WFJacoby retweeted
Every GOP strategist, consultant, and candidate should be forced to participate in a role-playing exercise this morning.
Your name is Bob. You’re a 49-year-old blue-collar worker in Ohio. You’ve always struggled to make ends meet. The good jobs were all shipped to China and the few remaining pay a pittance wage, undercut by endless illegal labor.
You’re a 3x Trump voter because you believed he would finally make America great again.
You put your son through Ohio State. He graduated cum laude in computer science. You couldn’t have been prouder. After months searching, he landed an entry-level job at Microsoft. Beneath his qualifications, but a good start for a smart kid.
Then he got laid off. That same month, Microsoft applied for 150,000 more H-1B visas because it can’t find qualified Americans.
Your son has spent six months back in his childhood bedroom, sending hundreds of applications without landing an interview.
On TV, Trump boasts about the greatest economy in history and how many women and minorities are finding jobs.
You decide a father-son steak night might cheer him up.
Gas is $4.50 a gallon. Filling your truck costs over $100. At Kroger, ribeyes are $30/lb. You settle for hamburger, even though 70/30 ground beef still costs $10+.
At checkout, a fat black woman is screaming at the cashier because her EBT will only cover most of the filet mignon and lobster in her cart.
You think to yourself how the Iran war has made everything expensive, but at least we’re stopping their nuclear bomb. You weren’t even sure where Iran was before you googled it after we first bombed them in March.
After dinner, you take your son to the county fair. Half the people aren’t speaking English. Virtually none of the crowd looks like you. You’re forced to leave early after a “teen takeover” turns violent. A foreign born judge pledges none of them will go to jail.
Back home, you turn on the TV. Vivek Ramaswamy is lecturing the crowd about American mediocrity and why Ohio needs more foreign talent.
Your son grows upset. You change the channel.
Now a Republican surrogate, the daughter of a governor or wife of an elderly billionaire, explains that young White men are the REAL welfare queens. They’d rather play videogames in their parents’ basements than work.
Your son says nothing. He just goes back to his childhood bedroom. You turn off the TV.
Then your neighbor starts blasting reggaeton and cracking open Modelos. He brought his cousin’s family from Mexico to help with all the minority-business contracts his construction firm keeps winning. Tonight they’re celebrating his nephew’s birth, the family’s first birthright American citizen.
You sit alone in your living room.
You worked hard, paid taxes, obeyed the law, and raised your son to do everything right. You voted Republican again and again because you believed somebody in Washington would finally fight for you.
Instead, your wages are stagnant. Groceries are unaffordable. Your community is unrecognizable. Your country is fighting another foreign war.
And upstairs, the son you sacrificed everything for is lying awake in the bedroom he slept in at twelve, wondering what the heck he’s even supposed to do with his life now.
Every time you turn on the TV, the Republicans you elected are either congratulating themselves or explaining why you and your son are the problem.
For ten years, they told you America’s future depended on your vote. Now you aren’t even sure America has a future worth defending.
The Republican Party needs to answer one simple question this morning:
You’ve spent a decade demanding Bob’s loyalty. You’ve given him stagnant wages, unaffordable groceries, another foreign war, and a son who did everything right but can’t find work.
And when they complain, you call them lazy, entitled, and racist.
What possible reason have you given Bob and his son to vote Republican? Do you honestly think you deserve their vote?
WFJacoby retweeted
under post-war western liberalism we breed dogs the same way we breed human beings:
we sterilize the absolute best, and allow the absolute worst to have 4-12 offspring each and then get decent working middle class people to pay to feed them
WFJacoby retweeted
Ok ladies: Imagine you don’t want to go shopping at all. Not even slightly. You’re busy folding laundry or painting your nails or watching your favourite TV show. Zero desire for retail therapy. Your boyfriend sighs loudly and goes “can we go shopping and get tasty treats now”
WFJacoby retweeted
An unspoken truth that so many people simply refuse to admit is that America has possibly the most hardworking, productive, and talented people on earth that are essentially propping up everyone else.
If you isolated for ONLY net tax contributors in the private sector in this country you would essentially find a foreign species compared to the rest of the planet.
There are ~350 million people in America. 90 million are adults working as net tax contributors. There’s about 80 million under 18. 100 million adults are not in the workforce. Half are retired, but they’re the largest welfare recipients in the US. This leaves approximately 80 million adults that work, but don’t earn enough to be net contributors. They’re the smallest share of the population.
