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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34967 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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I'm not endorsing the racial consciousness of any group. I preach color blindness and believe that we can return to it. Wokeness has not been around in the mainstream public consciousness for all that long and what it has wrought has been quite negative. It very much could still crumble. Call it copium if you must but I still see a way out. Your average progressive supporter has not peaked behind the curtain, they do not pay attention to the rhetoric or underlying belief structure. They simply think that progressivism is kindness. The facade cannot hold forever, the wrongness of the theory becomes more apparent every day. You see it with schooling reform, you see it with trans kids, you see it with police funding. Progressives can sell the credulous public on trying some policy but when these policies bear fruits and the fruits turn to ash on the average person's tongue the average person still trusts their senses and spits it out. Liberalism runs deep and can still be saved.

Also a response to @chickenoverlord

I think it does indeed run deep. When talking to progressives their arguments are often rooted in a kind of disjointed liberalism. They talk about unfairness, discrimination, equal treatment under the law as a goal that they believe we're failing. These are fundamentally liberal ideals. They can be induced to mouth and chant unexamined slogans about oppressors and Marx adjacent things but they do not recognize the Marx in it. When it comes down to actually needing to reason instead of regurgitate I have always found they fall back on liberalism immediately and instinctually.

To a large degree BLM is founded on a belief that we do not have equal treatment under the law. I know there is more under the hood than that but I think the main kernel that differentiates BLM from all lives matter is the assumption that black people are in fact treated particularly bad. Whether it's true or not I'm sure could be a matter of lively debate here but they do believe not.

I think you have it backwards. The normies believe in the disjointed liberal stuff. The progressives do not (and often enough claim these ideas are somehow racist or problematic); they believe in the oppressor stuff, but will often use liberal terms to keep the normies happy.

Case in point: "When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression". Which Al Yankovich put better as "they kick you and they beat you and they tell you it's fair".

Perhaps we're just describing the same thing with different labels. I was describing the normies that parrot the progressive party line as progressives. You can call them normies with deep fundamental liberalism and then I think our main disagreement is the relative size of the groups.

Liberalism runs deep and can still be saved.

Does it run deep? As much as I love it, it seems to largely be the product of English culture and institutions, and the weirdos who were most into it self-selected and yeeted themselves across the ocean to America. Continental Europeans never really seemed to get behind it, given their love of handing over absolute power to the state. And of late England and most of its former colonies other than the US seem more in favor of giving absolute power to the state rather than anything remotely resembling liberal democracy. The US is the last bastion of anyone and everyone who gives the smallest fuck about limiting state power, and even then it's a dwindling number. Covid lockdowns alone should have been enough to convince you of that.

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