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So we just had an emergency lab meeting about the Charlie Kirk situation. Someone screenshotted an instagram story from one of my fellow lab members and sent in anonymous email to my PI (professor/supervisor). The instagram story said basically that Charlie Kirk's death was a good thing, actually. PI didn't name names, and it was also unclear what exactly the anonymous emailer wanted, but did caution us that this is a dangerous environment to be posting this kind of thing. EDIT: He also said that he STRONGLY disagrees with this position, but he's very in favor of free speech and would defend unnamed individual from the university/public if push came to shove, despite disagreeing with their politics.
I have a couple thoughts about this. Firstly, it's legitimately pretty scary that internet posting is now important enough to warrant an emergency lab meeting. It feels like we rapidly are descending into an authoritarian anti-free speech environment (not that universities were bastions of this to begin with). My own social media and blog are extremely clean, but it's trivially easy to link this account with my real name, and I've posted some not kosher things here before.
Secondly, universities/leftists have kind of done this to themselves. This is the old Cory Doctrow/ Freddie DeBoer stick. Trigger warnings, anti-racism and cancel culture have all led to this kind of environment where speech can be policed in this way by the state and doesn't look hypocritical.
Thirdly, and I hate to say this, but whichever one of my colleagues posted this is a fucking idiot, along with most of the left in my generation. I still think of myself as a socialist, perhaps less so recently, and I want to shake this person and ask what good this kind of statement actually does for our cause. Do you want more vigilante killings? The right is going to come up on top with that one, as most lefties in this country are strangely anti-gun. Do you want to win elections? Advocating for murder isn't very popular with most of the electorate. Do you want continued science funding so you can have a job and accomplish the things that you think are so important you dedicated 8-12 hours of your day to, every day? Then stop tarnishing the reputation of universities and science in general with your crazy politics: our stipends come from taxpayer money. As I've written on earlier, scientists are woefully naive about politics. This is not how you win political victories, which makes me think that the goal isn't actually political victory, but some kind of LARP/ in-group signaling game.
It took 200 years of misbehavior from both the Protestant and Catholic camps to convince everyone to stop the pointless destruction and establish the norms we call freedom of religion and the Peace of Westphalia. Imagine one side or the other stopping early and not fighting back after wringing their hands over abstract principles! The abstract principles come out of peace negotiations. First, you have to either win or fight to a stalemate. We're not even out of the opening phases of what will be a long, brutal war.
I think this is a bit different, because left-wing ideology is, at least in all relevant practice, parasitic: the more radically conservative you are, the higher fertility you have; the more progressive you are, the less you have.
Conservatives can survive just fine without leftists; leftists cannot survive without conservatives.
In contrast, Protestants and Catholics can both survive just fine without either parasitizing off of the other.
Also, note that 'left-wing ideology' forms the 'traditional female' role in society (creates secondary goods, thrive/idealistic mindset, sets morality/cultural aesthetics), where 'right-wing ideology' forms the 'traditional male' role (creates primary goods, survive/realistic mindset, executes on morality/cultural aesthetics).
Remember that
is the state of nature, and what humans have spent the last 200,000 years evolving alongside, and that
has only been true in Western nations for only about the last hundred years. We're still in the evolutionary transition period from the former to the latter, and most left-wing actions are perfectly sane if you view them as "women getting revenge on men for the crime of being utterly dependent on them" (and "the unproductive getting revenge on the productive for being utterly dependent on them" is an excellent explanation for why there are still communists in Western countries).
The problem, and the growing pains now, are that women/leftists perceive (and they are correct) that the Nazis were the last male/rightist attempt at a State. So anything that grants men more power is, in a very literal sense, Naziism to a leftist. [The fact this definition is self-serving, and exists as a conservative force to avoid a more equitable distribution of moral power in society, is by definition irrelevant to leftists.]
No, the dynamics I’m talking about manifest at timescales larger than a generation. Men cannot reproduce without women, nor vice versa, so they are both parts of a single whole. I don’t think one can reasonably call a gender relationship “parasitic” in any biological sense. I’m not using “parasite” as a slur, but referring to a particular dynamic of how life operates.
Now, one can ask “ok but if we just imagine reproduction could be done without the need of one of the sexes, now what?” Basically, either synthetic sperm or synthetic wombs. And yeah, here women don’t come out looking very well. Andrea Dworkin (blackpilled feminist addicted to doomposting before we even had the internet) explicitly posited that right-wing women are terrified of male homosexuality because it represents a potential world without women at all—with reproductive tech, gays could obsolete women entirely and live in a paradise without them. (Yes, this was her actual thesis lol)
I’m not sure I entirely buy her thesis—if nothing else, homosexual desire only exists as a bug in heterosexual desire, so once you’ve severed reproduction and sex with technology, there’s no selection pressure to even be horny in the first place, so I predict it would vanish entirely within a few short generations.
Whether Jesus predicted this in his answer to the Sadducees I leave as an exercise to the reader.
I do. Gynosupremacist thought (erroneously called "feminism" here) is legitimately terrified of straight men doing this to women. "Kill all men"... before men kill all women. This is existential, instinctual, foundational, horrible anxiety.
Some humans are more driven by raw instinct than others.
The dynamics I'm talking about manifest at more immediate timescales. Men are strong enough to do the heavy lifting that is required to secure better sources of food; women are not, thus women die without men. I believe 'helper' was the term used in Genesis.
Interestingly, in places where you can't take two steps without literally tripping over food and game animals, women rule precisely because they have little existential need for men. Their cities consisted of these long houses: the earliest arcologies. This typifies certain civilizations historically native to North America because, prior to 1800 or so, those were the conditions on the continent.
Sure you can. The problem comes when you turn "parasitic" from description to prescription, and it's not acceptable to do this for the same reason it's not acceptable to cheer murder of your political enemies. It's a fundamentally symbiotic relationship where one part needs to not be [seen to be] exploiting the relationship, either in reality or in the eyes of the other.
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