It’s been pointed out recently that the topics discussed in the Culture War thread have gotten a bit repetitive. While I do think the Motte has a good spread on intellectual discussion, I’m always pushing for a wider range (dare I say diversity?) of viewpoints and topics in the CW thread.
I was a lurker for years, and I know that the barrier between having a thought and writing a top level comment in the CW thread can loom large indeed. Luckily I’m fresh out of inspiration, and would love to hear thoughts from folks about effortposts they want to write but haven’t gotten around to.
This of course applies to regulars who post frequently as well - share any and all topics you wish were discussed in the CW thread!
Jump in the discussion.
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Notes -
I've been thinking a little bit about some of the dynamics of left/right wing politics as a continuation of high school social dynamics into old age. It's a half formed thought that I have not fully explored internally but the vague idea is; popular kids stop getting things for free when they enter the adult world and find it unfair they've lost influence, so engage more with 'people should just be good to each other' type ideas. Unpopular kids who became successful are still resentful and engage more with a 'fuck you, why would I share my money/power/influence with the people who hate me' worldview. Both are pushing to maximize the type of influence that benefits them the most, popular kids obviously do better with social dynamics and the ones who succeed economically or in the workplace might(?) do better where influence is measured in tangible things or actions.
A second thought kicking around in my head is a little weirder and harder to pin down. The human brain seems to compulsively project personalities onto ... stuff. Things, ideas, ideals. I suspect (but don't know how to go about researching or confirming) that most religions spring from a desire to understand things beyond our control. Thunder is scary, you can't control it, but you can project a personality onto it and then 'understand' that in a social sense. From this perspective a religion like Shinto displays a kind of raw form of this, in that any random inanimate object can be inhabited(?) by Kami, and thereby have personality projected onto it. It is enough for an object to have been interacted with by humans, and for an emotional bond to be formed, for it to be divine.
Non-religious people do this as well, their cars, computers, plants, tools; they all have 'personality'. I think if you take this to its logical conclusion, we are simply projecting a personality onto ourselves, and others as well. People are more convinced by being described as the type of person who would do something than by trying to convince them to take a specific action in the first place. There might be some way to fit this into existing conversations about whether machine-learning type intelligence is qualitatively different to meat based intelligence.
I'm unfortunately too busy with work to flesh out either of these thoughts fully, and most of the time too distracted reading the entertaining conversations others are having to make an effort post!
My practical experience in local youth politics basically indicates that almost everyone drawn towards politics is a bit "special" in some way, but generally speaking more popular one was, more likely they're simply to be drawn towards mainstream centrist politics, not any of the extremes.
My experience in the US is that any youths with political interests are a bit nerdy, but at least for boys the more popular, the more likely to be on the right, with a major confound that artsy needs are usually to the left of math nerds.
I think it depends how you’re interested. The nerdy types tend to (and this seems to generalize across most domains, actually) be the deep divers. A political nerd can talk endlessly about policies, the contents of various bills or laws or Supreme Court decisions. They can Also usually handicap a political race using polling data.
Most people, regardless of political opinions, cannot actually do that. The normies might have various opinions on abortion, but they don’t understand the laws, or that the supreme court’s decision didn’t actually ban anything. They remanded it to the states and the legislature. I heard the wrong takes on that one from people who want abortions legal and from abortion abolitionists.
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I'd say that "politics nerds" and other special types turn up in numbers in all parties I've encountered, but in the mainstream centrist parties they'd be more than offset by normie types who got into politics because they wanted, for instance, to fix some particular local issue (of course local-issue stalwarts can also go pretty weird and feral over their particular issue), or who just "felt the need to serve" or whatever. Often the mechanism for latter seems to be that they participate in one of the youth councils set up in municipalities to "give the youth a voice" and then gravitate to the party that rules their municipality (or where they have a family background, or which simply annoys them the least), which almost always tends to be a milquetoast centre-right-to-centre-left party.
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