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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 16, 2024

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Sovereign is he who defines the exception, or so it is said.

I know you are trying to quote Moldbug here, but that's neither the exact quote nor is it a particularly deep insight. The "sovereign" gets to write your dictionary, so He actually defines everything.

There is no distinction between cultural and economic marxism in the end because it all leads to redistribution of wealth from oppressor to oppressed.

What upstart movement can not be glossed as saying that some group is not getting what it deserves and some other group is getting more than it deserves? If this is the definition of Marxism, then the Nazis, the Basque and Catalan independence movement, the Kievan Rus throwing off the Mongol yoke and the American Revolution are all Marxist. Why don't you call it Cultural Patriotism, or Cultural ETAism? This analysis is not predictive of anything either, because it is not a feature of "cultural marxist" SJWs that who they want redistribute wealth from and to has anything to do with who is oppressing whom. No amount of oppression heaped on their political opponents would make them think "huh, I recall that we were Marxists and must pursue the redistribution of wealth from oppressor to oppressed" and proceed to expropriate their allies to pay their enemies.

You are falling for a psy-op, a plausible smokescreen of academic confusion.

What exactly is the psy-op I am supposedly falling for? I don't think I'm particularly confused about what SJWs want, or what Marxists want, or what anti-Marxists want, and I'm strongly against the first, mildly against the second, and strongly against the third. If your rhetorical trick made me support the third because I wanted to oppose the first, you would be the one psyopping me. You might be trying to frame things as if there were a contradiction in my position, but your argument only works if you consider "oppressed" and "oppressor" to be pointers that must not be resolved or refined, which as I argued above not even the SJWs do. I want some redistribution from rich to poor, and no redistribution between any ethnic groups, and this is independent of who oppresses whom: even if the rich were publicly flagellated and forced to eat dirt for two hours every day while the homeless get to spit on them, I would still want them to pay more taxes.

I really don't want to get into definitional arguments, because they don't get anywhere.

I am using their terminology. You can argue it as much as you want that it is vague and nebulous, but it doesn't matter, because it describes a real subset of people that do exist that push policy and active goals. I don't have to go back to the Kievan Rus to explain it. What am I, Putin?

Don't dive into generalities. I am addressing a very specific movement (the woke, the intersectionalists, the crt) who can be described as cultural marxists. I am intentionally limiting the scope of the discussion here because there is where an argument can actually be had.

But if you want to continue down this path, please, provide your definitions of these things.

Who are "they"? The vast majority of people you seek to describe as "Cultural Marxists" do not use that terminology for themselves. There apparently existed some group of people who used that term once upon a time, and maybe you can still find one or another stray adherent, but it's not clear why it would even still be popular given that the typical SJW is hustling for a seat at the table of the megacorps and passive-income fatcats.

The definitions are not that hard.

  • Marxists are adherents of Marx's theories and visions for society and economics, who believe that the principal division in society is between people who own property that generates value and those who have to sell their labour to provide for themselves, and it is inevitable that the latter will rise up and bring about a new form of society where the former mode of existence is impossible and the latter retain control over the property complement that is needed to convert their labour into value.

  • "Cultural Marxists" are not really a thing anymore; to the extent to which people identified with this, this can be compared to the tendency of metal music fans to create new "types of metal" whenever they stumble upon a non-metal music genre that they like, so folk music as enjoyed by the metal community is "folk metal", J-pop enjoyed by Metal fans is "kawaii metal" and so on. "Cultural Marxism" is a label that emerges when people whose identity revolves around being "Marxist" discover their interest in culture warring, and have to lay claim to still being part of their old community.

  • The people currently controlling culture in the US and its vassals can be called SJWs, Wokeists or the Awokened or whatever you prefer. I found that in my life calling them "the Social Justice crowd" is specific and inoffensive enough that it gets the point across without eliciting backlash.

Someone who doesn't identify as a Marxist can't be a Cultural Marxist, any more than a folk music fan who is not into metal music or culture can be a folk metal fan. What you are doing amounts to relabelling all folk music fans as folk metallers, because you hate both metal and folk music and during the most recent resurgence of folk music there happened to be a group of metalheads who got into it.