vorpa-glavo
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User ID: 674
vorpa-glavo
19hr ago
What gets me about it is that all of this, this entire culture war, just seems like such an utterly trivial thing to escalate into a shooting war. What are the issues really when you boil it down? Whether trans women should have access to female-only spaces or not? Whether immigration law should be enforced, and how much immigration should occur and how difficult it should be? What the limits of free speech are? How tough on crime people should be? These aren't issues that should be tearing nations apart. These should be normal political issues people can discuss civily and disagree on without thinking of themselves as soldiers in an apocalyptic all-consuming war for the soul of the West. If people could politely disagree on gay marriage they could certainly do it for any kind of trans issue, or so you'd think.
I agree with you wholeheartedly here. A lot of these issues are absolutely small potatoes.
I'm one of the Motte's more pro-trans people, and even I can admit that from a purely consequentialist perspective if the "victory" against trans people looks like the segregation of female-only bathrooms, prisons, and sports leagues and ID cards using biological sex markers, then that is less than ideal from my perspective, but it still leaves a ton of latitude for trans people to seek out their version of human flourishing as best they can according to their own lights in a liberal city somewhere. Private businesses that want to be inclusive can switch to unisex bathrooms if they want, sympathetic friends and family can still engage in pronoun hospitality, parents of trans children can home school or send them to progressive private schools (with concerned private donors helping families that might not otherwise be able to afford that option), and the Earth will keep turning.
But I think the algorithmic Web 2.0 sites that have swallowed the internet have turned everything into a supposedly life and death struggle. It can't just be that a group of people whose interests you care about will have lives that are about 90% as good as they might have in a counterfactual world where your political tribe got everything they wanted, you need to catastrophize about that missing 10% of well-being, and make up outrages and scandals to justify hating the opposing side. It's not very conducive to having nuanced societal debates, with respectful disagreement when you don't agree with someone else's stance.
vorpa-glavo
1d ago
I think this is a bit different, because left-wing ideology is, at least in all relevant practice, parasitic: the more radically conservative you are, the higher fertility you have; the more progressive you are, the less you have.
I'm not sure this is the fairest way to look at it.
I live in a blue city, and a lot of my friends are progressive and/or part of the LGBT community. And a lot of them were the black sheep in their family even at a young age. Things like a person who became vegetarian almost as soon as she could start thinking about things despite living in a conservative religious household (and who was the token liberal in her mostly conservative public school), or gay/bi people who were really messed up by their strict Mormon upbringing.
I've also heard similar things from people of different generations. A 60-something family friend whose son came out as a transwoman in his 40's, and who was bullied from a young age for being effeminate and found solace in theater in high school. (That last fact was one of the least surprising things I've ever heard - many of my LGBT friends were also part of theater.)
I strongly suspect that being "Bohemian" or a "black sheep" or a certain kind of "weird" is strongly correlated with certain kinds of bullying in middle and high school, and often leads to adopting a more liberal/progressive perspective later in life (probably through some combination of nature - their personalities start off off-putting to some portion of population, and nurture - the experience of being bullied leads them to seek out alternative family-like structures to make up for the ones that failed them in the first place.)
Now, the specific manifestation of this tendency resulting in left-wing politics in modern America is obviously not true at all times and all eras. But I think that calling left-wing politics parasitic might be the wrong framing. I think that the left serves a very similar function to early Christianity, by embracing the cast offs and rejects of the fertile majority, and offering an alternative family structure. For black sheep who become estranged from their family, this becomes deeply important to them.
(I'm mildly reminded of a brief encounter I had with some American Mormon missionaries in Slovakia. They happened to be on the same train I was, and asked to sit near me. And they were accompanied by a Slovakian woman with a disfiguring birth mark on her face. Obviously, one brief encounter is not enough to know for sure, but I wonder if that deformity wasn't somehow causally related to the fact that she became drawn to Mormonism as a Slovakian woman.)
vorpa-glavo
1d ago
But Kash says he'll see him there, implying that Kash is going to Valhalla as well. Really, I don't think Kash meant it literally at all. It was just a fancy way of saying, 'I see you as a fallen warrior for our side, and I will keep up the good fight, and metaphorically warrant a place by your side in Valhalla.'
But also when a Hindu (Kash Patel) tells a Protestant (Charlie Kirk) "I’ll see you in Valhalla" it is somehow even more incoherent.
I mean, that would have still made sense coming from a protestant. Kash Patel is trying to say Charlie Kirk was a warrior for his side, who died a warrior's death. Whether it landed or not is a separate issue.
How can/should Hindus appeal to the divine and the afterlife in public pleasantries like this? Should they invoke their own religious mythos? Or should they just appeal to "God" even though they are not talking about the same literary figure(s) as everyone else? Should/are they all going to convert to Christianity? Seems unlikely. They should probably just avoid this trap altogether although that's difficult to do for a Conservative constituency.
I feel like this issue already played out in the Greater Indian sphere, with the end result being that Muslims in that sphere grudgingly accepted Hindus as People of the Book. You can see this today in the weird Islamicized version of Hinduism supposedly practiced in Bali.
Granted, that's a slightly easier posture to adopt in Islam, where the Quran says God has sent prophets to every nation. If you already accept that Judaism and Christianity are corrupted forms of Islam (with mainstream Christianity even having polytheism/shirk from an Islamic perspective), why not accept that Hinduism is a super corrupted form of a true revelation sent from God?
