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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   26432 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 15, 2024

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To the Blue Tribe, there is a Leviathan: the socio-emotional consensus.

Oh, I too believe in the social contract, but I think the 'emotional' part above is doing the majority of the work for the Blue Tribe version. I'm more in the vein of this way it works out, from "The Ball and the Cross":

He was speaking exactly as a French bourgeois speaks to the manager of a restaurant. That is, he spoke with rattling and breathless rapidity, but with no incoherence, and therefore with no emotion. It was a steady, monotonous vivacity, which came not seemingly from passion, but merely from the reason having been sent off at a gallop. He was saying something like this:

“You refuse me my half-bottle of Medoc, the drink the most wholesome and the most customary. You refuse me the company and obedience of my daughter, which Nature herself indicates. You refuse me the beef and mutton, without pretence that it is a fast of the Church. You now forbid me the promenade, a thing necessary to a person of my age. It is useless to tell me that you do all this by law. Law rests upon the social contract. If the citizen finds himself despoiled of such pleasures and powers as he would have had even in the savage state, the social contract is annulled.”

“It's no good chattering away, Monsieur,” said Hutton, for the Master was silent. “The place is covered with machine-guns. We've got to obey our orders, and so have you.”

“The machinery is of the most perfect,” assented Durand, somewhat irrelevantly; “worked by petroleum, I believe. I only ask you to admit that if such things fall below the comfort of barbarism, the social contract is annulled. It is a pretty little point of theory.”

“Oh! I dare say,” said Hutton.

Durand bowed quite civilly and withdrew.

…“The place is on fire!” cried Quayle with a scream of indecent terror. “Oh, who can have done it? How can it have happened?”

A light had come into Turnbull's eyes. “How did the French Revolution happen?” he asked.

“Oh, how should I know!” wailed the other.

“Then I will tell you,” said Turnbull; “it happened because some people fancied that a French grocer was as respectable as he looked.”

Even as he spoke, as if by confirmation, old Mr. Durand re-entered the smoky room quite placidly, wiping the petroleum from his hands with a handkerchief. He had set fire to the building in accordance with the strict principles of the social contract.

You probably noticed after that unfortunate subway incident that left-wing reddit was quick to say "We failed Jordan Neely", and if you understand that statement, you understand the Blue Tribe.

Yes, society did fail him, by letting the "emotional" side of the "socio-emotional consensus" do all the work and so he could not be arrested, because that is police brutality, nor committed to a hospital, because One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, but he could be left to sink further into sickness and violence until the eventual end came as it did.

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