When young white men take themselves seriously, the cultural Left has a conniption. If they have fun, the Right loses its mind.
For the former: political engagement, fitness, scholarly interest. For the latter: watching sports, drinking, music.
The intersection is fraternities
Examples of point A:
- Derision & mocking of politically-active young white men, especially on the Right (but really anywhere)
- Extreme distaste for bodybuilding
- Freakouts about "extremist interest in the Classics" or other academic topics
- Mockery of any earnest emotion
Examples of point B:
- "This energy should be directed elsewhere" in response to any video of recreation or fun; old-type whining about danger or foolishness
- Pointless yelling about the evils of "sportsball"
- Reflexive hatred of popular music subcultures, bars, etc.
This is true, but I don’t think it goes far enough. Global military dominance by the West was largely due to drill & discipline, standardization, engineering, and immense feats of logistics & infrastructure.
Technics and organization are spurned today as “soulless” but they are what built the modern world.
This isn’t to say that warrior cultures in the West were built upon nerd-ism or technics alone; I would be the last person to ever say that.
But global dominance does not come from guts & vril alone, or else Gurkhas or some other military people would have conquered the world
But in the desire to reignite thumos among Westerners today, many disregard the fact that we built our culture with incredible feats of technics.
I see this as merely a subset of the same thing; excess energy thrown into creativity, optimization, commitment to improvement
All very old martial arts have a sort of oddness to them, a disorienting underlying philosophy of movement that throws off a modern revivalist because it’s just so *odd*
It’s near-impossible to cut through centuries of unwritten, unspoken ways of movement. Then the natural esotericism of things like kata or manuals make it even harder.
But if these arts (often the only athletic tradition surviving from their time, perhaps aside from dances) can be decoded… broken into phonemes and morphemes, like ancient unwritten languages… much could be learned about their respective cultures
Perhaps about mankind’s development overall, too — the same intangible “flavor” of systematized motion runs through many of these long-lost systems
The key would be reverse-engineering the physical assumptions & surrounding habitus of each one, then drawing connections or distinctions; by way of comparison one could find “lineages” of underlying assumptions about combat & motion, a vast unrecorded network of silent languages
Low-hanging fruit:
Almost universally, every fighting system more than ~200 years old includes *much* lower stances.
Athleticism difference from modernity, different philosophy, or a carryover from weapon-based fighting into empty hand?
Really look at all these people. They’re the exact kind of people that would set up a group picture flipping off the camera to “dunk” on a Twitter anon for wrongthink
Imagine the conversation that led to this. None of them are even attractive! What were they expecting?
The Navy today is facing the same problems that the Navy faced in the interwar period — really the same problems faced by any peacetime naval force throughout history.
The good news is that it’s fixable. The bad news is that it takes a lot for the Navy to fix anything.