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Various thoughts, probably won't be too cohesive...

On the first point, I'm not a parent but I do feel like the healthiest attitude to hope to pass on something true, useful and right while also recognising that they're going to be their own person, shaped by the world and culture around them and not just by their parents. I really can't relate to the attitude of wanting or expecting your children to be the same as you, although at the same time I can understand a certain protectiveness over what children are exposed to, since it's obviously true that children are more easily influenced than adults are. Probably this attitude comes from me having a good relationship with my parents.

I feel like the best defence of disgust is that it often points to something more important beneath it, maybe the average person can't philosophically justify all of their disgust-based taboos (against excrement, incest and cannibalism, for example) but it's probably not a good idea to disregard them entirely based on the word of the first convincing sophist you encounter. Still, I think the best argument in favor of paying attention to disgust is that it may point to a more profound insight or justification, obviously abandoning that attempt at justification entirely is not a great idea for a convincing or reflective movement.

I really don't think that characterising the driving forces of "the right" as nihilists and opportunists is accurate - not because they're not present, as they must be in any movement, but because in my opinion taking people at their word that they really do believe the things they say is usually the best approach. Inconsistencies are more likely to be the result of hypocrisy than some elaborate 4D chess game.

I'm honestly never sure how seriously to take comparisons of things to the demonic, because sometimes it's metaphorical, sometimes its an honest conviction in evil spirits, and sometimes it a combination of the two that makes sense from a certain spiritual understanding of the world. It's a useful rhetorical move to the right audience but only if you can at least justify the comparison with Satan.

Specifically on the last point, I doubt that the "centrists" complaining about cancel culture are the same as the ones to blame for it. Totally depends on what you consider as "centrism" obviously, since both "right" and "left" are subjective the borders of what is considered "centrist" are even more nebulous.

I guess my main concern with the direction politics is heading in is that there seems to be less of a focus on principles and more of a focus on which side is winning. It's occurring on both sides of the spectrum in my opinion, but it really doesn't matter which side it more to blame because it's self-reinforcing - once the other side basically admits that they're going to use any tactic that works to win, it's unclear what the appropriate response is other than to do the same.

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As a general rule, natural conservatives – not always republicans, but conservative in outlook – tend to fear change because they’re always close to the margin and a bad year, or even a small disaster, could ruin them. If they are farmers, for example, and they switch from corn to soy or whatever and it turns out the crops fail they’re screwed. A person who has a degree – a lawyer, for example – can afford to be liberal when it comes to immigration because he’s not directly threatened. He’s not going to lose his job to an illegal immigrant. A person who works a menial job, on the other hand, is going to regard immigrants as a threat. And he’ll be right.

The lawyer’s attitudes would change in a heartbeat if there really was a threat, like white upper-class suburbs proclaiming their support for BLM while doing everything in their power to keep black people out of their schools.

To paraphrase the old saying, a liberal is a conservative who thinks change will either benefit him or have a neutral effect. A conservative is a liberal who thinks change will have a very negative effect on him personally.

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I read a fair amount online, but hardly anything that offers this level of integration between what the writer believes and the writer's model of what motivates the outgroup to believe/behave differently. I hope to read more posts like this from various perspectives. (For a specific example, I would quite like to know what NIMBYs think motivates YIMBYs.)

>... psychological evidence that conservatives have always been more prone to feelings of disgust than the left is not hard to find.

There is also recent research which does not find this association (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0146167219880191). I wonder if there any politically charged issues in psychology where there aren't contrary findings.

> The right is perpetually getting caught doing this or that hypocritical thing about criminal justice. Endorsing harsh punishments for others, but not when their own friends or kin, metaphorical or literal kin, get caught.

Am I correct that in your model, left-wingers would be more likely to admire Guzman El Bueno than right-wingers? See here for the legend for which he's known: (http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/yonge/deeds/guzman.html).

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I find 'all of this' to be exceedingly tedious because "left" and "right" always seem so idiosyncratic. _Maybe_ you and, perhaps, Freddie deBoer might mostly/somewhat agree on what 'the left' is? Or maybe not! Sometimes the nastiest disagreements are between people that others would judge are much more similar than almost anyone else.

Given the 'generational drift' you mention, it seems reasonable to think that what you consider 'centrist', e.g. 'wokeness' or 'cancel culture', might still be meaningfully 'leftist' (or leftist imports) from previous generations. It is of course true that 'the right' has and does engage in the same basic behavior and to a large, if not greater, extent. It does seem to me that the right has been pretty ineffective for a long time – but maybe that's only because of the places I've lived, the social circles of which I've been a member, and the specific things I've paid attention to.

