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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   30499 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 3, 2023

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I am not using "strong" here as a positive adjective.

obviously. Likewise, I can assert that "sick" is actually better than "well", but there's no obvious reason why others should take that assertion seriously. See the edits above for more detail.

The "weak" and "strong" for the purposes of this model relate specifically to the ability to do what is required for base survival. Many men that might be called weak are not useless just because their current skillset would be useless in a harder time. It's also important to note that the ratio of survivor/thriver in a man is not fixed for life.

The "weak" and "strong" for the purposes of this model relate specifically to the ability to do what is required for base survival.

Yes, but that is an interpretation you are importing from "thrive/survive". That is not the understanding of the person who coined the phrase, nor of the people who repeat it, and you haven't demonstrated why they should, only asserted that they should.

You are claiming that "strength" is nothing but raw animalistic survival potential, and that "weakness" is everything else, and then announce that there are many good things other than raw animalistic survival potential, and so therefore "weakness" is better than "strength". This is obviously true, for what it's worth, but I doubt anyone worth listening to has ever argued otherwise. The question remains of whether "survive/strength" reduces down to nothing more than raw animalistic survival (it certainly does not) and whether "thriving" can actually self-sustain such that "survive" is no longer necessary and can be discarded. Is "thrive" simply a rebranding of "eat your seed corn"? Aesop's grasshoppers "thrived" for a time, and a number of human polities have as well, up until they neglected a few too many things and then died screaming. History strongly indicates that there's no free lunch, that sooner or later the constraints of material reality must be accounted with. The fact that the Thrivers themselves have more or less wholesale begun adopting Survive tools like censorship and enforced conformity kinda paints a bleak picture for the future of Thrive, but hey, as every sucker ever proclaimed: maybe this time really is different!

and whether "thriving" can actually self-sustain such that "survive" is no longer necessary and can be discarded. Is "thrive" simply a rebranding of "eat your seed corn"?

I thought I was rather clear that both extremes are not ideal. Eating your seed corn is the extreme of what I call thrive here.

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