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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'll have some of what you're smoking if you don't mind.

The problem, Hlynka, is that you are always trying to shoehorn reality into what suits your fancy, rudely at that. This is something I've accused women of doing recently, to some understandable disapproval from @gemmaem, but I did say that this is not so much a particularly female moral failing as a natural outcome of having power (maybe it could have been better described with some of TLP's writings about narcissistic rage, which of course have nothing to do with psychopathology). You serve the greatest power on Earth, one that feverishly seeks to extend its monopoly on violence to the furthest reaches of the Universe, you identify with it, so it is a given you succumb to this temptation as well.

To begin with, while you were indeed accused of torturing the meaning of words and the like in relation to your hot takes on tribal affiliation of right-wingers, the «doubling down on obvious falsehoods» was specifically about your bizarrely hostile – and easily disproven – insistence that language models don't have certain capabilities. You can't deal with that issue by doubling down on your politics.

But since language models and your politics are, in fact, only tangentially related, I'll only comment on the latter.

Your politics are not conservative or progressive in some principled philosophical sense. They are technically center-right but, first and foremost, American – and this pretty much exhausts their content.

All nations are, to an extent, imagined communities, where the actual cohabitation is fortified, like democracy can be, with clever psyops and retcons. Your nation is a Proposition Community – and one heavily reinvented in your lifetime to become as expansive and comfortable to the power brokers within it as possible. The marriage of Jerusalem and Athens can result in any number of political systems, and each one would seek to claim the mantle of Western Civilization as such, this has happened a few times before. Indeed, even the Proposition Nation idea, very infectious as of late, can take many forms. Singapore is the Proposition Nation with mercantile East Asian characteristics; France is the Proposition Nation of Reddit Rationalism. And like Alasdair MacIntyre has said,

…But perhaps a systematic recognition of this incompatibility will enable us to diagnose one central flaw in the political life characteristic of modern Western states, or at least of all those modern Western states which look back for their legitimation to the American and the French revolutions. For polities so established have tended to contrast themselves with the older regimes that they displaced by asserting that, while all previous polities had expressed in their lives the partiality and one-sidedness of local customs, institutions and traditions, they have for the first time given expression in their constitutional and institutional forms to the impersonal and impartial rules of morality as such, common to all rational beings. So Robespierre proclaimed that it was an effect of the French Revolution that the cause of France and the cause of the Rights of Man were one and the same cause. And in the nineteenth century the United States produced its own version of this claim, one which at the level of rhetoric provided the content for many Fourth ofJuly orations and at the level of education set the standards for the Americanisation of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century immigrants, especially those from Europe.

Hegel employs a useful distinction which he marks by his use of words Sittlichkeit and Moralitiit. Sittlichkeit is the customary morality of each particular society, pretending to be no more than this. Moralitiit reigns in the realm of rational universal, impersonal morality, of liberal morality, as I have defined it. What those immigrants were taught in effect was that they had left behind countries and cultures where Sittlichkeit and Moralitiit were certainly distinct and often opposed and arrived in a country and a culture whose Sittlichkeitjust is Moralitiit. And thus for many Americans the cause of America, understood as the object of patriotic regard, and the cause of morality, understood as the liberal moralist understands it, came to be identified. The history of this identification could not be other than a history of confusion and incoherence, if the argument which I have constructed in this lecture is correct. For a morality of particularist ties and solidarities has been conflated with a morality of universal, impersonal and impartial principles in a way that can never be carried through without incoherence.

The modern American system, however, is a particularly extreme case in that it reduces this civilization to a citizenship and a rather short list of legal precepts (and one more thing we'll return to shortly). Not the people (which drives @SecureSignals or @Hoffmeister25 to predictable indignation), nor an ideology (as those are quickly exchanged), nor religion, nor heritage, as even history is rewritten and reinterpreted at a whim. Who are your people? Degenerates and mongrels (your words, not mine). What is the living spirituality of your people? Something something Jesus quoted Homer when drinking at Moe's, but also live and let live, man; further, myopic pragmatism dressed as virtue. What is your idea? «Grand ideas suck», but you're always itching to bash some egghead's skull in for having the temerity to propose one and expect an argument in return. The power you have amassed, however, seeks expression, and it takes the shape informed by grand ideas you prefer to haughtily ignore until they become received wisdom, the water you swim in, and you become willing to murder and get murdered in their name – with nothing, really, except some confused childish platitudes about good and evil to justify the call.

Naturally this can't be how it works. How it works – coming back to the one more thing – is that you do have a grand idea. The grand idea is circular self-worship bringing the confused identification of Sittlichkeit and Moralitiit to the logically final point where no distinction is, strictly thinking, conceivable; America is its own God. This faith is not grounded in any intellectual tradition, in fact not in any tradition, but remains as jealous as any other. All people who found their beliefs on other frameworks, and therefore are or might become disloyal, are seen as heathens or heretics, depending on their background. In your lingo they are «progressives», but this means less than an Orthodox Christian accusing a Catholic of being a schismatic. In the lingo of your Legal Enemies, enemies playing another part in the two-tact regime of American political worship, defectors from the vacuous self-worship cult can be called «fascists» or «far right». There is an asymmetry between sides of the performance in their ability to publicly make use of those allies, and other slight details, but we've been discussing those asymmetries for years now.

It's about time to scrutinize the median case, which you represent well enough.

The problem, Hlynka, is that you are always trying to shoehorn reality into what suits your fancy, rudely at that. This is something I've accused women of doing recently, to some understandable disapproval from @gemmaem, but I did say that this is not so much a particularly female moral failing as a natural outcome of having power (maybe it could have been better described with some of TLP's writings about narcissistic rage, which of course have nothing to do with psychopathology). You serve the greatest power on Earth, one that feverishly seeks to extend its monopoly on violence to the furthest reaches of the Universe, you identify with it, so it is a given you succumb to this temptation as well.

What if there is no monopoly on violence to be had? What if our interlocutor's "narcissistic rage" is exactly that? Am I to become a narcissist?

What is the living spirituality of your people?

Good question. What keeps Americans of all races and creeds together?

It is not politics, it is not voting - about half of eligible voters do not bother to register and vote, but no one wants to excommunicate them from ranks of American nation.

Yes there is something, and this is sport - more precisely, sports that are played only or mostly in good ole US.

Throwing big ball, kicking ball (but in completely different way than rest of the world kicks ball), beating small ball with big stick.

This is why everything stops during the biggest sport event of the year, this is why it is so big deal what music is playing and what advertisements run in this grand event.

This is the way it is, and it had been for a long time. Remember what happened during WW2 when Americans needed to find enemy infiltrators in American uniforms speaking English? Knowledge of baseball players and trivia was the shibboleth to find out real Americans from the other kind.

("American" who knows nothing about hitting small ball with big stick is no real American and will not be missed)

("American" who knows nothing about hitting small ball with big stick is no real American and will not be missed)

I know you were trying to mock the whole thing, but writing it down in Grugspeak makes it sound pretty based.

Yes it is based and ball pilled.

In the late unpleasantness in god fearing Yugoslavia, when thugs with guns wanted to find who are you, they forced you to cross yourself. If you did it the wrong way, you were fucked.

In today's Ukraine, a foodie place, it is Palianytsia. Do not know what it is, cannot pronounce it correctly? You doubly fucked.

In America, it is the ball. If you expect interesting times incoming, get prepared, learn all what you can about balls.

Meanwhile I'm sitting here like "this but without the irony".

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