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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 27, 2023

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The Illegitimacy of Power

In the beginning, the world was just, populated by true equals. Injustice was born when a Will first imposed itself upon another. How? Power. Is it possible to learn this “Power”? Not from the Good. Might makes wrong. Might as well submit, and take your righteous place in the great chain of...

The Interlocking Wills

With Power, the original Will comes down from above, and as it passes through inert Wills, is transmitted losslessly to the bottom . An ukrainian supports war on his government’s orders, itself a vassal of the EU, itself a vassal of the US, itself controlled by the CIA, the telephone company, boomers, elites, jews, rich cishet whites, billionaires, english royalty, the NWO, or you-shall-name-and-blame-it. Whoever He is, we are all NPCs in the Prime Mover’s single-player game. His shadowy Will reigns supreme. Fear not and rejoice, for it means we are...

The Bloodstained Innocents

We have no agency, pure victims even as we victimize. Our crimes are His crimes. Passing them down the chain, and guilt up the chain, we are a perfect conduit of power. Can’t victim-blame the helpless oppressed. As absolute power corrupts Him absolutely, utter lack of it frees us from corruption. Free to dance and sing and reach for...

The Clouds Above

All our ideas are at best irrelevant, at worst another manifestation of His Will. As we are powerless, it appears he manipulates us through media and everything else for the hell of it. Or an epiphenomenom, the illusory superstructure rising from the base like a cloud of smoke.

edit: I do not believe any of this.

  • -16

It doesn't matter that free will doesn't exist, you have to act as if it does anyway.

Alright, no one is getting it, my bad, failure to communicate, I’m adding an edit. I suspect people agree too much with the parody, so the underlying criticism creates an uncanny valley or something.

I figured it was parody when you said in the beginning the world was just because everyone was equal, but I thought you were looking for responses in the same pithy quasi-religious style. What kind of responses were you hoping for?

I expected alt-righters to find the flaws in the reductio ad absurdum and explain how their ideology is totally different from similar woke theories. More progressive posters, if they still exist, to do the opposite. And guys like igi and me to argue and laugh at the spat.

But I think I once again underestimated how widespread those wokish-postmodern ideas have become on here. They don’t feel the need to defend them anymore, they just downvote and move on (ITT company excluded). I think they really do believe a version of this caricature.

Alternatively, you posted a lazy, low-effort caricature of what you think others believe, in direct violation of several of the sidebar rules, and people here object to that sort of behavior.

I thought it was neat, and zeroed in on a deep disagreement between the factions, but the Popular Will evidently disagrees. Am I not allowed to present my interpretation of where their ideas lead to? I thought it was identifiable as a criticism, but even if it wasn't, I quickly corrected the misunderstanding.

I don’t know why you bother responding to me if you’re trying to get me banned for insufficiently docile contradiction of rightism like so many before me.

I thought it was neat, and zeroed in on a deep disagreement between the factions, but the Popular Will evidently disagrees.

Can you name someone who is willing to say that you have accurately described their own thinking? If not, you haven't zeroed in on a disagreement between the factions, you've generated a strawman.

I don’t know why you bother responding to me if you’re trying to get me banned for insufficiently docile contradiction of rightism like so many before me.

I'm not trying to get you banned. I'm not a mod, and I have not reported you to the actual mods. I'm pointing out that you are engaging in behavior that will get you banned by the mods if you keep it up. I'm doing this because I want our conversations to be able to continue, and if you get banned that won't happen.

Docility has nothing to do with it. You can rain hellfire on people here, and there is no restriction on who you do it to, provided you do it the right way. One of the reasons my replies to you contain so many question marks is because I don't believe I understand your position well enough to explain it to you in my own language, and have you agree that the explanation is accurate. That's the gold standard this community runs on, and you often don't appear to even be trying to meet it.

If I say "progressives hate freedom and want more dead black people", I will get modded, because that is an inflammatory claim made without evidence. If I say "progressive ideology constantly finds itself in conflict with our essential freedom, here's why and here's some examples to prove the point, and progressive policies claim to protect black people but actually get a lot of them killed, as proved by these events and those statistics", I will not get modded, even though the two statements are pretty similar in their conclusions. It's not what you say, it's how you say it.

Speak of The Law, and it will appear. I don’t think this is even close to rule-breaking.

If I left out the ‘interlocking wills’ part and presented it strictly as a standard attack on the woke ('them' instead of including the reader in the criticism with 'we' , made the bloodstained innocents the oppressed bipoc minorities, and hypoagency an exclusively feminist/female concept), you wouldn’t be lecturing me on mottiquette, and I’d be upvoted.

Can you name someone who is willing to say that you have accurately described their own thinking?

Tough standard, don't you think? The woke don't like to be called woke, it's called 'basic decency'.

The standard response to a strawman would be to deny that people hold the view, not agree that people (soldiers and bakers) have no agency, that orders should be followed , ‘this is how the world tends to work’, and ‘evil people are actually running the thing’.

The only ‘strawman’ objection to my characterization was “Just following orders is not accepted as an excuse” , and that was heavily criticized.