From an orthodox Christian perspective, Hinduism is demon worship writ large. And while the British were practical enough to not actually convert the Indian subcontinent to Christianity, it sits uneasily in the Christian sphere.
I think a compromise invocation of "God" probably works okay (since there are monotheistic sects of Hinduism, and the nature of logical identity is that if there is a God, they're all the same god), but things get dicier when you start to get to the exact specifics of what state Charlie Kirk's soul is in from a Hindu perspective. (He presumably hasn't achieved Moksha or some other higher spiritual state, so he's still part of Samsara, and thus reincarnated based on his karma.) I think referring to secular legacy elements might be the safest compromise. Something like, "You'll live on in our hearts and minds, and in the amazing legacy you've left behind for all of us, but especially for your wife and two kids."
vorpa-glavo
2d ago
Yeah, saw several Tumblr reactions today, and while it is perfectly predictable, I'm saddened how many people are celebrating political violence against a non-politician on there. There's a lot of people who don't have any sense of decorum, or respect for people with opposing viewpoints.
vorpa-glavo
5d ago
I thought you might be interested in this. I was listening through the backlog of the Voluminous podcast, which reads a letter of H.P. Lovecraft's every episode, followed by the hosts commenting on it. And in episode 62 H.P Lovecraft talks a bit about The Worm Ouroboros.
If you're of the right or alt-right persuasion, you might want to skip the commentary afterwards, since the hosts are classic American progressives, but the readings of the letters at the start of every episode are often quite enjoyable.
vorpa-glavo
5d ago
Did you read the rest of my comment? I'm not using "violence" in a pejorative sense here, I'm using it because within the linguistic resources of English it is the most general word available, unless I am very much mistaken.
Do you have a better word for that category of human activity that is more neutral? Because I personally don't think the neutral use of the word "violence" should be considered an attempt to try to sway an argument one way or another, because there are many instances where "violence" is morally acceptable and justified, maybe even necessary for the functioning of society.
vorpa-glavo
5d ago
Isn't using men with guns to do something part of the standard definition of violence? How do illegal immigrants get removed from the country?
I'm actually a little surprised by the people pushing back on this one, as I don't consider it a "leftist framing." It's certainly compatible with a libertarian analysis as well.
Except for literal pacifists, basically every person on Earth agrees violence is acceptable under at least some circumstances, whether it be self-defense, carrying out a just/honorable war, defending ones property or whatever. The police and federal agents use violence to enforce the rule of law in society. I think the vast majority of ordinary people consider ordinary instances of police force/violence to be completely justified and necessary. Without that, you don't have the rule of law at all, you just have a bunch of suggestions and no means of enforcing them.
I agree that walls are not violence, though. But I don't think physical barriers are the primary way we prevent people from getting into or out of the country, or get rid of them once they get here.
vorpa-glavo
13d ago
I read The Worm Ouroboros a while back and really enjoyed it. Obviously haven't had a chance to reread it yet, but maybe this post is a good excuse to do so!
I've sometimes toyed with the idea of turning the setting into a tabletop RPG. The only issue comes in how to depict the various ethnic groups on Mercury. I might be misremembering, but it really seemed like they're all essentially human beings, despite names like "demons", "pixies", "goblins", "witches", etc.
There's a lot of great sections, like the Sending (which was awesomely described), the manticore (especially loved the brief lapse into even more archaic language for its description), and the moment when one of the characters insults another by "thou"-ing them instead of "you"-ing them.
You mentioned people being confused by the Olympian gods being on Mercury, but I found it delightful. I was especially enchanted by the concept of a "fosterling of the gods", since I feel like it has a lot of storytelling potential in itself.
I also think that all the names of characters and places have a certain charm to them, even if they're clearly a little more haphazard than, say, Tolkien's names.
vorpa-glavo
20d ago
Who on earth liked the Force witches or whatever the hell these things are supposed to be? (Just a hint here, if you're doing a sacred mystic ritual, try not to have it look like an am-dram society pretending to have epileptic seizures).
Didn't watch the Acolyte, but it is sad to see them botch the Force witches so bad. I like the concept of there being non-Jed/Sith force traditions out there, and I think with the right approach they could absolutely make them feel distinct and interesting. Too bad Disney doesn't know how to do that.
Yeah, I should have probably brought up this disanalogy somehow, since people here have brought up that Christians had a high TFR compared to other Romans before.
However, my main point is that while Leftists grow memetically, it might not quite be correct to call it "parasitically."
Like, putting aside their high TFR, when Christians showed compassion and charity to lepers, Roman tax collectors and ex-prostitutes, they weren't being "parasitic" on all those groups.
And in the modern day, when mentally ill black sheep move away from home, and find the LGBT community or progressivism waiting there to embrace them and all of their messiness, I don't think it is correct to call it "parasitism." Those communities are taking the cast offs that the families with lots of kids didn't want in the end.
Like, I get why some people on The Motte have a natural aesthetic distaste for the way the progressive left seems to embrace weakness, mental illness and ugliness. But you can't cultivate an attitude like that, and then be surprised when a leper colony has formed behind your back, and become part of a larger coalition opposing you.
I have seen so many broken people "bloom" for lack of a better word when they became a part of the LGBT community in my city. They went from struggling people with no friends, and painful family connections to people who could embrace being the weird black sheep that they were, becoming more confident and emotionally stable in the process. How is that parasitic? Especially when the "solution" to that supposed parasitism for the other political tribe is one they will never realistically embrace.
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