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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   29422 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 31, 2023

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What I struggle with is seeing how you get from

there is a spectrum of philosophies between Rousseau on the left and Hobbes on the right

to

when you're born outside the Matrix you know the steak aint real

From where I’m standing there are many, many strands of conservatism. Pro trade-Union, anti trade-union; pro free-speech, pro obscenity laws; pro planned economy, pro free trade, pro protectionism; conceiving of the nation as a land and the people of that land, conceiving of the nation as a creed or economic zone; pro monarchy and nobility, pro parliament; so on and so on, and that’s just British conservatism, let alone French, German, or American.

To boil these down into a post-Enlightenment Rousseau vs Hobbes schism is already pretty subjective and lossy, but I can get where you’re coming from and we can debate to some extent.

Where you do lose me is when you jump from that to “all of you are traitors to the movement that you claim to belong to, and you’re too far gone to see it. It doesn’t matter what tradition you think you’re part of, I know what you are.” Not only is it frankly arrogant, it precludes all possibility of meaningful debate. You are the wise sage who knows how shit is, and your interlocutors are either errant sheep in need of guidance or secret liberals.

If you’ll forgive me for bringing stuff up from another thread:

The liberal asks "what's the point of defending yourself (or others) if it lands you in prison?" and the conservative replies "to defend yourself". It really is that simple.

I get that you’re trying to make a point about inferential distance here, but it’s an inferential distance between you and the person you’re talking to, not between Real Conservatives and Fake Conservatives.

You’re an interesting person and I would like to debate with you more, but at the same time I and mine have been conservative for generations and it’s very frustrating to be lectured by somebody from another continent about what that means, even indirectly. Hence this rather vehement reply.

What I struggle with is seeing how you get from

there is a spectrum of philosophies between Rousseau on the left and Hobbes on the right

to

when you're born outside the Matrix you know the steak ahnt real.

At the risk of coming across as a shameless self-promoter. this is what my posts on inferential distance have been about. Academia has become overwhelmingly left wing/Rousseauean and as a result there is now a massive Leviathan shaped hole in the popular discourse that is immediately obvious to anyone outside of the secular academic memeplex but not to those dwelling within it.

Horseshoe theory is bullshit because it presupposes that the radical socialists cosplaying as X are somehow fundamentally different from the radical socialists cosplaying as Y, rather than just being two different flavors of radical socialist.

I'm not just quibbling about definitions of particular words, I'm rejecting the entire framework upon which your politics are based.

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