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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 7, 2022

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The archetypal format of arguing your position is a debate, not a manifesto, not even a dumbed-down one. Today that probably means some podcast interview. In principle, it's not hard to argue any right-winger take on a podcast convincingly. This isn't rocket science.

I've just watched Jared Taylor make an unbelievably anodyne case for White Supremacy to some Japanese interviewers in simple words a low-literacy layman could understand and nod do. He could do that because his audience was evidently sympathetic and polite to a fault.

A typical popular American debate (to say nothing of worse debate environments) on a politically fraught topic is very different, it consists either of empty blathering and sloganeering or walking on eggshells, and you need a heck of a lot more rhetorical skill to not break any, not get bogged down in interruptions, gotchas and «mask slipping» type attacks. Even if you're that good, by the time you're done with your little eggshell dance and ready to deliver the conclusion, the average listener has long tired of it and switched channels. And the smart listener's time is too expensive for this shit. And what you're left with is either dysfunctional obsessive fanatics or lukewarm information consumers. Not much of a platform, so why bother.

The tragedy is that as a CW-minoritarian and a suspected witch, you have to be leagues better than your opponents who have been given license to uncharitable assumptions and plain savagery in public, and the water level keeps rising as your arguments are added to hate speech checklists and become the setup for gotchas, so you need to run on euphemism threadmill or keep getting fucking better. Being in the right helps, of course, against the more ludicrous and artificially propped-up beliefs; but on the other hand, your opponents have access to institutions of sense-making and memetic engineering. And if that fails, they turn to means of demonization, bullying and deplatforming so you cannot propagate your agenda effectively.

This exhausts people and they leave.

But one shouldn't look down on laymen too much. In a less adversarial situation, an average person wouldn't struggle with understanding e.g. Moldbug, if Moldbug were to be distilled to the standard of a high school essay. Our friend JB did just that once, in fact. Of course, Moldbug when distilled shrinks to truisms, trivialities and a bunch of ludicrous unsupported claims. But he becomes plenty understandable.

To the extent that he does not, this is because of obscurantism, which is a valuable feature of the doctrine, seeing as it helps with building the stratified, loyal movement/cult.

Likewise with Marxism.