Conversation

We need a word for “rule by people who sincerely believe they know how to rank the suffering in the world.” Something like referredpainarchy.
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It’s not quite either oppression olympics by professional victims or power-tripping by insincere sociopaths. This is strong empaths who genuinely trust their sense of empathetic pain. The people with unironic Troi complexes. Hmm. Troiarchy has a nice ring to it.
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They suffer from a sense of entitlement to political power that’s oddly similar to the divine right of kings. Both Trois and Kings claim to give voices to the unseen/unheard. 🤔
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It’s an odd sort of confidence. I’ll happily admit I haven’t endured much pain in my life. And while I can tell when someone is in more or less pain and guess at what their tolerance level is, I really wouldn’t trust my rankings very far. Some seem to have no such doubts.
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Just naming/flagging a problem. Clearly we need empathy factored into politics. Equally clearly, self-certainly makes any capacity a danger. In the empath world any systematic doubt is flagged gaslighting and dismissed. Like apostasy in religion.
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In The Religious Case Against Belief, James Carse made a decent case for grounding religious belief in doubt. Need something like The Empathetic Case Against Self-Certainty.
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Thoughts generally sparked by the question of how to unbundle woke conceptually. Unpopular topic but now’s the time to think hard about it. It’s a messier, more ambiguous, more complex phenomenon than Trumpism, and is in the emboldened mode the latter was in ~2016.
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The temptation a lot of people have succumbed to is to simply silently ignore it, retreat from the turf it has claimed, and hope it goes away. And to reduce their own exposure to its attention in the meantime. This phase of the culture war wants to go dark/underground.
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Unlike Trumpism, Woke is complicated by having a much more complex entanglement between ressentiment and genuine concerns, and representing more actual moral high ground. To reject woke wholesale is to abandon the worthy causes it has squatted.
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The challenge is to reject the claims to monopoly on behalf of certain issues/parties based on Divine Right of Empaths. Retain locus standi to speak *for* certain things without speaking *with* the woke monopoly or in their preferred language.
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In general nobody prominent has managed to effectively distance themselves from woke without simultaneously doing an unwitting trust-fall into the delighted waiting hands of the alt light/alt right all the way to cryptofascists and actual fascists. The monopoly is strong.
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An interesting realization for me is that I am actually left on many things. Just not party-line left. Call it indie-left. It is easy to misread your own distaste for the wine monopoly as centrism and retreat to some middle defined by balance of distastes for far left/far right.
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Being centrist because you dislike people at the extremes is a bit like eating strawberry ice-cream when you’d rather have vanilla or chocolate, simply because it has the shortest line with the least annoying people. I mean... find a way to get the flavor you actually want.
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Still figuring it out, but I feel it’s dangerous to sit this one out even though we’re all exhausted from 6 years culture warring and 1 year Covid. Thinking you can wait it out is to cede the game. That’s what happened to the thoughtful part of the right with Trump.
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Replying to @vgr
what's your approach to all this? just tread lightly and wait it out?
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Exactly. Every time I distance myself from a woke-weaponized issue, I feel like whispering to the actual worthwhile cause “don’t worry we’ll get you out of this alive.” They’ve taken hostage many issues which a lot of people care about through basic decency.
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Replying to @vgr
Seems like there's sort of a hostage-taking in this "If you abandon us, you're abandoning our legit ideals" Woke is the liberal "support our troops"
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Eg: feminism/supporting women in tech type stuff. If you actually want to do that now you kinda have to sneak past the “official allyship API” and do your own best on the dl or just abandon the cause.
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My heuristics so far for holding position where I want instead of letting crowd shove me around: a) do everything politically fraught at 1:1 level b) avoid organized efforts c) stay reactive (wait to be asked for help by individuals but be willing to say yes) d) stay small
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The indie-scab left staying left but staying away from the woke-monopoly troiarchy Time for the libertarian left to break with the authoritarian collectivist left without accidentally sliding right through sheer cluelessness. “Libertarian” is not an ideal label but it will do.
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