Reveal Your Uncool Conservative Beliefs Here

xp sorry you don’t have an indigenous culture anymore i guess

I celebrate it because I'm sick of it being dark and am happy that we made it around the sun again

also, astronomy is cool

I appreciate crut's salty take here, though

^^^

Right. Paganism was completely gone from Europe everywhere but St. Kilda and parts of the Baltics by 1000CE. Also, "Pagan," in anything written by Protestants before the 20th Century, is an euphemism for "Catholic."

In Ireland we at least acknowledge the winter solstice every year, purely because the Neolithic passage tomb at Newgrange is designed specifically to allow the sun to enter the inner chamber on the solstice days. It’s nice to watch and feel that connection with the ancestors. They televise it and it’s wonderful to watch.

related: i never get how the white ppl i know who have the most ultra sensitive antennae for calling out cultural appropriation are the same ones who are always into doing solemn sage burning smudge rituals when they move into a new apt

interest in paganism is cool, as is the recognition that vestiges of that culture persisted through the pagan centuries.

I associate a strong interest in paganism as a red flag for fascist/racist/alt right shit, probably unfair but still

there is that but then there are all also lots of "witchy" people in major cities -- mostly women -- who are definitely on the left if anything

now that you mention it i went to a viking wedding once. didn't know the couple very much or why they identified with the norse gods. didn't ask but maybe i should have.

Anything to do with Odin and Nordic/Germanic gods seems well dodgy to me.

For sure. To my knowledge, the Witches vs. the Patriarchy crowd treesh is referring to doesn't dabble in that stuff much.

no, they don't. i'll bet they like freya though.

Tbf, Freyja's pretty awesome.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBZNK_CEVZw

I wonder how Varg reacted to this bit of news:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/dna-analysis-reveals-vikings-surprising-genetic-diversity-180975865/

gyac that tomb looks amazing

to me it's like, some people do feel a strong need for ritual as part of the rhythms of life - i certainly recognize it myself for things like funerals and birthday parties, we must mark the important things in recurring ways or else we fail to mark them (or feel stressed trying to come up with unsatisfying substitutes). and if the traditions you were raised in now ring hollow --- let's say a version of christianity that just doesn't work for your present values and beliefs --- then a lot of the practices that have cultural legitimacy around you just aren't going to feel right. so you find something else, even if it risks being mocked for lacking that perceived legitimacy. and maybe bits and pieces of paganism, witchcraft, astrological tradition fill that void and in particular help overcome other modern anxieties by being rooted in observable natural phenomena like the changing of the seasons and the positions of the stars. for the overwhelming majority of human history these were some of the fundamental things we could see, and by seeing them, begin to mark the passage of time and the meaning of a life.

idk it doesn't seem too crazy to me that people would adopt that stuff, there were waves of renewed interest in pagan practices and "mysticism" at least as early as Victorian times (see T.J. Jackson Lears in /No Place of Grace/). maybe it looks silly or mishmashy from the outside, esp if someone has newly gotten into it and all the stuff they're saying doesn't seem to quite add up --- doesn't mean they're insincere!

anyway *all* ritual practices are sort of arbitrary and silly really, at the same time as they're deeply meaningful. imagine trying to explain to Martians why it's really important that on the anniversary of your birth, a sweet pastry must be topped with candles that you blow out while silently making a wish, surrounded by singing friends, and how it just doesn't feel like a birthday otherwise. or why even lapsed christians really want a christmas tree in the home during december, and to have some days out of the 365 in the calendar that are special, which separate out the endless stream of days into meaningful units and journeys through life. the winter solstice doesn't do that for me, but if it does for someone else, they've arguably got a more rational basis for where they've put their seasonal rituals - it's undeniably true that the days start getting longer again at that point!

I used to walk past three megalithic sites, signposted in a language a couple thousand odd years old, to check on the cows every day, in a landscape that would knock you flat with awe every time you looked up at it with the power and majesty of nature.

As always, youve to mentally insert "in america/american" for context when and where p much anything comes up about culture or we're all just talking past each other sher

Not that we dont have a load of artists/nutters down around bathing in ley line energy poking at farmers for their ancient celtic wisdom, crut otm about most of these types but they keep the local fences mended and the few euro coming in so yknow

ogham the money

Hah

I’ve definitely seen pushback against smudging/using white sage or palo santo in more uh witchy circles. Around here, it’s the live laugh love type of stores that are all over it.

speaking as someone living in witchy hippie land USA, it's also important to remember that there's a lot of overlap with anti-vax and #S@ve0urCH1ld3n types

> Anything to do with Odin and Nordic/Germanic gods seems well dodgy to me.

tuesday, wednesday, thursday, friday...

