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PaperclipPerfector  16d ago (text post)   32754 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 24, 2025

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I find it pretty distasteful to give up anthropology to positive feedback loops, and let our history become a mockery when it is within one's power to just raze it.

The fundamental problem the Red Tribe/American conservatism faces is a culture of proud, resentful ignorance. They can't or won't produce knowledge and they distrust anyone who does. They don't want to become librarians or museum curators or anthropologists. The best they can manage is the occasional court historian or renegade economist, chosen more for partisan loyalty than academic achievement and quite likely to be a defector. The effect is this bizarre arrangement where rather than produce conservative thought, they are demanding liberals think conservative thoughts for them.

Occasionally rightists will plead weakness to rationalize their lack of intellectual productivity, but this is nonsense. They have had plenty of money, plenty of political power, and a broad base of support. Unless we accept the Trace-Hanania thesis that they literally just lack human capital, we're left with the conclusion that the right-wing withdrawal from intellectual spaces is a sort of distributed choice. Razing institutions because you can't be bothered to make your case is just barbarism.

They don't want to become librarians or museum curators or anthropologists.

I did want to become a librarian. It wasn't open to me due to lack of money and other reasons. Today, I think if I did train as a librarian (and depending what country you are in), there might or might not be the push to be progressive, but I think it's very likely that the education will be on the liberal side, and to get your qualification you will have to (1) genuinely agree and be converted to The Right Side Of History (2) pretend to agree to pass and hide your real opinions (3) openly disagree and be failed by your professors.

(1) means changing to the Blue Tribe side so you are no longer counted as Red Tribe (so people like you can then go on to sneer about the ignorant Reds because look, all the educated people are Blues in thought and behaviour). (2) means always have to be 'just following orders' or else your career is over, which again hobbles the chance for expression of conservative values. And (3) of course means you never get to be a librarian or museum curator or anthropologist, which again enables the sneers about "see how dumb and arrogantly ignorant the Reds are?"

means changing to the Blue Tribe side so you are no longer counted as Red Tribe (so people like you can then go on to sneer about the ignorant Reds because look, all the educated people are Blues in thought and behaviour).

It's a lot harder to switch than this though. If you grew up rurally with a family with a pick up truck watching NASCAR then you are almost certainly Red Tribe and will remain so even if you change political views. Becoming Blue Tribe would mean rewriting not just your political views (there are after all Red Tribe Democrats and Blue Tribe Republicans) but also your preferences for food and entertainment and dress. And not just at the surface level (that would just be "passing") but at the level where you actually preferred football ("soccer") to NASCAR and a hybrid compact to a truck and avocado toast to a steak and so on and so forth.

Red Tribe and Blue Tribe are cultural groups that overlap heavily with political groups but the Tribal markers remain, absent significant effort to remove them.

I've tried to get Violet Tribe (as the equivalent to Grey Tribe) adopted for that exact thing - grew up Red, had or adopted Blue tastes.

In fact I do have Blue Tribe preferences in (some) food and dress and (much more) entertainment. But I don't like the very progressive "we must have Representation which means Black Romans in Britain" style attitudes, so I guess I remain Red in some things (though since I'm not American, NASCAR doesn't apply to me. But plenty of liberals in my own country like to sneer at the bogtrotters, so the attitudes remain recognisable and relatable).

Is Vance, for example, Red or Blue? He seems more Violet to me, but of course the Blues very much want him to be a redneck (literally). Same with Ross Douthat and some others. That is what is meant to be the alchemy of higher education - it takes the base material of the Red young adult and refines it in the crucible so that the end product is flawlessly Blue and the dross of the old attitudes have been purged away. And if you come out the other end Blue to the core, then of course you no longer count as a Red, and hence "Reds don't care about education or learning" is propagated.

But it was my rural and working class family which always went "education is no burden". Yes, often it was because of the same push to go to college because "college educated earn more" and not for disinterested love of learning, but in general they are ambitious for their children to do better than they did, and not have to engage in hard manual labour. But if you can be a successful small businessman without going to college, or at least not for a degree in Queer Gender Glaciers, then is that "not interested in education"?

I think there are a lot of Blues also not interested in education qua education, but more "now we can set out to decolonise geology" and such agendas.

Right, one of the issues with keeping the Red Tribe going is they are (or were) supporters of their kids going to college. I've mentioned before how miners and steel workers in small town America don't necessarily want their kids to do those jobs because they know how dangerous and back breaking they can be. Now I think they're more interested in the perceived benefits of getting a degree (better, easier, less body destroying jobs) but they are to sn extent the architect of their own destruction, by buying into that part of the American dream. If you send your kids off to college in bigger towns and cities, some of them will get assimilated, and stay and some will choose to stay for those better jobs. So even before neoliberalism crushed the steel and mining sectors, they were on a slow steady road to decline.

Yes, unfortunately Scott’s original anthropological definition has gotten filed off over the years and it’s just used as a shorthand for Republican and Democrat. If we’re using the term correctly, almost everyone on this board is Blue Tribe, even the most right wing among us.

Yeah, and it is a useful distinction, even if its not a perfect set of descriptors. Which is why I often try and oush back towards Scott's formulation. Even if that is a losing battle.

And there's nothing wrong with being a Blue Tribe conservative, but in general that conservatism is not exactky like Red Tribe conservatism so we're missing a pretty important part of America's "voice".

I have it on very good authority that I'm conservative, and I would probably be a physicist or an archivist in a world where that were really on offer. I used to think I was progressive. For me, university and after was a process of learning that wasn't the case. So here we are.

It looks a little late to go back from where I'm standing—but who knows? You changed my mind once. Maybe you'll manage it twice in one life.

In my experience studying physics at a German university, there was little in the way of ideological purity required.

Generally, STEM seems a useful niche for contrarians. While subjects such as art, literature, history, law, medicine, sociology, psychology, economics all include things on which the predominant ideology has an opinion about -- you can not really use colonialism to explain the behavior of bacteria, or blank-slatism to design a more efficient motor, or Marxism to explain semiconductors, or social darwinism to prove a theorem, or religion to predict the movements of planets. Sure, the Nazis tried to establish a non-Jewish German physics, but that attempt did not even last as long as their "thousand-year" empire did. The woke ideology can mostly be seen on a meta level, by asserting that institutional sexism is the only possible explanation to a skewed gender ratio. This certainly can be a problem if you apply for a professorship, but not on the levels below that.

Of course, German universities are likely a bit different from US ones. Basically, what was required of us was passing exams and taking a few lab courses. Granted, visiting the lectures and studying with others helped, but I did not see a lot in the way of mobbing -- people who did not like you generally just left you alone. Few people had the time for an outrage campaign in any case. In general, nobody cared much what you did outside university.

From my understanding, it is common for students to live on the campus in the US, which makes the university much more central in the life of the students and (presumably) enforces greater conformity.

This certainly can be a problem if you apply for a professorship, but not on the levels below that.

Unfortunately academia in the US is pretty precarious below tenure level. And despite nominally opposing that state of affairs, the "progressive" crowd have always been happy to settle intraparty scores permanently.

It was safer to go somewhere entirely else than to be always almost (not quite) a friend. That "ally" just means "enemy" with extra steps.

Unless we accept the Trace-Hanania thesis that they literally just lack human capital

I don't like this post of course, but I have to upvote you for it because as far as turns of phrase that advance your argument go, this one deserves a chef's kiss. Sincerely it's beautifully executed.

Ignorant of what, exactly? The intellectual fashions and constantly evolving terminology of the left? The revisionism of the entire school of leftist history? The activism of the professorial-activist class?

99% of the intellectual output of the social sciences is essentially Blue Tribe navel-gazing. (The pHD dissertation on the colonialism bias of the smell of Indians is beyond parody.) Civilized societies throw their scholars to the fire every so often: Qin Shi Huang was arguably too merciful.

The pHD dissertation on the colonialism bias of the smell of Indians is beyond parody

Got a link? I need to read this

This just seems incorrect given it's the most hard sciences that trend most conservative to my knowledge. It seems the other way around, where progressives prize subjects more where nothing ever needs to be proven and it's all just theories.

it's the most hard sciences that trend most conservative to my knowledge.

Looking at donations amongst professors, if there's an effect, it's very small.

That only works if the right-wing barbarian agrees that there is any value left in those institutions. I’m not sure modern anthropology departments or modern hollywood clear that bar.

Empty museums are depressing. Close most of them, sell all the old coins, keep the mona lisa. If the people then clamor for more museums, just buy the stuff back. And if these so-called ‘public goods’ are only enjoyed by the rich, , like opera, let them pay. The rich and cultured get a perverse kick out of having the poor pay for the very class markers used to exclude them.

Opera! Now this is in my wheelhouse. Your aside is ill informed.

If you’re an American, public/government funding for opera is truly negligible. There is significant state funding for opera in Europe. But Verdi is to Italy what Havel is to the Czech Republic what Yeats is to Ireland, and what rather tragically Wagner was to the Reich, so there’s more of a cultural cause for continued funding. Gershwin, Glass and Adams, for all their merits, aren’t exactly important to our nation-state the way Thomas Paine was.

Opera was a popular art form heading into the middle of the 20th Century, and experienced a commercial boom in America coming out of WW2. But by the 1960s there were warnings that ticket revenues wouldn’t cover expenses. Now, here in the States, it’s about 50/50 on tickets versus philanthropy, with a sliver of NEA money and the like tossed in.

The poor are not paying for opera in America. The truly rich are picking up half the tab for the middle and upper-middle class. And this is after the culling and consolidation of operas and symphonies in America that started in the 1990s, and was twice accelerated by the housing crisis and pandemic lockdowns.

Every opera company in America, sans one, uses the more economical stagione system, staging one, discrete production at a time. Only the Met in New York has the financial capital to operate as a repertory company, with concurrent productions, whereas this is far more common in the state-funded companies of Europe. That NYC is America’s financial capitol is not coincidence.

Now, if I may gripe as a Conservative, because the art form is so dependent on philanthropy — contrasted against that the Magic Flute was a blasphemous production sung in German as opposed to the proper Italian and staged in a common theater, and the Golden Age and Dark Age of opera both refer to its commercial heyday in Italy where there was so much demand that mounds of forgotten schlock was produced — in America today it’s MFA holders who control commissions and grants, and they award these to fellow MFA holders who know how to write for MFA holders, and the art form is now trapped in an artistic ghetto. A beautiful melody, or asks of virtuosity are deemed common and vulgar by MFA holders, and thus they further confine opera to a commercial decline.

I’ve made converts of friends and acquaintances with recordings of Pavarotti‘s Nessun Dorma, and YouTube clips of Donizetti‘s Cheti, Cheti/Aspetta duet. Anything current? Sadly, no.

the Magic Flute was a blasphemous production sung in German as opposed to the proper Italian

Mozart genuinely was a genius, as he made sung German tolerable to listen to 😁 For more converting people, Soave sia il vento, no matter what production design shenanigans, is ethereally beautiful.

And Dante wrote The Divine Comedy in the common Italian of his time, not in proper Latin. "High culture" often only becomes "high" after gently marinating for a couple of centuries.

Terry Pratchett in his novel Maskerade made the point that if you want to make money out of people standing around on stage singing, you write musicals. Opera is a machine for turning money into beautiful music and nothing else. That's why it will always need funding, either public, private, or a mix of both. Unhappily as with all high art, the 'you need to be Educated to Appreciate it' has taken over so, as you say, public taste diverges from what the authorities deem correct, and it falls even more out of favour and needs even more propping up by donations instead of generating revenue (I have tried, and failed, to listen to an entire opera by Harrison Birtwistle).

EDIT: An online acquaintance introduced me to this 17th century piece which sounds surprisingly modern (I can see what Birtwistle is trying to do by comparison but this is more listenable) - the Cold Song from "King Arthur".

…no matter what production design shenanigans…

Way back, there was an Onion headline to the effect of, “Avant-Garde Director Shocks Audiences With In-Period Staging.”

The recontextualization can occasionally be done well. I enjoyed the 2022 Salzburg Festival’s production of the Magic Flute as bedtime story come to life.

the Magic Flute was a blasphemous production sung in German as opposed to the proper Italian and staged in a common theater

I would love to read your review of Death in Venice.

I’m laying it on a bit thick there and I hope the above came across; it is a good thing that one of the most-enduring and well-loved operas being performed today occurred because… Mozart needed money, and outside of any commission, wrote an opera with the aim of it being a popular, commercial success. As soon as my daughter is old enough and possesses the patience to sit through it, I can’t wait to take her to see the Met’s annual abridged, English-language production it puts on every December that is designed to be child-friendly.

I read Death in Venice as an undergrad, and I wasn’t a great student, so I’m certain I procrastinated, rushed through it, and now don’t have much recall of it — broad strokes of industriousness versus leisure, the love drive versus the death drive, how our base desires conflict with good manners?

Maybe I'm a philistine but I found the music boring and my takeaway was that Britton was doing a poor retelling of Nabokov.

Opera at its best involves a dramatic heightening of human emotion. Small children often sing to themselves when playing to achieve just this. It is intrinsically in us; part of our souls. If a particular work doesn’t move you in this manner, feel no shame in casting it aside.

