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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   31392 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024

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I really like your comments on culture war and I disagree with this take for a few reasons. My intention is not to be rude, in case my response sounds off, please let me and I can reword it better.

None of all of the above is to imply that I agree with any and all criticisms of Ireland’s policy on immigration, or that I am personally opposed to immigration into Ireland - I am not. All I’m saying is: before you lecture anti-immigration activists on their hypocrisy, first ask yourself whether you’re guilty of the exact same hypocrisy in the other direction.

Will quote a celt in response here, Aidan Maclear

Just reminding everybody that the Left has nothing to do with principles, and you cannot defeat it by attacking its purported moral principles as hypocrisy. Power knows no hypocrisy. Claims of hypocrisy only work when they are used by power against the weak and principled. Because if you’re weak, the only thing backing up your claim to power is said principles.

Claiming your powerful enemy is a hypocrite is simply a claim that they are powerful- because otherwise they could not get away with hypocrisy.

While the forces of darkness steadily advance their power, people like Ben Shapiro make a lot of money snarking off from the sidelines about their lack of principles. It sells well because it makes a lot of gangly college Republicans feel smug and superior for an hour or two. It changes nothing and has the potential to change nothing.

The pursuit of political power is not fair and anyone abiding by moral principles the other side does not keep is outright incorrect. You cannot cooperate with those who defect. I am neither a nationalist nor am I Irish but I would much rather lean towards waht keith woods says on the topic of migration. Even if you dont have crimes being commited, suppose the people migrating are very smart, you still would have some levels of soceital breakdown after the number exceed a threshold. I know people irl who are scamming their way and getting their relatives and friends to ireland, they dont see themselves as irish and explicitly move out because they can reap benefits from the taxes the actual irish pay and live in a society they created which they could not back home.

On the topic of Conor, this was a civil proceeding, not a criminal proceeding where a girl retroactively took back her consent. I am not sure if we can even call him a rapist legally since he did not serve time in jail, in case it does turn out after a fair trial that he violated her consent, I will hope for justice for the girl involved.

The anti-migration people doing what any political movement that wins always does, it is not ideal behaviour in some place like this forum or in ones family or house but if the people who are against you start doing underhanded things, the only way you can get any peace is by winning against them and that cannot be done via morals. There are examples of the political class letting go of rapists, this case in England for instance. I am obviously against having rapists or other criminals in any movement but he has not been judged to be a rapist by the criminal court. I am not a rape apologist but there is nothing wrong in being a hypocrite in my opinion if you are up against people who routinely do the same thing. You defect against those who defect.

I understand where you're coming from and I don't think you expressed yourself rudely, but this entire comment seems very "boo outgroup" to me. "It's pointless pointing out that your enemies are violating their own principles because they have no principles: the only appropriate response to their lies and deceit is to destroy them and ground them into dust" - I mean, it's fair to say this doesn't pass the intellectual Turing test, now does it?

Of course I'll never persuade the person who wrote that Waterford Whispers post about McGregor that they're being hypocritical, but I think there are people on the margin who could be persuaded that the way the news media covers crime is a bit dishonest and demand them to change accordingly.

On the topic of Conor, this was a civil proceeding, not a criminal proceeding where a girl retroactively took back her consent. I am not sure if we can even call him a rapist legally since he did not serve time in jail

Legally McGregor cannot be called a rapist, having never been found guilty of rape in a criminal trial. But while the burden of proof may be lower in a civil proceeding than in a criminal trial, it's not nothing. OJ Simpson was found not guilty of murder in a criminal trial, found guilty of murder in a civil proceeding, and now no one feels bad about calling him a murderer, even if news media avoided doing so during his lifetime to avoid getting sued for defamation. I'm applying the same standard to McGregor, who I think is exceptionally unlikely to sue me for defamation or to firebomb my house.

In the case of conor, the girl was as hammered as he was and her texts were later removed from her friends phones. A womans honor is a pious thing in my society but I do have some suspicions in this case since we have seen rich and famous get accused of rape, in case the evidence out there is sufficient enough to prove that he did rape her then I would absolutely want him punished but these encounters. Conor got accused in the past in Miami too, my statement still stands since rape apologia is not a hill to die on.

I understand where you're coming from, but this entire comment seems very "boo outgroup" to me. "It's pointless pointing out that your enemies are violating their own principles because they have no principles - the only appropriate response to their lies and deceit is to destroy them and ground them into dust" - I mean, it's fair to say this doesn't pass the intellectual Turing test, now does it?

