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naraburns  nihil supernum  3yr ago (text post)   34343 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 2, 2023

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What healthy political system do you propose, then?

The one we have now but where we all recognize that changes made before we were born are legitimate targets for conservative critique. Which may just be the one we have now but I certainly don't want the proposed one where it's not considered conservative to undo changes that happened a long while ago because then if there are truly bad changes that age long enough they're impossible to undo.

I've always found the word reactionary rather useless if not actively harmful. Opposition to a proposed policy doesn't magically transmute into an entirely different faction the moment it gets passed. It's just an artifact of trying to map complex ideologies onto a spectrum. But I guess that critique applies to all the other words used as well.

Taxonomic, it is like if "progressive" only applied to the exact policies up for debate and no further and we had to use some other word to describe people who wanted more than this iteration of gun control or whatever issue. I don't really think reactionary means much of anything besides a sneer by leftists and some negligible number of people who want to be ruled by a king. And these two definitions don't even intersect.

If I say that Australia made mistake when they gave up their guns I have much in common with modern conservatives and basically nothing in common with people who want to be ruled by a king. It's just not a useful word as used. It would make more sense to call people who want to change past mistakes progressives rather than reactionaries as they want to change the status quo but that would just be even more confusing.

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