There is Britten I love — The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra - — and Britten I like — The Turn of the Screw — but if Death in Venice doesn’t resonate in your heart, then go with your heart.

I’ve made converts of friends and acquaintances with recordings of Pavarotti‘s Nessun Dorma, and YouTube clips of Donizetti‘s Cheti, Cheti/Aspetta duet.

Your post intrigues me, and I'd be interested in watching/listening to any specific links you'd care to share. (High) Opera has never been a particular interest of mine, but I do enjoy musical theatre and the occasional Gilbert and Sullivan, so it seems like something I might like with the right introduction.

Seconded. Please make a top-level post about this, @UnopenedEnvilope!

I'll start with the two mentioned.

A quick setup for what is going on in Nessun Dorma. There is a beautiful princess (Turandot) and the king, her father, does not have a male heir; whoever marries her gets a gorgeous wife and a kingdom. The princess does not want to get married, and especially not to a foreigner because of some past trauma in her family line. So, whomever asks for her hand has to successfully answer a series of riddles. If they succeed: gorgeous wife and a kingdom. If they fail: decapitation. A young unknown prince is travelling, incognito, through this kingdom. He sees the decapitated heads of failed suitors perched atop spikes on the outside of the city walls. But then he sees the princess, and falls head over heels. He successfully answers the riddles, and the princess is distraught at the prospect of actually getting married. So moved by love, he gives the princess a riddle. If she can guess his name by sunrise, he gets decapitated, but if not, she has to willingly(!) marry him. The princess charges all her servants with discovering the prince's name before sunrise, on penalty of death for failing to do so.

In Nessun Dorma (No One Sleeps), we hear both the prince's aria, giving his internal monologue, and in the background the chorus of the princess' servants. Some info on the composition of operas. Almost all begin with a libretto, a kind of poem, to which the composer then sets the music. The supermajority of operas have a different librettist and composer. The composer has great if not total license as to which lines and words within the libretto to emphasize and to repeat. The prince wills the night stars to set. And, when Puccini composed this aria, it was his choice to repeat the last word, thrice, to shape it -- victory... victory... victory!

This is an excellent live recording of Pavarotti singing Nessun Dorma and you can use the closed caption option in YouTube to get English subtitles in case you aren't fluent in Italian. I think sports are a helpful comparison when discussing opera singers. There are different kinds of forwards in soccer, quarterbacks in football, etc. And, there are different kinds of basses, baritones, tenors, altos and sopranos. Roles are written for certain subtypes. Pavarotti is a great fit for this particular part because he is both more than a credible lyric and spinto tenor; he's capable of the warmth needed for most of the aria and as a huge-chested man, the power to drive its finale.

Setup for the duet I mentioned: Don Pasquale is a comic opera and if you like a bit of Gilbert and Sullivan this should feel familiar and fun. Pasquale, himself, is the buffoon of the opera, and he's taken a young wife far too pretty for him, and after forbidding his nephew, who is his ward, to marry her even though the latter pair are in love. He is (rightly) suspicious she's still in love with his nephew, and he enlists Dr. Malatesta to help him try and catch the two out. Unbeknownst to Pasquale, Malatesta is on the side of the young lovers, and the small plot he proposes is a setup within a larger plot. Donizetti wrote a duet between Pasquale and Malatesta where both switch between addressing each other and making asides to the audience as the tempo keeps accelerating, ending with both talking over and past one another at breakneck speed.

This is a favorite comic opera of mine but not as famous as many so the recordings on YouTube are a bit limited in terms of quality. Here is one that I quite like, by Hampson and Pisaroni who have great comedic chemistry with one another.

There's a lot appealing about opera if you geek out about it. There's history in it: Verdi's Nabucco, to avoid censorship, smuggled a call for a unified Italian nation state within a biblical story, and Va Pensiero was the unification movement's unofficial anthem. Wagner drew inspiration from the same Nordic myths that Tolkien did, and his works are so dense with symbolism he's been claimed by all different types. Obviously the Reich's interest was horrid, and Wagner was certainly antisemitic, but as an example, prior to WW2, he was a darling of the Marxists (clearly Gotterdammerung, the Twilight of the Gods, was about the death of nobility and feudalism, only to be replaced by capitalism, and Das Rheingold, a symbol of capital itself that allows the industrialist Alberich to oppress the proletariat, Nibelungen).

And there's also at the highest levels stunning virtuosity. Mozart wrote his Queen of the Night Aria for his sister-in-law who was a virtuosic soprano. When testing the upper limits of a singer's vocal rage, taking small steps up to the highest pitch makes hitting those highest notes much, much easier. So, Mozart arpeggiates the approach when he writes this aria, making it brutally difficult to sing. If you see it somewhere other than at one of the major opera houses, there is serious tension in the audience, as everyone waits to see if the soprano singing it will hit her high F in tune. On the other end of things, here is a professional opera singer turned vocal coach breaking down how a truly elite soprano deals with signing the role.

I’ve made converts of friends and acquaintances with recordings of Pavarotti‘s Nessun Dorma, and YouTube clips of Donizetti‘s Cheti, Cheti/Aspetta duet. Anything current? Sadly, no.

Funny enough I became a fan of opera for almost precisely this reason. I credit Tom Cruise and "Rogue Nation" for introducing me to Turandot and went to see it performed live at the MET a few years back.

My mother took us to the theater, orchestra and opera as children. The use of Beethoven’s Ninth in Die Hard sparked my love of these arts (and gave me an appreciation for what she was in process of trying to impart). The four-minute highlight edit from the end credits, specifically.

The fundamental problem the Red Tribe/American conservatism faces is a culture of proud, resentful ignorance.

This is fundamentally untrue I think and close to boo outgroup (Edit - I think you explain below what you mean somewhat better). Red Tribers have a great deal of use for knowledge. It's just usually directly applicable knowledge. Half my family are redneck equivalents and they prize knowledge. The type of practical knowledge that lets them run a successful farm or build houses. My uncle has forgotten more about small hold farming than I ever knew. My grandfather could eke a living out of poor soil and hilly terrain with a knowledge of local weather and rainfall patterns that rivaled anything the Met Office can put out. They possess a great deal of knowledge in the Red Tribe. I lived in a small Red town in the US for a number of years and this is just not a good description of Red Tribe folk even at the most general level.

It's true they don't generally want to become an anthropologist or what have you, but academia is only a subset of knowledge generation. An important one! But not the only one by far.

What is true I think is that almost definitionally Red Tribers in general don't want to sit in offices and decide on funding for hypothetical research, which means it is going to be up to the small number of conservative Blue Tribers to do that. It also explains why so often Republican politicians are more left then their base. Because they are usually Blue Tribers who are conservative, again because almost definitionally Red Tribers don't want to live in a big city and sit in meetings and give speeches for a living. But Blue Tribe conservatives are not identical to Red Tribe conservatives, we can see the spat with Musk and Vivek about H-1B visas as an example.

I don't think the Red Tribe could ever be 50% of academia there simply not enough of them who would want to do that. The whole point of different tribes is they do have different values and preferences. Just like farmers or lumberjacks or oil workers are never going to be 50% Blue Tribe.

For the Red Tribe to pull its weight in academia or politics you have to convince salt of the earth people like my uncle to go and sit in meetings and give speeches or go to school for 4 years so he can get a degree, and then teach people or research at a university, when that is the last thing he wants to do. He would rather be out in his fields.

But don't think that means he is ignorant. He knows exactly how to skin and butcher a carcass, he knows what his fields need and can diagnose a multitude of livestock illnesses. He also knows exactly what the price of feed and crops need to be before he breaks even. All without finishing school at all.

I think Red's do undervalue the kind of academic knowledge that can be transformative, but equally I think Blue's do undervalue practical day to day useful knowledge. We need both in order for societies to advance.

Red Tribers have a great deal of use for knowledge. It's just usually directly applicable knowledge.

This is my point. I want to reiterate: I am not saying that Red Tribers are stupid or have no skills. I am saying they have a general disdain for knowledge production. Which, bluntly, the rest of your comment and my own personal experience does not dispute. Knowledge is either inherited or received from trusted community members, and updated only slowly. It's not just that they don't want to personally do academic research, they don't trust the entire process because it's not part of their epistemological paradigm.

I lived in a small Red town in the US for a number of years

So did I. I've lived in Red America in one form or another (it's important to note that "red tribe" != rural) for most of my life. I went to private evangelical schools until I left for college (to my original point, my high school's college counselor advised against going to any but a select list of private Evangelical colleges). Most of my extended family is from the rural Midwest. My perspective on this is personal, not sociological.

(Something I find deeply frustrating about this forum is that it is taken as a given that criticism of the Red Tribe or Red Tribe-adjacent things are coming from a distance)

I think you explained better here and in other posts, what you meant, but I think using resentful and ignorant was probably a poor choice, because it's not exactly what you seem to be saying.

I think we are largely on the same page aside from that. Given the ideological skew of this place, Making sure you are signaling that you do indeed know what you are talking about is going to be useful, for example when talking about atheism, I now make a point to say that I was in fact raised in a Christian household and was Christian until I became an atheist, which is helpful in that it means we can skip the "Do you really know what Christianity is" and similar tangents. So probably making sure to highlight your direct experience with the Red Tribe (as I did also) up front will be helpful here.

The frustration I think everyone's feeling with this discussion is that while what you're saying is true in a certain way and for certain sample of people, it applies to almost no one here. A bad faith poster in this forum may cherrypick sources and cite only the studies already favorable the their viewpoint, but they're still citing and searching for and reading [abstracts of] studies - which puts them miles ahead of a median person, who gets their entire memeplex wholesale from a medium of their choice.

Now I'll give you, this leaves "regular" red tribers in a worse position - Fox et al just has a worse quality of journalism than NYT or WaPo, or whatever you thing the "default" blue tv station is. Or so I've heard, I'm not an American and I've seen <15m of Fox News material in my life (I try to never watch it, just so I can angle-shoot someone who would accuse me of getting my viewpoints from there).

But yeah, if I may be a bit self-indulgent, you arrive at a space where people are in the top ~5-2% of striving to be up to date on the news and research, and proclaim that a core tenet of their affiliates is "proud, resentful ignorance". People are taking it personally, even if they probably shouldn't.

A perfect microcosm of different faction's approach to knowledge would be 2020. In the beginning, you get grays and "high reds" freaking out about approaching epidemic, while the mainstream and progs are mocking them for being weird techbros, telling people to celebrate freely in the streets, and "justtheflu"ing it. Then the epidemic arrives, and suddenly everyone's got an opinion. The reds get locked in the "low" mode, so they inherit the "just the flu, bro" position and insist on folk medicine, evidence be damned. This is the source of the supposed March-April switch of the positions - there was hardly a switch, it's mainly different demographics. The blues find themselves in a more truth-aligned position, until they too err catastrophically for ideological reasons (telling people to go out and protest in June).

tl;dr As i/o on twitter put it, the worst of the right are retarded, the worst of the left are mentally ill.

The frustration I think everyone's feeling with this discussion is that while what you're saying is true in a certain way and for certain sample of people, it applies to almost no one here.

Because most people here are not actually Red Tribe conservatives. We're mostly Blue Tribers and Blue Tribe dissidents (or Grey Tribe). Hlynka's conservatism was closer to the Red Tribe people I know in person than to most of the conservatives we have here I think, (particularly in being hostile to HBD), but he was pretty unusual compared to the median Motte poster.

Conservatives I know in person are not hostile per se to HBD, but definitely would see 'blacks less intelligent' as a significantly overrated factor compared to bad culture, and may not want to focus on it to begin with. For lots of them it comes off as pointlessly offensive even if true, like calling someone 'fatso' instead of 'heavyset'.

Besides, blacks can marry their babymamas, work hard, etc, but they can't very well become smarter.

And therein lies their downfall. Because once you eliminate every other factor and blacks are still less likely, you're caught between the claims of double-secret discrimination and HBD. Make HBD anathema, and yep, it's The Man up to his old tricks again.

You haven't eliminated every other factor. Blacks do have a bad culture. Go listen to pop country vs hip hop.

Now if you convinced blacks overnight to adopt a much better culture wholesale the gap wouldn't disappear but I don't think most red tribers are firmly committed to the equality of races in natural giftedness. It just seems pointless, from a red tribe perspective, to focus on the unfixable parts of problems when there's just so so much that can be fixed.

So you're suggesting that a culture exemplified by a man who talked about a Hobbes-shaped hole in discourse is somehow so anti-intellectual that Skibboleth is right?

Hmm, No, as I don't think he was a perfect exemplar, just the closest we have here in a specifically online unusual space. Just because most Blues don't want to farm, doesn't mean none of them do, they are still Blues even if unusual.

None of my neighbors have ever mentioned Hobbes for example. But their fundamental ideas seem to match his reasonably well even if he backs his up with more of a philosophical bent.

You don't have to know anything about Hobbes to have ideas that match. Whether it's because you worked it out yourself or the culture you were brought up in taught you something similar without ever talking about Enlightenment philosophy specifically. I don't know that many Blues outside of academia would know much about Mill either.