It is boo outgroup because hypocrisy is not a bad thing if the people you are up against are that low, Moldbug has echoed similar sentiments and I stand by them. Mass migration protestors are doing what their opponents would do instead of punching right which is very rare.

Conor got accused in the past in Miami too

Doesn't the fact that McGregor has been accused of sexual misconduct by so many different women, completely independently, in different countries or even continents move the needle for you at all? Isn't this exactly why people are so confident that Bill Clinton is a sexual predator, despite (to the best of my knowledge) never having been found guilty even in a civil proceeding?

hypocrisy is not a bad thing

You've lost me there buddy. If at any point you find yourself thinking "my enemies are so vicious that I must preemptively become more vicious than them before they destroy me outright", I think it's worth taking a step back and asking yourself if that's an accurate appraisal of the state of affairs, or if you're just coming up with some half-baked ham-handed rationalisation to do something you know is bad but want to do anyway. Note that your reasoning is word for word the same as that employed by woke people to justify deplatforming, cancelling or beating up conservatives.

Moldbug has echoed similar sentiments and I stand by them

I have never understood the appeal of Moldbug or why he's considered such an intellectual giant. So many of his allegedly profound insights just seem like trite (or even tautological) truisms dressed up with needlessly circomlocutory or obfuscatory language. I think Scott hit the nail on the head with Moldbug's whole approach in 2013:

Reactionaries have to walk a fine line. They can’t just say “people consider liberal policies, decide they would be helpful, and form grassroots movements pushing for the policies they support”, because that would make leftist policies sound like reasonable ideas pursued by decent people for normal human motives.

But they can’t just say “There’s a giant conspiracy where the heads of all the major Ivy League universities meet at midnight under the full moon”, because that would sound ridiculous and tinfoilish.

So they invent this strange creature, the distributed conspiracy. It’s not just people being convinced of something and then supporting it, it’s them conspiring to do so. Not the sort of conspiring where they talk to one another about it or coordinate. But still a conspiracy!

I don’t think a distributed conspiracy is all that weird. The machinations around power and the seeking of power have not really ever changed, except that they’ve become more sophisticated as knowledge of psychology and technology has allowed for greater social engineering capabilities. In the bad old days of feudal societies, thing we’re done fairly openly because there really wasn’t much knowledge about how to do so quietly. You’d openly scheme that you and your faction want power, find Allies whose wealth, power and influence you could use to take power, and off you go, sitting a Lannister on the throne of Westeros. Not everyone involved would be part of a conspiracy. Maybe you stood to gain a trade deal if you had someone on the throne who shared your interests. In that instance you might well support the movement even if you’re not in on the conspiracy. You might well jump on social trends that increase your power. This is how power always works.

I think by the point at which a conspiracy is "distributed" it can no longer meaningfully called a conspiracy, and is just an ordinary political coalition. The concept of a "distributed conspiracy" just seems to be (neo-)reactionaries attempting to tar a political coalition they don't like by describing it using a scary word. No different, really, from woke people calling everyone they don't like a fascist.

Collition is a distributed conspiracy. Lobbying is a distributed conspiracy. I’ve never really noted that the NRx groups would not have considered a rightward leaning lobby or collition as not being a distributed conspiracy. Distributed conspiracies are simply the building and wielding of a power base. And really the biggest difference in modern times is how the influence peddling works due to how we perceive the legitimacy of a power base. In modern liberal democracy, legitimacy flows from the deimos— all of us, so power is wielded by creating the appearance of the public being for something and creating propaganda networks.

Why do they only use the Cathedral in reference to the "distributed conspiracy" of left-leaning academia, news media etc.? Why, to the best of my knowledge, is there no equivalently ominous term in NRx circles for conservative lobby groups, the Koch brothers etc.?

Because until very recently the only conservative lobby groups that had any degree of success were already Cathedral-friendly. Financial liberalisation tempered (controlled) by light government regulation is quite popular among the great and the good. Not amongst deBoer and his ilk but he is clearly a heretic.

The original right wing Cathedral was, literally, the Cathedral. An alliance between priests, lords and burghers, all of whom came from similar backgrounds and had a shared interest in keeping the peasants down and the aristocrats, bureaucrats and propagandists up. Thus the French revolutionary saying: “France will not be free until the last lord is strangled with the entrails of the last priest”. I.e. until the Cathedral is destroyed.

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