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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 6, 2023

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So, in other Aella news, she's channelling the spirit of Hanania with this poll:

Suppose you have a 13 year old child dying of a terminal illness, and their final wish is to lose their virginity before they die. Is it ethical for the Make A Wish Foundation to hire them a prostitute?

Options are (with their current percentages):

  • yes, any prostitute (10.7%)
  • yes, only child prostitute (3.9%)
  • yes, only adult prostitute (9.8%)
  • no (75.6%)

Of course Aella with her reach manages to get normies to see her posts and the replies are wild that such a person could even exist, some choice replies:

Bro how do you niggas even think of shit like this

What if you were executed at gitmo that would be so crazy

Is this "chick" a pedo? (poll, results are 56.5% yes, 21.7% no, 21.7% "show me the results")

Again I ask, what is wrong with you and why do you keep showing up on my timeline?

While the poll itself may be interesting, what I find most interesting of all are the responses from the normies (there are responses that look objectively at the situation and say stuff like "no, if anyone is going to hire prostitutes it should be the parents, not the make a wish foundation", but they all tend to have stuff like "e/acc" in their usernames so they aren't your average randos). These tend to be extremely negative, but not negative in a "I know what I hate and this is it" form but rather a "first encounter with a terrible eldrich abomination you want to see destroyed but are confused at how could it even exist" sort of way. It does not feel like pure hate, but rather a hate that is born of fear, true xenophobia in its original meaning of the word. Nevertheless it is still a form of hate and you can quite easily see the vitriol directed towards Aella, merely for posting this poll.

My worry here though is that as technology advances and a sliver of people with disproportionate cultural cachet adopt belief systems like those of Aella and decouple from the low sophistication ways of thinking common in most westerners along with completely different cultures entering the west and taking root the current indigenous westerners will find their belief and value systems squeezed on both sides, from above by the likes of people who think like Aella does (nothing wrong with how she thinks, in fact I support it) along with from below by the value systems of recent migrants (who still care about stuff like honour and shame etc.).

While this may be a difficult time for the squeezed westereners themselves (I have little sympathy though, these very same people expect migrants to deal with a far bigger and more rapid cultural shock and blame them if they migrants take steps to mitigate this impact), I am more concerned about potential increased societal scale strife as people lash out from being put in a world that they no longer understand (see the "what if you were executed at gitmo" response above, I for one am glad this person has no power and hope it stays this way).

Naturally I have no doubt that any reified violence by the disaffected would be put down with the same prejudice we use for terrorist attacks these days, but it would still not be a good time for social harmony and that has widespread social impacts beyond a small handful of people cracking and going on a rampage where they kill a few people before bring brought down themselves.

Honestly some of the reactions here make me feel we’ve drifted away from the high-decoupling crowd we used to be, closer to normie conservatism. Pray god some of these people never get into a moral philosophy class or their heads will explode. “Why are you even thinking about pushing fat men off bridges? Are you some kind of sicko?”

We haven't drifted from the high-decoupling crowd, the crowd has drifted away from high-decoupling. I used to love these sorts of thought experiments, now I roll my eyes at them at best.

Right, because the Culture War has taught many the lesson that an invitation to engage in high-decoupling analysis is a trap.

Okay, teleport back to the 1700s. You're a Christian. A high decoupler invites you to a talk about how to assess the historicity of the bible. Do you accept?

On the one hand, yeah, it's a trap to convince you to be a non-denominational Deist damn you to hell for eternity and expel you from polite society.

On the other hand, the person's more right than they know, because the Christian God actually isn't real!

The ideologies and material practices of the next 50 years will be different from those of today, in ways that will necessarily not be emotionally 'coupled' in the way today's issues are. By refusing to 'decouple', you're covering your ears as the world changes around you.

By refusing to 'decouple', you're covering your ears as the world changes around you.

La-la-la, can't hear you.

Honestly, "Christian God not real!" and you know this how? Oh, Science, blah blah blah, let's argue this out with the same arguments for the past three hundred years.

That's not a good example - they were right for the wrong reasons? they were right but didn't know how right they were? they were right because I know they were right because I don't believe in Christian God?

I'm sure society will be very different in 50 years time. I've already seen huge changes in the society I grew up in, over the past 40 years. But that does not mean that someone proposing a 'decoupled' idea is right; am I to 'emotionally uncouple' and go "well back when I was in my 30s it was generally frowned upon to rape 6 year olds, but hey today is a different era and let's not cover our ears as the world changes!"

Oh, Science, blah blah

Evolution by natural selection is easily the most important 'theological' thing to ever happen, it (together with history) explains every impulse that God is claimed to have given to man by independent choice. Every unexplainable natural phenomenon used to be attributable to God, and his role today in that front is minimal due to science - even today's Christians still claim various modern miracles (and if you investigate one of them deeply enough, it inevitably collapses). Like, how does Christianity relate to AGI? It doesn't! Does this mean AGI won't happen?

But that does not mean that someone proposing a 'decoupled' idea is right;

It means that some of them are in some parts right, and if you don't decouple you'll not be able to notice that

Every unexplainable natural phenomenon used to be attributable to God, and his role today in that front is minimal due to science

What's your stance on human free will?

A reasonable question, and an important one, but not one I really want to discuss right now tbh.

I think it's not too relevant to the point that we have a lot of evidence there's not a heaven with jesus and angels and the happy souls of all the do-gooders that we didn't have a thousand years ago. Whether there's something non-mechanistic going on with the universe - important, tied up in why people are so attracted to things like Christianity, but still doesn't prove Christianity true.

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