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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   27143 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 6, 2023

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A leftist talking point between 2017 and 2019 was that if someone seems to deny someone else their rights, then they forfeit their own rights. Therefore, it is okay to "punch Nazis".

Now, I'm hearing a lot of the opposite, that queers and feminists stand with Palestine because homophobic transmisogynists are human too.

It's hard to know for certain what happened. My hunch is that these are largely the same people, and that they've never been interested in meta level principles. But it's possible that these are totally different people who've replaced the leftist activists of a few years ago. That's certainly a more charitable explanation.

(I'm not posting this in the Israel/Gaza thread because it's not directly about that conflict.)

They have meta level principles, but those aren't it. You're reading the slogans that are meant to beat liberals into submission, not the inner thoughts of the movement. These people do not believe in rights as a concept.

Their philosophy is ultimately one of love of the weak and hatred of the strong, they are slave moralists above most things and if Hebrew and Palestinian were swapped in perceived relative power they would likely have different allegiances.

Do note that the hierarchy of power seems to have been dogmatically set and isn't mutable. If the oppressed become the oppressors they don't switch sides, it's "justice".

You're reading the slogans that are meant to beat liberals into submission, not the inner thoughts of the movement.

I often wonder whether neurotypicals can read minds, since they so often as though they can.

I see your point, though. And I think you may be right, but I'd like to be charitable.

I'm not quite mind reading here, so much as actually reading.

They plainly say the slogans are bullshit for libs in their own writings. Go read the CRT authors, they literally explain how they're trying to trick liberals into bringing about a real revolution instead of extinguishing it.

They will deny it in interviews (there's this hilarious bit where Crenshaw is asked point blank if she's a Marxist as a softball and has to give a non answer which puzzles the interviewer) but they are pretty open about this in their esoteric literature.

I don't know who Crenshaw is. I only know who Ibram Kendi and Robin DiAngelo are. Tell me more about this Crenshaw.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kimberl%C3%A9_Crenshaw

She coined the term intersectionality, influenced the equality clause of the South African constitution and is one of the major founders of CRT with Derrick Bell and Richard Delgado.

I recommend reading Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement which gives a good overview of the movement and its authors.

To give a candid reading of their ideas: Liberals tricked American blacks into false liberation through the idea of colorblindness and individualism, true liberation can only come from race consciousness, Common Law and private property are inherently incompatible with black liberation and their existence is a structural inequality that requires no less than a new constitutional order that places social justice above such principles.

I often wonder whether neurotypicals can read minds, since they so often as though they can.

Your post reminds me of captchas where the user is presented a single picture, divided into squares, and asked to identify all squares with a bicycle (or whatever) in them. Sometimes there are perhaps a few pixels that are from the bicycle on the edge of one of the squares. Does that count or not? What if the pixel in the square is only partly colored by the bicycle, and the other half of its color comes from background? What about reflections? I used to get a bit stressed trying to answer correctly based on my understanding of what "correct" was. That is wrong. You are not being asked to identify all squares with a bicycle in them. You're being asked to reproduce how an average person would respond to this task, given the prompt "identify all squares with a bicycle in them". An average person doesn't think about reflections, or subpixels, or any of that. And so I am no longer stressed about captchas.

It's not reading minds exactly, but it is a combination of "not overthinking" and "enough shared culture so that they all understand those critical, unstated assumptions".

Ah. Sadly, not only do I not share normie cultural assumptions, I don't even understand the assumptions of the terminally online culture I've grown up in.

Your formulation makes it sound like it is intended as an attack, but as a (hopefully not too non-central) leftist, I'm fairly happy to stand by "[love the weak and] hate the strong" - more the latter than the former - as a tenet. Right-wingers who celebrate strength, in my general experience and certainly on here, are very quick to conflate strength and excellence (in the sense of being good at something that the speaker values terminally, hopefully not circularly including strength qua strength); but as I see it, the evolutionary telos of strength is the telos of evolution itself - that is, survival, domination and reproduction - and though strength makes it easier to attain excellence, it only does so reluctantly as a side effect when excellence is the least-resistance path to attain said domination. This, in turn, is actually more often the case when we do not grant strength the compound interest of celebrating it for itself, but instead denigrate it to force it to camouflage as something else.

I think many right-wingers, at least here, actually understand the difference between strength and excellence quite well; at least I do not see them, looking out to the sea as the SJ juggernaut rises, going "Who is like unto the beast? Who is able to make war with him?" with sparkly eyes. What draws me to oppose the SJ movement is its strength, and to the extent any conservatives are drawn to support it on that basis, they become the "liberals who are the real authoritarians" that are only spoken about in hushed tones, whether you fear the modus ponens or the modus tollens.

Maybe this is a total failure of reading comprehension on my part, but passages such as

the evolutionary telos of strength is the telos of evolution itself - that is, survival, domination and reproduction - and though strength makes it easier to attain excellence, it only does so reluctantly as a side effect when excellence is the least-resistance path to attain said domination. This, in turn, is actually more often the case when we do not grant strength the compound interest of celebrating it for itself, but instead denigrate it to force it to camouflage as something else

read as complete word salad to me. I genuinely have no idea what point you’re trying to make, or why strength is supposed to be a bad thing in this construction. Are you saying you hate strength because it’s instrumentally useful to rhetorically deploy expressions of hate toward strength, because strong people have to strive harder to achieve excellence if we don’t just let them use their strength to take the shortcut to excellence? That’s my read of what you’re saying if I squint, but honestly I’m not confident that I’m interpreting anything of value in your post.

This is how I interpreted it:

  • Strength makes it easier to attain excellence.
  • But strength does not particularly care about excellence. Strength only produces excellence as a side effect under certain conditions.
  • If strength is widely denigrated, then the only way for strength to make itself look good is to be excellent.
  • Therefore, we ought to denigrate strength, to force it to be excellent.

That’s the thing that I find interesting (the fact that hierarchies can’t change). Why? Is it that they hated the strong for so long that even when they aren’t strong the hate remains?

Because it's not about weak vs. strong. It's about signalling.

Poor people can't afford to have slave morality. They need to fight for their rights. Rich woke people are thriving and can afford to send expensive signals such as "white people are evil", "defund the police", and "raise taxes".

It's worth pointing out that these people are overwhelmingly more likely to send their own children to private school and live in a safe neighborhood.

Hate for the strong and love for the weak is just another layer of the onion; it's not a true meta-principle either.

Part of me thinks it isn’t really hate for the strong and love for the weak but hate for the competent and love for the dysfunctional.

It's hate for the weakness and dysfunction within themselves that leads to the hate for the strength and competence they see in others. Also the fear of being weak and dysfunctional themselves and not knowing enough about themselves to know their own strength or weakness. People who have pushed themselves to see themselves fully aren't as easily led astray into these modes of thinking.

Competent are competitors, the dysfunctional are clients ?

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