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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 23, 2024

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For a decade, people on the left have called me a fascist because I believe people can be better, learn more, accomplish anything. To me, that path is straight forward: Learn the systems which govern the world and make good decisions. If you want to read, learn how the alphabet works, if you want to maintain industrial society, learn economics, physics and chemistry, then keep supply lines up. And yet, people who believe in progress believe phonics is bad, that children should spontaneously understand how to read...

There are some leftist progressives: https://youtube.com/watch?v=0i4ZETgfNuM or the 17th century levers, but it tends towards a negative correlation, sadly.

really driven home to me the idea that what counts as left or right is mostly about vibes and historical coalitions

Even less than that, really. Even people who agree entirely with each other and work for the same political program tend to be there by inertia, understanding different things etc. (unless they are so thoroughly indoctrinated to stop thinking.)

Conserve and progress are meaningless without starting and (intended) end positions, details about methodologies and purpose. You can desire to progress entropy, or progress matter's longevity etc. etc. What aspects do the conservatives want to progress, which do they ignore? Which do the "liberals" want to ignore and which seek they to progress? What if I want to progress the nuclear family into a multigenerational thing, is that reactionary, progressive or?

There are some leftist progressives: https://youtube.com/watch?v=0i4ZETgfNuM

I don't know how sincere this is. I guess it being made in 1990 makes it possibly sincere. But I can't help but point to it's spiritual follow-up.

I just meant the Communist space narrative; I like the song, but assumed it was quite modern.

Well I do think that fascists are right-progressives in the same way that Guy Standing is a left-reactionary. They were all about building a better and more efficient society. They thought their system would triumph by virtue of transcending the squabbling that held democracies back. The Nazi vision is definitely one of Progress, even if it is an alien and twisted sort of Progress. The Japanese thought they were ushering in a new and better age for Asia (or at least that's what their propaganda said).

There were elements of reaction, like the Italian dream of a neo-Roman empire or the German dusting off of old folk religions, but I think that was mostly in service of creating a newly invigorated national spirit.

The fact that left-Progressives usually try to do things that will actively made the world worse is somewhat beside the point in my view. They think their policies will make the world better, and they want to do so by innovating in how society is arranged. Maybe it wasn't obvious in my original post, but I intended there to be a note of irony in the way I was capitalizing Progress.