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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   35215 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 26, 2023

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I think you'd get a lot out of the following article - https://www.ecosophia.net/hate-new-sex/

That’s what happens whenever people decide that an ordinary human emotion is unacceptable and insist that good people don’t experience it. A culture of pretense, hypocrisy, and evasion springs up to allow them to vent the unacceptable emotion on some set of acceptable targets without admitting that they were doing so. That’s what emerged in Victorian society once people convinced themselves that sexual desire was the root of all evil, and it’s what has emerged in our time as people have convinced themselves that hate fills the same role. In a very real sense, these days, hate is the new sex.

If you have any doubts concerning this, dear reader, observe the way that the same people who were sporting LOVE TRUMPS HATE bumper stickers a year ago talk about Donald Trump and his supporters today. Back in January of 2016, when I first predicted Trump’s victory, I pointed out that if you wanted to hear really over-the-top hate speech, all you had to do was listen to a group of comfortably well-to-do Americans in the bicoastal urban bubble talk about white working class Americans in the flyover states. That’s become even more true now than it was then. Take the rhetoric currently being flung by well-off Democratic voters at Trump supporters, swap out the ethnic labels for any other set you choose, and you’ll have a hard time telling it apart from the rantings of any other group of bigots.

That's a blog written by a prominent astrologer. Even if I agree with what they're saying I just can't view it with credibility.

I mean check out this line from his wiki "He is currently blogging at Ecosophia, where he has written about the intersection of magic and politics."

"He criticises the openness of liberal occultists, arguing that magical practices benefit from more obscurity and secrecy" I mean fucking christ

If you don't like occultism or things influenced by it, what are you doing on the rationalist side of the internet? Did you somehow miss all the references to the kabbalah in Scott's work? He even directly mentions in one of his articles on Slatestarcodex that he has a lot of friends who are practicing occultists. If you're going to judge people based on an interest in the occult, you're going to have to throw Scott Alexander out with the bathwater too. For the record I think that if you actually listen to Greer speak on those topics he's eminently reasonable, but I'm not going to try to convince you.

Either way, I don't understand why you think that an author has to be judged by the entirety of their work as summarised by wikipedia. There are plenty of people who I trust in some domains but not in others, and I often find that even people I disagree with strongly on important issues can produce compelling works of writing. I don't agree with everything Friedrich Nietzsche said and I definitely think that Plato got some things wrong too, but that doesn't mean I can't recognise the quality of their work and get something out of it.

We have to draw the line somewhere and if that line is not at believing in astrology and practicing magic, I don't know where it is.

I don't think that's a particularly good metric. You're tossing out almost the entirety of human culture - you're throwing away Plato, Isaac Newton... hell, you're tossing just about the entirety of pre-Renaissance cultural output into the bin. Moreover, I view a lot of modern beliefs as having substantially less truth-value in them than astrology or magic - say what you will about astrology, but it produces less incorrect information than modern social justice theories, antiracist activism and a decent chunk of both libertarian and communist ideology. The fact that a lot of insightful and compelling writers believe in nonsense like tabula rasa doesn't mean that they can't produce great work in other areas.

i wouldn't consider that standard to apply to people like Plato, Newton etc. They were just around at a different time, which just didn't have the same level of understanding of the world, so a lot of ideas and thoughts about the world were given room to be elevated. I'm not going to fault someone for not knowing space is a vacuum when they lived thousands of years before we went to space, for instance. Just like I'm not going to fault someone for believing something wrong about the spread of disease prior to the invention of germ theory.

I would agree with what you're saying about things like social justice, antiracism etc. But those are really low quality modes of thought. Exceeding that standard, which I'm not sure astrology does but it's certainly not substantially below that standard, does not lend credibility. That's not good company to be in.

Also disagree that a writer should be regarded as being capable of producing great work in one area and nonsense in another. If those areas are substantially different, that's one thing. And there are always exceptions to the rule. But in analyzing the world, if they indulge in nonsense that's a good indicator that their critical thinking abilities and abilities to discern the true nature of things are probably fairly weak.

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