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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   25443 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 8, 2024

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It started off with angry, poor people looking for a scapegoat

I don't think that people really do this on a mass scale, and I've never seen an actual argument put forth for this thesis. It seems like one of those cached thoughts that just got repeated enough until everyone believed it.

Not to say that large social groups are always infallibly correct when it comes to political beliefs either. But generally, people don't just make shit up out of nothing. When progressives complain about straight white men, are they looking for a "scapegoat" for all their problems? I don't think that's accurate. Their complaints are grounded in actual facts, its just that there's disagreement over the cause and interpretation of those facts.

Very naive. And it depends what you consider "nothing". You can base huge lies on tiny amounts of real evidence. Repeat it often enough, with punishments for nonconformity, people will adopt them.

I misspoke. That was a poor way of phrasing it.

I agree that people do make things up sometimes, although I'd note that an intentional lie as an attack against a designated enemy is different from "scapegoating".

It's mainly in the context of inter-ethnic conflicts that I'm particularly suspicious of the idea of "scapegoating", because the contemporary intelligentsia is structurally incapable of acknowledging that such conflicts might be grounded in genuine concerns (unless it's the concerns of a party who has already been given a privileged position in the oppression stack). Sometimes, group A doesn't like group B because group B really just did something to piss them off. But acknowledging this, instead of blaming it on misrecognition, irrational fear, and the nebulous force of racism, opens the door to justifying racism, in their minds. So there's a tendency to engage in motivated reasoning on this issue.

But generally, people don't just make shit up out of nothing.

Do you actually really believe it?

people don't just make shit up out of nothing

Humanity is a lot more unhinged than your intuitions are ready to admit. We make shit up to justify mass murder all the time.

There's countless historical examples, and both sides of both major ongoing wars are blood libeling each other right now. The reason people initially doubted rumors of the Holocaust wasn't an assumption of good character on the part of Germans, but rather that the Entente had so thoroughly lied about the vile Hun and his violent treachery that any similar claims were immediately suspect.

Go read anything about the Cultural Revolution. Documented stories of people getting shot over criticizing a mango and cannibalism of people rumored to be the children of landlords will quickly dispel any notion that people can't become murderous mobs out of essentially nothing but insane nonsense.

When progressives complain about straight white men, are they looking for a "scapegoat" for all their problems?

Yes.

"Men punching random women in NYC: a desperate last gasp of the male rage fueling MAGA"

My favorite example from the last six hours of making shit up out of whole cloth to scapegoat the enemy, although I'm sure it'll be topped by tomorrow

Or how #StopAsianHate saw a meteoric rise when the implicit or explicit blame was cast upon white men, but then got memory-holed when too many inconvenient videos surfaced that those predominantly responsible for acts of Asian hatred were black.

A convincing case can be made that modern liberal movements have in fact tamed their rhetoric of 'universal maga supremacy' vs 2015 because of the overwhelming amount of video evidence showing blacks (and MENA for europe) committing the antisocial crimes being lambasted, with exceedingly little evidence of roving gangs of white supremacists committing supposedly white supremacist crimes.

The end goal is to castigate the proximate enemy, with the likely outcome being that the neutering of the group identity will leave state institutional capture possible by progressives. This is the reason jan 6 is endlessly repeated in liberal media (and to unearth the memory hole, Anders Brevik) , while George Floyd riots are aggressively forgotten or characterized as false flags. If at any point the Powers that be are RIGHT that black criminality is a real problem, then it invalidates the operational means being deployed to undermine said Powers.

Ah, Amanda Marcotte. Thus demonstrating that a bad penny always turns up. She used to be rather commonly mentioned on Scott's "Things I Will Regret Writing" posts.

Really? Its a pretty common theory. See eg: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4497288

"Scapegoat theory has long been relied upon to explain periods of intolerance and opression towards minority groups."

When progressives complain about straight white men, are they looking for a "scapegoat" for all their problems?

Sometimes there are reasonable facts behind the complaints, but have you seen the litany of things "white supremacy" and "patriarchy" are casually blamed for?

I think it's kind of true.

The Nazis, or European reactionaries in general, didn't just randomly pick Jews to hate which admittedly is the impression you get from the most dumbed-down version of pop history, but the Jews did become scapegoats for the sins of modernity. The case against the Jews; they are responsible for social revolution, the dissolution of pre-industrial community and the family, the victory of soulless commerce over blood and soil, atheism and the death of God, so on and on, is false. The Jews were latecomers to the European revolutionary movement, and all of the seeds of later bolshevism which were and are often put down to some inherently 'Jewish' character, were found in the very gentile French Revolution. Modern financial capitalism was likewise pioneered gentiles, as was the initial 17th - 18th century rationalist assault on established religion, etc. Jews did however become very prominent in all of those scenes for a variety of reasons, and therefore became the most obvious target for a violent reaction modernity in general, which is what Nazism and to a lesser extent other fascist movements were. It's like genocidal shadowboxing.

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