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