My grandfather didn't know Hobbes from Paine from Locke but his thoughts on human nature and people being selfish and violent if not restrained mesh pretty well.

Philosophers do not have exclusivity on making observations about people. They just write about it more. As opposed to my grandfather who kept a shotgun under his bed and wrote very little that wasn't accounting for his farm.

He'd probably have thought Hobbes should have got a real job, and that he was making basic observations sound fancier than they were. But he would roughly have agreed about the fundamental nature of men.

Having said that, he wasn't against learning. He asked my father who was a maths teacher to help him with his books and towards the end of his life, investments because he said an educated man doesn't have to break his back. He left money to help pay for my kids to go to university. He valued useful knowledge.

I don't know if I would call it anti-intellectual as much as pro-practical. And of course generalizing elides that people are varied even between cultures or tribes.

Does that make more sense?

Knowledge is either inherited or received from trusted community members, and updated only slowly. It's not just that they don't want to personally do academic research, they don't trust the entire process because it's not part of their epistemological paradigm.

That is true, but that is because academia has abandoned the scientific method. And we know this is the case because the more a discipline retains the scientific method, the more conservative it is. And the further away from the scientific method it got, the more conservatives stayed away.

Conservatives like to be certain before they make declarations about reality because they don't want to break society, whereas progressives prefer moving fast and fixing anything they break. Both perspectives have merit imo, but academia disagrees, so of course conservatives don't want to be a part of it. Say it was possible, would you want to build a lifelong career around being a primary antagonist on the motte? Would you expect your friends and family to?

I agree with monzer, nobody is necessarily to blame for it, it's perverse incentives and cognitive biases on both sides. Having control over academia however, does mean progressives are more responsible for the current dismal state of things imo, because even before you start conspiracy theorising, more access to academia means they have fewer excuses for not recognising the biases and incentives.

Red tribers mostly respect discoveries in eg hard mathematics, chemistry, archeology, etc. But generally not philosophical theorizing, or gender studies, or what have you. So yes it's writing off entire fields but it's because they think the answers are so obvious/already known(there are two genders, you can figure out which one you are by dropping your pants in front of a mirror) that the field in question consists of making yourself stupid to avoid them.

History. Red tribe loves studying history.

And entering some of these fields feels like the equivalent of 'Feel like you disagree with the tenets of Islam? Become a Koranic scholar and argue with Muftis all day' in which the consensus and shared assumptions that fields like Gender Research are built on essentially originate from a series of value judgements than underpin all contemplation.

I have spent my entire adult life, and even before that, with the knowledge that if I ever spoke my true political/social views I would instantly torpedo my entire career and social standing forever. I have been living under a censorious regime in a country that supposedly enshrines freedom of speech as one of its highest virtues for My. Entire. Life. The only place where I can even come close to honestly speaking about how I view the world is in anonymous and pseudoanonymous forums like this one, and even then I take pains not to get too real with y'all because it's really not that difficult to dox someone with a long post history and it just takes one obsessive.

Why are there no rightists in the academy? Could it be because they were systematically deplatformed and depersoned and dethroned on a generational, decades long project to completely seize control of elite production forever? No, it's because righties are dumdums, we're all dumdums.

And now you have the audacity to complain when the institutions you hollowed out are being kicked over, all the support columns contributed from the right having been forcibly removed? Boo hoo.

If you may allow me a moment of cathartic ranting emerging from decades of repression; razing these institutions is a moral imperative. I want them to do it more. I voted for it. I hope it gets worse for you. I hope your degrees not only become worthless, but millstones to drown you. I hope you have to hide your former affiliations on your social media and resumes, like I have had to do with my views for my entire life. I hope you know every ounce of the fear and anxiety your regime has smothered on me like an inescapable burial shroud, for, again, my entire fucking life. I hope they are so thorough with their dismantling of your institutions that in 50 years your cathedrals that are on the tips of every tongue now are only vaguely recalled in retrospect. A quaint historical artifact, like Standard Oil. Only then can something somewhat resembling what was lost be built from the ashes.

You stomped on us for 20+ fucking years, did you never think what would happen when we became the shoe? You deserve everything bad that is happening to you; you will deserve the much worse things that are still to come.

Sorry for the heat, but it's probably more honest than what you usually get. If you read between the lines, you should have seen this seething rage boiling over years ago. I am quite certain that many, many people feel the same - they just don't say it, yet; the habit of censoring one's own emotions, thoughts, and opinions for safety being deeply ingrained. The tighter you seal it, the more dangerous the pressure cooker becomes.

I suppose I'm just tempermentally different in some fundamental way from many people here, but despite going through the same Great Awokening experiences as most college-educated individuals with heterodox views, I never felt this crushing sense of repression that others seem to. It has never been more than a minor annoyance to me that I had to attend diversity trainings, disinterestedly listen to whatever my progressive peers have decided to rant about that day, or that I would be mildly discriminated against by college admissions and hiring committees on account of my race(s), and one day in the past few months things seamlessly flipped over and I started being mildly annoyed instead that federal research grants were being canceled on account of including banned words. So it goes.

Perhaps I just never had any naive expectations of fairness, or that things like freedom of speech counted for much in practice, so the fact that I couldn't talk about race or sex differences in public didn't strike me as some sort of betrayal that needed to be avenged. Perhaps I don't have any real principles, and so, like the average person, I have no qualms about passively accepting whatever the ruling ideology happens to be and getting along as best I can without taking a stand for Truth and Justice. Perhaps I spent enough time in the third world that Americans complaining about basically anything at all strikes me as laughable. Whatever the reason, I notice that I am confused by this in the same way I am by the broader "mental health crisis" that has double digit percentages of my generation popping SSRI's like they're candy.

Spinelessness is not a virtue.

I don't see progressive ideology as an existential threat and so have not lifted a hand to fight it. Is not the man who does perceive it as such but does nothing except fume about it in an anonymous forum more spineless than me?

I must confess that my persona on themotte up to this point has been a lie. I'm actually a progressive democrat. Here's what I actually, truly believe as a progressive democrat. That we have gone much too far with our cultural revolution, that it's not enough we stop pushing for further progressive transformation but that we must also roll back the success we've had. I think that conservatives have a point that our institutions are buckling from the weight of dogma. I also find conservative women beautiful and the men to be strong and handsome. Reminder, I am a progressive.

Sorry for the heat

A rant about how much you hate your enemies and can't wait to see them get the rope is always going to be hard keep within the rules of discourse here, but all your "you" statements put this well over the line. The first part of your post was okay, but when you tell another poster that you want to see them, personally, suffer, that is too much heat.

My apologies, the you is rhetorical and broad. "You (the left)." I'm not wishing personal, specific harm on Skibboleth.

One of the divergences of right and left, however, is their belief in retribution, punishment, and suffering as morally justified and necessary in and of themselves. It has been my general observation that the left has completely abandoned the idea that retribution and punishment can be just and morally necessary for their own sake, not merely as incentives or correctives.

If there was a magic pill that would ensure a criminal never again committed crime - indeed, became an upstanding moral citizen - but induced no particular suffering, I get the feeling that many on the left would feel this was a sufficient "punishment" to, say, child murderers, and that any further retribution upon them would be barbaric and primitive. I do not believe this, nor do most on the right.

Suffering punishment when you do wrong is correct, morally. You SHOULD feel guilt when you do bad things. The push towards a shameless society is very, very bad. Shame is good, actually. Being punished when you do wrong is good for you and just good, full stop. A father disciplining his child does so out of love, and for their own good. So understand that even when if I say things like, "I think X should be punished" - this too is not necessarily a statement born out of hate. I can and do think that being punished can be good for someone. I think this is frequently the case, in fact.

And again, not merely for its utility to modify behavior. I think this a view that many postmodern leftists simply can't square - "I want you to be hurt because it will be good for you on a spiritual and moral level to be punished for your sins. I want you to suffer because I love you and suffering can, in fact, be good." The purely utilitarian view where all suffering is bad simply can't deal with this. Their instinct is to try and invert it somehow, "Oh, the suffering actually is good because it brings positive utility later-" NO. The suffering is good because it is suffering. If it is just it is just completely independent of the future. If the universe were to blip out of existence the next nanoinstant, it would still be just.

I want to also comment briefly on hate. Hate, in almost all modern popular media, is simply bad in and of itself. Epitomized by Star Wars philosophy schlock about the dark side. "Hate is the worst. Humans would be better off without hate. If only we could learn not to hate?" - These things sum up a LOT of the left's worldview. I think it's dead wrong. Hate is the most human and divine of emotions. God is merciful, yes, but he is also wrathful - when it is justified. A rat can feel fear, or even joy - can it feel hate?

And what of the utility of hate? The left seems to have completely forgotten why hate exists. Whether you think it a quirk of evopsych or a divine part of the grand design, hate has a strong, real, and practical purpose. It motivates you to completely destroy long-term threats permanently, even at considerable short term cost. A herd of gazelles might stomp out a lion that eats their young if they can catch it in the act. A tribe of humans tracks the lioness 30 miles to their den, kills her, kills her mate, kills all her cubs - and repeats the process every time they even see a lion in their territory from now until eternity until their distant descendants can't even imagine what it is like to fear being prey, to fear their child being snatched up in the red jaws. That is the value of hatred.

The events in Rotherham could never have happened to a society that hadn't had its ability to hate stripped from it. Hate is an essential part of society's immune system, and while it must be controlled, it should never be discarded.

The events in Rotherham could never have happened to a society that hadn't had its ability to hate stripped from it. Hate is an essential part of society's immune system, and while it must be controlled, it should never be discarded<

This is untrue. There was plenty of hate for Pakistani muslims in the 80s and 90s when this started. So that cannot be the whole story. The first reason it wasn't stopped and why white prostitution gangs still operate in the same way is that no-one really cares about the victims. Underclass girls who drink and do drugs and are from broken homes or in care are seen as a problem, as scum. I've heard the cops say it, in towns just down the road from Rotherham. Their own families barely care for them let alone anyone else.

That is the true and ongoing failure here. Condemned by conservatives for loose morals and sin and condemned by liberals for being chavvy and ill educated and low class.

They will continue to be victimised by one group or another for these reasons. Its Russian gangs in London, Sectarian ones in Northern Ireland, but the victims remain the same.

A lack of hate is not the issue by far. There is more than enough of that. It's not enough compassion. Not enough love.

Child prostitution is popular because there are always men who will pay for it. Always. Lock up the offenders of course, but just like with drug dealers, a new one will be along in a minute. You have to want to protect the victims not just punish the guilty. You have to want to see them not as a problem but as broken girls from broken homes who need help and treatment. But they aren't easy to work with or help so even the most compassionate of social workers or police officers becomes a jaded burned out cynic soon enough. I've seen it happen in my days working in social care. So then the cops treat the girls as prostitutes and drug addicts not as vulnerable children. No humans involved as the saying goes.

That is the almost insumountable problem. Anyone who wants to help is set against an almost unending torrent of misery and exposed to the sordid underbelly of human desire. Not many come out of it with their compassion intact. But that is what is needed, not more hate.

Have you commented anywhere around here on the refugee and resistance goings-on in Ireland? Seeing ladies getting run roughshod by the police is a bit strange to this American.

Not meant to be a gotcha of any sort, just asking since your commentary on the UK tends to be thoughtful and much more charitable than I'll see anywhere else. Not around as much as I used to be and figured I'd missed it if it's come up.

Not really, I'm from Northern Ireland, and I lived in England for a long while, so those are the places I know best. My insight into the South of Ireland is likely to be slightly superficial. I was raised Protestant so I don't have a lot of close links south of the border.

Dublin, I know is expensive and its likely immigration is contributing to that, and I think the Irish government much like the English has been reasonably pro-immigration for some time, so I'd imagine its the same pressures driving resentment as elsewhere. The Gardai don't to my knowledge have much of a reputation for unnecessary brutality, but they are part of the establishment and its very easy for an us vs them mentality to result in overreaction. To see the mass of people not the individuals.

@FtttG may have more local knowledge.

I appreciate your kind words by the way.

You also have to keep in mind that the actions of the public were stymied by their own government. There was no mechanism for driving out the Pakistani rape gangs because the cops were running cover for them — to the point that today, cops waste time and resources tracking down people posting mean things about the rotherham gangs and Pakistanis in general, while still not doing much about said rape gangs.

I think vigilante justice would probably be a perfectly reasonable way to keep grooming gangs from acting openly. They’d know that if they hang around primary schools they’re going to face consequences from the community, and they … don’t do it. They know that if they touch a girl they face being hung from a telephone pole, they’re not going to be doing that. Keeping Pakistani men from being able to gain access to children, and being willing to actually punish wrongdoing is protective. And as far as im concerned, noting who is likely to do harmful things to your community and acting to keep them out is a social good.

To be clear the anti-racist stuff was certainly the reason those particular gangs were able to last longer than they should.

Though I'll note cops in the 80s and 90s were not running cover and it still happened thats why it isn't the whole picture.