(always boggles my mind that most of our days of the week are named after norse gods)

... see the video above.

the Portuguese have it right. none of that pagan nonsense. the lord's day, second day, third day, fourth day, fifth day, sixth day, sabbath

Just because someone’s a woman means they’re ’nurturing’?! Come on! We’re reducing women to their biological functions when we do that! Those functions have of course molded social attitudes and even constructed, through a legacy of generations, women’s own ideas of themselves, sure, and in many ways those ideas are beautiful, but there’s a flip side to them, which is a limiting one - that women’s place is as a caregiver, etc. So to the bedevilment: is there ANY value in ascribing particular characteristics as ‘feminine’ or ‘masculine’? Isn’t that incredibly limiting? Yet yet yet - there is such fun to be had with masculinity and femininity. Dressing up. Swapping around. Exaggerating. What about trans people? Someone born biologically male but who ‘feels’ like a woman. Well, what does that feel like? Doesn’t that suggest there IS some essential quality of womanhood and femininity that goes beyond biology? Isn't that....... wildly uncool????!?

(and 'limiting' cf above??) I twist myself into knots sometimes thinking about this which makes me feel extremely like Mark on Peep Show

a lot of things but biology is part of the reduction / limiting not prior to it
the nurturing thing is just a way to naturalise / biologise divisions of (esp reproductive) labour & obscure the violence of the process by framing it in terms of love & self sacrifice
playing with signifiers of masculinity/femininity doesn't require any kind of approval of gender as a regime, I want to think it can undermine it to some degree
transness isn't about being one thing & feeling another in any necessary sense
there is of course a tension between identity & opposition to regimes that produce it or make it possible or necessary but that's not something that any one person should or can resolve

i guess my big conservative views are that progress & modernity are horrific & the luddites had a point

Luddites were fighting capitalism not technology though

i already said progress & modernity

Sorry, the thread context may have misled me? I get annoyed by the popular misunderstanding of Luddites as being against technological change per se (like they'd be smashing Playstations today or something), rather than against deskilling of their labor and subsequent wage slashing. I mean they're not politically conservative in any way.

Anyway, I am sympathetic to an abstract, idealized version of small-c conservatism that is motivated by a desire to understand and preserve the past.

I am sympathetic to an abstract, idealized version of small-c conservatism that is motivated by a desire to understand and preserve the past.

This is indeed preferable to, say, Marinetti-style Futurism.

I was exploiting a possibly overliteral definition of conservatism to complain about the basically uncritical glorification of industrialism found across the political spectrum today- because some leftists will call you a fascist if you take issue with this (fascism being famously anti-industrial apparently)

to me anti-industrialism is what sets hippies aside from leftists, at least since marx there has been a ‘game recognize game’ dynamic.

i don’t agree that people are too uncritical of industrialism and progress today, but to the extent they are it’s probably a reflection of the strong nostalgic strain on the left. leftists are wistful for industrialism as we enter a post-industrial age

if the whole "capitalism is an improvement" thing is a necessary part of being a leftist then i'm much more of a hippie

i've been thinking about limnits, i guess, and grey areas. also violence. here's an uncool conservative belief: violence is unavoidable.

https://streamable.com/t1pzpx

lol

lol x2

Another one: utopia is unachievable for the foreseeable future because biological existence is itself broken rather than just us anthropocentric apes and the sociopolitical systems we have set up to bear the unbearable. I draw no quietist conclusions from this, however. Something must be done to improve our lot, be it almost nothing. So not quite a conservative belief per se, but definitely an uncool one ca. 2021.

i thought u were talking about industrialism and technological progress. anyways, recognizing emancipatory potential of industry’s productive forces is pretty old school

The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground — what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?

The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented.

The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself.

but even marx and engels couldn’t help wax nostalgic about the cottage-core small scale skilled craftsmen mode of production that predates industrial production and division of labour. it’s something that’s always been confusing to me in marxism. if workers are going to exploit this industrial technology to form a revolutionary class, and then overthrow it and return to an idyllic pre-industrial form of production where labor is not alienated (the quote about being a “fisherman in the afternoon”) presumably they would also lose the corresponding increase in standard of living that came from industrial production?

xps to Left

marx is confusing on this as on many other issues (imperialism, primitive accumulation, the state, the bourgeoisie) where he clearly has qualms with something he needs (in this case a whiggish notion of progress applied to modes of production) to make part of the theory work and/or win an argument with a rival. his worst followers removed all ambivalence or ambiguity

Marijuana should be 100% legal but public smoking of it--and public smoking of anything (tobacco, vape smoke, banana peels)-- should be shunned by all right thinking people.
I don't want your second hand smoke.

That's not a conservative view, it's nanny state liberalism

does 2nd hand vapour bother people (besides the smell)? serious q

can we still smoke in the park if we're like 50 yards away?

liberalism

words with contradictory meanings