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PaperclipPerfector  26d ago (text post)   26035 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 22, 2024

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It's strange to be hated by the far-left for being rightist, and hated by the far-right for being leftist.

It's less strange if you consider that far-left and far-right are not polar opposites, but instead something approximating Stalinists and Trotskyites: members of a coherent ideological tribe, sharing basic values in common, driven to mutual hatred by surface details.

I'd tend to agree with this, yes. It's been cited far too many times before, but the old woke versus racist skit still rings true. In some cases the overlap is even stronger.

I recently found myself reading Yasmin Nair on Palestine, and was struck by this line:

Liberal Zionists are, I believe, taken aback by constant reminders that their pallid views are now exposed as insufficient for these times, as the world literally marches past them, losing patience with their weak discourse about concepts like “human rights” and “freedom of expression.”

I'm sure I don't even need to say what it resembles. The portrayal of liberalism as weak and self-defeating, the obsession with a putative Jewish conspiracy controlling the nation, the call for violent revolution - ultimately it reminds me of many of the Motte's own far-right posters. Even on the psychological level, when we find themes like the validation of anger, praise of strength and aggression, the sense of the whole culture as a kind of malicious conspiracy against one, the felt sense of solidarity with an almost-wholly-imagined public, even an online culture that's saturated with memes, affected irony, and deliberate overstatement to either signal in-group loyalty or trigger propriety-obsessed centrists...

The mirror is there. The far-left and far-right share basic values, even if they're sitting in different camps.

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