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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32404 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 23, 2023

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...How is this different than (((Triple Parentheses)))?

Mormons would probably say it isn't, but Mormons have long reveled in their status as a Persecuted Minority.

If you're asking if I think woke conflict theorists like Gretchen Felker-Martin, who seems to unironically want to purge Christians, are really different from Neo-Nazis who want to unironically purge Jews, no, I don't think they are.

Mormons would probably say it isn't, but Mormons have long reveled in their status as a Persecuted Minority.

Well, there was that time not too long ago when they found themselves in a shooting war with state governments... But more to the point, are they wrong? Sooner or later, one must look at the decisions being made, both by individuals and collectives.

GFM is an individual. My two best guesses at why they do what they do would be Ideological zeal, or status games hustle; probably it's a mix of the two.

On the ideological zeal end, either they're conforming to their ideology, or diverging from it. If they were diverging from it, I'd expect to see their community turn on them, the way it frequently turns on others who stray from community norms; there's hardly a shortage of examples of what that looks like. If they're conforming to it, then their actions give us evidence of how that ideological community actually thinks. It seems clear to me from this and numerous other examples that to the extent GFM is acting ideologically, they are conforming, and their actions are representative of the collective LGBTQ+ zeitgeist. This is where the movement is going.

On the status hustle end, they're doing what they're doing because they think it will be popular and will gain them status. In this way, the action is a test of broader social norms and attitudes, a way of betting, with skin in the game, on the nature of our society. From where I'm sitting, it looks like a reasonable bet. Not a million-to-one jackpot, but a limited win with negligible downside and solid gains secured. They were a nobody, and now their name is out in a (for them) net-positive context, with the name of their book attached. The campaign against Sanderson is back on, and wherever it goes, GFM will be riding it. Reddit normies and twitter folk are playing along. TOR isn't, yet, in this case, but the effort costs the attackers nothing, and gains them much, so it will happen again. It costs them nothing, because this sort of behavior is, in fact, popular, norm-affirming, in step with the spirit of the age.

If GFM is roughly equivalent to a neo-nazi, one must observe that this variant of neo-naziism is actually quite popular, growing more so by the day, and is in a position to secure dominance of our social, political and economic systems.

Mormons would probably say it isn't, but Mormons have long reveled in their status as a Persecuted Minority.

I find this a bit uncharitable. Just about every group has their Founding Myths. Americans sailed across the sea for freedom, Jews left Egypt, Mormons left the East, black Americans escaped slavery, and so on. Are there any cultures without these culturally-valued histories of persecution?. Christianity in general is (to an extent) based on the whole "the world will hate you" thing, and even when the world doesn't hate Christians they want to pattern-match that onto everything. So I'm not saying you're wrong, but I'd disagree that Mormons in particular feel this way; I think it's basically normal for all such groups (especially Christian groups) to shout about their persecuted pasts as much as possible.

White southerners have Birth of a Nation New England wasps have seeking religious freedom on the mayflower, ethnics have escaping terrible conditions in their home country, etc.

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