Pongalh
15d ago
I looked into that yesterday and curiously enough most of the RW glee came from a guy being hoisted by his own defund petard, and after having celebrated the death of Rush Limbaugh (among others, iirc)
There is no unity, and there is no both sides.
Well, the idea that there are just two "sides" is also foolish. The conflict and lack of unity is real, and for that reason suggests a multiplicity of sides. You expect fractious human beings to just line up within one of these sides, out of just two sides? What are you assuming here, kumbaya unity?
Pongalh
15d ago
In the tense spring of 1936, on his way to Madrid University, Juian Marias, a disciple of the philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset, never forgot the hatred in the expression of a tram-driver at a stop as he watched a beautiful and well-dressed young woman step down onto the pavement. 'We've really had it,' Marias said to himself. 'When Marx has more effect than hormones, there is nothing to be done.'
Very interesting. I look at frustrated Gen Z men and their disdain for licentious hot women and the men who get laid with them and feel something similar. They've overcome the stigma of being what my generation called "a hater" (and the attendant possession of a PhD, or Player Hatin' Degree).
Pongalh
15d ago
Yea people oscillate between hanging you for who you are/what you do and what you say. Progressives claiming Robinson's upbringing and demographic profile make him actually right-wing e.g.
Pongalh
15d ago
Al Green, a black Texas Dem that surely screams "woke," said kind things about Kirk. Said they have the same creator up above and that Kirk "had a right to be where he was, and a right to life." But he's old school black religious, likes MLK Jr. The newer school of James Baldwin and post-colonial lefties, not a sentiment you see much.
Pongalh
16d ago
Right. Men in particular of the Joe Rogan sort liken cancelling to HR ladies OR church ladies. Indeed HR ladies are the next generation of church ladies to them. (Though in the age of Trump perhaps it could be described as HR Ladies vs. DR Ladies.) There's something in fact un-manly about cancellations. Something un-manly about being a pink slip sniper, of being a clipboard-carrying, list-compiling hall monitor.
Pongalh
16d ago
I guess I feel bad for some on the left now the same way I felt bad for conservatives amid covid, when they were the pariahs
Pongalh
16d ago
Kirk happened in the age of social media's over-socialization engine, which amplifies everything
Pongalh
16d ago
Busybody pile-ons full of people feeling giddy at the prospect of ruining someone's life for an opinion is is shameful.
A business owner in Sacramento was just mistaken for a guy in So Cal whose wife talked shit about Kirk. He was getting threats from people running away with ignorant moral righteousness fueled by social media amphetamines. Again, shameful.
The right discovering that they believe liberalism itself is nihilism reminds me of a central Asian Muslim student who attended a classical liberal seminar years back with me. He said it all just sounded like moral relativism to him. (He ended up sleeping with a Marxist woman that night we both were trying to get at, lol, but I digress. Totally principled guy!)
Pongalh
16d ago
yea that'll work out fine. we can just trust them stop. the best time to stop is always NOW.
Pongalh
17d ago
"If I find out you ever said X anywhere, and I work with you, then you said X at work."
Pongalh
17d ago
Well put. The "they started it" angle of attack obscures that we've all "started it" in a messy, volley-like and cross-cutting manner.
Pongalh
17d ago
"We live in the postliberal Friend-Enemy Schmittian power dynamic and the left is responsible for it."
I'd put the blame more on the development of media and particularly the social media panopticon. But let's assume it's just the left that started it (and not that it hasn't just been a persistent back and forth from both illiberal leftists and rightists for a very long time), for how long does the right get to cancel back before it's the right responsible for it?
Pongalh
18d ago
Yes, again, we're not doing the same thing. I'd reframe it as, "illiberals have been treating political disagreement as an existential and moral struggle for years..."
Pongalh
19d ago
We are in a culture war that was started most noticeably because the dominant left culture cancelled, censored, and doxxed nearly every dissenting opinion they could.
Yea, and that was awful. But are they awful because they're doing that or because they're on the left? If your opponents just are people that censor well then you're not even doing the same thing as a conservative at all.
Pongalh
19d ago
"if we got through the beatifiction of St. Floyd, St.Kirk should be no skin off anyone's nose."
Yes. And if you're on the right you've gotten so used to having a thick skin on this - being asked to worship people you find pretty repellant, and the favor never going the other way - it becomes more difficult to bemoan OR celebrate anyone. It can make cynical and indifferent as much as it can make you hate the left passionately enough to posture and discourse like they do.
Pongalh
19d ago
But with that said, I have significantly more sympathy for people who celebrate his death than seems to be common among people who don't share that celebratory mood. It doesn't feel outrageous to me that people are enjoying this. Imagine that someone you really hated was randomly struck down by a freak bolt of lightning. Wouldn't you be pretty giddy?
That's the thing though. No, I only really hate people who do things like murder people. I hate the Charlottesville guy e.g.. Otherwise it's just words. Not that I can't see a breaking point even there, if he's going around advocating for pedophilia or instructing terrorists in bomb-making (which of course has a more material component).
Pongalh
19d ago
I don't know, people not waiting some minimum amount of time to be critical, and doling out "why can't we all get along?" platitudes, just can't be sustained in the attention economy. It's not the people are just so much meaner now.
Pongalh
21d ago
It's prudent to drive the economy into the ground on purpose, by any means necessary, to raise consciousness
Pongalh
21d ago
I don't anticipate these cooling because we are talking about fundamental disagreements about the shape of society.
Do not all previous high-profile debates in this country involve fundamental disagreements about the shape of society? From free speech to abortion to...
Pongalh
21d ago
I suspect this one will not catch on: https://x.com/DainFitzgerald/status/1965107130668908660
Pongalh
23d ago
"a theme is how they were constantly breaking the law and given second chances..."
Yep, all kinds of casual rule-breaking and callous behavior in the past. My dad stole cars (to this day he says "I just borrowed them (because he did in fact return them)" and went to juvenile hall but still went on to have multiple marriages, kids, long career. Dealt with alcoholism, saved by his marriage. At one point one of our cats had an unexpected litter and I shit you not he just put them in a bag and dropped them in a well. My mom was furious. (In pop culture, the first season of Mad Men depicting Draper's family littering after a picnic was also quite accurate.)
Hard to see all that happening today for a man and it still turns out ok. For one, women aren't as interested in rescuing you from yourself, as my mother did for him. You need your shit together early and on your own.
Pongalh
26d ago
Creating a polity where Blues hold no sway, and hence browns and blacks are not an appreciable problem. encouraging blacks and browns committed to blueness to leave for blue areas seems like a pretty easy and bloodless solution.
Agreed. But I think many conservatives do not want a bloodless solution. They want to overcome liberalism's tolerance of mediocrity and comfort. They want a return of martial values and spirit. They're Occidentalists, seeing bourgeois values as soft and unworthy of emulation.
We got here because not enough people want to take the low road? And what does the low road look like to you?
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