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Notes -
What does the light at the end of the tunnel look like?
Look, every now and then I stop watching my footfalls and get pensive. And one of the things I've gotten pensive about the past few days is this: the Western culture war is not going to last forever, which means it's going to end. And when it does, how will we look back on this mad time?
Two of the answers are obvious:
But what I can't really put together is the third option, the narrative that will be told if SJ is indeed just a passing phase, either because Red/Grey defeated it or because it wins and then turns out to be unsustainable. Frankly, the Blue Tribe's been writing all the history books since before I was born, so it's hard for me to even picture it. And that troubles me; it's the scenario I think is most likely, and the one I'm to at least some extent trying to bring about, so if I don't have a good idea of what it even looks like that's kind of an HCF. "It is not enough to say that you do not like the way things are. You must say how you will change them, and to what."
So, how will the people in that scenario think of this time? What story will they tell?
(To the SJers here: feel free to answer, if you think you understand your opposition, or feel free to correct me if you think my #2 is uncharitable.)
The good thing is that in my experience blue tribers greatly prefer denial & misdirection over blatant lying/fabrication when the facts don't go their way (yes I know the story of the harvard honesty prof, no I don't think this is a major problem currently). This means that it's often trivially easy to read the truth between the lines if you care to look. There's plenty of papers that put some left-friendly conclusion into the title, intro and discussion but if you look even just at the tables in the paper itself with a critical eye, you'll come to a very different conclusion than them. If they're very dedicated, it may only become obvious after looking at the raw data bc they tailored the tables well, but you can usually still find it.
That said, I consider myself in no way red tribe, and I also consider the "grey tribe", which is the closest to my own position, merely a subgroup of the blues and not a proper third faction.
So I think there is some room for non-woke centrists and even red tribers to generate a history from the evidence left behind. Probably something along the lines of a well-meaning movement that caused a lot of damage by being unwilling to deal with tough choices and instead engaging in increasing levels of make-believe and blaming others every time their plans fail.
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