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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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it is not because you think their reasoning is sound or their character, but that they got lucky enough to say a smart thing.

That's not what the phrase 'reasoning is sound' means? If their argument is sound, their 'reasoning is sound'. Very dumb people often understand things correctly, e.g. they go about day-to-day life normally, and that requires thousands of bits of 'sound reasoning' - what made that sound, did i buy food yesterday, etc. "Get lucky" and "take seriously" are entirely compatible! If someone with 100iq, purely randomly, discovered the true theory of quantum gravity, the 150iq physicists would love to take his argument seriously. And I've learned a lot from some objectively stupid people who still, by coincidence or life experience, had interesting information.

More specifically, I've had teachers in subjects who were, clearly, much dumber than me, but they had lots of domain knowledge that I didn't have, which it was useful for me to learn, so I learned it! It's difficult to say I wasn't taking said teacher seriously as I learned all that stuff from them, in the exact same way I would from a smarter teacher. Yet that's what your argument would suggest.

They have their own individual preferences that vary between each other.

But nothing is monolithic - the reason for the islam example was precisely because there are a lot of liberal muslims who don't share most of the ideas of conservative muslims. And, similarly, that phrase, as it describes women, is referring to a strong tendency among most women, not all women.

For example, I think PUA stuff does universally not work, and...

Then what explains the many women who say it works on them? An example of which I linked, but there are many more. In general, if one observes peoples' stated desires, they are so clearly influenced by social norms, mimesis, and all sorts of complicated contingencies that they are clearly very often wrong. Not as explicit lies, but more as combinations of alienation, general confusion, not wanting to seem weird, copying the desires of others, confusing signs for signified, etc. So I can just do this - from your perspective, both modern conservative women and generally past 'reactionary' women were wrong about their desires, right? So it's clearly possible.

"Sane" and "healthy", in my opinion, fall under "not being with someone who thinks you should be subservient to them or they should be subservient to you

So have 98% of all male humans who have ever lived not been "sane"? Because 'women have lower status than men and are in some what subservient" is the norm, obviously in many different forms, historically.

A sexist is not a sane, healthy person.

Yet sexists can lead ... perfectly normal lives? Again, by this claim, 99% of all male humans who have ever lived are not sane or healthy. Yet they lived very similar lives to male humans today, and we can read their cultural artifacts, books, diaries, and they clearly are, by every conventional meaning of the word, sane and healthy.

Does your wife know that you think, explicitly, she should be subservient to you?

I haven't ever claimed, anywhere, that women should be subservient to men, or husbands should be to their wives. You've conflated my arguments with the general sphere of 'right-wing arguments' you're seeing here.