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Do you mean to say that the notion of justice, and even good and bad, are progressive inventions now, and based conservatives like you and Hlynka operate without that nonsense?
If the belief in «Hegelian oppressor/oppressed dynamics» is characteristic of the group Hlynka is castigating as not truly right-wing, there must be more to it than that.
I will note that Moldbug for all his arrogance rules no one and has built something (indeed something very elegant), which is more than can be said of Hlynka, who is essentially an expert in destruction and state-approved murder.
More generally this attack on natural hierarchy advocates is very tired and very incoherent. I see it, I recoil in horror. These people say that the only reason someone could posit human inequality is to assert being superior. Is their acceptance of their lot in life entirely predicated on thinking that everyone is the same? Do they just… suppress their psychopathy and power-seeking with this clear absurdity?
Well, one answer is that slavish loyalty to some disgusting grifter like Trump, thrown to them like a bone to elicit predictable swarming behavior, solely because of his lower-class aesthetics and manners, is not a cause to pat yourself on the back. I'm with Hanania in thinking «trad right» should be mocked about this until they learn that pride is a sin and pig-headedness is a potentially lethal disease.
This is plainly false, as can be gleaned from the usually very severe and hostile trad con attitudes to punishments for antisocial behavior (your own too, if memory serves) and beliefs about moral worth of criminals and worth of «restorative justice». Tradcons very easily label men as irredeemable – perhaps as easily as wokes do, since this is the thread of equivocation.
Better sort is a matter of behavior; and inasmuch as capacities like IQ matter here, they do so as proxies for behavior (although casually it's the other way around, with IQ affecting behavior, of course).
Which side did Hlynka's forebears fight for?
No. Everyone (to a first approximation) believes in Justice, in Good and Bad. Oppression is badness enforced as a norm, so everyone believes that oppression is a thing that can happen. People differ on the details of what Good and Bad are, on how to define Oppression, and this is where the disagreements come in. Some people (Nazis, Communists) have an extremely deranged definition of Oppression that makes coexistence with them flatly impossible. Progressive and race-based definitions of oppression are similarly deranged, if less extreme, because they collapse their moral judgements down to identity, rather than actions chosen. Regardless of how they dress it up, their beliefs in practice are that some people are good and some bad innately, as a social class, regardless of individual behavior. This is what Hlynka and I are objecting to, and drawing an equivalence from.
@Hoffmeister25 claimed that he can't be accused of framing his worldview in terms of oppressor/oppressed because he doesn't believe in the progressive conception of human rights. I was pointing out that many people don't believe in progressive human rights, but still adopt an oppressor/oppressed worldview. Nor, I might add, does it much matter if one uses the terms "oppressor" or "oppressed", or finds some other term for "good" and "bad". There is a core nature that shines through regardless.
The question was framed specifically regarding his maxim of "become worthy of power, be handed power" maxim. He is indeed capable of being the boss, and being effective in the role. Can he build power, from scratch, and with himself not on top? Can he join someone else's heirarchy and still function? Can he serve a king, not as vizier, but as dogcatcher if that's the job that needs doing? Can he follow?
It rather depends on the nature of the inequality being posited. In any case, it's not the only reason, but it's certainly a potential reason, and a cause for concern. People who see power as an end need to be kept as far from it as possible. Good leaders approach leadership as service. Bad leaders approach it as something they're entitled to, something others owe them. Those who actually possess superior qualities do not generally need to trumpet those qualities; in a healthy environment, they will be evident to those around you, who will see giving you a chance to exercise them as a benefit to everyone. But already, I'm presuming a healthy environment, presuming selflessness on the part of the leader, presuming a desire to serve... and it's not obvious that these presumptions can be made for Moldbug or his ilk.
I'm not talking about Trump. I'm talking about how one structures their relationships with the people immediately around them, how they come together to form hierarchy in the immediate and concrete sense of ordinary life, not in population-level abstractions. Do they look at the people around them as their community, or as human resources to be exploited? Are they willing to work with those weaker than themselves?
Criminals do not lose their moral value when they commit crimes. On the other hand, moral value doesn't preclude lethal self-defense or lawful execution either. We don't kill people because they have less moral value, we kill them because they are doing something that justifies stopping them by any means necessary, or because they've done something bad enough that no lesser punishment would be just. Moral value necessarily means moral accountability as well. "Restorative Justice", on the other hand, is scorned for being two lies for the price of one; nothing is restored, and so there is no justice.
There is a fundamental disagreement here about what justice is, how violence and conflict work, how interaction between groups of humans works. seeing it pop up over and over again, even in my own thinking, is what convinced me that Hlynka's thesis was correct.
Willingness to punish is not labeling someone "irredeemable". Likewise, I think it matters a great deal what you punish people for, and how. I do not think there is much similarity between trads and wokes in this regard.
...And this is one of the major points of disagreement. There are no proxies for behavior. Smart and Dumb are completely orthogonal to Good and Evil; neither axis says anything meaningful about the other. Dumber people will almost certainly have harder lives, and their evil will be more obviously legible, but that is not the same as them being morally lesser, or the smarter people being morally greater. Scott Aaronson has never intentionally broken a law, and appears to be smart as hell, and yet he's got evil in his heart, just like we all do.
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