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PaperclipPerfector  19d ago (text post)   35137 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 3, 2025

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The fact that TracingWoodgrains doesn't fully come over to the right because of this and doggedly is determined to stay in the principled center makes me completely unsympathetic. So as far as I'm concerned, they're stuck between the icky chuds like me who know it's a problem but have aesthetically unpleasant views and the other kind of people who stick their heads in the sand in the face of overwhelming evidence. People who will bald-facedly lie even when you bring the smoldering gun, the receipt, and a signed confession are bad people.

And despite all of this... they are more aligned with the latter kind of people then the former.

I will make a prediction now: TW will still be hacking at this ten years from now, doing their enlightened centrist gig, making no progress. Because the liberals they are trying to convince don't really exist: they are trying to persuade a species of extinct men who could be swayed by reason and good faith.

Did you forget he's literally a gay furry? He doesn't want to be on the team with people who discriminate against him(and I won't say that they're wrong, either). It's a perfectly understandable human impulse.

I have seen too many anthro german shepherds in suspicious outfits to say that he would not be in good company if he did make the change.

And what were YOU doing at the devil's sacrament?

The guy has an obvious personal preference for the welcoming and affurming faction. It is to his credit that he brought up the FAA thing at all rather than accept it as part of the cost (or worse, benefit) of his faction being in power.

So the only people in existence are righties like you who can handle the truth and thus arrive at "aesthetically unpleasant views," and everyone else who can't, or else is an evil liar?

Do you think there is any possibility whatsoever that you could be wrong about anything?

No. Obviously not.

Yes.

Despite this, or perhaps because of it: I feel that I have an infinitely easier and gladder task of convincing partisans of my ideological bent to come around to reason then TW does for theirs. Not everyone on my side is an honest truthteller. We have our share of witches and evil liars. But there's the kind of lies that make you feel the ick, and the kind of lies that make planes fall out of the sky. One is a more egregious imposition on reality than the other.

"I have no sympathy for people who are not fully on board with my team" is about the coldest take you can have in the culture war. I, for my part, hope Trace will still be at it in 10 years, showing that there is a way to survive without submitting to either of the two tyrannies of unreason.

It's not that I wasn't sympathetic before. I too, was on the left. But that was fifteen years ago. I feel at this point that everyone persuadable has already decamped and we are in the last stages of Schmittian hyperwar. I can't imagine sharing common ground with those on the left who call TW a fascist. They live in their own partisan hyperreality and attempting to convert them is like being a Christian missionary to the Sentinelese.

I'm sorry. There is no way to survive. You have to pick your lane, or you end up like James Damore. If I have to make a choice between the twitter racists and the race communists, I'm siding with the former over the latter every time. It's not a great choice. But it's better than refusing to acknowledge that one has to make a choice at all.

If I have to make a choice between the twitter racists and the race communists

Reading it put in this stark way makes me glad that I find both equally disgusting. And no, I do not have to make a choice between them. Why would I? We're not in a civil war, so far at least. I'm not going to die if I continue to despise both of these tribal groups. I get that if we were in a hot civil war, I'd probably have to either leave the country or pick one of the tribal groups, just to survive. But even if, in that situation, I picked one, I wouldn't really be picking it, I would just be pretending to in order to survive, and I would happily go over to the other side if it offered me better opportunities. Internally, I am pretty sure that I will never actually choose to support either of these tribal groups. And that's in a hot civil war situation! In today's situation, I don't even have to pretend to pick one of those two groups. I can, and do, freely say that both utterly disgust me.

Well said. I might borrow 'the tyrannies of unreason' - that's an excellent phrase.

It's not a question of "being fully on board with my team;" it's the prioritization of what is fundamentally an aesthetic choice ("these chuds are low-status and have low-status views; I don't want to think of myself as being like them") over purported principal ("people shouldn't impose racial gatekeeping mechanisms on hiring for life-and-death public safety positions").

Surely you must understand that if there are non-aesthetic reasons for siding with the Republicans, the same things can also be non-aesthetic reasons for someone to side against the Republicans - you just have to disagree with the Republican stance on those propositions. Yes, Trace presumably happens to agree with the Republicans on the specific topic of DEI in the FAA, but last I checked they were not a single-issue "no DEI in the FAA" party.

Yes, of course. But if a topic engages someone enough that they spend non-trivial portions of their life discussing, investigating, and inveighing against certain approaches to it, one would expect to be surprised if the party openly and aggressively not on their side got their vote because of other ancillary issues which they seemed to not care as much about. It betrays a certain tension or inconsistency.

I'd be surprised if Trace was actually putting as much weight in his political value function on DEI at the FAA as you seem to make him out to be. Sometimes people just like making deep dives in some random direction, whether it is intrinsically interesting to them, they just enjoy the act of researching and arguing for its own sake, or they think they can make an impact or gain clout by spending effort on it. For starters, as people are quick to point out, he is a gay furry; it seems quite likely that those things take up a bigger share of his life than whatever research went into the FAA article, and along that dimension clearly Democrats are more of an ally of his than Republicans.

If you actually think that siding with Democrats on sexual tolerance and with Republicans on DEI is in itself a "tension or inconsistency", that's just being an agent of toxoplasma.

I...am not so certain that "siding with Democrats on sexual tolerance" is a full descriptor of Trace because I don't think he's all that into the sort of obligatory pride stuff and trans stuff that the Dems are doubling down on. But point taken.

they are trying to persuade a species of extinct men who could be swayed by reason and good faith.

They're not extinct, they just don't have loyalty to a particular party as their terminal value. Even in Europe, I'm nearly-literally watching women who were welcoming refugees 10 years ago, now dancing to the tune of "Ausländer Raus", and conspiracy-posting about woke NGO's sponsored by the EU (roughly analogous to the USAID scandal uncovered by Trump). Trace wants to arrest this process of defection by promising to reform the Democratic party from within, the problem he has is that:

  • People have eyes, and
  • With every defection he's losing an ally in the party, not only dropping the credibility of his promise, but lowering the actual chances of his success.

Its kind of the age-old dilemma. Speaking truth to power doesn't really work.

You have to acquire power, THEN speak truth.

But the process of acquiring power requires you to believe or promulgate so many falsehoods you will probably forget the truths you wanted to spread anyway.

If speaking truth, plainly, effected change we wouldn't even be in the mess needing saving.

If you have power, why would you need truth for any reason other than power?

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