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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 2, 2023

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Yes, another top level comment about The Origins of Woke from me, in the same thread on the same week. But this is about something else. I had an epiphany while reading the book.

I've wondered for many years why Marxism is more socially acceptable than racism when it's responsible for even more deaths than the Holocaust. It's because companies are (de facto) legally required to fire racists, but they're not required to fire Marxists. In fact, firing a Marxist for merely being Marxist would be illegal in California.

California has a state law against firing people for their political beliefs, but it didn't protect James Damore, who was fired in compliance with the law against creating a hostile work environment for protected groups.

It all adds up.

Most elites are left-liberal and thus have an emotional affinity to Marxism in a way they never will to far-right politics. It's about ideological proximity, not rationality. The fact that Marxism was genocidal when it was fully practiced is almost irrelevant.

Genocide requires intent to wipe out a specific ethnos. For example Nazism was genocidal towards Jews and Slavs. While Marxists certainly didn't shy away from political violence or bad policy, they were not "genocidal".

I guess this is an argument against consequentialism. Namely, we didn't mean to kill tons of people, we just sort of did. But those baddies over there who did intend to do it nevertheless failed to do so as much as we did, hence we're better people.

Whereas the critics of such a position would simply say, what matters is what you do not what you say or claim to want.

And while I agree that genocide strictly defined is incompatible with Marxism (unless you think of capitalists and kulaks as an ethnicity), ultimately what I look at is how many people the ideology killed and on that count it was simply worst of all ideologies of the 20th century. No contest.

By their fruits you will know them. Was Jesus a consequentialist? Hmm...