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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 20, 2024

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I think "left" and "right" are net-harmful concepts in that whatever minor useful explanatory value they have is more than counterweighed by the enormous confusion and thought-termination that they cause in political discussions. I have never seen a clear definition of either "left" or "right" that people in general can even vaguely agree on.

My politics depends on what mood I am in. I have a certain mood in which I am purely selfish in my politics and care only about whatever will bring me personally the most power. One advantage of this view of things is that unlike all political ideologies I know of, it is internally consistent.

However, I am not a sociopath and so there is another side of me in which I do favor certain politics for non-selfish reasons. In this other mood, I am a classical liberal who is an extreme liberal (in the pro-freedom sense, not the woke sense) when it comes to social issues like sexuality (I do not care in the least bit what people do in bed as long as it is consensual), a moderate liberal when it comes to economics (I do not think pure free markets are the optimal system, but I do think that regulated free markets are the best one anyone has come up with so far), and a libertarian when it comes to free speech.

I oppose the woke, the social conservatives, the alt-rightists, and the moderate political mainstream. Given that people who agree with my politics do not dominate American politics (since the four groups I mentioned in the previous sentence together make up the majority of politically-interested Americans), my political strategy is to play off other political groups against each other so that they expend their energies in futile fighting but without any single group ever gaining a dominant position over the others.

Wokism to me seems like a combination of ignorance about reality about various things like basic economics and HBD and willful refusal to engage with the reality of those things, plus I dislike wokism's censorious anti-meritocraticism and wannabe-authoritarianism. Social conservatism just seems bizarre, primitive, and distasteful to me, a modern relic of times when small groups of embattled villagers had to forge oppressive social structures and rely on traditions and religious nonsense in order to maintain stability in the midst of possible famines and foreign invasions. I view the alt-right as mostly made up of either whiny people with large victim complexes whose politics is mainly driven by sexual frustration, or white nationalists who would start fighting each other and denouncing each other as not white enough if they ever managed to establish a white ethnostate - and in any case, their anti-meritocratic and authoritarian views make them distasteful to me for the same reason as why I dislike wokism. And I view the moderate political mainstream as too contaminated by lies, corruption, censoriousness, "polite" taboos, and a desire for imperial world-spanning big government (no matter what it costs) to consider them allies.