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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   20980 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 28, 2024

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It's interesting that Vance can see the parallels between pride parades and civil religion, but I wonder if he can see how christianity and wokeness fit in. Pride parades are positive rites - they celebrate the existence of LGBTs without demonizing straight people. Then wokeness came along, and its core thesis was original sin: you are born racist, sexist, and homophobic, and only through listening to marginalized voices, unpacking your racism, and de-toxifying your masculinity can you ever hope to be saved.

The comparison to the Christian concept of original sin falls apart immediately.

In Christian theology, everyone is born with original sin and everyone has the opportunity to atone for it through faith and receiving Grace. It's universal and - wait for it - egalitarian.

Wokeness has explicit power hierarchy from birth wherein some groups are sinless throughout life and others are without redemption. Furthermore, Christian original sin is about the origin point of man - we are all fallen. Wokeness is about different historical scorecards for inherited wrongness. Some groups (white males) have inherited such substantial debts that we can actually condemn them as a class (isn't that like, bad?). The Canadians are now finding ways to help people of all types find ways to not be the wrong types.

It's conceptually eugenic - if you're born "wrong" maybe we won't kill you (although if your self-sterilize that would be nice), but you will be confined to a life of non-personhood full of self-flagellation. But if I can "choose" to be something that is biologically impossible, it begs the question - why can't we all just choose to be one of the non-bad character classes?

Sometimes I do believe the double-weirdos when they say that middle aged divorced men transition just so they have some relevance to society today.

Ah, so they've speedrun Calvinism.

I knew I could count on a banger from @hydroacetylene.

In a word, yes. Wokeness has all of the hallmarks of fundamentalist revival movement. There's no coherent worldview or deeper investigated theology, it all ends at the level of "what we're fighting for is right because we're fighting so hard for it."

I would argue that the shift from the Pride flag to the Progress Pride flag more explicitly aligns it with the hard left and makes it a more exclusionary movement. It is now a flag that excludes only one group (straight white people). And that's the flag that you see flown from government buildings and put up in school classrooms.

The Pride flag says "we're gay!". The Progress Pride flag says "We represent everybody but straight whites!". So it is kind of a short hand for the left coalition.

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