The problem is no-one actually wants to hang around the schools these girls go to and protect them from Pakistanis or anyone else. Are you going to hang out in schools and care homes in Stoke on Trent? In run down city centres with drug addicts shooting up around the corner and breaking into your car? And the local alkies shambling around? You're going to be there all day everyday? You won't and nor will anyone else, is the point. Regardless of Pakistani grooming gangs, no-one cares enough to start vigilante gangs. The odd attempt to burn down a mosque is the best you're going to get.

I want to be really clear, I worked in city government in the Midlands and large numbers of Pakistani immigrants are a huge problem for multiple reasons, over-representation in child prostiution gangs being one among many. But class attitudes towards lower and underclass girls are a huge part of why they are victims all across the country and people don't care.

You ask why the average Brit won't riot to protect these girls? Because to most of them they are just as much the outgroup as Pakistanis. Worse even because they should know better. Even with the cops blessing there aren't going to be lynch mobs over this. Not until most of the victims are nice middle class girls.

That's bullshit covering for them, because the government actively went after a) anyone who tried to do anything, like the girls' dads, and b) anyone who tried to bring it to public attention.

"Ohh we're just so lazy" would be a better excuse if the coverup wasn't so active. And yes, I was there in the 80s and 90s, and local governments were absolutely running cover just as much back then. I remember the "minorities can do no wrong, so the police had better find no wrong" attitudes of the time, and I'm very much not surprised you were mixed up in it.

I remember the "minorities can do no wrong, so the police had better find no wrong" attitudes of the time, and I'm very much not surprised you were mixed up in it.

Stop lobbing personal attacks, especially with no foundation in anything the person you're attacking said.

That's bullshit covering for them, because the government actively went after a) anyone who tried to do anything, like the girls' dads, and b) anyone who tried to bring it to public attention.

When we say "the government went after the girls' dads", we are talking about dads who had been kicked out of their daughters' lives for reasons. Sometimes the mundane - there was a messy breakup, Mum got the kids, and Mum doesn't find Dad's continued involvement convenient. Sometime the kids had been taken away because Dad was abusing them too - both Pakistani and white rape gangs preferentially targeted girls in children's homes. But the criminal charge against the fathers was variants on "violating a restraining order" rather than "being a racist".

Pakistani rape gangs did not go after girls with married parents. Even in the UK, the fraction of married fathers whose attitude would be "I'll kill him, go to prison, and expect to have a tolerable time there after the other inmates find out I'm in for murdering a sex offender" is too high to risk. Particularly in the working-class neighbourhoods of Rotherham.

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And yes, I was there in the 80s and 90s, and local governments were absolutely running cover just as much back then.

Beat bobbies in the 80's were calling Pakistanis Paki scum and much worse things. They were not running cover for them. That didn't start until it got up to the political levels (as you point out). "Paki-bashing" was still common through the 1980s. The "anti-racism" of not wanting to incriminate Pakistani communities was a direct reaction to that behavior. I was in the Midlands in the 80s working with the police (albeit in adult social care not children's). My first wife is from that working class background. I saw exactly the treatment those girls got from their own families and communities, let alone anyone else.

There is simply no widespread movement (even now!) to help these girls. Whether it is to protect them from prostitution gangs, to protect them from county line gangs or often their own families.

I'm not covering for anyone. I am telling you WHY even after all the revelations the reaction from Brits is still pretty muted. If they wanted to protest over it in numbers they could. If they wanted to make it a huge deal they could, just like Brexit. For Brexit, Labour strongholds who hated the Tories with the burning passion of a million flaming Maggie Thatcher's torching mining unions with a flamethrower were willing to flip. But for these girls? Barely a peep.

The average middle class liberal will talk about how its just awful, but will they actually be willing to pay more taxes to help these girls? No. Will they adopt troubled young "chav" girls in care homes? No. Actions speak louder than words, and the actions of the Great British public shows us exactly where these girls come in the hierarchy of care.

Believe me I have my own issues with Pakistani communities particularly in the Midlands, and I have no love for them. But we cannot ignore our own failings to protect these vulnerable girls and how that is even more widespread, simply due to demographics. If we do, we are failing these girls even harder than we already did and are.

By all means lock up every Pakistani grooming gang member and throw away the key. I won't shed a tear. Want to zero immigration from Pakistan? I'm all on board. In fact, I recommended that in the 1990s, when I joined central government. Condemn anti-racists for running cover? Go off King! (or whatever the kids of today say).

But if we do not pair that with staring into the face of own monsters, with our own biases and apathy, well the men grooming and drugging and raping these girls might then be white, but I don't think that is much comfort personally.

The demand for underage kids is ubiquitous whether we are talking Rotherham, Glasgow, Belfast, Epstein Island or Diddy parties. There will always be predators. Protecting the prey better, protects them against all predators whether wolves, foxes or coyotes. Otherwise you'll come back from hunting the wolves to discover the foxes ate your chickens.

I am not saying not to hunt the wolves. I am saying putting up a chicken coop is part of the solution. And observing people don't care about doing that, gives us information about what those people actually care about.

Being punished when you do wrong is good for you and just good, full stop.

If punishment is not merely an incentive or a corrective, then what else is there, particularly in the "good for you" scenario? Suppose I'm an incorrigible psychopath who already did wrong, you punish me in secret so that it is not a counterincentive for others and does not provide catharsis to anyone - how is it good for me? (I imagine it would still provide catharsis to you, the thought experimenter, but that can't be helped.)

If you're tempted to answer with something like "God" (paraphrased), first recall your rage when a trans person told you the definition of a woman is whoever wants to be a woman.

I get the feeling that many on the left would feel this was a sufficient "punishment" to, say, child murderers

This would not be sufficient punishment because it does not deter potential criminals from first doing the crime and then being force-repented. If this was the sole punishment for murder, I believe the Luigis of the world would be many more in number. This example of yours demonstrates the importance of the deterrence part of punishment, not the esoteric goodness you're hinting at but haven't explained.

Yes, it's axiomatic. Being punished when you do wrong is good. The cosmic scales are balanced. It simply is good.

Why is pleasure good? Why is pain bad? Why is fulfilling preference good? As you well know, at a certain point we all must defer to some axiom of what is right and wrong, whether it come from god or preference or whatever.

I simply see punishment for wrongdoing as axiomatically good. Indeed, your hypothetical incorrigible psychopath deserves to be punished and suffer. If he does not learn, being incorrigible, he will do more wrong and deserve more punishment. It is simply obviously good to me that this occurs. It is good when evil and wickedness are punished. It is bad when they are not.

That the psychopath does not recognize this no more changes this brute fact than does his opinion that killing people is fine, actually, makes that actually true. But, of course, it is superior if punishment also effects a moral change. And the most significant and greatest punishment is not that which is externally and bodily administered, but that of genuine guilt and shame for understanding one's own transgressions. But it is extraordinarily for the good when someone does, in fact, recognize their guilt and repents it, even if this causes them to suffer greatly.

It is far, far superior for a murderer to repent their ways out of genuine contrition than to be given a magic pill that, say, makes them forget their crimes while also causing extreme pain in addition to making them model citizens, even if that has the same deterring effect.

And since it is important to the overall calculus, if you are a calculating sort of person, I would be remiss if not to mention the obvious. If you believe in an afterlife where all imbalanced mortal scales are finally put to rights, any wrong someone does where they do not suffer the appropriate punishment in this fleeting life will surely be addressed in the long run.

Also, I don't believe in true incorrigibility. Everyone has the potential for redemption. "Members of His faction have frequently admitted that if ever we came to understand what He means by Love, the war would be over and we should re-enter Heaven." - The Archdemon Screwtape

Why is pleasure good?

Our reward systems, as evolved from those that reproduced best, respond to certail stimuli with seeking more of them.

Why is pain bad?

Our reward systems, as evolved from those that reproduced best, respond to certain stimuli with avoiding them.

Why is fulfilling preference good?

It's not always good. For example, many people prefer to do hard drugs, but fail to predict and conceptualize that they will develop a tolerance, overdose and die an early death in a ditch, which they don't prefer now and wouldn't prefer later.

Punishment may result in net higher pleasure and/or net higher reproduction for the punished individual, but whether it does is quite far removed from whether the punishment was actually just. This leads us back to incentives.

It is simply obviously good to me that this occurs. It is good when evil and wickedness are punished. It is bad when they are not.

The very fact that it is "simply obviously good to you" betrays that what we're observing is the retributive effect of punishment, not a cosmic axiom of its goodness. You imagine evil being punished, you feel good. If you imagined good being punished, you would not feel good even if it was, unknown to you, actually evil. It would be the furthest thing from obvious.

The incentive societies face is to indoctrinate their constitutients with the idea that punishment has a cosmic axiomatic importance, along with their particular definitions of wickedness, of course. This is to persuade the members of society to act according to the rules even if they are sure they will not get caught.

Sometimes shame is good for the immediate survival of the individual. Sometimes it is good for the immediate survival of the society, which usually benefits individuals and their reproduction long-term. Other times, shame is an instrument that only serves a particular layer of society at the expense of others.

Examples are left as an exercise to the reader. Given the role shame plays in the toolbox of the left-dominated society you wished destruction upon, the exercise shouldn't be hard. Your compatriots who were shamed by leftists have felt the exact same shame that wicked people supposedly must feel for understanding their own transgressions. Shame does not have a hash code that decyphers to "good" if it was a wicked person feeling shame for wicked deeds and to "bad/fake/wrong" if it was a righteous person misled into feeling shame. It is the same mechanism.

And since it is important to the overall calculus, if you are a calculating sort of person, I would be remiss if not to mention the obvious. If you believe in an afterlife where all imbalanced mortal scales are finally put to rights, any wrong someone does where they do not suffer the appropriate punishment in this fleeting life will surely be addressed in the long run.

Because I'm a calculating sort of person, I do not believe in the kind of afterlife where finite wrongs done in life are punished infinitely/many times over what would be the punishment in life. This is exactly the kind of afterlife I would have people believe in if I wanted them to voluntarily seek punishment in life, because I actually only cared about what they do in life. I would also be susceptible to believing in that kind of afterlife if I wanted to cope with wickedness not being punished on earth by imagining how it's punished in hell (and then, because I wanted to be a righteous person, convince myself I feel sorry for them and regretful for them not repenting earlier). But as it happens, I want my enemies punished now, and I want to avoid letting them run amok by convincing myself they'll get their due in the afterlife.

Our reward systems, as evolved from those that reproduced best, respond to certain stimuli with seeking more of them.

Why is that good, as opposed to merely feeling good?

Our reward systems, as evolved from those that reproduced best, respond to certain stimuli with avoiding them.

Why is that bad, as opposed to merely feeling bad? I think you don't recognize that such a difference could even exist, which seems to me very... empty and sad.

The very fact that it is "simply obviously good to you" betrays that what we're observing is the retributive effect of punishment, not a cosmic axiom of its goodness. You imagine evil being punished, you feel good. If you imagined good being punished, you would not feel good even if it was, unknown to you, actually evil. It would be the furthest thing from obvious.

No, it would not matter whether or not it was observed or imagined by me, or you, or anyone. That it is obviously good is because we have a moral sense.

You can't seem to disentangle your own belief that everything must merely boil down to meat preferences in the end. It has nothing to do with feeling good or feeling bad. It has everything to do with being good or being bad. Feeling guilty doesn't feel good. It actually feels quite shitty. It would be much, much easier and more pleasurable to simply decide that the thing you are feeling guilty and shame about is actually not bad at all and it's just your irrational guilt/shame that's the problem, not your bad actions correctly causing them. Believing this would feel a whole lot better, it would feel good, but it would be bad.

You can make a just-so story about why such and such moral beliefs must have been adaptive (except when they weren't), but what I am trying to say is that most people don't believe this. They believe that they have a moral sense (perhaps imperfect) and that through the exercise of this moral sense they can discern right and wrong. Almost everyone believes this unless it is deliberately taught out of them.

Because I'm a calculating sort of person, I do not believe in the kind of afterlife where finite wrongs done in life are punished infinitely/many times over what would be the punishment in life. This is exactly the kind of afterlife I would have people believe in if I wanted them to voluntarily seek punishment in life, because I actually only cared about what they do in life. I would also be susceptible to believing in that kind of afterlife if I wanted to cope with wickedness not being punished on earth by imagining how it's punished in hell (and then, because I wanted to be a righteous person, convince myself I feel sorry for them and regretful for them not repenting earlier). But as it happens, I want my enemies punished now, and I want to avoid letting them run amok by convincing myself they'll get their due in the afterlife.

Well I don't want to get into a whole discourse - but there is a whole discourse on sorts of wickedness that are inflicted on others vs. internal wickedness (which is nowadays called victimless - nonsense, as if you yourself can not be a victim of your own actions - and therefore not wickedness). Both are wicked, but the correct response to both is very different. I also do not believe in an afterlife where finite wrongs are met with infinite punishment.

I think you don't recognize that such a difference could even exist, which seems to me very... empty and sad.

Is it sad that I don't recognize that a set can both have members and be empty? That two could be the same as one? That yes could be the same as no?

