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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   44963 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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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.

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