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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 16, 2024

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social justice is simply one of the many things Jesus would engage in during his time here on earth

The more I think about this the more I fundamentally disagree with this. Jesus accommodated every social standard of the day except for the ones he was explicitly sent to overturn [almost like trying to overturn others would be counterproductive in this regard]. You can see that by how He talks to women at fountains; but in other instances interacts and employs other women very, very differently (which then creates problems because you get selfish traditionalists going "haha Jesus patrolled thots lmao, I'll do the same thing to women I meet and claim it's correct because Jesus", and then 20 years later wonder why they can't get young families to come to their Church any more).

People want to appropriate Christianity to whatever philosophical ideology suits their worldview

Yes. If Christianity isn't social justice enough, then social justice can/will be added to Christianity to fill that void if the Church isn't prepared to deal with that. This is why young men went tradcath; they perceive (correctly) that Catholicism is the most alien to their sociopolitical adversaries and this is just a reaction to social [in]justice that targets them (for the same reasons that everyone on the losing side of oppression seems to become Christian for some reason, almost like that's by design; despite what Medieval mythology might have you believe Christianity really isn't meant for people who see themselves as winners, and those young men are eventually going to leave the Church because of that- it's exactly the same thing where [young women] SJWs are burning down their own churches in its name and forcing everyone out, as they simply want to win harder as is human nature to do).

and I just don't understand it

Moral superiority is one of the rungs of Maslow's Hierarchy (usually labelled as "security"). It's a thing most human beings have a psychological need for; evidenced by the emotion of disgust being universal to all cultures.

Some people are moral mutants and don't need that to function correctly (and can do things like answer "no" when the question of "aren't you just violating moral X for selfish reasons?" comes up, and be autistically/childishly 100% honest when doing so), but those mutants tend to fail to understand that moralfaggotry [I don't have a better word for this, sorry] is of vital importance for everyone else. This is part of the "struggle" that some philosophers and political thinkers talk about; I think one of them wrote a book with that title. It's a biological holdover, and you need some of it for social cohesion; most of what we see as traditional Christian morality is just playing to biological strengths anyway, so it makes having those morals both easy and as productive as you could make an emotion whose purpose is fundamentally destructive/self-preservatory.

[No, I haven't actually read the Screwtape Letters yet.]

Where you start to get problems is basically just the midwit meme where they're able to recognize "wait, all this moralfaggotry is fake!" (usually accompanied by "only God can judge me"/"in this moment, I am euphoric, ...enlightened by my own intelligence", which is why everyone else thinks [and 99% of the time, correctly] it's just people doing it for selfish reasons) but not capable of recognizing why it exists, or who it exists for, in the first place.

Jesus accommodated every social standard of the day except for the ones he was explicitly sent to overturn [almost like trying to overturn others would be counterproductive in this regard]. You can see that by how He talks to women at fountains;

Interesting. What do you think of the times that he heals people -- people he knows to be sinners, unclean, or undesirable -- or when he calls Matthew, a tax collector, someone who at the time people viewed as an "elite" to follow him?

his is why young men went tradcath; they perceive (correctly) that Catholicism is the most alien to their sociopolitical adversaries and this is just a reaction to social [in]justice that targets them

One of these days I'm going to effortpost on anthropology of actual rad trads(who are not a very online demographic, and may have local gender skews but on the whole don't have a particularly cartoonish split- and who also exist within an existing framework of conservative and self-consciously orthodox Catholic movements) and compare to DR twitterati tradcaths(who it seems are mostly trad Catholic in the sense that the church to which they do not go is in Latin). But for now- these are two different demographics(not to say no overlap) and I suspect the DR twitterati tradcaths aren't so much lashing out at liberalism as they are attracted to something(probably very obviously western, growing, and real world reactionaries with a white majority who are also very cool looking and sounding with all the incense and chanting and whatnot) and just not sold on having to change their lifestyle. I think a tell tale of these being largely different groups of people is that the twitterati tradcaths are so likely to be sedevacantists, which is a fringey position viewed by most actual irl rad trads as a collection of cults with serious skeletons in their closets led by madmen with possibly-invalid sacraments(IRL sedevacantists are not a very large number of people, and nor are Williamson's followers. Reactionary families attending SSPX or fully regular Latin masses will happily associate with each other, but shun sedevacantists/followers of Richard Williamson).