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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 2, 2024

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Right, this is where it once again becomes clear that Huxley utterly failed to write an actually dystopian world, and had to resort to the cheap tactic of making things gratuitously and unnecessarily ugly to make sure readers understand that the Brave New World is supposed to be bad, actually.

You have it backwards, he was writing his utopia and had to cover it up with the thinnest veneer of criticism, so people don't show up at his door with torches and pitchforks.

I love you man, but you're never beating the closeted leftist allegations

At this point I no longer care whether people think I’m right-wing enough. As this recent post of mine probably makes clear, I’m getting increasing disillusioned with a number of trends that I see congealing on what passes for the “intellectual Right” these days, and I’m searching for a sphere that’s far more akin to the early-20th-century “Progressive” intellectual movements that inspired works like Brave New World. Thinkers who had a profound optimism about humanity and technology, instead of the dour, overly-cautious naysaying of the Christian conservative right - a movement I’ve explicitly distanced myself from many times. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that I’m a techno-optimist who wants to live in a hyper-modern mega-city on Mars surrounded by effete Hapa urbanite aesthetes, because I’ve said that openly more than once.

Authleft and authright are always going to have more in common with each other in certain ways than with many small-l liberal ideologies.