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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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I’m unsure whether you think our beliefs about fairness affect us or not.

They do, and they are subject to change because of threats and other external stimuli.

and you concede that we could convince incels to accept the status quo (might be sarcasm, though) like they do now, but you maintain that justice consists of nothing but threats.

There's no contradiction here. «Incels» or like @urquan properly says young sexless men who may one day stop being incels, accept it conditional on the sense of the threat being enough to outweigh the sense of unfairness and vague promise of potential upsides from chaos that men under pressure sometimes feel (and more importantly, conditional on availability of copes, which is why wokeness in games is such an irritant).

If the pressure increases, or more capable men are demoted into incels (even if the bottom 30% on attractiveness perfectly coincides with the bottom 30% on general ability to get shit done, which it does not, the 30th percentile man is not nothing, and the 50th percentile man would be more of something). it may not be enough.

which likewise never grants that some rights were handed over graciously.

The woke are of course rational to do so, because the claim that your rights have been handed over graciously serves solely to imply that they could have been not handed over – or may be withdrawn, if you don't behave as was expected upon them being handed over. It's usually a negotiation tactic to overstate your degree of control over the situation and discourage escalation of demands.

But I also think they are correct objectively. Some people can be persuaded by peaceful means. Heck, some could even be proactively sympathetic while not sharing your burdens in any way, like white Abolitionists were.* In the end, there remains at best a minority of disagreeable profiteers of the status quo who seek to maintain it, and you should hope they will be intimidated into submission peacefully, by the new consensus. But, well, you see – when intimidation is necessary, violence is always around the corner.

This reminds me:

...Neither could the suffragists point to any laws that would be passed under the new regime, since everything on their wish list—higher education, inheritance rights, guardianship of children, divorce reform, factory laws—had already been granted. (So much for the argument that power yields only to force.) Sometimes it seemed like the antis were the only ones who anticipated any practical consequences to follow from suffrage. Of course, the effects they had in mind were things like the routinization of suffragette tactics: blowing up buildings, shouting down public speakers, pouring acid down pillar-boxes, slashing priceless paintings, horsewhipping ministers on the street.

Ultimately, though, women needn't use violence the way that men have to.

* Notice how this possibility is effortfully mocked and denied when applied to this topic. No, the only reason one could be willing to speak in incels' favor is being one, a filthy lying nig fag incel, ergo inherently undeserving of anything better than sensible chuckles and strawmen.

I think it's a completely reflexive, unthinking, subhuman reaction, just a monkey dangling his balls in the interlocutor's face because the situation feels like a natural opportunity to show the goods.

But again: it is informed by the wisdom of public negotiations, and thus rational, even if not quite helpful specifically here.

Not percolating, sorry. You’ve got this bucket, and into it drip some threats, and from the other side arguments about fairness. Both are real things with visible effects, in a complex causal relationship, but each can be independently generated. (At any time, there are always a small number of pure altruistic arguers and completely self-interested blackmailers.)

Why then do you describe the resulting liquid as being composed entirely of threats? Why is the man who argues wasting his time, and the pirate the only true champion of the cause? Both can theoretically achieve the same goal. (But the pirate’s way is a lot more bloody, and results in a law of the jungle society where morality and justice mean nothing, and individual outcomes are not good.)

You attempt to reconcile the contradiction by insisting on seeing arguments as merely another power play, and making the threats the ultimate cause of the arguments. The panglossian mirror version would view threats as nothing more than political enforcement of fairness concepts, entirely generated by those.

It’s like the different perspectives scott wrote about. You can see the corruption of the state as the exception, or as the default. I prefer the former, but you seem to go farther than the latter and say corruption is the entire story.