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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 23, 2024

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I think this is the first time I’ve seen someone accuse Hoff of postmodernism. Or of being wishy-washy, for that matter.

FWIW the comment started as a reply to someone else but still...

There seems to be this perception amonst rationalists that the "based" option is by definition the most aggressively retarded and anti-social one and that is what I am trying to push back against as futile as it may be.

I mean this is the same guy who believes that John Wilkes Booth was a progressive, so I think he might be suffering from a serious case of whatever Hlynka suffered from, which renders the sufferer unable to recognize distinctions between the various alternatives to American-style Christian conservatism.

I mean this is the same guy who believes that John Wilkes Booth was a progressive

No, I called him a "democrat" though to be fair those terms are becoming increasingly interchangeable.

And then in this comment you explicitly said that you were suggesting that he was also a left-winger. I don’t know how much more clear you could have been in this conversation.

Again, i called him a leftist and a democrat. You're drawing your own associations

[I] called him a leftist and a [D]emocrat

In 1865, the Democrats were the right-wing party.

What do you think is the difference between a leftist and a progressive?

I think the thing that makes a progressive "progressive" is an axiomatic belief in "Progress". Ie a belief that current year is special and need not be beholden to the rules and realities of prior years.

I think that while not all leftists are progressive, almost all progressives are leftists. There are conversations and compromises that a sincere conservative can have with a sincere leftist that cant be had with a sincere progressive and that is the benefit to drawing the distinction.

Once upon a time there was a progressive faction in both the Republican and Democratic parties just as there was an explicitly Christian/Social conservative faction in both parties but as the Democrats became more explicitly progressive the realities of a two-party system encouraged the Republicans to become more explicitly conservative to pick up newly alienated conservative democrats.

And what do you think any of that has to do with John Wilkes Booth?

Very little.

I called Booth a "Democrat" which he was, and a "leftist" which is admittedly more of a stretch but him being a theater person from a family of theater people coupled with the "Sic semper tyrannis" shtick is surely a gesture in that direction.

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