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PaperclipPerfector  8d ago (text post)   31570 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 7, 2025

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Well I believe that you don't give people enough credit because they're part of your outgroup and that your standards of what people are allowed caring about without being hypocritical are bad models of people's behavior and therefore functionally useless except as the very sort of grievance they denounce.

The idea that people feeling empathy for the plight of people who look like and feel like them is bad, empty or without meaning in some way is, I believe, one of the great sins of Western civilization. And I don't feel difficulty defending anybody who feels such feelings, wicked as they may be, far from me as they may be.

Indeed, insofar as humanism has any degree of visceral grounding, it springs from this feeling and cannot denounce it without sapping itself.

Well I believe that you don't give people enough credit because they're part of your outgroup

Fair. People who hype genocidal warfare are indeed part of my outgroup.

and that your standards of what people are allowed caring about without being hypocritical

I do not think you understand what my standards of what people are "allowed" to care about are.

The idea that people feeling empathy for the plight of people who look like and feel like them is bad, empty or without meaning

This not what I believe.

Is your objection merely that people recommend violence as an answer to things that are not in their most intimate circle of concern? Because whilst I can understand the sentiment, I don't really see that as particularly worthy of judgement given the ubiquity and inherent merits of direct action as a political means.

Please. Explain.

My objection is that I think people like Kulak who engage in performative outrage about Rotherham do not actually care about the victims and are not advocating race war because white girls were victimized. They are not motivated by empathy at any level.

There certainly are some people who care, and there are probably some people who care only because they were white girls raped by Muslims (and yes, I am judgmental and critical of them too). But the strain of race warrior who wants Rotherham to be a causus belli against the coloreds otherwise have nothing but contempt for the sort of girls victimized in Rotherham, white or not.

I understand this is your claim but I've yet to see you produce some actual reasoning as to why this is true besides that you don't like those people. How did you arrive at this conclusion?

By observing what they say about, and how they treat, their supposed "ingroup" in every other situation.

Can you be more specific?

... How specific do you want me to be? I am genuinely not sure what you're grasping at here, other than that we disagree over what internally motivates this particular class of people. Neither of us are mindreaders, and I doubt asking Kulak would produce an answer both of us believe. Perhaps Kulak is not the best example to use, since he's quite extreme and performative anyway and it's hard to guess what he honestly believes (if anything) other than "violence is good." However, I already stated my reasoning above: the sort of people suddenly motivated by outrage at the Rotherham rape gangs were not outraged many years ago (when I first heard about them, and I'm not even British!) and the reaction I saw from people who want to burn the place down and lynch all the kebabis now was "Where are these sluts' fathers?"

You seem to either object to my being uncharitable to people who want a race war, or you are striving to match me to that ingroup/outgroup empathy map that supposedly shows liberals care more about immigrants than they do about their own families. If I am misunderstanding you, I'm afraid you will need to clarify.

I'm just trying to get something more out of you than "I believe this is the case" because I care about understanding how and why people think what they do.

I don't really give a shit about that mislabeled graphic from that study everyone misquotes. Except insofar as the success of the meme reveals something about how people view each other.

I feel the same way I do when people say commies don't care about the poor and just hate the rich. There's some version of that statement that's true for some of the people. But it's not that simple and "they don't care" is the kind of thought terminating cliché that leads people to be befuddled when the people who don't care start doing radical things in directions they telegraphed.

I find this type of mind reading frustrating. People are a lot more honest and open about their intentions than they get credit for. People just don't like to look at or think about it.

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But the strain of race warrior who wants Rotherham to be a causus belli against the coloreds otherwise have nothing but contempt for the sort of girls victimized in Rotherham, white or not.

This may or may not be true of Kulak, but I think there's more demand for this sort of person then there is supply. In fact I've seen more frustration with the right's lack of contempt for these girls, than I did actual contempt.

sounds like this meme, only swap a couple of words out.

Pretty accurate, yes.

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