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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   29623 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 2, 2023

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Left-wing art has stuff like Star Trek, at least, which in its earlier incarnations makes SJWs a bit uncomfortable because of the hiring hot actresses to wear short skirts and so on but overall still articulates a pretty attractive vision of a post-scarcity future where humans have overcome their differences and enjoy exploring the universe in their pajamas while having minor conflicts with each other that all get resolved in the same episode or maybe one episode later by everyone learning a moral lesson.

The latter makes them far more uncomfortable than the former. They're progressives, they cannot have a particular goal that they'll be satisfied reaching, or they'll become conservatives. There's a reason why they reintroduced racism and economic inequality in the new iterations of Star Trek, and a reason why a lot of TNG fans aren't SJWs.

I think it can be misleading to conflate the Eternal Struggleists with the leftists, even if at the moment they are a very nearly perfect subset. My understanding is that other times and places have had plenty of space for people who were existentially offended at the idea of an attainable/attained success criterion while having ideas that our modern classification would unambiguously label "right of center". Any setting with religious crusaders comes to mind (in "Environmentalists are the new Christians" arguments, I always like raising the thought experiment of presenting Catholics with a worldly plan to discharge Original Sin once and for all).

Well I don't often say this and I don't often agree with you, but you have a point! I never saw it like that before.

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