary for X% the length of the marriage (not this salary would also count towards determining marital assets). If the state is paying your last wife it won't pay your new wife until that ends, so you can't go hoping around.
We want incentives to be married not punishments for divorce (which are often uncollectible anyway), and this can work into solving multiple issues (incentives to have more children, ending the marriage penalty and 100% marginal tax rates on the middle class).
You had me at “Traditional Degeneracy” 🙂
Privatized marriage: poly-marriages are toxic and should be illegal. Gays should not be allowed to adopt children. Ban surrogate pregnancy.
Everything good in this world can be summed up in one organizing ideal: Beauty🌸 .
-Beauty, excellence etc… destroys the myth of equality without being rude.
-Beauty requires health. Health requires a clean environment & food system.
-We want beautiful people to have more children! - promote beautiful white families with 3 children. Start small. (This takes care of the problem of marriage morality & allows lesser people to escape social norms they don’t qualify for.
Really what we want is a world view of vitalism. Something right wing & even normie liberal types can aspire to.
Imagine if the states competed on who has the lowest obesity numbers & who has the most triumphant art & architecture! This is how Renaissance Italy saw their city states competing for excellence.
Is there any article that sets out barstool conservatism's positions on foreign policy and economics? Is there a "vision" for the nation's future? I find the fourteen principles to be fascinating, but it kind of seemed like the policy positions were more focused on domestic culture and sanding off the sharp edges of the right. That is very valuable, but just wondering what the goal of this platform is with regard to setting out a trajectory and instilling a sense of shared legacy for its adherents?