Pongalh
10hr ago
yea that'll work out fine. we can just trust them stop. the best time to stop is always NOW.
Pongalh
14hr ago
"If I find out you ever said X anywhere, and I work with you, then you said X at work."
Pongalh
14hr 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
14hr 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
1d 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
2d 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
2d 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
2d 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
2d 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
4d ago
It's prudent to drive the economy into the ground on purpose, by any means necessary, to raise consciousness
Pongalh
4d 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
4d ago
I suspect this one will not catch on: https://x.com/DainFitzgerald/status/1965107130668908660
Pongalh
6d 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
9d 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
9d 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
16d 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)
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!)
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