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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022

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I live in a very very progressive part of the world, and I went to a small local craft market event today. Near the event, there was a 65ish year old woman waving around a GOP tote bag at cars and people passing by. Everyone was ignoring her, but I went to talk to her.

It started out just fine. I told her (in a friendly way) that she's unlikely to change any minds here, and she replied that that she's just trying to show people that there are others out there who have had enough of the progressive orthodoxy, citing CRT, transgenderism, etc. She felt like maybe this might just convince some young people to even question whether there's another viewpoint out there, or convince those who are hiding their views to speak up more. I definitely respected and agreed with that.

Then, her stream of consciousness-style insane ramblings started coming out. She went on for like 7 minutes without pausing, about so many topics I couldn't even keep track, jumping from one to the other. I recall her mentioning that leftists want to harvest and sell fetus organs, and somehow she started talking about slavery and pre-civil war America, waving a book around trying to show me underlined passages trying to liken the practice of slavery to what progressives are doing today, maybe implying that leftists want to return to pre-civil war America in some way. It was pretty hard to manage to get away.

This comes in the wake of being at my wife's family event where her crazy uncle kept bringing up conservative talking points apropos of nothing, shoehorning them into conversations which everyone tried politely to ignore, and was a total conversation killer. I'm usually only used to leftists doing that.

These experiences were pretty disheartening to me. I spend so much time here on The Motte that I end up feeling like people who are anti-progressive are probably more thoughtful and less crazy than progressives and more in touch with reality. But that's probably not true. I guess a lot of conservatives really are in their own echo chambers just as much as leftists are. Probably a good number of them really take seriously the conspiracy-style theories of talking head personalities in the style of Glenn Beck and Alex Jones. The true disconnect on both sides, from each other and probably also from reality and the true values of most people, is a very sad state of affairs.

I truly believe that the way we tend to talk about things on the Motte and in rationalist-adjacent spaces makes sense, and seems like far more logical discourse than I can find anywhere else. But of course I would, I'm part of this specific world. Any leftist would say the same about their progressive reddit subs, and most republicans would say that about the comments section in the Daily Wire. Is there any evidence that we're not just rambling buffoons in our own echo chamber, just like I'd find on either end of the spectrum?

Are we just whistling in the dark? We’re engaged in a process of refining our own beliefs, separating the gold from the dross, or at least the iron from the stone. We’re sharpening our wits, becoming able to see our own biases and those of our discussion partners. If nothing else, we’re learning to be less foolish ourselves.

I recall her mentioning that leftists want to harvest and sell fetus organs

According to investigations, Planned Parenthood does indeed harvest and donate fetal tissue/parts/organs, and is often compensated for their effort. The right was aghast when this hit the news cycle, and called for investigations. The left pointed out that it’s perfectly legal and above-board, and that Planned Parenthood isn’t being paid above market rates. The right has basically said, “And that’s a problem! It should be illegal,” but has no power to make it illegal.

She wasn’t using our words, but she was aware of a real occurence.

The person's claims, to the extent they're coherent at all, are a combination of: "the left wants to do medical research on fetuses" - nobody on 'the left' cares - "planned parenthood is incentivized to cause more abortions because they get monetary compensation for selling fetuses" - when you combine the frequency of said tissue donation and the compensation, it is not relevant to their bottom line.

The left as a coalition contains the constituency of academics whose perennial interest is that the budget to study anything and everything is always increased. Moral considerations only enter into this insofar as they conflict with other members of the coalition, and as it turns out, the people with any fealty to the sanctity of fetuses are all on the right.

And here we see one of the most common tactical patterns of the culture war. People see ill consequence for them, and infer intent from their ennemies, and their ennemies assure them that they are imagining the intent, paint the implication as delusional and use this to shutdown any discussion of the original consequence.

The Great Replacement is probably the canonical example of this, with the same exact people boasting about something they are actively saying isn't real, but you can see it throughout so many memetic conflicts between humans that it should probably get a name.

I suppose Coulter's got a nice formulation in "the law of merited impossibility" but this seems to double down on intent being actualized, which I don't believe to be necessary for the pattern to exist or be effective.

FYI, the Law of Merited Impossibility is Rod Dreher’s, not Ann Coulter’s. Coulter’s Law is the principle that when you’re reading a news article about some sort of crime or malfeasance, if the race of the perpetrator is not mentioned, that’s a clear indication that he or she is a racial minority. If the criminal were white, the author would have mentioned it without hesitation.

Oh yes, I got my conservative editor wires crossed somehow.