Pongalh
1d 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
1d 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
1d 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
1d 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
3d ago
It's prudent to drive the economy into the ground on purpose, by any means necessary, to raise consciousness
Pongalh
3d 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
3d ago
I suspect this one will not catch on: https://x.com/DainFitzgerald/status/1965107130668908660
Pongalh
5d 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
8d 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.
Pongalh
8d ago
and the second amendment does not protect my right to keep and bear arms.
So then a progressive effort to scrap that, you'd just be indifferent? Waste of time to try and do anything about it?
Pongalh
15d ago
This is where we are now, so concerned about fertility rate that a drunken hookup that results in pregnancy - and presumably parents and at least a man who isn't invested or in love - is preferable to a liberal Hippocratic oath to at least do no harm (by bringing someone into the world that isn't wanted)
Pongalh
15d ago
"makes you at peace" is the focus there. Fuck the rat race. Contentment and enjoyment without reference to what someone else is doing, and how you stack up, delivers peace of mind.
Pongalh
30d ago
Life for the sake of life
It's religious conservatives who believe every life has intrinsic value, though
Pongalh
30d ago
The idea that your views on this stem from whether you've got kids or not is dubious. My father had a bunch of kids, who've now got kids who have their own kids, and his opinion is still the boomer holdover of there being too many people on earth. Like that 80s song by Genesis, "...too many people making too many problems."
Pongalh
1mo ago
I am come from an upper-class family, I went to the appropriate schools in the UK, I read the Soectator, etc. You could pretty easily predict my views on the merits of taxation and on the usefulness of the Laffer curve, my voting affiliation, my views on fox-hunting, on globalisation, all from those pieces of information.
Sure, you could, but it's not causal. But do you believe the veracity of what you think about the effects of taxation is really no more accurate than what a poor person thinks? It's all just situated selves determining so-called truth? Or are the effects real independent of you coming from an upper-class background?
Pongalh
1mo ago
People significantly choose what side they're on by considering the effects of what they believe to be facts beyond subjective self-interest or family ties. They demonstrably spend time researching "the facts" and the "science."
Even this notion of tribal loyalties determining political outcomes is supposedly a disinterested value-free view from above, about human behavior.
Pongalh
1mo ago
Good deep dive! But the point is that the effect of price controls - do they deliver the goods by keeping things affordable and available or not? - isn't determined by ethnicity or tribe.
"Is strongly suspect that Tutsis would be hit badly by..." is implicitly based on an understanding of the above, in fact.
Pongalh
1mo ago
"What will the effect be of this 50% tariff?"
"I don't know. Are we talking about Hutus or Tutsis here?"
You can see how un-illuminating this is pretty quickly.
Pongalh
1mo ago
I'm curious what family, tribe or ethnicity have to contribute to considering the effects of certain economic policies like price controls, or law regarding the environment, or political and institutional design.
Would you say your family, tribe or ethnicity has helped you determine the answers to the above?
Pongalh
1mo ago
"Suit and tie conservatives lost the culture war."
Though they still tend to win the economic war, in their own lives most certainly.
Pongalh
1mo ago
It's a curiosity because without principles, what makes someone choose any particular side to begin with?
Pongalh
1mo ago
What is the relationship between attacking enthusiastic nerds specifically and trying to shed a reputation for mental illness?
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..."
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