It is in this sense that I do not recognize that "good" and "bad" are things that exist outside of moral agents.

No, it would not matter whether or not it was observed or imagined by me, or you, or anyone.

But you are imagining it. It would be literally impossible to "morally sense" something you do not imagine.

most people don't believe this. They believe that they have a moral sense (perhaps imperfect) and that through the exercise of this moral sense they can discern right and wrong. Almost everyone believes this unless it is deliberately taught out of them.

I'm aware. Curiously, in all societies I've seen including the most robust ones, children are deliberately taught to discern right and wrong in the correct way as described by the society, often significantly differing per society.

You can't seem to disentangle your own belief that everything must merely boil down to meat preferences in the end. It has nothing to do with feeling good or feeling bad. It has everything to do with being good or being bad. Feeling guilty doesn't feel good. It actually feels quite shitty. It would be much, much easier and more pleasurable to simply decide that the thing you are feeling guilty and shame about is actually not bad at all and it's just your irrational guilt/shame that's the problem, not your bad actions correctly causing them. Believing this would feel a whole lot better, it would feel good, but it would be bad.

You seem to either be bluntly reasserting your belief or pointing out a contradiction. I see no contradiction. Wicked men feeling shame is good for others, not them. Of course the shamed person is not supposed to feel good.

I'm still awaiting your method for discerning the shame you feel at having done bad things from the shame you feel because a part of your correct (obviously) moral sense has been deliberately taught out of you.

My method, if you were curious, is that there is no difference and that exaniming and understanding the source and mechanism of shame is important if you want to reach anything that could be described as "good".

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It is not good. There are many times where I would prefer not to have my preferences culminate in "what is, somehow, predicted to make more of those specific genes or at least some of those other similar genes". It merely is. There is no cosmic scales in it, however, of justice or otherwise.

The difference in our beliefs seems to be that you believe the world is just and balanced. Maybe you even believe that even if it's not true, it is best for you to believe it is.

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I wasn't commenting on the quality of your argument or whether nor not I agree with it. Just the tone. Even if your "you" was meant rhetorically (as I suspected it was), we're going to step in when people start posting things that seem meant to turn up the heat.

You are allowed to hate here. We are used to hate, seething hate, boiling, barely-contained rage. But we have rules about expressing it. Yes, that is frustrating to those who want to feel the hate flow through them. But unfiltered rage-posting just isn't what this place is for, as the unfiltered rage-posters are wont to tell us, before they storm away.

I have spent my entire adult life, and even before that, with the knowledge that if I ever spoke my true political/social views I would instantly torpedo my entire career and social standing forever.

...

You stomped on us for 20+ fucking years, did you never think what would happen when we became the shoe? You deserve everything bad that is happening to you; you will deserve the much worse things that are still to come.

Do you think you deserved this treatment? The left's long march and resulting political/social power was itself a reaction to decades of similar suppression after all. Is your goal to doom us to cycles of repression?

Is your goal to doom us to cycles of repression?

Thus has it ever been. Thus is how it always will be.

Do you think you deserved this treatment? The left's long march and resulting political/social power was itself a reaction to decades of similar suppression after all. Is your goal to doom us to cycles of repression?

What? When? Commies were popular in the university from the outset.

His description of having to hide who he really is, could nearly word for word be from a gay man in the not so distant past. That he is discriminated against from a black man in the 50s and 60s and so on and so forth.

Not that it matters, but I did not sin against gay or black people in thought or deed before I found myself in the Left’s sights.

The collective Left chose to wage wide-ranging racist, sexist campaigns of persecution in flagrant contradiction of all their loudly stated principles and as far as I’m concerned they have utterly forfeited the right to tell sob stories about the 1950s.

We had a society that was, for all intents and purposes, colour and sex and sexuality blind. It was the left who chose to push that pendulum back up on the other side. In retrospect, I think they probably had to, because pertinent facts about these different groups did not make it possible for them to become interchangeable in reality, with all the consequences of that.

But the pendulum is still going to swing back, and it should.

Being gay or black is orthogonal to political persuasion.

It is also statistically true that being a gay or black man means you pose a heightened risk to society over a straight white man.

Theres always reasons why it is different. But there are reasons why the Democrat coalition looks like it does. In the US for example being black or gay is very predictive of political persuasion at somewhere around 90% voting Democrat. That can change over time but currently it is not orthogonal to political persuasion.

No, my goal is to end the cycle with permanent victory (Hell, I'd settle with just most of my remaining lifetime). I am sure you will say, "But don't you see how the left was trying to do the same thing?"

Obviously. They failed, so the cycle continues. And your proposed solution is simply to cede victory forever. Yes, of course, we could end the culture war today if we just unconditionally surrender. Why didn't we think of that?

Endless cycles of repression is infinitely preferable to total defeat. Let's flip it around - all the left has to do is just totally renege on all their culture war beliefs; just 180 on trans, 180 on abortion, 180 on affirmative action, 180 on forced vaccinations, 180 on marxism/socialism, and damn the cycle's over. Peace in our time! Why do you guys not do it, do you just hate peace? Do you just want an endless cycle of repression? Sounds pretty barbaric not gonna lie. Just give up, like you're proposing we do. Is your goal to doom us to cycles of repression?

"Is your goal to doom us to cycles of repression?"

The problem is there can be no permanent victory. For you or for them. You tried, they tried, there is no reason to think it will work better than last time. And I agree there is no reason for either you or them to concede defeat and see your values lose.

So now we've agreed on that, and setting aside heat if we can, what does that tell us? If neither of you should surrender, and neither can win, are there any other options?

And the answer may be no! An ongoing pendulum swinging so we kind of average out over time to moderation may be the best we can hope for. But we can at least think around the topic, without committing to unilateral disarmament.

Sorry for the heat, but it's probably more honest than what you usually get.

No, I actually hear stuff like this on the regular from gainfully employed relatives and acquaintances, loudly telling anyone who will listen how they're not allowed to speak their mind for fear of dire consequences.

For reasons that I don't understand, a lot of right-wingers simultaneously openly, viciously loathe liberals but also seem to crave their respect and approval.

loudly telling anyone who will listen how they're not allowed to speak their mind for fear of dire consequences.

No, they aren't. "They say it where I can hear it" isn't the same as "they'll say it to anyone".

No, I actually hear stuff like this on the regular from gainfully employed relatives and acquaintances, loudly telling anyone who will listen how they're not allowed to speak their mind for fear of dire consequences.

And why don't you believe them?

You do realize what they AREN'T saying, right? Do you ever wonder what they don't say to you, you seemingly being clearly hostile to their entire worldview, when they complain about not being able to speak? Do you have an ounce of self-awareness about what a damning statement it is on your character that people complain to you about not being allowed to speak their minds instead of actually speaking their minds? Complaining to you about not being able to say things is their only safe way of expressing that they don't feel comfortable actually expressing themselves around you.

For reasons that I don't understand, a lot of right-wingers simultaneously openly, viciously loathe liberals but also seem to crave their respect and approval.

People crave good careers and not being harassed by twitter randos. In many areas access to such things is gated by saying goodthink and not saying wrongthink. Don't confuse kowtowing to the mad emperor with heartfelt respect for his insane majesty.

I think you will understand this position better when you are made to bow.

Do you ever wonder what they don't say to you, you seemingly being clearly hostile to their entire worldview

Considering that several of them are openly sexist or homophobic and routinely make outrageously bigoted comments about blacks and latinos to my face, with seemingly no expectation that I might find any of that objectionable, I can only imagine the true opinions they're hiding are that George Wallace was right.

(to be fair, at least one of them seems to grasp that it's not appropriate to openly say all our black coworkers are incompetent, but he either thinks I privately agree with him or at least trusts that since he outranks me I just have to put up with it (he's correct on that last point)).

I think you will understand this position better when you are made to bow.

What makes you think I haven't? I don't think conservatives understand that the reason their ideological adversaries are unsympathetic is not because they don't understand what it's like to have to bite your tongue, it's because many of them have had a boot up their ass their entire lives.

whose boot?

Their approval is worthless, the cultural power they wield is the prize. I expect better analysis from one who is not "proudly ignorant".

Having been unable to contain my inner thoughts and having had my career and social standing indeed torpedoed, I too can't help but feel a large dose of schadenfreude toward the cathedral these days. I hope that with a true swing of the pendulum, more of these silenced voices can join an open dialogue to help rebuild a high-trust society from the ashes of the torn country we have today.

The red tribe produces plenty of petroleum geologists, clergy are generally quite intelligent, has successfully engineered affirmative action for themselves in the legal profession despite the legal profession trying to do the exact opposite.

What you’ll notice is access to status from non-academic sources(money, religion, conservative activism). This is a consistent pattern- the red tribe does not care about status within the school system for its own sake(which is the main reward for anthropologists).

The red tribe produces plenty of petroleum geologists, clergy are generally quite intelligent, has successfully engineered affirmative action for themselves in the legal profession despite the legal profession trying to do the exact opposite.

All of this just seems to me to be implicitly conceding the point. My contention, contra Hanania, is not that Red Tribers are literally stupid. It is that Red Tribers are somewhere between uninterested in and actively hostile to intellectual/cultural production (by which I mean things like scholarship or art). But they are still very much interested in those products, hence my remark that they want liberals to think conservative thoughts for them. They want (liberal) artists to create conservative-inflected art, (liberal) historians to write conservative historical narratives, etc...

I think it's correct to say that conservatives don't care about academic status and prioritize income/general social status - that's my point. Nothing wrong with that on an individual scale (I'm certainly not one to talk), but a side effect of this taken across a whole society is an extraordinarily vulgar* culture that produces little thought, little art, and can't handle critical perspectives.

*for lack of a better term. I do not mean that it is rude/inappropriate.

Who’s hostile though? My perception of most of academia is that they are not going to give an “out of the closet” conservative a position, let alone a tenure track position in a university. The field has been closed to them for decades. Under such conditions, I think great claims of “conservatives, bless their little hearts, just aren’t interested in academia,” to be equivalent to claims that blacks in the Jim Crow South just weren’t interested in attending white majority schools. The system keeping black out of those schools was legal as well as cultural, while tge system keeping out conservatives is informal, but if you’re not going to be allowed into a system, your interest in going into that system tends to fall off a cliff.

One thing about the clampdown on college protests and DEI will hopefully bring is to make the campus less openly hostile to conservatives who are open about being conservatives.

True, but given that the Dems will be back in power eventually forcing a bunch of conservatives into tenured positions in the academy might have some long term positive effects

It’s a generations long project because the liberals have long been in charge of the hiring and are looking specifically for signs or being insufficiently progressive. That’s one thing that the DEI and Land Statements and Pronouns in Signature are meant to do — weed out those who aren’t actively progressive by forcing them under threat of losing their jobs to make performative progressive statements. And until you have at least non-progressives in those hiring positions, it’s going to be really hard to get conservatives into those positions and other high powered positions.

Near term, I think it’s best to also build parallel institutions where the conservative opinion can be put out in publi.

Parallel institutions are good, but Harvard is Harvard and its reputation extends far beyond the US. Tenure can’t easily be revoked, so pressuring universities into hiring conservatives could be long term smart.

I’ve heard of red state universities doing this. Specifically I’ve heard rumors about Texas A&M and Ohio state being made to begin doing this.

And it can’t work unless there are good tenure ready conservatives with a strong background and lots of published papers that are pushing their field forward. If old progressive universities are not going to hire conservatives, they can’t get in the door, let alone be in a position to hire conservative professors. Plus, having those conservative institutions around gives the public a fair test case. If conservative leaning universities are producing more useful research, better quality education, more capable graduates, either the old guard dies off, or they are forced to compete by producing the same results.

By all means, try to go to art school and get elite support and patronage - some nice New York galas - as a traditional painter who wants to make Christian iconographic art. Really emphasize in your applications and piece descriptions how Christian it is. Maybe throw in some quotes like, "If your right eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell." Make sure to REALLY tie that into current trans trends, and pornography! Man, really emphasize how bank loans are usury and a mortal sin, and how all the people working for Chase (who funded the museum wing) are going to (justly) burn for eternity. I'm sure that will go over really well over champagne and salmon bites.

I'm sure you'll have your own special exhibit in MoMA in no time at all.

There is a vast amount of conservative art, but you do not see it in your bubble. It is not on TV, it is not in the papers, it is not advertised - cities don't commission it, (taxpayer funded) nonprofits don't fund it, museums don't host it, universities don't teach it.

I think a Christian artist might get artworld support if their art was about their complex feelings toward Christianity or had some kind of critical lens, or maybe if it was by a Christian outsider or even mentally ill person and mixed in another culture or influences in novel ways. If it was primarily proselytising art, it wouldn't stand much of a chance though, especially if it was iconographic in the sense of emulating previous artists in already existing styles. Today's art world insists on newness above all. Not to say most 'tastemakers' of the 21st century aren't incredibly judgemental, they are, but they don't generally deny the incredible artistic output of christianity in centuries past, just today.

If you have got some good example of contemporary conservative Christian art that is uncelebrated, would you be willing to share? I'm genuinely interested.

