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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   33194 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022

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When Jesse Singal was interviewed by Destiny, they talked for an hour and a half through these tiny viewports, while unrelated Elden Ring gameplay footage played on center stage throughout.

There's something fascinating about this video, which seems to be a pattern that I've noticed in the ultra-online US left, where for all the admonishment they'll do of their own side, whenever they speak about anyone right-wing, they speak as if they are so far beneath them that even when right-wingers agree with them they are wrong. I'm not really sure how to phrase it, but it's like... they treat even the centre-right, who in theory should agree with them on far more than the far-left, as axiomatically wrong? As if their perpetual wrongness is just an inherent part of the universe. Almost this meme. And they end up doing the rhetorical equivalent of contortionist backflips to agree with them while pretending to disagree with them.

It's just a very strange attitude to have if you're actively trying to discuss flaws within your own side. Shouldn't you at least give credence to the possibility that those on the other side of the aisle might be right, even if not specifically so in this instance? Seeing a discussion that acknowledges uncertainty in their own views, while simultaneously absolute certainty on others, is weird.

Edit: The highlight here is when they address that conservatives calling out insane views on Twitter, which initially they attributed to being niche nobodies, but now acknowledge as actually becoming mainstream views. Then they just... Blitz past it without acknowledging that they were wrong, and those filthy rightoids were right. Or the Covington and Rittenhouse stuff - shouldn't conservatives get credit for calling it right?

Because the radical left operates on pure Conflict Theory.

Why they should concede that the enemy does something right, if this does not help the inevitable march of progress?

The only times someone should concede something is when it helps the cause. Saying that the right is sometimes right does not help the left.

Because the radical left operates on pure Conflict Theory.

People like Destiny and Jesse Singal style themselves as "reasonable moderates", not radicals. There's a case to be made they still operate on pure Conflict Theory, but at least on the surface there is a dissonance.

Because their object-level positions put the lie to a lot of the wilder and more radical theories of the left fringe, the only way JS, Destiny, et. al. can avoid being pattern matched to bad-nasty conservatives (who, in fairness, do make the same object-level arguments sometimes) is to otherwise performatively and aggressively shit on the right as much as possible.

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