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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31654 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 9, 2023

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We really would benefit from having LW-style separate upvotes for liking and agreeing.

Well you should like it too (assuming that’s your meaning) it’s not like western civ is bad and we have to carry and promote that.

Nah, I viscerally dislike the image of either maga or wokes (or their unholy union) asserting dominance over humanity. But more importantly I reject your claim to stewardship of the West – and the self-serving belief in this stewardship being beneficial for the West or for the rest. You're going to hell in a handbasket, taking us with you, and not letting anyone leave.

The latest drama is a case in point. Bostrom is part of the best that the West has to offer. He has developed his views in Sweden and in England. It takes the black-obsessed, anti-intellectual American purity spiral to drag him through the mud. You folks aren't really Western, at least not post-Enlightenment West, you're something new and simultaneously ancient – simpler, stronger, cruder, driven by primitive taboos and collective hysterias, and unlike similar archaic resurgencies in other places, entirely invulnerable to reality checks. Carl Jung would attribute this to «spiritual negrification», and Hlynka would boast (perhaps misleadingly) of being an «inbred degenerate» and Scott would speak of Moloch, but there's little point: might as well blame Tezcatlipoca. Drag Queen Story Hour isn't a Western thing, and Megachurches are even less so, and you're right they do have more in common than they have with Western debauchery and religion, respectively. To the extent that you define the West with your gimmicky fascinations, you brutalize it. And you take pride in your dominant brutality. This, too, is ancient.

You should have had a few more centuries of isolationism to figure out some bearable attitude. It's too bad that history is ending in this generation, under your yoke.

You folks aren't really Western, at least not post-Enlightenment West, you're something new and simultaneously ancient – simpler, stronger, cruder, driven by primitive taboos and collective hysterias, and unlike similar archaic resurgencies in other places, entirely invulnerable to reality checks.

Reminds me of that book review of The Dawn of Everything on ACX, where the author described the "sapience trap"(?) as being, in all likelihood, a sociality trap where reputation was the biggest currency of all.

You folks aren't really Western, at least not post-Enlightenment West

And we would also benefit from having a special BASED upvote.

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