You're a leftist I respect and follow; there are some others, tho I strongly expect that none of you would agree on who of you are 'real leftists'. I don't follow any people on 'the right' – or at least none that I think even somewhat match the examples in this post. It seems unfair to me to even consider your examples as 'political', tho I admit they're some non-zero, and maybe even significant fraction, of 'politics' in practice. I feel the same way about most political 'rhetoric' tho – approximately none of it is about ideas, or reality, and almost all of it is some genre of 'venting'.

I (try to) feel for everyone tho – it seems obvious that almost everyone is very afraid, and many are _terrified_. That's particularly sad, to me, because, as bad as things are (and they are), they are in many important ways _amazingly_ good. It is something like a 'miracle' that everything isn't much worse.

I didn't like this post. It felt excessively cruel and nasty and pointless. I hope there was some benefit to you at least in having written it. (My overall estimation of the value to me of continuing to follow you hasn't budged much tho. I do appreciate your perspective still generally.)

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1) I think this was a really interesting post. I don't know how much I think is true, but I think it's interesting.

2) I'm sorry to nitpick as this was just a small part of the post, but it's clearly false to say that the post neo-liberal consensus is that no one redistributes and everything it privatised. In most rich countries, healthcare and education and almost all government expenditures. Even the US government spends more on healthcare as a percentage of GDP than the UK. Because these services are free at the point of use and finnaced by proggressive taxation they're also redistrutibve.

The biggest item in most rich country budgets is pensions. What is this if not redistribution! And obviously the core funcutions of the state - courts, army, police, prisons, core civil servants - and almost exclusively in public hands. This is ideological depolitisation in a pure form - most people don't even notice that not providing pensions or free primary and secondary education isn't anywhere near public debate.

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Literally nothing you attribute to the right is characteristic of, much less exclusive to the right. (At least the right as you define it, drawing a distinction between it and liberals/centrists. You are, of course, correct that the current political discourse is establishment-driven and attempts to blame the left for it are disingenuous, but realizing that should act as a discouragement from basing your argument on any establishment-defined categories, including "the right".) It's impossible to claim that establishment "liberals" don't want to mold children, or aren't driven by disgust ("upset fearfulness at the cruelty of the world" is a Russel's conjugation, a distinction without a difference), or don't have a hypocritical double standard (one for itself, the other for unwashed masses they're afraid of), or that they aren't full of opportunists striving to join the established elite (who do, in fact, often join left-wing orgs in the process; then invariably drive them to the ground because they're incapable of not just organizing, but any kind of cooperation). In fact, liberals would be the ones to come to mind were I to read about, e.g., "a revolt against reality from people whose sense of disgust has become so hypersensitized that the real world makes them naseous" without additional context. It's a (young, SM-addicted) liberal stereotype now, and for a good reason.

And the few real distinctions you're using aren't political, but cultural, and paint a consistent picture of class, rather than ideological, divide. Compare Harry Potter's tale of joining and excelling at elite institution with the affirmation of mundane everyday life that drives much of Japanese escapist pop-culture. What you're (following liberals in) doing is pretty much pathologizing commoners' desires to live a happy fulfilling life, a life that is increasingly not available to them. Them turning to "the right" is a symptom, first of their desires being tautologically stigmatized as "right-wing", second of the right actually addressing their concerns (it does not matter how honest or plausible or grounded in reality its vision is, it will win by default against the liberal alternative of "join the bourgeois/PMC hivemind, and no, we're not giving you the resources required to thrive in it").

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In general, these points are off, and the skew isn't only out of hostility to your subject: I would characterize it as a blindness to human nature, which is apparent to varying degrees.

You don't seem to understand the human urge to reproduce, or the emotion of disgust. "...Connection with family gets coded as altruistic in our society," as if it could be coded differently. "The kids are getting alternative attitudes," as if the concern is over an alternate as such, and not the specific alternate.

The left is not convinced they're losing; this is affectation, to maintain the illusion that the right has not been getting stomped on for three centuries.

Calling an appreciation for the true, the good, and the beautiful an "ideological movement towards fascism" is calling a deer a horse; please stop rubbing it in.

I'm not familiar with anime culture, but I suspect the "revolt against reality" comment is much more projection than it is truth about your subject. It evokes the "struggle against reality" skit from Life of Brian.

"On the scale of politics, [cancel culture] is a relatively minor problem." This is just regular politically-self-serving blindness. I wouldn't expect you to forthrightly admit this in your post, but for clarity's sake: obviously, cancellation is perpetrated by the liberal left, on the right, and the exceptions prove the rule.

It seems that in exchange for admitting that cancel culture exists, you have decided to call it bad, because it's mean. You are afraid of being cancelled, and of its effect on your mental health; I truly do wish you the best, despite any disagreements.

Have you considered that you are in disproportionately dense company being on the left, with a mental disorder? Maybe you've seen the studies to that effect, or the one which demonstrates that testosterone can turn male Democrats red.

Here's a miscellaneous thought: the difference between left and right is far more biological than most moderns, and especially leftists, being generally deniers of biology, believe.

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