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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 25, 2024

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At the time, I wasn’t particularly right-aligned, so this wasn’t really an ingroup-outgroup thing, but an articulation of a growing frustration I had with people on the left, this absolute refusal to ever tell people to own up to their situations, take responsibility for where they are in life, and fix it. Everything, always, forever is just contingent on circumstances, completely outside of their control. While I could understand the arguments about this sort of thing when it comes to wealth accumulation or crime, to be so extreme as to not grant that people have agency over what they eat was the kind of thing that was just steadily pushing me away from having any inclination to share goals with the economic left.

A sort of nitpick: they don't think that all people are subject to circumstances out of their control. I think they only think the people who are oppressed are subject to this.

For the remaining people (who by process of elimination have to be the oppressors), the progressive frame generally seems to attribute too much control to them, believing that these elite oppressors are coordinating things to take advantage of and oppress others. These elite are specifically the ones who are setting the beauty standards that the oppressed have to live up to, while also simultaneously getting rich off of people's obesity by selling cheap junk food and then marking up the prices of plus-size clothing, and purposely keeping medical expenses high, just cause.

I find this sort of model very infuriating, because there's a lack of acknowledgement that we're all people, and we're all just trying to live our lives. And there really is no logical rubric for who is oppressed or not, other than inclusion in specific categories (most of which almost everyone has at least one of), and therefore, there really is no logic to who is in control of theirs and others lives and who isn't.

For the remaining people (who by process of elimination have to be the oppressors), the progressive frame generally seems attribute too much control to them, believing that these elite oppressors are coordinating things to take advantage of and oppress others. These elite are specifically the ones who are setting the beauty standards that the oppressed have to live up to, while also simultaneously getting rich of of people's obesity by selling cheap junk food and then marking up the prices of plus-size clothing, and purposely keeping medical expenses high, just cause.

I do agree there's a quite a lot of hypo-/hyper-agency attributed to oppressed/oppressor classes of people, respectively, in the modern "progressive" worldview, but I also don't think there's much of a belief in this kind of coordination. A belief in this kind of coordination could be challenged and even destroyed by the lack of evidence of such coordination, and even more by the evidence of the lack of such coordination. Rather, "white supremacy" and "patriarchy" and other similar concepts are said to imbue these oppressors with attitudes that lead them to behaving as if they coordinate to oppress others without any of the actual coordination. The oppressors aren't meeting in a smokey room somewhere to discuss how to keep the oppressed people down, they're merely inheriting a legacy of oppression which reproduces the past oppression despite every individual in every situation behaving in ways that are completely egalitarian and non-oppressive at the individual level.

Where the hyper-agency comes in is that people who have been labeled as oppressors according to this worldview are deemed as having the responsibility to sacrifice in order to tear down this oppressive structure. While the those labeled as oppressed have only the responsibility to speak their truth and to yell at their oppressors until they go along with tearing down the structure. And if this doesn't work, then the oppressed have no responsibility to adapt their tactics to convince the oppressors; it's always the oppressors' responsibility to be convinced, no matter how unconvincing or abusive the arguments that come their way.

I do agree there's a quite a lot of hypo-/hyper-agency attributed to oppressed/oppressor classes of people, respectively, in the modern "progressive" worldview, but I also don't think there's much of a belief in this kind of coordination.

Yes, that's true. My framing of it is not a steelman, for sure. Though I do know some people who certainly act like they believe in the coordination, believe that there's a cabal of white men who are actively trying to keep others down, and they take our their anger on white men as such. I think that some groundling progressives may intellectually know some things, but have a lot of anger about their perceived injustices, and they end up having a hard time separating their angry feelings from their logical thoughts on the subject.