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PaperclipPerfector  23d ago (text post)   29178 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 26, 2024

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In their defense they are like the various right wing commenters here who refuse any compromise on guns, abortion, environmental law, etc. on the grounds that the left will just run rampant over them if they compromise and the only winning move is complete defiance and opposition to anything the enemy does. Even if each action is indefensible individually. I don't have a high opinion of either group.

In their defense they are like the various right wing commenters here who refuse any compromise...

Then just come out and say it.

"No gun control" and "Full ban on abortion" are both within the Overton Window, albeit as fringe positions. "No new development in Ontario" would be derided as batshit insane. If they're going to refuse any compromise, then they should at least have the balls to stand by their convictions.

State your arguments, gather support, and fight for your goals. Anything less than that has too many shades of conspiracy for my tastes.

That "the left will just run rampant over them if they compromise" is also obviously true with guns in a way it is not with the right for the environment. Containing the tiniest little compromise, the Bruen decision has resulted in it remaining illegal for me, a citizen of the State of New Jersey with no criminal record, to buy a gun anywhere in the United States or to carry one outside my home in New Jersey or anywhere in New York. Whereas the environmentalists not winning every battle on the environment has not resulted in lead back in gasoline or the Cuyahoga river catching fire again.

Obstinate Gun Owners is a thing, but I don't think they're analogous to environmentalists. Gun owners and its advocacy are working with much different incentives. Gun owners online can be annoying like environmentalists, but gun owners are mostly fine to stay out of the news. Most change is bad, most coverage is bad. Status quo is the best thing. They rarely receive friendly reporting when they organize, so they haven't learned to leverage media the same way as environmentalists. Generally, 2A advocacy groups fight in in the courts, or in some places on online forums (lol), but not in big displays of protest.

When gun owners do mass it's usually not so much a shock-and-awe lever, but a more traditional "we exist, there's lots of us, we will walk to the state capitol, clean up, and leave."

Generally, 2A advocacy groups fight in in the courts, or in some places on online forums (lol), but not in big displays of protest.

Sure, but fighting in court is what we've been talking about this whole thread, not protests. Environmentalists also do silly protests, but those aren't what we are talking about and I'm not making a 1 to 1 analogy or making this especially about the 2A.

It's good politics if you care about your goals. Centrist opinion doesn't matter in the long run. Only control of institutions does.

Centrists vote for the status quo. So all you have to do is be the status quo.

If you want something different out of politics, you have to be Lenin, not Talleyrand.

In the long run, I think Talleyrand spent more of his life getting what he wanted than Lenin did. And he saw a lot of change in his life, too. He just didn't think he could control it.

It feels like one of those intentionally bad metaphors. It's so bad I can't make heads or tails of it, but, also, to quote Bertrand Russell on Marx,

"His theoretical errors, however, would not have mattered so much but for the fact that, like Tertullian and Carlyle, his chief desire was to see his enemies punished, and he cared little what happened to his friends in the process."

I feel the same about all these people who look down on centrists and Talleyrand.

I don't look down on him. He was an incredibly competent and useful man, and without his involvement France may not even still exist.

But he is also not who you want to be if you have political goals. He went with the flow, only altering fate in small ways.

If you want to make a mark on history and change things you need to hire guys like him, but you can't be like him.

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