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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 13, 2023

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I take a lot of inspiration from "don't negotiate with terrorist memeplexes."

It didn't feel like I was talking to a person at all.

It felt like I was talking to an AI designed to maximize the number of trans people.

The negotiating with terrorists analogy goes both ways. If you read their books they explicitly say that all negotiation is tactical: luring the victim into a moment of vulnerability to line up a kill shot, just like you would offer to deliver a pizza to a hostage-taker so your sniper can shoot him when he opens the door.

We had some wonderful posts from leftists just a few weeks ago who just couldn't understand why anyone would be foolish enough to keep the terms of a social compromise when they had the power to impose their will; the concept was utterly alien to them, like saying it's wrong to lie to Kant's axe murderer. All compromises are a temporary restriction to be abolished the second they hinder rather than help your goal.

Any negotiation you do isn't between two people who can come to a reasonable accommodation, it's between an agent of a totalizing ideology that will not stop until its goals are accomplished... and a victim that stands in its way. At the very best you might experience "united front work":

a mix of infiltration, subversion, propaganda, bribery, and false promises... Key to this work is a candied eye for what Party leaders would today call “win-win” propositions. Both sides win, then win, then win some more—until the Party is in position to impose a decisive win-lose on the other group

To it, you are the criminal that needs to be lied to, negotiated with in bad faith, and ultimately betrayed because no agreement with you is valid or enforceable. Because the goal is not coexisting with you, it is winning and erasing you and everything you believe in from history. Assurances like "nobody is coming for your children" don't actually mean anything: it's just a soothing noise, like an ambush predator instinctively imitates to make its prey feel safe. Or, like in that linked essay, a 1940s Chinese communist party liaison assuring the gullible Americans how much they love democracy and the USA, yee-haw boy-howdy.

So to the extent that being realistic about the intent of these actors is "denying their personhood", I deny it. "Less than human" would be an odd way of putting it, because in some sense being one component of a massive group-mind makes someone more than human, just not in any way that allows genuine person-to-person relationships to exist.

Putting it another way, a soldier wearing an enemy uniform is not less than human. If he was not wearing the uniform you might be friends. But if you walk up to him and offer to talk things out he will just shoot you, because that is the job he put the uniform on to do for his state, becoming the tool of a massive, uncaring, inhuman intelligence that seeks total victory rather than mutual understanding.

it's between an agent of a totalizing ideology that will not stop until its goals are accomplished...

If you want to go full galaxy-brain on this, you can strip away another level of abstraction and say this: on the full biopolitical scale, there is no ideology, there are no goals, and there is no stop.

An ideology does not exist. What exists is a set of political organisations (thinktanks, ideologically-captured media, etc.), whose policies and membership are fluid but which retain some degree of institutional power.

Given large horizontal memetic transfer (schools, universities, social media), and a pre-existing tolerance for radicalism, it's not too hard to sketch out the Lamarckian and Darwinian evolution of those organisations. Reaching a goal doesn't destroy an organisation; it just causes those people who are satisfied there to leave and thus evaporatively-cools the organisation's policies. Organisations that actually are set up to self-destruct upon reaching a set goalpost do, and thus are not around for very long if the Overton Window isn't static. Radicalism draws both ire and interest, which is good for the organisation because interested people can join but irate non-members can't directly hurt it. And so on. I don't claim this to be the One True Lens to view things through, but it's an interesting one.

That said, this isn't a full blackpill way of looking at things. You can adjust the pressures on those organisations and prevent them from being self-sustaining enough for Lamarckian evolution. There's obviously the Hitlerian way of doing that, but that has its own terrible spirals and I don't advocate it. Here are some relatively-Actually-Liberal suggestions:

-Disestablish schools, replaced in whole or in part with homeschooling or community-schooling by an otherwise-unqualified parent living in the neighbourhood.

-Strangle university by scrapping government loans (and if you want to get really clever, disallow wage garnishment for unpaid private university loans; sounds pro-student, but forces a market failure).

-Sin-tax political nonprofits and social media (no need to be politically discriminatory about it; we all know which side benefits more from them).

-And, obviously, kill "disparate impact" and anything else legally forcing organisations to hire enemy saboteurs.