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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   44993 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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"If you behave like a rabid dog, don't be surprised if you get taken behind the shed and shot"

It is easy to mistake the leeriness of members of a society you find yourself opposing some key elements of for irredeemable, minus-infinity-level hostility that the only dignified response for you is to fight with all your might, but the natural consequence is then that every time you fight back against someone, more members get leery of you, until you are left standing alone against everyone. Sometimes dissidents who contain their righteous anger and try to work with those organs of society that are predisposed against them fail miserably anyway, but it seems quite clear that 100% of those that do not contain it do. Of course, it may be that you value a great chance of coming out looking more dignified to yourself in your loss higher than a small chance of not losing, but then forgive me if I don't want to participate in your particular rebellion and prefer one that is in it for victory rather than aesthetics.

Strange - I see large segments of society behave like rabid dogs, and instead of being shot they secure victory after victory and bathe in endless rewards for mashing defect in the prisoner's game we call coexistence. How curious that society bends over backwards to appease left-approved violence, but right-approved violence is surely doomed to failure. Why, it must just be a simple rule of nature that bad things only work for leftists.

Alternatively, perhaps bad things just work, period, and there's an influential chunk of society keenly interested in making sure their enemy tribe doesn't realize this.

this is exactly what moldbug's terrorism as folk activism or breivik was about. The left can kill and smash as much as they want because they're left wing, and because SOME in power supported them. If you shoot keffals, nobody's gonna support you. No NLG will break you out. No politicians will pardon you. You'll just be all over the internet as christchurch 2, shooting a bunch of fweaking innocent people for no reason, evil right wingers are a threat to society.

The problem is that in this metaphor, capturing (and, of course, exaggerating) the vast difference in institutional power, only you are the dog. A dog can see its fellow dogs getting kicked, dragged around by the leash and euthanised by "rabid" humans, but lashing out at its human owner when the human owner already thinks of it as a problem dog will lead to worse outcomes than, say, becoming the maximally instagrammable pomeranian that has trained its dog mommy so much that it's really not clear anymore who exactly owns whom.

"How curious that society bends over backwards to appease human-approved violence, but dog-approved violence is surely doomed to failure"

A sufficiently brutish dog can kill a full-grown man. If you must lose, take someone down with you.

Alternatively, maybe things only work for leftists, good or bad.

Yeah, that's certainly something the leftist leviathan would want to convince people of. Color me skeptical.

This is about where I am, too. It seems that the moral high ground is more of a cliff edge off which you will inevitably be pushed.

You remember the post about how a system that optimises for only one metric will eventually end up sacrificing all others in pursuit of it? It's that, and the criteria is victory. You're either willing to sacrifice everything to win, or you're destined to lose.

You have to be willing to burn and salt the earth.

Agreed. Personally the fact that modern society has by and large rejected using outright, violent force to solve disputes is something that makes me quite happy.

If we start to push violence against others as a way to settle disputes, we risk falling back into the pre-modern hellhole of constant warfare and massive, cyclical societal devastation.

It's easy to reject using force when you already control all the other means of solving disputes.

Hmmm good point. I don't reject using force per-se, but I'm more inline with curiously_straight_CA that if you're going to use force, especially against the progressive leviathan, you had better be damn sure it works. 'If you come at the king, you'd best not miss' and all that. That's my more fundamental disagreement with this line of thinking.

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