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PaperclipPerfector  2yr ago (text post)   28292 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 25, 2023

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To take this specific example, the use of arbitrary power to maintain a "i know it when i see it" standard requires the constant deployment of political capital to defend a blatant injustice that can easily be attacked. This is not a problem if this is used to exploit a breach, such as in the case of preferential admissions into an institution as one's power can grow faster than is spent, but it's not something that can be maintained in the long term without a legitimizing principle.

Eventually someone you don't like gets the arbitrary power and can wipe you out since all restraints are gone. If it is "i'll know it when I see it", then you may very well say that only neo-post-chisto-integralist women are real women for these purposes, insofar as you have a coalition backing you.

These are fair points, and I particularly find the note about having to expend political capital to be a very good one. But what if these people believe that they have effectively infinite political capital, and what if they're right? We can talk about how naked power moves make the populace less likely to politically support you, but I think the protection they developed against the vulnerabilities they exploited can keep that at bay such that the long term is the long term. At some point as that long term gets lengthened, it becomes effectively infinite for someone living in 2023.

I've long predicted that intersectionalism is going to have to mutate into a proper imperial religion if it seeks to maintain its gains as Christianity had to do. Either that or it'll end up being the same sort of flash in the pan as the Terreur or the Cultural Revolution. But I'm not sure which is more likely even now.

I'm not sure either. After all, even tracing all the way back to the intellectual roots in the 20th century, it's barely a blip so far in historical terms. I don't know what a "proper imperial religion" is, but by my lights, I think it has already mutated - or perhaps "evolved" or "ascended" - to a proper religion at this point. I see it as one possible next evolution of religion, one that's developed in response to the greater materialistic and scientific thinking by the populace of the past couple centuries in comparison to most times before, which has greatly weakened the status of traditional religions which often directly contradict materialism or science. The religion that succeeds in this environment is the religion that convinces its believers that it's not a religion or even that it's antithetical to religion, and I think intersectionality (or CRT or wokeness or idpol or whatever name its adherents refuse to let others label it by) is proving to be extremely successful at this.

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