Today's art world insists on newness above all.

They say they do, but whether they actually do is another question. And at any rate, constant newness is not a reasonable demand. Creative work always falls into regular patterns; in both the sciences and the arts, the majority of work consists in simply filling out the details of a given paradigm, rather than actually pushing at the boundaries of the paradigm itself. True innovation is hard, and at this point in human history, the possibility space of the traditional plastic arts has been explored pretty thoroughly.

A sculpture that consists of, say, a few loose pipes and concrete slabs strewn about the floor, which are alleged to represent the struggle for Palestinian liberation, is just as much of a genre piece as a representational painting of the deposition of Christ. It follows genre conventions, it shares a clear lineage with other works in the same group, etc. It's just that "abstract sculpture paired with a leftist artist statement" is a politically favored genre, whereas "representational Christian painting" is a politically disfavored genre.

I don't know if you're describing an actual or hypothetical sculpture, but yes, it does sound workmanlike from your description (although, if we're evaluating comparative newness alone, we can note that it is at least in a relatively new genre compared to a representational religious painting, and potentially expresses emotion about a breaking situation rather than depicting the motifs of an ancient faith).

I also think a lot of the artworld would agree that abstract political sculptures genuinely were a lot more exciting back when there was something innovative about them as a form. In other words I suspect artworld people often really are interested in newness and I am not convinced by your suggestion that it's a pretense. (Of course within that story, loads of art is totally boring and not innovative and exists only for reasons of business, personal ambition and to rally political causes.)

Not off the top of my head, in regards to painting. I was just giving an example of conservative subject matter that would not fly far in contemporary art circles. You raise a good point that one of the issues is the constant drive for novelty, which I think comes at the cost of alienation from more universal experiences and values that could reach a larger audience.

I'm more familiar with Christian music. POD is an example of a Christian group that was very contemporary and found wider market success when I was younger. I like Alive and Youth of the Nation by them. Looking them up, I hadn't realized they were still going, I need to check out their recent stuff.

It is that Red Tribers are somewhere between uninterested in and actively hostile to intellectual/cultural production

Sad Puppies says hello.

You are looking at the empty buildings and barren fields and conflating it with a lack of interest, refusing to acknowledged that the bodies have already been buried and the survivors herded away elsewhere.

I'm just going to refer back to what I wrote when this came up a few years ago, since nothing has really emerged that had changed my views on the subject (tl;dr Correia and Torgersen mostly precipitated the situation they claimed to be fighting because they were upset pulp wasn't winning awards, pre-2015 Hugo winners were totally fine):

Part 1

Part 2

If we are going to assign blame to anyone on the puppy side, I think the problem was Vox Day/Theodore Beale rather than Correia and Torgersen.

Beale is a prime example of why the Red Tribe doesn't produce good cultural products. He first came to my attention for his theology blogging - heresies as interesting as his views on the equal divinity of the Holy Spirit are rare nowadays. The Selenoth books are overly wordy and ultimately I couldn't read them, but they were not written by an idiot. And he has other mid-tier accomplishments in multiple fields (music, video-game development, hardware design etc.) I am happy to call him a genius. But in order to remain relevant, he gradually shifted his blogging output from serious theology and literary criticism to standard-issue midwit Confederate apologia and ultimately to antivax and conspiracy theories. Whatever incentives he was responding to were to be less interesting and less intelligent. Last time I bothered to look into what he was doing, his main project was putting out superhero comics with a crass political message in every panel, which is as unappealing to a normie reader as the left-wing equivalent.

The only one of the Puppies who I found plausibly award-worthy was John C Wright. Correia writes technically competent schlock which plays the same role for his male readership that romance novels do for their female readership. It is valuable work and harder than it looks, and he fully deserves the money he made, but that kind of book has never been supposed to win awards.

But in order to remain relevant, he gradually shifted his blogging output from serious theology and literary criticism to standard-issue midwit Confederate apologia and ultimately to antivax and conspiracy theories

How is this different from transgender blm lockdown posturing taking over previously cogent blogs?

I would have to agree with this, although some more explanation would be nice.

@Skibboleth: I don't have personal experience* (yet; I suspect this'll show up when I do my MEd) but I strongly suspect that in the arts/humanities side of things, expressing conservative views/tastes in assessments will literally often get you marked down (when you aren't thrown out), which literally makes it harder to become legibly "a historian" or "an architect" as a conservative than as a progressive. If you want to see the prior ratio, you need to either enforce political neutrality in the current universities' assessments, or enforce that degrees from those universities be held to be of negligible credential value (as in, "I hired this architect because he got a Harvard degree in architecture" becomes identical in legal ramifications to "I hired this architect because he's white").

I suspect that that ratio does favour progressives, but not remotely to the current extent.

*Well, I do have personal experience that there are opportunities open to progressives and not conservatives in university, just not in the academic side - specifically, I wasn't able to become an RA in my dorm because "spread SJ propaganda" was part of the job description. Would have been nice to not have to pay rent, particularly since I was doing much of the rest of the job anyway!

I strongly suspect that in the arts/humanities side of things, expressing conservative views/tastes in assessments will literally often get you marked down

I don't find this to be true except in one very particular sense: there are a subset of bigots who are also conservatives who define conservatism in terms of their own prejudices, who arrive in a space that is extremely hostile to those prejudices and find that expressing them gets them in trouble. You're not going to get marked down for saying we should lower taxes or be tougher on crime, for using nationalistic iconography, taking a pro-American stance in history class etc... If you study philosophy, there's a good chance there will be literal fascists on the curriculum. You may find yourself as a distinct minority opinion and arguing with your peers a lot, which is undeniably an unpleasant experience, but the actual landmines tend to be homophobia and racism.

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Assuming all of this is entirely accurate, it seems exactly as bad a situation as the worst things that people are complaining about here. In a humanities course, someone being marked down for making arguments in favor of open homophobia and racism is utterly horrifying. It defeats the entire purpose of a humanities education to judge students' capabilities based on the conclusions they land at, rather than the arguments and reasoning they use to land at those arguments. Some professors might claim that only bad reasoning could land at those conclusions, but that, in itself, would be even more perverse, in a humanities professor being that simple- or closed-minded as to hold such a belief.

Why? No one would blame a geology teacher for marking down a student who hands in a paper whose conclusion is that the Earth is flat. Sometimes positions are known by a field to be outrageously wrong, so that any student who's let those ideas become a part of their conceptual landscape is worse than ignorant. There is no reason, prima facie, why sociology couldn't deem other positions equally deleterious.

If a geology student used all the best scientific practices and all the best available empirical evidence and all the best arguments by the standards of all the best geologists that somehow ended up with a convincing conclusion that the Earth was flat, then the geology teacher would absolutely be in the wrong for marking down the student.

In any case, questions of moral truths like "is homophobia or racism wrong" is categorically different from questions of empirical facts like "is the Earth flat," and to whatever extent academics conflate the two, they ought to be called out and actively denigrated for it. The purpose of humanities education is to teach how to properly think through these moral truths (as well as other things), not what to properly conclude about these moral truths.

A sociology class that deems certain moral truths out of bounds isn't a sociology class, it's a religious sermon. Sociology can make claims about how homophobia and racism affect society and individuals within it, and the teacher can even make the argument that these effects are bad, but once they cross the line into demanding that students conform to their own judgments of what's bad and good, they're taking on the role of preacher, not teacher. "Deleterious" and "wrong" are not synonyms.

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When you say you don't "find" this to be true, are you saying you're involved with this personally in some fashion?

I think you should be more specific about the subset you have in mind.

My first thought was “Civil Rights era Southern Democrats,” a group which unapologetically grounded their racism in conservative thought. But those people are mostly dead now, and their legacy is a good bit more complicated.

If you’re accusing Bob Jones fundamentalists or scientific racists or based post-Christian vitalists of confusing prejudice for conservatism, you’ve got to do more work to establish it.

It's not a unified subset. It's a disparate collection of individuals with discriminatory beliefs which they nevertheless consider to be an integral part of their political identity, though you can point to specific groups in some cases. Religious conservatives are a big standout on the gender and sexuality front, but they're hardly exclusive. Insofar as there's a real unifying theme, it's the "facts don't care about your feelings" aesthetic that many conservatives (especially younger ones) adopt, which IME mostly ends up glossing prejudice as "realism".

To put it as plainly as I can: whenever you find right-wingers saying "I don't think I can be open about my political beliefs because I'll be ostracized", it's never about fiscal policy or foreign policy or even touchier things like immigration or criminal justice. You can think we should slash welfare or defend aggressive foreign policy or declare that Christianity is the one true religion and your left-wing peers at college may think you're an asshole (or a rube), but you're not going to be a pariah (nor is the TA going to mark you down on your essay). The sticking point is basically always about either gender/sexuality or race, and often beliefs that would be considered boundary-pushing even in conservative milieus. For example.

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Russ Roberts talks about the reaction he gets when he talks about some pretty basic free market economics. I know he's told a story where he used the phrase "they edge away from you". I think it had to do with minimum wage. I may or may not have also gotten the phrase "they stare at you like you're an alien" from him, which I used here, in context of a not-even-boundary-pushing sort of take on sexuality. Perhaps the moment has passed, because the political battles have been won, but at the peak of the cultural pressure cooker, trying desperately to win the political battle, it really was the case that even the most mild doubt of the Dogmatic Position was heavily disfavored.

it's never about fiscal policy or foreign policy

This is literally just that one reddit meme that they change every time there's a new sacred cow

Do you want some gun rights examples? Because oh boy do I have gunnie examples; shall we start with the people who did get fired for putting twenty bucks toward Rittenhouse’s defense fund?

Even for gender/sexuality, the progressive taboos are far more often dependent on matters that are not controversial, or worse are only controversial to the opposing direction. There’s fair argument against misgendering a trans school shooter, but it’s not some universal standard, and people did still lose literal careers over (liking a tweet that did) it.

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To put it as plainly as I can: whenever you find right-wingers saying "I don't think I can be open about my political beliefs because I'll be ostracized", it's never about fiscal policy or foreign policy or even touchier things like immigration or criminal justice.

It is in fact often about immigration and criminal justice.

To put it as plainly as I can: whenever you find right-wingers saying "I don't think I can be open about my political beliefs because I'll be ostracized", it's never about fiscal policy or foreign policy or even touchier things like immigration or criminal justice.

I just had someone on an unnamed forum say that he wanted me banned (fortunately he is not a mod) for "supporting genocide" by defending Israel with respect to Gaza. So forgive me if I think you are not being accurate here.

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it's never about fiscal policy or foreign policy or even touchier things like immigration or criminal justice.

In my experience, I lost a huge amount of friends for my dissident opinions about policing, immigration, and COVID. My most recent girlfriend broke up with me because I disagreed with her that it wasn’t “fascist” for the Trump administration to detain children and separate immigrant families at the border. I lost a ton of friends for opposing strict COVID lockdowns and mask mandates. And of course I started losing friends as early as college because I expressed tepid opposition to the Black Lives Matter movement.

Believe me, the opinions I express in public are far more tame than the things I say here, and also I started getting anathematized in certain circles even when my worldview was far closer to the progressive mainstream than it is now.

And Larry Correio, John Ringo, David Weber, Orson Scott Card etc remain extremely successful science fiction writers. Again, the red tribe just cares about things other than status within the academy. I'll wager their fiction is better than black lesbians in outer space or whatever wins the hugos these days. I don't read that much fiction.

The majority of your examples cut their teeth on writing novels over 30 years ago, exempting Larry Corerria, who seems to thrive on controversy and culture war, and is a relatively newcomer, putting out his first book in the 2008.

That we're discussing the current state of conservatives producing cultural content and how we got here and the writers you point to are a bunch of giants in their field nearly three decades old does not make the argument you think it does.

a side effect of this taken across a whole society is an extraordinarily vulgar* culture that produces little thought, little art, and can't handle critical perspectives

How do you square this with the phenomenon of "this artist expressed rightwing opinions, we have to disavow anything he ever made"?

They want (liberal) artists to create conservative-inflected art,

If anything, I think they'd be happy with conservative artists making conservative-inflected art, but The Academy has largely destroyed the teaching of traditional forms of (visual) art. Over the last decade or so I've found a decent list of artists whose works I enjoy, but most of them have very mixed advice about "art school" specifically: it's not a great place to learn, for example, traditional painting (landscapes, formal portraits, still life) because "traditional" isn't "cool," and so you see those produce things (uncharitably: ugly schlock) like "CalArts-style" or brutalist architecture that are IMO visually unappealing.

For some reason, the (traditional) music side of the academy seems to have held onto tradition better, although even there "I went to music school. Don't go to music school. Just make music." is a surprisingly common piece of serious advice. And despite not being a huge Rand-stan, The Fountainhead feels fairly relatable here: most of the artists I'd list seem successful because they chose to make what they were themselves were passionate about, not what the zeitgeist told them to. Some of them seem to be doing reasonably well based off their social media profiles. And I really appreciate it, because it's had me take up art as a modest hobby, even if it'd never work for me as a career.

