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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 14, 2023

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Shouldn’t this be evidence against the proposed dichotomy?

Not really, in fact explaining why constituencies reverse is part of the allure here.

If you're interested, give me an example and I'll see if we can walk through it.

Suppose a third category, neuter, defined by compromise positions.

In this taxonomy, the poles are theoretical, like the width of a line in geometry. Compromise positions are where we all are, stuck in a million tensions, being pulled off our center. What you call neuter I call synthesis, reality. No one is 100% one thing. No one is perfectly free, or perfectly unfree. We all exist as many contradictions in uneasy compromise with all the others.

Then what does it buy us?

At best, you’ve applied Principal Component Analysis to sociology. But correlation still isn’t causation, and just because you can model a position as a linear combination of some axes doesn’t imply they are meaningful.

It buys us a model of the world as conflict theory and a more realistic expectation of what progress and success should look like.

And a simple yet infinitely recursive method of disentangling issues into component dialectics.