So yeah, this is gonna be another political post - specifically, these are some random thoughts borne from my many months of cutting my teeth arguing with reactionaries in online gaming chatrooms. Some heavy stuff in this one, but there's a beautiful punchline at the end if you wanna just skip to that.
- 1 -
I have a very particular sort of irony towards the phrase "facts don't care about your feelings", because I feel like my base emotional and aesthetic impulses are as right wing as it gets. Leftism has always been very "unnatural" for me; I'm a trust fund kid living a sheltered, suburban, upper-middle-class life, and I'm a beneficiary of all oppressive societal structures. The biggest hardship I faced growing up (besides mental illness) was being a social outcast who took refuge in gaming and the Internet. Every persuasive influence in my life was directing me towards the "alt right", and I somehow resisted.
I'm also very prone to being disgusted - a trait that is very correlated with conservatism. I have that same visceral revulsion towards people and practices that are visibly "abnormal".
It sounds pompous to say, but I feel like I arrived at my beliefs by thinking constantly about issues through the lens of the base philosophical framework that I kinda have, along with carefully listening to, and sympathizing with, people with different experiences whose validity I have to constantly remind myself of. To bring things back to Ben Shapiro, for example, I've never been able fully empathize with trans people - I have no idea what gender dysphoria (or, for that matter, gender euphoria) could possibly feel like - but all I know is that it's apparently incentive enough to make vast swathes of people go through transitioning, and potentially alienate themselves from half the population. And there's just no logical reason in my mind why society shouldn't take every conceivable measure to help them along.
A lot of times it feels like the only thing preventing me from becoming a culture warrior ranting about "degeneration" is my rational faculties. I have to always be mindful that facts don't care about my feelings.
- 2 -
Fair warning for this one: I'm gonna entertain some gross hypotheticals.
Even if ethnostatists were right that there are insurmountable genetic differences between races, that black people could not have created modern society the way white people supposedly did, wouldn't this only be more reason for us to integrate the "lesser races" instead of making them live in separate countries?
Like… you could say that people with Down's Syndrome or low-functioning autism are genetically less intelligent, but this is precisely why we take special measures to accommodate and integrate these people. It would be that much more cruel to suggest they should have to live with other such disabled people and try to survive and build an economy for themselves.
I've never heard anyone make this point, and I can definitely understand why - maybe it's just obvious - but it just seems to me like a direct contradiction in what these people say, one that just completely dispels the idea that they're motivated by anything except racial hatred. "No, we're not 'supremacist', we think that everyone should get to have their own ethnostate! But also we think that your state is definitely gonna be a dumpster fire because its average IQ will be like 50."
I dunno... maybe people should stop arguing about the Bell Curve and stuff. They want us to get mired in the scientific debate, dissecting every stupid fraudulent statistic they throw at us. Maybe we can sidestep that, and make them try to justify their stance on moral grounds. Then we're not arguing on their terms anymore, and we have a better chance of winning over the crowd.
(Of course, this is assuming that you're in a rare situation where you have to argue with them. If not, then don't.)
- 3 -
Speaking of which, today an online "acquaintance" of mine in Sweden who is a hardcore nationalist and social conservative was asked why he didn't attend his country's military parade. In response, he posted this picture of them holding up gay pride flags, and he said "the military is extremely political here and I want nothing to do with it".
Which, for my money, is a quote for the ages, and a perfect distilment of where 2010s political discourse has taken us. An open, jingoistic celebration of state violence was "apolitical" until they started waving rainbows around. I don't know about you, but I'm ready to end the decade now.