(liberal) historians to write conservative historical narratives,

I think this has largely the same concerns as the artists: the pipelines for traditional publishing are fairly tightly controlled, and while it's possible for non-leftist fiction authors to self-publish, non-fiction has a higher expectation of review. I'm not the biggest reader of history, but my understanding is that nonfiction skews more male than other parts of literature, and I haven't seen modern book reviews of history (say, Scott's review of Hoover) take on a hugely strong left-leaning bent. But your average school history textbook is probably a left-of-center framing.

There are beautiful traditional churches with traditional art being newly built today. Somebody, presumably, is making that art. I don't know where we source it from but it is representational and new.

Red Tribers are somewhere between uninterested in and actively hostile to intellectual/cultural production (by which I mean things like scholarship or art)

That depends on what you mean by "Red Tribe" (everyone seems to have a slightly different definition).

It's not particularly hard to list right-wing intellectuals and artists. Nietzsche, Heidegger, Pound, Eliot. There was an intimate link between Italian futurism and Mussolini's fascism.

I think Yarvin's concept of the dark elves is useful here: internal traitors to the Blue Tribe who align with Red Tribe on certain key issues and provide intellectual and cultural support to the reds. If your definition of a Red Triber is a person who prioritizes "income/general social status" over intellectual development, then sure, ex hypothesi such a person will take little interest in cultural production. But you're ignoring all the dark elves who very much are in the business of thinking "conservative" thoughts, and as others in this thread have pointed out their perspective has been systematically censored in elite institutions.

I mean, Ross Douthat is not a red triber. He seems unlikely to deer hunt or listen to country music. He's clearly quite conservative, but he's a blue tribe conservative.

I think this exposes the fundamental flaw in the red tribe/blue tribe model and undermines this whole debate.

If we're defining "red tribe" (as Scott does, it's his model) solely in terms of class markers for the white working class, and dumping literally all other Americans into the other bucket... well, uh, yeah, it's going to be a tribe that values higher education less than the other bucket. Put the way you have, "the red tribe" isn't even represented by the Republican Party -- Trump is not a red triber in this sense, Josh Hawley (the Trumpiest senator) is not a red triber in this sense, Clarence Thomas is not a red triber in this sense, Alito is not a red triber in that sense, Amy Coney Barrett is not a red triber in that sense, all but very few in elected office is a red triber in that sense, Vance grew up in the red tribe but is very much not so red tribe now.

In fact, J.D. Vance is a perfect example; he grew up "red tribe" but adopted many values of the "blue tribe" as he gained social status, yet he's a fairly conservative guy who believes in God and cares about the needs of rural white people. If red tribers who adopt the beneficial aspects of the blue tribe like the pursuit of higher education, while having a religious conversion experience and supporting policies driven by patriotism, lose their "red tribe" cred... then the distinction doesn't actually cleave to anything relevant for whether conservatism or progressivism values art and scholarship more. It would mean that valuing art and scholarship makes you not a red triber, making the whole debate circular.

Conservatism, in any meaningful sense, isn't about being a member of the white working class. It's about having a commitment to conserving the values of the past that contribute to human flourishing. Often it's about believing in God.

If a devout Christian who reads his Bible every day and goes to church every Sunday and puts his hope in Jesus Christ for eternal salvation -- but also lives in a city and works in a computer science lab on a university campus -- is a member of a different tribe than his fellow parishioner who lives outside the city limits and works as a contractor, then not only these tribal markers but the Church itself means nothing. If we're going to talk about whether conservatism is intellectually vacuous, we had better get our definitions right first, just as we had better get our dogmas in a row before we start anathematizing people as formal heretics. We should probably try to understand reality before we condemn.

The near-complete alignment of the tribes with politics is a result of the culture war. The progressive long march through the institutions not only threw conservatives out of the institutions but out of Blue Tribe itself. Much of this is conversion -- your devout Christian who goes to progressive college will likely lose his faith. Some is oppression -- your devout Christian who doesn't lose his faith but remains in the progressive environment will conceal it out of self-preservation, and so be invisible. Some is reverse-conversion -- your political conservative who is driven out of Blue Tribe will adopt at least some of the tribal markers of the tribe that DOES accept his politics.

I go deer hunting with a senior partner at a CPA firm. He plays 70s country, has a masters degree, drives a pickup truck, speaks only English but thinks learning Spanish is generally wise(this is not echoed for eg French, Japanese, etc), wants nothing to do with Europe except maybe a vacation, and watches college football in his free time.

This is red tribe, but very much not working class. Now he probably valued money over self actualization(no one dreams of becoming an accountant, let’s be real) when he was ~20, which is a red tribe value that does go a ways towards explaining the conservative under representation in academia. But it’s tribal identity markers, not class, and there may be class markers involved but they’re tangential at best.

Now he probably valued money over self actualization(no one dreams of becoming an accountant, let’s be real) when he was ~20, which is a red tribe value that does go a ways towards explaining the conservative under representation in academia

Yes, thank you for saying this. Conservatives tend to be a lot more practical about career choice, and working at a museum just isn't the kind of thing you can make a career out of that can support a family. When I was growing up, my parents told me a big long list of careers I should not get into, including music and art.

That depends on what you mean by "Red Tribe" (everyone seems to have a slightly different definition).

The Red and Blue Tribes may have rough analogs in other countries, but IMO they are strictly American (and primarily White American, though there peripheral non-white members) phenomena. As I've said before, the artistic and intellectual bankruptcy of the Red Tribe is not some universal attribute of conservatives. It's not even some atemporal quality of the Red Tribe. It seems to be something that's emerged in the past few decades.

So what is your basic definition of the Red Tribe, exactly?

More or less what what @hydroacetylene said. I'll admit that there's an element of "I know it when I see it", but I think it's important to note that it's not just (or even primarily) a proxy for rural - most Red Tribers live in suburbs/exurbs, not rural areas.

White Southerners (including the white Southerners who settled the Mountain West after the Civil War), Appalachian hillbillies, anyone who goes to or pretends to go to a church where those groups dominate, and any non-white or white ethnic who makes a good-faith attempt to assimilate into the traditional culture of the white South or Mountain West. Serious Catholics and Mormons are generally allies of the Red Tribe, but they are not part of it.

My equivalent definition of the Blue Tribe would be New England Yankees, Quakers, pre-Ellis Island era German/Scandinavian immigrants*, descendants of the above who lost religion, and any non-white or white ethnic who makes a good-faith attempt to assimilate into the traditional culture of the Northeast - notably including Conservative/Reform/secular Jews. Unassimilated non-whites are (or were) allies of the Blue Tribe, but not part of it.

* i.e. all Mainline Protestants

Albion's Seed is the definitive book on the origins of the culture war.

Serious Catholics and Mormons are generally allies of the Red Tribe, but they are not part of it.

Yes we are(can't speak for Mormons obviously but it probably applies). We have a lower view of evangelicals than they typically do of us, but your median Knights of Columbus family has recent experience of representation in the military, serious Catholics drink a lot but don't pot smoke(tell tale tribal marker- blue tribe loves its party drugs, red tribe has a big double standard), Catholics make a big outreach to supporting police and fire and often distrust the public school system, etc, etc.

There's a class difference between the majority of serious Catholics and your stereotypical red triber, but there's plenty of higher-class red tribers.

don't pot smoke(tell tale tribal marker- blue tribe loves its party drugs, red tribe has a big double standard)

You are saying that Toby Keith, Steve Earle, Hank Jr, Kris Kristofferson, etc -- are/were not Red Tribe?

I'll grant there's a bit of a schism going on with older school law&order types, but modern (meaning post-1970ish) Red Tribe certainly has room for the wacky tabbacy.

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'People who match the culture of white republicans' is a basic paraphrase of Scott's original definition.

What that culture is is of course not monophyletic; there's the country music crowd, the church crowd, the red dirt types(genuine connection to the rural), and that's before getting into the importance of regional and religious differences. But there's an identifiable cluster there, where a Cajun and an eastern Oregon rancher and a UAW worker and a snake-handler all would rather socialize with each of each other rather than a professor of gender studies, despite their vast differences.

But there's an identifiable cluster there, where a Cajun and an eastern Oregon rancher and a UAW worker and a snake-handler all would rather socialize with each of each other rather than a professor of gender studies, despite their vast differences.

Would this apply also to socializing with an academic in a field that is more neutral but still without practical applications, such as for example a professor of theoretical astrophysics? I suspect it very much would but I'm not an American so I won't outright make such a claim.

Here in Finland there is a similar contingent who see non-practical work as "useless" but it's smaller due to historical reasons (education was seen as an important factor in increasing national consciousness in the 19th century as well as a way to improve the next generation's social standing). More importantly the lack of a two party system means it never got coupled to the broader left vs right political orientation. It's easy to see the difference even in looking at who people consider to be academic compared to the discussions here on The Motte where The Motte definition of an "academic" has a large bias towards social sciences and other left dominated fields (whereas locally people would consider a professor of Electrical Engineering very much an academic).

The way a red triber uses the word ‘academic’ probably implies philosophy or something similarly self-referential, perhaps some vapidity or ivory tower tendencies. A professor of electrical engineering or astrophysics or business or history would probably be referred to as a ‘professor’ or ‘researcher’ or maybe ‘scientist’.

Edit- to address your question more directly, talking to an astrophysicist who uses layman’s terms would be considered very interesting to most red tribers. I don’t think that that necessarily translates into making friends, though.

The fundamental problem the Red Tribe/American conservatism faces is a culture of proud, resentful ignorance.

Mass, public epistemic victory is about popularity and not truth. If you can gaslight the population to the degree that a 38 year old man can hold the belief that there are no physical differences between genders then it's trivial to gaslight the public to believe that anyone who speaks up otherwise is "proudly, resentfully ignorant". Too bad for you that society requires a minimum level of truth-based epistemology to function and you don't understand that you've crossed the line.

This is pure boo-outgroup. Anyone who doesn't share your views would read something like this, and respond "Oh, they're sneering at us from the high windows of the ivory towers of their institutions again. Keep those bulldozers coming."

The conservatives did not abandon the institutions. The institutions were taken over by their opponents, who then gatekept new entrants and in many cases expelled the remainder of the old guard. They cannot "make their case" because this is not a courtroom; there are no impartial judges. The only judges are those within the institutions, who are thoroughly corrupt. Well, as I've been saying for some time, once your enemies have occupied the institutions and expelled all your people, there's no reason NOT to shell them from the outside. That's what's happening.

The left took over these institutions because the right couldn't be bothered to defend them. 25 years ago, while there was a clear left-wing bias in academia, you could still be a conservative and get tenure and publish papers without too much controversy. And conservatives were still telling my generation that if we pursued a career in academia, or government, or the nonprofit sector, or whatever, we were idiots, because those jobs were for people who couldn't hack it in the private sector. Hell, just look at their paychecks. Hell, I remember us joking after our first semester in law school that we could relax for a few weeks between the end of finals and discovering that we were all destined for the public defender (never mind that a year later working as a PD seemed like a pretty good deal).

Government jobs were for the mediocre, nonprofit jobs were for the bleeding hearts. But academia was the worst. At the age when your peers are all established in their jobs, have mortgages, and are trying to figure out how to coach a little league baseball team, you're living in a shithole apartment in a college town on a stipend, hoping that you'll get to move to rural Nebraska so you can teach history at a small liberal arts college that's not even offering tenure. And even that's such a long shot that it's pretty much your dream job at this point. The GOP at this time was preaching a civic version of the prosperity gospel: Taxes on the rich only serve to penalize the most productive/talented/innovative citizens. If you make a lot of money it's because you deserve it, and if you don't it's because you simply aren't as good. And God help you if you were on welfare or some other kind of public assistance, which was evidence that you were simply lazy and expected a handout.

This wasn't the case among Democrats. The important thing in Democratic families wasn't maximizing your paycheck, but having a job that made full use of your talents. So if a smart kid wanted to be a taxi driver, that was looked down on, but if he wanted to be a teacher, it was okay, even if they both made the same salary. So there was a period, probably beginning in the 1980s, where the number of conservative PhD candidates began dwindling, year by year, and as conservative professors retired, they were replaced by liberals. By 2015 you had a critical mass of leftist professors and new Republican orthodoxy that was repugnant not just to liberals, but to old guard conservatives, and has no intellectual foundation. At this point, it's hard to imagine what a conservative academic would even look like, since the tenants of conservatism are all dependent on the fickle whim of one man. So even the conservatives who have made it through probably aren't conservative in contemporary terms, since up until fairly recently no self-respecting conservative economist, for example, would ever wright an academic treatise on why 30% tariffs are actually good, and no conservative political scientist would write a treatise on why the US needs to invade Canada. As much as the right complains about this, the wound is entirely self-inflicted.

As much as the right complains about this, the wound is entirely self-inflicted.

I think this line of thinking misses where the wound actually is - it isn't that conservatives are absent from the academy (although we do focus on that a lot, in part because it is easier to point at when it comes to data), it is that the academy can't function in their absence.

Gender studies can be a real discipline in the absence of conservatives, in the same way that most theological work can. But it isn't.

