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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   44997 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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My main problem with Wokeism is that it really struggles to answer whether it actually delivers what it promises to. A Buddhist monk, a nun, and an EA (as far as I know) have a good sense of what they're getting into and what they'll get from it. In contrast, the effectiveness of woke policies on actually improving the wellbeing of the disadvantaged (what its adherents actually want) runs the entire gauntlet from effective to counter productive, while cultivating a culture that has no qualms about deliberately misrepresenting the empirics.

This is the big difference between the two, in my mind. More specifically, I think Wokism (Neo-Progressivism) is a culture-focused, externalizing memeset, where EA is a highly materialist, internalizing memeset. (And I think I'm being accurate in the former...as someone who has internalized NP ideas in the past, I've been told a lot that you're not actually supposed to do that. You're not supposed to actually self-deconstruct).

If you want to get into religion, I think there are versions of religion that run that particular gamut. There are culture-focused externalizing types and materialist focused internalizing types.

I am partisan in that I think the latter, materialist route is the only thing sustainable, but I can steelman the culturalist approach, in that it's focused on politics and structures and how to change them. I just don't think it'll be successful, because human nature will twist it for personal gain.

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