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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   4097 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 9, 2022

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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This post on the Objectivism sub is a fantastic journey through how the Successor Ideology grabs people up, uses them like a drug cartel uses addicts, and wrecks their present and future. It’s not angrily culture-war, but it is pure and stunning culture war.

Wait, now that I’ve actually clicked through...this is pure and stunning boo outgroup. There’s not even a pretense of decency, just “leftism bad,” backed up by caricatures and hand-wringing.

Suppose you are a Chinese transgender girl coming to US for grad studies.

...

They want to abolish all such power structures such as white supremacy, patriarchy, heteronormativity and capitalism.

Lets go queer, no masc, more femme, more yaaas!!

They bond you on your experiences of marginalization.

Also, it switches from second to third person for no reason and with no warning.

Then in those groups she is made to realize that there are so many people below her in the social circle with a black trans queer non binary person in a wheelchair at the most bottom.

And, in the Objectivist tradition, the author gets to decide how the opposing philosophy is hollow:

In the corner of her heart she always knew that nobody in those queer leftist circles ever tried to understand her, her struggles, her family loans for the education she undertook, her struggle to find a partner and still live a life and do things she wanted to do, the courses she was so good at that she actually enjoyed learning so much as a child, the potential she had as a person to achieve so much in the world, that she sacrificed while in these groups.

I don’t think it clears the bar for this sub, even through a link.

Good feedback. My focus when reading was on how the main character’s perspective shifted through the whole ordeal, and I found it riveting.

Seems possible, but it feels like “I invented a character that disagreed with me but then realized my opponents were stupid and I was right all along.” On the other hand, is using an example of a real person much different? Sure, it reins in the most ridiculous excesses, but there are so many people with such a variety of contradictory experiences in the world that maybe even cherry-picking a real person isn’t all that different from inventing a character out of whole cloth.

I invented a character that disagreed with me but then realized my opponents were stupid and I was right all along

Perhaps the author took the wrong lesson from Ayn Rand.

That's...not a question.

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