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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   21296 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 9, 2023

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Honestly I don't believe this entirely. The issue of try-try-try again-pass is real yes, but as Brexit shows it's an advantage inherent to the "Anti-Status-Quo" stance rather than inherently an advantage for progressives.

The problem is that conservatives believe you can just rest on your laurels and do nothing whatsoever to uphold your beliefs beyond voting, while progressives understand that to win you have to fight for your beliefs every single day. If conservatives tried half as hard to ban gay marriage as the progressives did to legalize it, it would be illegal.

Progressives collectively throw hundreds of billions of dollars towards their social goals, have numerous people whose entire lives and careers are dedicated to furthering the cause (many of whom abandoned more profitable avenues to do so) and have millions more who make art, put the values into their work, make public displays of loyalty, etc. Conservatives aren't even in the same ballpark of effort and commitment.

The sole exception would of course be Christian Evangelicals, who do all the same things progressives do to to actually attempt to win. And would you look at that, they did in fact get Roe v Wade overturned! Turns out conservatives can win if they actually care and put their money where their mouth is!

What I'm trying to get at is that "well this vote shows the people do/don't want this thing" only applies to the "anti-" side of any proposal after the "pro" side get their victory. I understand this tactic, but I don't see how you can shift from "we don't agree with this result so we'll keep going till we get the one we want", to "this result is now written in stone and can never be challenged". Unless you don't care a whit about the charge of hypocrisy and can be certain the tame media will never apply it to you, but always and only to your opponents.

That's my takeaway on the whole abortion debate: "why can't both sides compromise?" Well, because for one side, 'compromise' means 'surrender your principles, give us what we want, but we won't give you anything in return'.

"Why don't you permit abortion for rape/incest/threat to life of mother?"

(1) You don't? Heartless monsters who hate women and want them to die! (2) You do? Okay, you've already given in on the permissibility of abortion, that means you have no principled objection, so why not give in on the other cases we want? If you don't, then you're a hypocrite!

"If you really thought abortion was murder, why aren't you bombing clinics/putting women who get abortions in jail/executing abortion doctors?"

(1) You don't? Ha ha, you hypocrites! So that means you're lying and you don't have any principled objection to abortion, you only hate women and want to punish them for their sexuality! (2) You do? You heartless monsters! You hate women and want to punish them for their sexuality!

Progressives collectively throw hundreds of billions of dollars towards their social goals

They can do this because it's other people's money. They've infiltrated corporate and government institutions and act as corrupt agents, turning them towards the goals of the left instead of the nominal goals of the organization.

Currently that is the case, and my only response is "Yes, and if Conservatives cared enough they'd be stealing our money to fund pet causes too."

But it wasn't always true. The early progressive movements were largely funded by progressives, progressive sympathizers, and donations by those who supported the associated causes. Conservatives could do the same, but they don't. An expected counterpoint would be the funds seized from the trucker protest but 1. That's not America, and 2. You have to actually put money towards building power structures (like the Federalist Society), not just in response to a single politically hot event.

The progressives aren't about to let the conservatives pull the same trick; now that they've done it, they've closed the door to conservatives doing it. Progressive organizations get to engage in conspiracies in restraint of trade with no one blinking an eye. Conservative organizations get the stink-eye from the IRS.

I don't entirely disagree with this, though I would say it occurred largely because conservatives didn't care enough about their own values to maintain them. They could have done what progressives are doing now, but failed to do so, and instead let sinful behavior take control of the most powerful state to ever exist.

The solution now is to find new tricks, new takeover methods, that the opponent doesn't see coming. It is a war after all. You can't just reuse the old methods identically, but there are consistently functional principles that are timeless.

The solution now is to find new tricks, new takeover methods, that the opponent doesn't see coming.

And if no such things exist to be found?

The idea that there are literally 0 remaining possibilities to counteract them is such an absurd way of thinking that frankly it took me a bit off guard. The idea that the current state of affairs, the institutions around us, are not only perfectly stable in a practical sense but even theoretically invincible is such an extreme claim it would require mountains of evidence. I reject the premise, and frankly I don't even expect the current system to resist takeover for another 100 years, let alone 2000.

