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naraburns  nihil supernum  3yr ago (text post)   38516 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 20, 2023

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This lends credence to my observation that a lot of what the dissident right does is to try to make leftist victim politics work in the service of white people / males / etc. rather than against them. In that sense, it is in spirit a leftist movement.

I actually cannot think of any popular modern political movement in the West that is not based on claiming to be the real victims.

This is an appealing belief but I don't think it holds up. There are perfectly rational reasons to dispute victimhood status even if you don't think it's actually important if your interlocutor thinks it is. If you're 5'5" tall and a 6'6" tall person behind you at a theater tells you that you should switch seats with him because it's easier for shorter people to see over taller people you can fully believe that they're not entitled to switch seats with you even if you were taller than them and argue that but it might be even easier to point out that you're not actually taller than them as that disarms their only argument and you don't have to go down the values disagreement about whether is legitimate to demand someone switch their assigned seat with you.

This same issue comes up with the gun debate. A lot of ink is spilt on whether guns makes people safer or more vulnerable. This is the sole position that the gun confiscation side of the aisle depends entirely on, if it's not true that getting rid of guns would make us safer then they have no possible justification for their policy proposals. The other side of the aisle also has some constituents that would switch sides based on the answer to the question but I believe them to be a vast minority. Listening to debates about gun control one could be understandably mistaken in believing that everyone only actually cares about whether guns make you safer or not despite that not actually being the universal motivation.

Do the libertarians count, or are they being victimized by the Man?

There's nothing about victimhood in my comment from the DR perspective, it's about conflict and how conflict manifests in public rituals and the hierarchy of civic symbols. The Conservative conflation of the recognition of conflict with the complaint of victimhood is another Conservative shortcoming.

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