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Notes -
Being charitable, let's consider this post in the context of (pseudo-?)Impassionata's previous top-level post post-return to TheMotte:
To me, the argument seems to be as follows. "Only nerds think of humans as rational agents", so they are blind to their own irrational or unjust impulses. Thus, when they follow the proper script for interacting with girls, they think that they ought be rewarded for acting in accordance with this rational system of "rules". As such, when they are justly pushed into a locker instead, they have no clue why. The hero jock, on the other hand, is able to cut through the bullshit, understand the nerd's diabolical motives for what they are (motives that the nerd has successfully wordcel'd himself into not even understanding himself), and intuitively punish him for this, stepping outside the bounds of reason.
Now, Control-F nerds with heterodox high-decouplers, who coolly and rationally debate the viability of ethnostates or the lack of consciousness in women. Any convincing arguments put forth are nothing but mere post-hoc rationalizations of preexisting evil beliefs, just as the nerd's talking-to-women script is merely a means of covering up impure desires. It's similar to the whole "Elephant in the Brain" thesis: any debate is not meant to arrive at the truth, but rather, to persuade others and even oneself that their own cause is the truth. As such, it is the role of the just person to ignore all of this reasoned argumentation and use whatever tools are necessary in order to silence hateful views.
...
I personally am skeptical of this thesis. Is conversation and debate really that futile? If so, then pseudo-Impassionata is wasting his time by engaging in conversation and debate here. Even he must recognize then, assuming that he's not just trolling or motivated by a primal desire to win online arguments, that there is utility in debate. At the very least, it can cut away the cruft that accumulates on top of an issue, revealing the fundamental loci of disagreement beneath. But I won't waste time on this, because more has been better written on this subject.
Instead, I'll indulge in a bit of armchair psychoanalysis: what's with this common theme of bullying nerds? Indeed, a while back, either here or in one of our previous venues, there was a post noticing a tendency for masculine posturing among a certain subset of progressives, a fixation on positioning themselves in apposition to loser dork hateful nerds. I believe that the post was written in the context of reproductively viable worker ants, which makes the fixation ironic: anyone involved in that has to be blind to not see that they're a nerd. So what gives? One hypothesis is that it's an attempt by Theater Kids (I would be grateful to anyone who knows where the comment introducing that framing is) to gain some amount of status by putting down the other group that seems to inhabit the same rung of the social ladder, Math Geeks. This would explain both the odd posturing and the focus on the "Hollywood" (as anti_dan put it above) narrative of jocks versus nerds. Maybe throw in that one "high school is the last time in your life that you can be someone" comment as well? (Again, I'd be grateful to anyone with a link.)
I don't know how much this hypothesis is actually worth anything. But in an effort to avoid merely sneering, I'll flesh it out a bit: I do think that an underrated determinant of which side Very Online people take in the Culture War is the degree to which they enjoy playing social games. Anecdotal evidence:
In my own experience, one of the factors that repelled me from Team Progress was noticing that the rules offered by progressives for dating as a man do not align with the actions of the most successful men.
A post (again, I don't have the link) on morlock-holmes.tumblr.com that I remember reading talked about a play, which was to star a white male lead, in which the playwright queried a diverse group of progressives on how to write this straight white male; the answers were all things like "Make him a good listener", "Make sure he stays in his lane", "Make him active in ceding to women's insights". The kicker is that when the play was finished, all the same members of the group hated the lead for his annoying lack of backbone.
That one comment here on TheMotte saying that when whites move into a neighborhood, it's gentrification; when whites move out, it's white flight; when whites live among PoC, it's colonization; when whites live apart, it's segregation: so where are whites supposed to live?
The frequent thesis that the constant "firmware updates" for progressive terminology are important from a status signaling perspective.
The "self-hating" whites from "I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup" who don't actually hate all whites.
The idea tying together these scattered examples is that progressive orthodoxy rewards people who are able to read between the lines, take things seriously but not literally, navigate complex social environments. If you're the kind of guy who can recite a litany of rules for dating without slipping up, but then know exactly when to break them in practice, then you're rewarded by progressivism: your less-adept competition is filtered out. If you're able to tolerate and write screeds against whites despite being white yourself, then you're rewarded: you draw suspicion towards less-progressive whites, while proving that you are "one of the good ones". If you can orate against the evil of toxic masculinity while still being able to take charge when it counts, then you're rewarded by progressivism.
Hence why Theater Kids are more progressive and why Math Geeks, who axiomatize and theorem-prove, are more likely to fall into heterodoxy. It's no surprise, then, that the progressive is arguing via indirect social shaming ("you all are nerds who deserve to be shoved into lockers by Cool Jocks like me") against rational debate.
Does this idea make sense? Does it accord with your own experiences?
I believe this is the original Theater Kid post by @Hoffmeister25 https://www.themotte.org/post/381/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/68537?context=8#context
Yep, that’s the one; thank you.
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Being charitable to attackers is being uncharitable to their targets.
Don't "be charitable to" trolls.
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