The current lack of representation would be unfortunate but otherwise benign, instead it has become an existential threat as most academic institutions can't manage to be anything other than a lobbying arm of the progressive wing of team blue.

Asking the conservatives to be there to intervene is about as dumb as saying "why weren't you there to stop me from shooting myself????"

Maybe they kicked themselves out maybe they got kicked out. That might be a problem but it isn't the root of the issue.

I think this line of thinking misses where the wound actually is - it isn't that conservatives are absent from the academy, it is that the academy can't function in their absence.

I apologize for my STEM arrogance, but I would claim that if a discipline can not function without having followers of any particular ideological bent, it is probably bullshit.

It's not the lack of followers of conservatism or any particular ideological bent. It's the dominance of followers of a particular ideology that is far more dogmatic than most religions, and does not value objective truth or an impartial search for same.

It’s not like STEM is immune, or even that resistant: the Hirsch-Dias feud is noteworthy only because we actually got to see the denouement in public, and the fraud was ‘replicated’. Had Hirsch not had such a bee in his bonnet, Dias would have ended up just like the Mxenes guys: maybe embarrassed, but Not Actually Proven.

I mean Medicine for instance is an example of a STEM field which can't function with the level of ideological mono polarity currently present in it - anything remotely politically controversial is super unreliable.

I would not count medicine as STEM. Also, there are plenty of subfields of medicine which are not very subject to ideology.

I would expect a Nazi obstetrician who wants to help Aryan women to give birth to new soldiers and soldier-makers for the Fuehrer and a minority ethnic radical feminist obstetrician to show a high degree of instrumental convergence in the long run.

The subfields ob medicine which are controversial -- like gender stuff, or perhaps psychiatry -- are generally few and far between. In most stuff which is tangentially related to medicine and controversial, the controversy is orthogonal to the science part: abortion, death penalty, MAID, embryo selection, germline editing, organ donation debates are all not about what is the case, but what we should do. Sure, sometimes activists smuggle in arguments masquerading as science, but mostly there are no open questions of fact there.

Every kernel of medicine has room for controversy, as Nybbler points out below. Where to prioritize resources, how research works (what do you do about males disproportionately signing up to be test dummies? ....a million other things. Some of it is certainly the "social" end of medicine like how to train and teach (is advocacy required?) but the hard science parts of it have plenty of dimensions.

Ethics are also fundamental to medicine and fundamentally on the spectrum of controversy.

The subfields ob medicine which are controversial -- like gender stuff, or perhaps psychiatry

Or kidney function?

This is a just-so story. It isn't true that conservatives "couldn't be bothered to defend them". It's that they weren't able to. They realized what was happening far too late, and treated the leftists as intellectual opponents at worst, while the left treated the conservatives as enemies to be vanquished or fossils to be re-buried.

They realized what was happening far too late

I think this is correct, and in areas where conservatives have made a concerted effort (particularly in law) they've been able to do very well.

Something I found a bit funny about the Woodgrains position of "shouldn't you build it up rather than tearing it down" is it seems to be to imply that Trump Et. Al. should redirect all of those funds straight into right-wing institutions. Which I somehow doubt would make people very happy. But if they were run by serious conservatives instead of grifter conservatives I think they would do just fine.

As much as the right complains about this, the wound is entirely self-inflicted.

Your make a good point overall, but it is an overreach to claim that this is entirely the fault of the right. Even when things weren't as bad as they are now in academia, there was still a bias (as you yourself said). I myself saw it when I was an undergrad student: conservatives were shamelessly (if clandestinely) mocked in ways that would never fly if it happened to other groups. I remember people leaving taunting messages on the chalkboard used by the university Christian group, or vandalizing political signs for conservative candidates. Nobody cared. But I strongly believe that if, say, the black student group had someone put derogatory messages on their chalkboard, there would have been a campus outcry and investigation of it.

That is the kind of environment conservatives faced, and even though it wasn't as bad as it has become, it wasn't remotely welcoming either. Would you make your career in an environment that was tacitly hostile to your beliefs and way of life, just to try to fight the good fight? I certainly wouldn't, and I can't really blame those who wouldn't either. I think it's fair to say that the right-wing culture which is suspicious of academia and other "not real work" kind of jobs is their own fault. But there are other factors here which aren't their fault.

I think it's fair to say that the right-wing culture which is suspicious of academia and other "not real work" kind of jobs is their own fault. But there are other factors here which aren't their fault.

Setting aside the word fault. If you have a culture that is suspicious of academia and other not real work, then it is likely the people in those positions are going to react and to be suspicious of you in return. I don't think it is either sides fault. Its the chicken or the egg. I think it is the outcome of the structural and systemic differences in value sets between tribes. Blues mock Reds for being dumb hicks and Reds mock Blues for being effete intellectuals. The result is any space that leans slightly one way or the other is going to cascade. Whether anyone is deliberately planning it or not.

90% of farmers are Republicans and that is ok. It is ok for your values and preferences to determine that some areas will be dominated by one tribe or the other. At scale individual choices are overtaken by systemic differences. There likely isn't any way to have a 50/50 split in academia for Reds and Blues short of changing what Reds want and hence what Reds are. Likewise with farming and Blues.

But the existing farmers don't make prospective farmers write a "why I love Trump and how my work will advance the cause of Trump" document in order to become a farmer. The left wing academia DOES make prospective new academics write DEI impact statements. If conservatives are so uninterested in being academics why did the academy need to put up so many walls and man their gates so firmly?

I can’t speak for farmers, but expressing liberal opinions will make it much harder to get a trades career going.

They didn't, because 1) They don't in general see a DEI statement as being analagous to supporting Trump or a wall.They see being anti-racist as something any decent person should do. They would see the fact conservatives won't do that as evidence they hold sexist or racist attitudes. They do not see that as being left wing and thus filtering out conservatives. They see it as being decent people and if conservatives aren't decent people that says more about conservatives and not them. That is the of power of "its just the right thing to do" framing.

  1. DEI statements aren't as common as you might think, I am a straight white man in academia and i've never had to write one. We have a couple of "out" Trump voters (admittedly in the economics department which is the most conservative in general I think), and while it does skew left overall, there isn't a lot of antipathy to the Red Tribe, because they don't really think of them at all. We're in a Blue city so its not like they come across that many in any case. They are steeped in Blue culture and Blue ideas. They're not even thinking about building walls to keep them out. Too busy fighting for grant money or hating dumb students of today and their short attention spans.

Now I don't work for an an Ivy League school or indeed any of the top ranked schools so maybe its more common and problematic there. But I think people have skewed ideas about academia as a whole, by looking at say Harvard or Columbia.

As for farmers, they have their own ways of enforcing social pressure. Its just not going to be a written statement. A Catholic farmer back home might find all of his neighbors equipment is mysteriously not available for him to rent come harvest time. Or an ex neighbor of mine in rural PA talked about how they charged hippies more for calves because they didn't know any better and were just going to go under anyway.

All communities enforce behaviors and beliefs, they just do it in different ways.

Now I don't work for an an Ivy League school or indeed any of the top ranked schools so maybe its more common and problematic there. But I think people have skewed ideas about academia as a whole, by looking at say Harvard or Columbia.

I don't know about that, I've been attached to X academic institutions in the last X years (sorry, vague, opsec blah blah) and while I've never had to write a diversity statement I also don't know any faculty who are "out" as a Republican and I know of exactly one student (who was widely criticized and socially censured).

I know plenty of students and faculty who hide their affiliation (in fact...it is a lot), and I've seen how both are treated when they are assumed to be Republicans (often by demographics and shallow stuff like owning a truck) and the way they are treated is about even with how old school racists treated Blacks.

In my experience academia is even worse than you'd guess from the stories.

and the way they are treated is about even with how old school racists treated Blacks.

I've never seen anything similar to that at all. Heck when I lived in a small Red town, I had my Blue colleagues over for bbqs alongside my Red neighbors and there was never any kind of problem.

I will say students seem to be more performatively anti-conservative than the faculty by a long way. So while I haven't seen them socially censuring conservative students, that wouldn't exactly surprise me. Our faculty is (or at least appears to be) more politically diverse than our students I would say. But it is a very Blue city.

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They didn't, because 1) They don't in general see a DEI statement as being analagous to supporting Trump or a wall. They see being anti-racist as something any decent person should do.

This just seems like describing the how, rather than contradicting the notion that they metaphorically put up walls and man the gates against conservatives so firmly: they do so by genuinely believing that being anti-racist (by their conception of anti-racism) is something any decent person should do and rejecting the contention that this belief is due to their partisanship rather than due to it being true. It's particularly a severe failure for academia, where one of the ostensible main themes is the inescapability of individual bias and the need to correct for it through multiple contrasting perspectives.

I recommend the (short but boring)book Compromising Scholarship to read a case for discrimination against conservatives in the academy. Very solid account of academic prejudices against proxies for conservatism.

The fundamental problem the Red Tribe/American conservatism faces is a culture of proud, resentful ignorance. They can't or won't produce knowledge and they distrust anyone who does.

I do not think this is true at all. The right is very good at producing knowledge, it is just unevenly distributed. If you spend any time reading Supreme Court briefs, you'll see rightie knowledge production in action, as this is an area where the right has (very successfully!) focused much of their energy and attention.

I think that the right-wing intellectual capital is considerably better than that on the left, if considerably smaller. Conservative or conservative-friendly educational institutions I think can be very good, just dwarfed in number by default-left-wing ones. (Some of this depends on what counts as "right" and "left" of course.)

There is also a structural reason for lack of conservative intellectual output. Conservatives like old ideas. There are only so many publishable takes on Aquinas, Hobbes and Kant, or why Shakespeare was pretty dope.

New ideas are the domain of reformers, who are definitionally not conservative. The main issue is that most new ideas are extremely likely to be less practical than old ideas. There are an infinite number of ways to explore why bread is racist, actually.

But there aren't many institutions teaching the old ideas either. And the ones that do are mostly Catholic, not core Red.

Serious religious Catholics mostly are red tribe, although aside from Cajuns they're often not-stereotypical red tribers.

I dunno. It seems to me that lefties live in the shadow of Marx much more so than the right lives in the shadow of, say, Aquinas.

You're not exactly wrong about conservatives definitionally (although consider conservative hero Edmund Burke - not exactly a hidebound anti-reformer), but righties per se have no problem with new and innovative ideas. Look at science fiction (which is very forward-looking) - is it more "conservative" or "rightie" than other areas of literature? Or less? Now look at mainstream film, media, literature, etc. Is it eaten up with retreads, remakes, retellings of fairy-tales and people reliving their childhoods? Where is the innovation truly?

Or look at politics - is there really more innovation in the Democratic national platform than "we should make Greenland a US territory?"

There is a De Maistre shaped hole on the motte. I'm Hlynkaposting I know.

Conservatism has come full circle- la contrerevolution nest pas la revolution contraire mais le contraire de la revolution. Building something that functions by the old rules until it grows and overtakes is the conservative project and it is the work of generations. Building off of the foundations of the old rules. Building a functional society. The counterrevolution is long but it is utterly predictable.

I for one like the Hlynkaposting.

Leftists are already razing their own institutions. Rightists might need to destroy the academy in order to save it.

For instance, leftists have started destroying historical artifacts.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/australians-are-destroying-our-ancient-past/

Museums might actually be dangerous places once leftists begin to turn to viewing history as “bourgeois” errrr I mean “racist” or whatever

My God, yes. I got so mad seeing the ~40k year old human fossils be buried. On the one hand, we're enlightened by science and we don't need this pesky Christianity anymore. On the other hand, give into (some of! not even all of them are calling for this!) the natives' homebrewed ideas about what belongs to whom and ancient customs and destroy priceless artifacts. Western civilization deserves to die if it's gonna be like this.

It seems like no country anywhere can stand up to indigenous peoples when they want something unreasonable. Even the Russians caved when it came to the Siberian Ice Queen. Look at this, too. Thirteen thousand year old kid. Modern Native Americans don't even have any more claim to that than we do, man. There's no way their cultures resemble each other at all at that point. And I don't see European natives kicking up a fuss that Otzi the Ice Man got dug up and put on display.

DNA research by the Russian Academy of Sciences found clear differences in the Ice Maiden's genetic material and that of modern Altaian communities, which led archaeologists to claim that the mummy was European and that Altaians were recent migrants to the region.[9] This was used as a reason to keep the mummy in Novosibirsk, and in 2004 the archaeologists who had refused to repatriate the Ice Maiden to the Altai because of her supposed European heritage were awarded the prestigious State Prize of the Russian Federation. Claims regarding the Ice Maiden's European or Altaian descent are, however, considered the products of indigenous Altaian cultural identity and political autonomy being undermined by a broad "Russian" nationalism

Holy fuck I hate Wikipedia

I don't get your point.

The wording is horrifically biased and self contradictory. How is the European heritage “supposed”? It was analyzed for their DNA and confirmed not to be Altai! Just emblematic of how terrible quality most articles on Wikipedia often are

I’m sure you do.

This is still not the place for your Two Minute Hate. Put some more substance into it or keep it to yourself; I don’t care which.

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