DrokkIt wrote:Kirbmarc wrote:DrokkIt wrote:I've been hovering over posting a social media rant about this that will probably lead to me being ostracised.
I don't know how it happened but everyone seems beholden by what is clearly a set of VERY BAD IDEAS now and it's actually depressing to watch this play out in real time.
If an idea is justification for violence (instead of just resistance), and it's apparently a given truth that people cannot change their ideas as response to debate, then surely we are now justified in using violence against children born into communities with these ideas..?
It's mind-blowing that people are buying into this, and yes, I do think this could lead to large-scale conflicts.
What makes this even worse is that nazis/racial nationalists always existed in the US, along with other cunts like the KKK or the Westboro Baptist Church, but very few people ever supported violence against them. People protested the WBC cleverly, by mocking their "God hates fags" idiocy with "God hates fangs" or "Cthulhu eats humans", by staging counter-demonstrations, by turning them into a laughingstock than no one would ever touch with a ten foot pole.
It was generally assumed that
REAL violence against people with vile ideas was off-limits. The SJW explosion of recent years seems to have changed the rules. It's the logical progression from "safe spaces", "triggering", "microaggression" and "punching up". The consequences of the stupid ideas we've seen among the FT-Baboons have become socially widespread to the point where nazi-punching is seen as protecting democracy in many circles.
The SJWs and their post-modern approach to violence have create a widespread climate where far too many people consider insults and ideas they don't like to be equally as bad as real violence. This is a huge danger. This is corroding liberal democratic principles.
I would make the argument it has also corroded the notion of consistent and clear logic. I literally think people who have gotten into this stuff come out unable to parse basic value propositions without the context of deontological oppression, moreover SJW-ism is full of the kind of sophistry that says appeals to logic or empirical verification are
inherently bad. Po-mo shite of the worst order.
That's why the comparison between SJW-ism and religion is apt - these are
rationalization engines. IOW, people are now being taught in the humanities at universities how to rationalize, as opposed to how to reason.
By "rationalization engine" I mean something like this: for every input, the output is monotonously the same: "because God", "because the Devil", "because Capitalism", "because the Patriarchy", "because white cisheteronormative hegemony", etc. The analogy with a virus is also apt - these are social viruses or mind-viruses, people infected by them are victims of a blind meme-cluster that "wants" to replicate itself, to tile the universe with itself. Again, the notion of "sphexishness" fits in here.
(One might say that scientific answers are also going to be "mono" in some sense - e.g. "it's gravity" - but the difference is that science is based on testing-to-destruction, as opposed to shoring-up-with-evidence.)
Big picture speculation:-
What I find interesting in this is the long view. I follow Robert L O'Connell's thesis that the transition from pre-agricultural/gatherer-hunter societies to agricultural city-states is marked by our co-evolution with crop and animal monocultures. There's an internal logic to guarding grain stores or shepherding herds, which leads to habit patterns that are insectile, in the manner of hive insects (i.e. it's a kind of convergent evolution, but with a memetic aspect on our part substituting for the biological aspect).
IOW, because of our tremendous mental (memetic) plasticity, our ability to take on habit patterns that overlay and can even contradict our innate biological drives (originally based on a facility for mimicry), for a substantial period in our prehistory and early history, we veered very close to becoming ant-like, or bee-like - cf. the pyramidal, heirarchical societies of the Bronze and Iron Ages, etc., their parallels in Mesoamerica and South America, etc.
In that context, the kind of large-scale war (with mass cannon-fodder) that humanity has seen for the past few millennia was a "governor" - high carbohydrate diet leads to higher rates of pregnancy in city state cultures, war (initiated by the predatory herd-based cultures) is the release valve for population pressure (slavery also plays a part here).
That has tailed off as the need to protect grain stores or herds has tailed off (IOW, as technology and capitalism have given us the ability to make more with less). But we're still left with the lingering after-effects. Rationalization engines, faith-based thinking, herd-like thinking - these are the remnants. In the long view, I think SJW-ism is one of the final forms of this insectile type of thinking, a secular quasi-religion, with equality of outcome as the unquestioned absolute value.
The problem is: in a world with high tech WMD, it's a race between this half-life of rationalization/faith-based memes, and the increasing spread of reason-based memes that's taking its place. In the
really big picture, this may well be the Great Filter (a hypothesized reason for the Fermi Paradox): supposing intelligence just is memetic plasticity (the discovery by a species of an advanced ability to program action on the fly, as opposed to having it solely biologically-determined), then perhaps every species that gets to our level of intelligence comes to this ironic crux point where the very "neat trick" that enables a species to become apex predator of its planet also contains the seed of its downfall (if the race between faith and reason is lost).
The irony is that what at a small scale is "social glue" (faith-based rationalization) that keeps relatively small communities coherent, and vying with other relatively small communities, on a large scale, when you get vast memetic monocultures at loggerheads (e.g. say a three-cornered global fight between Islam vs. Christianity-based nationalism vs. SJW-ism/globalism), and then suppose one of them "wins", you get to the point where the blind replication of the mind-virus, with random variation, starts to lead to internal division - i.e. it's the civil war in amongst the victorious faith-based meme cluster that would really do us in. You can sort of see that within Islam itself - so long as there are cultures outside Islam, then people who are sick of the endless, endemic Islamic civil war can escape to other cultures. But then they (largely unwittingly) infect those other cultures, bringing the civil war with them. Suppose, say, Islam becomes the victorious memetic monoculture, then at some point there's no escape and the whole thing goes poof (it would be the same for the other two).
The way out is the way the West discovered; to turn internal strife to good account, to make it
useful as a means of bootstrapping knowledge. But the race between faith and reason is a race we could still lose.