WFJacoby retweeted
There is an important reason that the right never wins the culture war overall, despite the left being so poor at tactics that they often end up shooting their own feet.
That is the reality that logistics are more important than tactics, and tactics only matter once you have sorted logistics out.
The left has sorted logistics out by creating patronage networks, while the right refuses to do so because it's still controlled by a curious kind of boomer paleoliberal who thinks that "free market" means "everything should pay for itself".
Thus, both the cultural and political struggles of the right must be waged by broke young men as a side project to their careers, while fighting for the left is a career.
The young men fighting for the right are simply expected to purchase their own rifles, ammunition, uniforms and kit, provide their own transport to the front, then organize themselves into units to defeat the communists.
If you understand this, then you will understand why the retards manage to win a lot despite being retards.
The left is giving people 100K fellowships for writing lesbian novels, while the right is charging its own guys $200 to listen to some theoretical ramblings about the antichrist.
No, that's not a metaphor. I wish I had made either of those two facts up as some sort of hyperbole.
Only the left understands how to get and use political power.
The left understands that power is a form of currency. So if you want it, you have to buy it, with some other form of currency. Such as money.
The right thinks that political power is a side effect... something that you naturally accumulate while doing business.
Possibly this is because most wealthy right-wing people are investors. They start a project, or put money into it, and they expect to get their money back and then some. That's what they are used to.
That's how investment works.
But that's not how power works.
And if you have wealth, but no power, then the people with power will just take whatever you built.
I don't know exactly what the tech right, the business right, the wealthy right, should be spending on political power. But what they are spending is clearly not enough and in the wrong places.
Because George Soros sure as hell isn't selling people tickets to listen to him talk.
WFJacoby retweeted
>you can’t cook the same meal more than once a month
This quoted post is unavailable.
Extended adolescence has this effect on friend groups. Many of our friends have kids and we have adjusted hang outs to include them and be 1 day events.
Other friends that are not having families expect us to go to random overnight trips on a whim and we have to decline.
My friend wants to plan a couples, no-kids weekend getaway, splitting the cost of a large AirBNB, in January for her 30th birthday. I really do not love this idea (husband is mortified), neither to spend the money nor to get someone to take the toddler for 3 days. It would be a 2.5 hour drive away for us, too, so it’s not like we’re close if something happens. I haven’t been away from him for even 1 night yet and he still just seems so young! It would be very hard to leave him for that long.
Am I just a party pooper who needs to get over it? Genuine question. Like I actually need advice here guys
Some friends just stop at a certain stage of life and that's their choice, but the logistics of that lifestyle do not mesh with parenting young kids.
I have a wife, kid, and a house to work on. If I'm going to spend a weekend away from those things it has to be super important.
WFJacoby retweeted
god i miss when i could just buy something and it wouldn't generate 50 fucking emails in my inbox
WFJacoby retweeted
I genuinely appreciate the detailed response Will, and I agree at the root of everything here is a fundamental philosophical difference that informs our orientations.
I am Christian, but I suppose I have a different interpretation of what we are called as Christians to do.
I believe accepting and alchemizing suffering is a major part of being a Christian, and I have no trouble enduring it for a just cause. I would die for my faith.
Where I part ways is including marriage in this equation, especially when the woman in question is operating with indifference or malintent. I do not believe that men are serving God in any way by allowing a woman (who is not serving God herself in these cases) to abuse and extract from them. The roles and attitudes a married couple should have are outlined in the bible clearly, and I deem a pattern of ignoring them to be an abandonment of vows; de facto, if not de jure. It is not a matter of selfish, individualistic maximization to leave in these scenarios. Evil entities work through people to parasite off of the energy of others; accordingly, I consider remaining with a bad faith woman akin to feeding a demon. I judge this interpretation to be correct, because of the fruits. The more you give these women, the more they take, and frequently the more vicious they become.
I do not think you believe this matters, however, because you believe the spiritual path for a Christian man is to suffer for Christ, and you have tied staying in your marriage to serving Christ. You believe that a man should be the best husband he can be (we agree on this), but if a woman does not reciprocate or indeed abuses her husband this doesn't matter - a good Christian man cannot leave without disobeying God. It is better for him to stay and suffer, and treat his marriage as a "cross to bear." This glorifies him, and God in the process.
