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PaperclipPerfector  20d ago (text post)   30973 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 2, 2024

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There can't be any reds and blues anymore.

But that’s saying that to destroy the enemy, we have to destroy ourselves.

It’s a bit like the school I mentioned once in the UK where, to avoid religious conflicts between children, everyone is forbidden from praying and all meals are vegetarian. I grew up Church of England. I resent having to give up my religious practices because newcomers are causing trouble. I don’t want to stop the Culture War, I want to win it, at least in my local area.

But I wouldn't even attempt to prosecute the people staffing the old decrepit system. Just let them go. Ignore them. Make their protests a meaningless antiquated impotent gesticulation that has no effect or meaning.

I agree with this otoh.

But that’s saying that to destroy the enemy, we have to destroy ourselves.

Yes. The Populares must cease to exist. Because they only exist in their opposition to the Optimates, and vice versa.

You must transition from the 2 story state to the 1 story state.

The Populares must cease to exist. Because they only exist in their opposition to the Optimates, and vice versa.

You deserve a better, longer reply but to be brief, I don’t think this is true. There are real, concrete issues at stake: who is allowed into the country, who is allowed to control cultural bottlenecks like Twitter or academia, the relative privileges and duties of men and women, whether we need to destroy our economy with unilateral green policies, and so on.

Tony Blair actually tried what you suggest: he began mass migration to, in the words of his advisor, “rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date”. But I consider myself a British nativist populist. If you attempt to render the Culture War irrelevant by flattening the differences between natives and newcomers, I lose by default. So I can’t back that. This is what I mean when I say I want victory not peace.

Another example would be transgenders vs TERFs. There are currently irreconcilable differences between the TERF wish for single sex spaces without men, and the trans wish to be invited into single sex spaces for women. You can render this conflict irrelevant by ceasing to consider women as meaningfully different from men, or considering trans ‘women’ as equivalent to women, but either is a loss for the TERF faction.

This is actually a good point, the essential claim is that neoliberalism attempted and failed to do this synthesis.

I'd argue it actually succeeded. And ruled the world for a long time. It's just that this has now fizzled out like any other regime.

But can you really say that the political lines of today are the same as the political lines of the cold war (which are the ones that neolibs synthesized).

Saying that you're a socialist or a capitalist today has indeed become essentially meaningless. Everyone lives in a managerial mixed economy where the line between public and private enterprise is so blurry it may as well not exist.

My call is for someone to do this with the issues of the day. However impossible it indeed seems right now.

But as Corvos raises, to go from a two-tier society to a one-tier society does not necessarily mean that Populares becomes Optimates. Rather, Optimates must become Populares. This is why people have railed against communism and similar ideologies in the past, because all they really accomplished was leveling everyone in certain societies down to a level that was objectively sub-par.

I think class is something that might be impossible to eradicate. Even the Soviet Union stratified into proletarians and intellectuals. Classes must always exist in any human civilization. The best you can do is to keep resentment from building up in the first place.

It's certainly impossible to eliminate classes and groups of interest, as a concept.

But making specific groups irrelevant happens all the time.

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