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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   29231 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 19, 2024

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Of course, this just moves the question back a step: why is the Blue tribe teaching its kids in such a way as to make them believe this narrative about the evils of the Red tribe? I think that's a result of status games without correction.

I think this is the wrong answer. Your answer should naturally prompt the question 'if its just arbitrary status games across all relevant areas and institutions, why do they all cohere to exactly the same result?'

These people already shared a framework which lead to all of them to arrive at the same conclusion regardless of their subject/position/domain. That should key you in to the fact that its not the competition per se.

As you mention:

And so teachers taught the (then-current) endpoints of these runaway status games to their students under the wholehearted belief that they were teaching something verified to be True.

The end-points were predetermined because they were all competing to do the same thing for the same moral reason. The end points existed before the institutions did. They were always driving towards them.

The academics in question are largely leftists, and leftist have always held that distinctions between things and people is the moral evil and that people who support fundamental distinctions between things are therefore the least moral persons. For example:

We aspire to live and die equal, the way we were born: we want real equality or death; this is what we need....We need not only that equality of rights written into the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen; we want it in our midst, under the roofs of our houses. We consent to everything for it, to make a clean slate so that we hold to it alone. Let all the arts perish, if need be, as long as real equality remains!...We lean towards something more sublime and more just: the common good or the community of property!... Let it at last end, this great scandal that our descendants will never believe existed! Disappear at last, revolting distinctions between rich and poor, great and small, masters and servants, rulers and ruled.

Let there no longer be any difference between people than that of age and sex. Since all have the same faculties and the same needs, let there then be for them but one education, but one nourishment. They are satisfied with one sun and one air for all: why then would the same portion and the same quality of food not suffice for each of them?

Already the enemies of the most natural order of things we can imagine raise a clamour against us.

Emphasis mine. Manifesto of the Equals, Gracchus Babeuf and the Conspiracy of the Equals 1796. It goes thousands of years back before this but this quote is the one I had at hand.

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