Putting aside the obvious fact that a torture rack is an utterly unpersuasive vision of marriage for Christian men, I find it pernicious on some level that suffering for Christ is being conflated with suffering for a woman's ego, in the same way I find the incessant worship of women's feelings, rather than truth, to be a form of idolatry. Christ was a truth-teller - he made enemies, he overturned institutions, he died rather than lie - yet men are somehow shamed for rebuking their wives for their bad behavior? Catering to a woman's dysfunctional patterns and taking it on the chin doesn't make you a good Christian - it makes you a coward; it is a form of lying; not only in words, but in actions. Even if you felt divorce was a spiritual violation for these men, you could still encourage them to separate, and deprive these women of their energy and attention. There is notably no biblical prohibition against that, and in most cases it would have a similar effect. I don't understand doctrinally why it is not a tool in the toolkit for you.
But my real problem with the assertion that "staying in a marriage is a biblical command," is that biblical marriage, or indeed marriage as outlined in Catholic doctrine, does not even exist in society anymore. It cannot exist anymore, regardless of the continuity of the term "marriage" or what church claims, because there is no legal or cultural framework anymore to support it. That these self-evident support beams of the institution were not specifically noted by Jesus or the church fathers does not mean they should be ignored as irrelevant, any more than it needs to be said that the color of the sky is blue. Their absence vitiates, because since they've been gone the structure has collapsed.
During Jesus' time there was no conception that a woman could be anything but obedient to her husband; it would have been considered laughably absurd for a woman to be able to divorce her husband and take half his assets (or more), as well as the children, on an emotional whim. Yet this sort of behavior is not only allowed today, it is normalized and even publicly encouraged. Men were prohibited from divorcing their wives in the past (absent infidelity) because these women depended on them for survival; wives were a husband's responsibility because he had total authority over them. This was moral and just. Additionally because of this power dynamic, husbands were also told to cherish their wives; women in turn also had social and practical incentives to be good wives and respect their husbands, since their happiness depended on it. Yet now it is the complete opposite: men have no authority in marriage - except that which they create with their own will (which you would deny them) - and women have no intrinsic incentive, socially or economically, to comply.
This means, to the extent marriage remains a sacrament as you said, it has been defiled. Modern marriage has become the equivalent of the eucharist being dumped in a toilet bowl someone just took a shit in. Our relationship to it must change, because it has changed. That does not mean of course that there aren't holy marriages today, but the spirit of God lives in these marriages for one and only one reason: because of the way the man and woman act within it. They sanctify the institution themselves out of its current default, corrupted form - and they only do this by transcending the lower consciousness emotions of the ego, like vanity and shame.
But the only way they get there sometimes, Will, is by being willing to lose the marriage and the distorted form it currently exists in. That is the only way for both people within it to move up in consciousness, towards the love and peace Christ told us to embody. Perhaps the fact that I'm willing to go there does make me a pragmatist, but my goals are not material gratification at the end of the day; sex is just a signal I'm on the right path with a guy. The real goal is a spiritually profound union that God is very palpably present within, both inside the bedroom and out. And I'm sorry, but that sacred phenomenon simply does not exist in a marriage where the woman is so caught up in her own ego she will hardly sleep with her husband, let alone respect him, no matter what he does or how much he pleads. No one feels it; it's absurd to state it. That man may have the comfort of God in his pain, but that marriage itself does not have God's blessing.
At any rate, we will not agree, because we do not only have different metaphysics but ultimately different goals, so I do not think there is anything more to say on the matter. The world is changing fast, and I do not care to support any structures in this world that bear barren fruit, regardless if their terms (not the substance) has biblical support from a different time and place. I do not think we have this luxury. The Church must have answers to modernity's problems, and when it comes to the problems between men and women, right now it doesn't. Right now you could argue it is part of the problem - and as a Christian, this is a problem for me, because it means the essence of the faith will be eventually lost in doctrine's brambles. Men will move on from Christianity if the deadwood crowding the trunk of its truth isn't burned off. So I am happy to play the role of arborist - or if you prefer, arsonist - to test and see what interpretations endure the stress of these times.
Many men will not agree with me on this, or on my approach towards life and marriage. They will agree with you that doctrine and dogma should be elevated above consciousness and results. Since I cannot help these men, because I do not share their constraints, I welcome them to work with you. You are a good man Will, and while I disagree with your view of the matter, you heart is in the right place. I wish you nothing but prosperity and success.
This is interesting because it makes personal autonomy the ultimate measure of a good life. And that's liberalism.
Catholicism, by contrast, makes conformity to God's will the measure of a good life.
Your philosophical foundation is pragmatism: you judge beliefs primarily by whether they produce desirable consequences.
Catholicism reverses this order. We must first determine what's objectively good, then choose morally legitimate means of pursuing it.
