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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 14, 2022

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Peace and kindness and love over war and hierarchy and conquest isn't trad - it's the creed of progressives

It's neither. No-one except the most radical ever espoused universal peace and kindness and love. Even Jesus, the lamb, drove the moneychangers out of the temple with scourges, and "came not to bring peace, but a sword." The question where the parties differ is who gets the peace-and-love, and who is consigned to the war-and-death. And as for hierarchy, that's sort of an orthogonal third quality that can come with either peace (as in leveller/quaker/anarchist dreams) or violence (the cossack/cowboy/yeoman tradition)

No-one except the most radical ever espoused universal peace and kindness and love

Huh? This is a universal belief today. It's mocked in the 'duude hippie universal love' sense - but 'fundamentally, we should be kind and good to everyone' is, like, a moral tenet most agree on. If I asked random people around me IRL if that's a good thing, they'd say "yes". The more conservative might add "but that's very difficult, and we can't go too far", and the more leftist might say "except for the NAZIS" (who are, of course, bad for breaking that premise, tolerate intolerance, w/e), but most agree on it in a significant sense. It relates to everything from antiracism to global development aid to christianity to why those hippies thought 'whoa love everyone' when they took acid (indigenous acid-doers have visions of their idiosyncratic practices when they do psychedelics), to one's day-to-day life where the economy, school, welfare, are justified by 'benefitting everyone'.

This is a universal belief today.

Peace and love to ISIS? To Putin? To Boko Haram? To "January Sixthers"? To Transphobes? To Pedophiles? To Conversion Therapists?

You don't have to scratch the surface too hard to find people who even baked-out old hippies don't extend "universal peace kindness and love" to. The question is, where do you draw the line?

Universal in an approximate sense, sure, but it's present