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PaperclipPerfector  2yr ago (text post)   22650 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 9, 2023

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Vibe shift?

I lost count of how many anglos, jews and anglo-jews on the center-left/left that, in the past days, had a "Conversion on the road to Damascus", openly admitting on Twitter that their views on the Left were utterly wrong and that they had no idea their side was so full of apologists for jew-slaughter. And I am talking about big figures, including some of the loudest neoliberal mouths, admitting grudgingly that the Right-wing view of academia had some points.

Let's say that this reckoning mood last more than two weeks and the inevitable Israeli reaction on Gaza; It is possible that we are beginning to see a realignement from the upper middle class on immigration in general and on inclusion and diversity in particular?

In my view, there are still some enormous obstacle to shift like these, primarly the enormous influence of academia on journalism and èlites policy and opinion-making in the west, and the machine of the anglo-left working in case of another menace from Trump, that can rapidly rebuild the ranks. Another interesting side of the discourse is what will happen in Europe, where it is true that there are way less Jews, but the Right has way more influence between young and important people. By tasting the environment, almost everyone apart from the aggravated minorities and feminists groups are very, very angry about all of this.

I do not know if it is ok to post this here or in the Gaza thread, if it is wrong I will move it there.

Let's say that this reckoning mood last more than two weeks and the inevitable Israeli reaction on Gaza; It is possible that we are beginning to see a realignement from the upper middle class on immigration in general and on inclusion and diversity in particular?

No. Because what I'm seeing happening on twitter is that these people who are having these revelations are only admitting fault in this one, narrow, blinkered way, and immediately Gell-Mann Amnesia-ing when it comes to everything else the left loves. So the guy who admits "okay, maybe the right were correct that BLM were a scummy group" will still then turn around and support open borders and DEI completely uncritically. One facet of the edifice falling does not cause questioning of the whole structure; rather, the internalised rationalisation is "wow, those guys were REALLY GOOD at concealing how shitty they were" and not "wow, I really blinded myself to how obviously shitty those guys are". It saves more ego to believe you were deceived by someone else, than to admit actual fault on your part. The right being correct about the issue is treated as a rare fluke, a broken clock moment, instead of a reason to re-examine all your existing beliefs. Because doing that is hard and painful.

One facet of the edifice falling does not cause questioning of the whole structure; rather, the internalised rationalisation is "wow, those guys were REALLY GOOD at concealing how shitty they were" and not "wow, I really blinded myself to how obviously shitty those guys are".

My first thought when reading the start of this sentence was that this reminds me of the Internet or the Titanic, in the way it has protections against the whole thing catastrophically going down just from one major part going down (the Titanic itself obviously went down, due to more compartments getting breached than it was designed for, but the principle stands). And in the realm of the self-proclaimed progressive left or the "woke" or the SocJus or the like, I think one of the strongest forms of protection it has is its outright rejection of logic, reasoning, and empirical evidence as tools to learn true things about the world as concepts invented by oppressors in order to oppress. By freeing themselves from the constraints of logic, they can observe one part of their ideology getting utterly crushed and then completely ignore that the very same thing that crushed one part will also crush other parts.

Combine that with plain old Gell-Mann Amnesia, and yeah, I think predictions of any sort of "vibe shift" are hugely premature at this point. I mean, it's not out of the question, but I feel like I've observed these sorts of "pre-vibe-shift" signs dozens of times in the past decade, and I'm not sure I can recall it ever leading to anything other than doubling down.

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