Obviously, practical results aren't irrelevant. Prudence requires evaluating whether our methods actually accomplish legitimate goals.
But experience only helps us judge the effectiveness of our methods; it doesn't determine the truth of our moral principles, e.g., a criminal can learn effective methods through experience in crime.
Your Scriptural omission is significant:
Mark 8:35 says, "Whoever loses his life for my sake and that of the gospel will save it."
Christ is teaching self-denial for the sake of God and the Gospel, not the necessity of risking every valued relationship to achieve personal transformation.
You're effectively saying that a man must be willing to lose his marriage to attain the life he desires. But Christ teaches that a man must be willing to surrender his own desires to remain faithful to God, including his marital obligations.
So a husband who sacrifices personal freedom, comfort and worldly opportunities for his wife and children may be practising precisely the self-denial Christ commands.
Especially when his sacrifice brings no immediate reward...
But you interpret the willingness to lose one's life chiefly as liberation from external constraints whereas Christianity interprets it as liberation from disordered self-love through submission to God.
You've got some good points, e.g., a man should confront unreasonable fears, take responsibility for his conduct, resist unjust demands and recognise when his attempts to improve a relationship have become ineffective.
But fundamentally the Catholic ideal isn't the man who's arranged his life so that nobody can obstruct his happiness but the man whose virtue remains intact even when others obstruct his happiness.
WFJacoby retweeted
Because the Boomer Holy War, otherwise known as the Second World War, is the creation myth, the biblical Genesis, of the political world order we inhabit. History begins in 1945, Year Zero, when the Allied and Axis powers, the cosmic forces of absolute Good and Evil, clashed for dominion over the world.
What we call “Western Values” are the liberal American values of the postwar order: unregulated global capitalism, liberal democracy, individualism, civil rights, and equality. Three generations of men have been indoctrinated into this cult, which is ultimately a secularized heresy of Aristotelian humanist Christianity, repackaged as a universal moral doctrine.
Hitler has assumed the role of Satan, while some grotesque amalgamation of Winston Churchill and Martin Luther King Jr. occupies the throne of Jesus Christ. The Nazis are the defeated legions of Hell, and the Holocaust is the ultimate revelation of Evil against which all subsequent political and moral questions must be judged.
You’re not allowed to have nice things like community, traditional families, immigration restrictions, or any meaningful sense of national, ethnic, racial, or religious identity as a White person because any deviation from the sacred doctrines of the postwar consensus threatens to bring about Holocaust 2. To believe in any of these is to practice heresy. Racism is the ultimate heresy, and White guilt is origin sin, without a path to atonement.
The further removed each generation becomes from 1945, the weaker its attachment to this haphazard, pseudo religious worldview grows. In 13 years, an entire century will have passed since the outbreak of the Second World War.
The moralizing about the Holocaust, the obsessive fixation on stopping identity politics among native Westerners, the relentless insistence on feminism, diversity, and the ideological apparatus of the postwar order will resemble the exhausted dogmas of a dying secular religion whose founding revelation has lost its power over the living.
This is obvious as the materialistic promise of infinite growth and wealth has failed, and mass immigration, diversity and the third world are an existential threat to westerners who have no socioeconomic opportunities and a poor shot at family for formation.
WFJacoby retweeted
Hybrid/WFH is objectively the best thing to happen to parents in last 40yrs
You can argue WFH perpetuates the absurd current state where once a quarter parents do some random school thing at 1PM on a Tuesday…but barring a total revolution in parenting, hybrid is obvi a net good
WFJacoby retweeted
I believe it. Some people have miserable home lives.
My wife and son are here. I like being around them.
This is awesome. I honestly feel bad for people who hate being in their own home, but we can't punish everyone else Harrison Bergeron style for being happy.
WFJacoby retweeted
The beautiful thing about rejecting the blank slate is that intelligence stops conveying morality and begins demanding noblesse oblige.
There needs to be a place for men of every ability in our communities, and it falls on the more intelligent among us to make that possible.
Children who are illiterate and dumb generally have parents who are illiterate and dumb. And the children who are illiterate and dumb generally stay that way no matter what external system is forced upon them. We haven't really figured out any way to take dumb people and turn them into smart people reliably. What we've done instead is create a society that works exceedingly well for smart people and makes being smart the only viable pathway for success. I think that should be the primary discussion we have and we should reorganize our society to make a place where dumb people can flourish and succeed. Right now we've created a system called "school" which is really well designed for smart people and very poorly designed for dumb people.