No, I don't think institutions are "perfectly stable" — practically the opposite — but that they are indeed "practically invincible" against takeover by human forces. There aren't "literally 0 remaining possibilities," there's one and only one inevitable possibility — that they eventually collapse utterly. But there's a lot of ruin in a nation, the market can remain irrational…, et cetera, et cetera, so I expect them to keep the plates spinning for at least a generation or two. It's why many of the people in circles on the right I interact with have given up on any politics other than "Benedict Option" style 'have a bunch of kids and pass on as much of our values and knowledge to them as we can, in hopes that they'll do the same, and their kids the same, until, eventually after the collapse has finished and the depths of the new dark age are here, our descendants are better prepared for the task of rebuilding.

Except that I expect the regime to increasingly resemble a star entering it's red giant days, expanding and engulfing more and more around it as it dies, consuming more and more civilizational "seed corn" to prop itself up. Thus, when it goes, even if our species manages to survive the resulting conflicts at all, I expect the collapse to do so much damage to civilizational infrastructure both tangible and intangible, to knock the planet so far back that, due to the Industrial Revolution being a once-per-planet event (due to depletion of the non-renewable "low-hanging fruit" resources accessible at positive EROI with 1500s technology), we will simply never recover. That, as someone on a podcast recently put it, the machines in The Matrix were right that the late 90's were the absolute peak of human civilization — and that we have no hope whatsoever of attaining such heights ever again. That there's nothing in the future to look forward to, only irreversible decline into a Dark Age that only ends with humanity's eventual extinction.

(Of course, I've encountered some people on the far-right who think this is a great outcome, because 1500s technology and economies cannot support much Progressivism, and therefore giving up for all time things like electricity, running water, medicine that works, having less than 90% of your population engaged in back-breaking farm labor, etc. is a small price to pay to "own the libs" forever, but I don't agree with them.)

Thus, when it goes, even if our species manages to survive the resulting conflicts at all, I expect the collapse to do so much damage to civilizational infrastructure both tangible and intangible, to knock the planet so far back that, due to the Industrial Revolution being a once-per-planet event (due to depletion of the non-renewable "low-hanging fruit" resources accessible at positive EROI with 1500s technology), we will simply never recover. That, as someone on a podcast recently put it, the machines in The Matrix were right that the late 90's were the absolute peak of human civilization — and that we have no hope whatsoever of attaining such heights ever again.

Toby Ord takes an axe to this argument in The Precipice; I'll summarise with some of my own points as well.

  1. Metals and similar are only non-renewable while they're in use. If there's a collapse, the ruins are themselves now mines - indeed, better mines than we've had for a long time.
  2. In a lot of cases with fossil fuel, the work to render it accessible is already done and won't be undone. An open-cut mine, for instance, is not going away; the resource is at the surface now. Plenty of open-cut coal mines in Australia. Moreover, you don't really need these for anything except making plastic, due to renewables and to some extent even uranium (see below).
  3. Phosphate... okay, that's a thing, but there are still decent amounts of it and it is renewable on a much-shorter timescale than fossil fuels.
  4. Remember that the Industrial Revolution required that the 1.0 version of machines be useful. A rediscovery doesn't need that, because the knowledge of how to build much-more-efficient machines will not be lost (I'm very confident of that; there was literally one technology actually lost in the fall of Rome i.e. Roman concrete). Even if it were, people would at least know it was possible, which is half the issue.

It is a war after all.

Sometimes the enemy just outclasses you.

True, and I think conservatives are generally outclassed. On this we agree entirely.

Not just conservatives, the entire Right, and, for that matter, probably most of the non-Progressive left. And not just "generally outclassed," but so totally, utterly outclassed that we've already been defeated totally. There is no fighting back, there is no meaningfully resisting, there is only inevitable doom.

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