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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   28414 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 11, 2024

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He insisted that all of his ideological opponents, whether they be Rationalists, woke progressives, fascists, or anything in between, were all really "the same" underneath, in spite of the continued insistence by all of those groups that they had deep fundamental disagreements with each other.

I just saw something on Tumblr that seems rather relevant to this. It started with an anon saying

Islam and Christianity are much closer than you think. They belive that a woman's role is motherhood and servitude and they oppose homosexuality and abortion.

Which, a little down the chain, leads to thathopeyetlives's reply

I continue to be alarmed and frustrated by the attitude of “this thing I hate and fear is totally defined by that specific aspect of it that I hate and fear and has no notable attributes other than those”.

I wonder how much this drove Hlynka's attitude, because, looking back, it seems like the sets 'what he hated about Rationalists,' 'what he hated about woke progressives,' 'what he hated about fascists,' et cetera, were significantly overlapping — lack of traditional religiosity, insufficient colorblindness, insufficient Hobbesianism, and (possibly most importantly) intellectualism. Hence, everything else about them becomes irrelevant, "the narcissism of small differences," "Stalinism vs. Trotskyism" minutiae.

I wonder how much this drove Hlynka's attitude, because, looking back, it seems like the sets 'what he hated about Rationalists,' 'what he hated about woke progressives,' 'what he hated about fascists,' et cetera, were significantly overlapping — lack of traditional religiosity, insufficient colorblindness, insufficient Hobbesianism, and (possibly most importantly) intellectualism.

Now suppose that, based on the evidence available, one comes to the conclusion that the list of hated things you've just provided, along with a number of others, appears to emerge from a fairly tightly clustered set of similar values and philosophical primitives. Suppose that there's a specific set of memes and ideas that can express themselves in a variety of negative ways, but share a basic commonality in how one gets to those negatives. The worldview leads to a typical set of strategies, which when adapted to local conditions result in a wide variety of specific behaviors, but with significant commonalities between them.

Categorizing human ideologies is not a trivial problem. Grouping together people who seem wildly disparate under a specific theory is not an unusual occurrence.

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