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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   25083 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 2025

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You go from

In the Judeo-Christian view, by contrast, Heaven takes only one side.

to

For Hitler -- as for a pagan, but not for Hebrews -- Heaven takes one side in every conflict.

This sounds contradictory - were the pagans and Hebrews meant to be the other way around in the latter?

More generally, if I read this as a book, I think certain parts of it would strike me as failure to maintain the professional detachment (or maybe just copy-editing?) I expect from them: the opening of Section 2 seems to jump back and forth between something like dry passive-voice academic writing ("This section compares the grand narrative...") and overly personal ("I believe...", "people like me into genocidal Nazis"), which is jarring and gives me the impression that you are trying to write in a voice that is not yours and you are not fully comfortable with. If I evaluate it as a mottepost, it feels like a manifesto smuggled in through the "review my book chapter" backdoor: the idea that the SJW and Nazi identity politics are the same is not new, and I'd want more thoroughness (Do you expect the wokes to start opening concentration camps soon as well, or is there an important way in which they are different? Do these commonalities you identify apply to other movements in history, and how did they fare?) and less gratuitous emotional appeal and polemic ("Poor baby.") from a repeat treatment here at this point.

This sounds contradictory - were the pagans and Hebrews meant to be the other way around in the latter?

Yes that was a typo. Thanks for pointing it out.

More generally, if I read this as a book, I think certain parts of it would strike me as failure to maintain the professional detachment

I think it's funny that you expect books to have a tone of "professional detachment". Plato didn't.

I think it's funny that you expect books to have a tone of "professional detachment". Plato didn't.

Quod licet Iovi non licet bovi?

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