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I was hoping we can get a convo about it going on here, as the rest of the internet is a bit of shitshow, and with our anti-woke bias it feels like this could be a topic that cuts right down the middle of the Motte.
I find what James is doing pretty frustrating because the concept of "woke right" feels quite coherent to me. To me, it would mean right-wing people viewing the world through the same oppressor-oppressed lens, deindivudialized to the point where any personal merits would be dismissed due to belonging to an oppressor class. I think there are people like that on the right, and they tend to spend their time putting forward theories about the Jews controlling the world. James seems to go a lot further than that, I can't find the relevant tweet, but from the firehose I saw in the last few days some of the relevant criteria were:
The problem I have here is that as far as I'm concerned these are not sufficient criteria to call the left woke. I've always said you can be socialist / communist / etc. and not be woke. Hell you could be a feminist / LGBTQ++ / black nationalist but without that distinct "uplift the voices of the oppressed over the voices of the oppressors / your opinion is invalid you cishetwhitemale" it just doesn't seem all that woke to me.
Now, if he wants to pick a fight with the illiberal right (and I think that's a better label for what he's going after) that's fair game, but the other frustrating thing is that in doing so the liberals seem to deploy cancel-culture-y tactics. For all the talk of how they are illiberal and want to limit free speech, all I see from the lib-brigade is ostracism, trying to generate a stink around people they don't like, and quarantining conversations. I could maybe understand it, if what they wanted to section off was holocaust denial or outright race-hatred, but if you're too afraid to debate a theocrat or a monarchist the very core of liberalism becomes a joke.
Carl, and a lot of 2019 liberals (myself included), had their break with liberalism so I don't know if this is completely fair.
Indeed, the median black nationalist is not woke in any way, but an antisemitic cult member who happens to be black.
Outright Holocaust denial is in fact kooky enough to be unwelcome by polite society, but white supremacy is just one kind of illiberalism. Where, exactly, do you want the line drawn in the name of ideological consistency? There’s plenty of people who would lump opposition to gay marriage in with white supremacy, would you?
The Right’s aggressive policing of its own kooks is in some ways quite admirable, but it’s also part of the reason it gets rolled so easily by the Left. When Holocaust denial eventually becomes popular on the radical left (it’s already starting to) I bet you won’t see Democratic politicians, breadtubers and CNN launching a crusade to eradicate it. They’ll just pretend it’s not a thing and gaslight anyone who says otherwise.
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I don't. Just trying to show some understanding for a classical liberal.
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Why are the first two things beyond the pale, but the second two aren’t?
There's no hard reason. Christian ethics are the water we swim in, so people don't bother to provide counterarguments for things that are clearly wrong in the Christian tradition.
Depends on what you mean by theocracy. Sharia-style religious law as a substitute for civil codes is something that is forced on Christianity occasionally(eg in the millet system), but it's not an endogenous tendency. On the other hand, technically England is a Christian theocracy based on its legitimating principles today.
I tend to take the view that true theocracy is something foreign to Christianity, because Christianity tends to nearly always, when it has a choice, put a lay ruler in command who has an understanding of the boundaries of religious influence in his kingdom(and historically it has been a kingdom, or at least some form of one-man rule). But at some level this is a category/definitional debate- was Ireland a theocracy in 1950? Spain?
I also see this term as well as "separation of church and state" as very confusing. After some deliberation looking into constitution of my country to me theocracy means that the power of government rests in religious institutions. As an example, if local archbishop or some religious council has power to unilaterally declare a new religious public holiday or enforce blasphemy laws, then it is theocracy.
However, this does not mean that people any society where religion has sway is automatically a theocracy. If local church preaches blasphemy laws and general public votes in religious leaders who establish such laws via structure like parliament then it is not a theocracy. To me it is sufficient to have differentiation between government and church structure, not that religious people cannot be part of government implementing their religious ideas.
Paradoxically this is often lost on many secular atheists, who deem anything not in line with their own secular ideology as theocracy. It is just a power move where they want to make secular atheism as reigning state religion preventing other ideas from establishing themselves.
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Well, yes, but otoh if Christ is King, that other guy can't be. Or at least that's how I've heard it explained by Christian anarchists.
In fact 'king' doesn't imply absolute authority; there can be a whole hierarchy of kings, high kings, and so on. "King" is cognate with 'kin' and means the patriarchal figure of a kin-group; a nation. An emperor is a different concept.
At no point in this post am I verging upon my own takes on the matter, just by the by.
Christ is King of Kings, afterall
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Keep in mind I said "could maybe understand" not "they're beyond the pale". Anyway when comes to holocaust denial, or historical revisionism in general, it can happen that the topic is complicated enough you end up losing ground even if you're on the right side of the issue. I don't think it's a good idea to declare the topic haram, but I can understand the temptation. As for race-hatred... well I don't know if you can have a productive conversation on the topic of "I hate your fucking guts", especially if the feeling of hatred are a response to how someone was born, rather than anything they did.
By contrast if you're declaring any competitor to your ideology as off-limits, you're basically showing that it can't stand scrutiny. It's particularly funny in the case liberalism who's claim to legitimacy rests strongly on the whole "marketplace of ideas" thing.
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Firstly thanks for remaining me to post it on the right thread, I posted it on an older thread and got no views lol
My understanding is a little rudimentary. Woke isn't like Marxism, it doesn't have a single point of authority defining it so I would assume that most just describe the far left bent with it. I want to discuss this too but getting a correct definition down that people agree with is the first thing one needs to do to.
Obsession with oppressed oppressor dynamic is a good rough definition but it seems to lack something.
The right has a lot of hateful losers, no doubt about that. James made a mistake in picking fights with well meaning smart people who understand his worldview better than him.
I discovered Moldbug that year thanks to the distributist on YouTube. People just want to uncover truth and have nice things. For a while 90s liberalism seemed amazing. The post sexual revolution US that has something for all is still seen as this nostalgic landmark but these are unstable positions. I agree with Yarvin on most issues and do look forward to a post liberal liberalism or discourse on it.
What do you think is a good definition of woke? Also because of the right getting some footing, punching right is now not seen as a good thing to do, Lindsay really made a mistake.
Marxism also doesn’t have “a single point of authority defining it.” It’s a whole corpus of thought, with hundreds of writers (maybe thousands) chiming in and adding their analysis and refinement of other writers’ ideas. It’s like how Christianity has long transcended sola scriptura and includes a massive world of commentary and schisms and church authorities and whatnot. “Woke”, to the extent that the word is anything other than a boo light, undoubtedly refers to a specific offshoot or sect of Marxism.
Sola Scriptura is actually extremely rare in Christianity; both Catholic and Orthodox Christians believe their church predates the codification and indeed writing of the scriptures and doctrine-heavy protestants in practice hold to definite-enough interpretations of scripture that tradition and church authority play a strong role(and have for a very long time; the Augsburg confession was literally written by Martin Luther). But almost all of these Christian branches have a single point of authority defining them, indeed rather notoriously so in the case of Catholicism.
The Protestants would also affirm that their church predates the codification and writing of the scriptures (at least of the new testament).
The Augsburg confession was written by Melanchthon. Edit: Luther did play a role in its drafting.
But this is pretty close to being true, at least, if you're construing sola scriptura as talking about use of other authorities in general, rather than whether there exist other final authorities accessible to the modern church.
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