culture war dynamics

Donald Trump is an uncannily accommodating vessel for projection, good and ill. It occurs as something of a cosmic joke that his last name is “Trump,” which is the Joker in a deck of cards, a wild card, the card that can be any card. So it is that Donald Trump can be any character, whatever people hold him to be. This serves both to elevate him and... See more

Men become monsters by convincing themselves they're saints.

The most radical thing you can do today is not be an asshole.

what is the relationship between ideological commitment and status seeking? is an ideology a particular status game you've opted into? do people select the highest status ideology they can get away with? are they just two independent drivers of social behavior?

It would sure make things easy if this election were a simple contest of good versus evil. But this is the way of thinking that is tearing the world apart. Those who think that way always consider themselves to be members of Team Good, of course. If your opponent is evil incarnate, then any means to stop him are justified.

I won’t play the game of denouncing or endorsing. The psycho-social patterning of “which side are you on” springs from one of the chief narratives of the mythology of Separation. It understands the world by simplifying it into a drama of good versus evil, and also simplifies the human beings who play roles in that drama into subhuman or superhuman ... See more

a successful malignant ideology will promise to make your life better while actually sabotaging it and making it worse in ways that seem to prove the ideology correct. the more you follow it, the worse everything gets, while you become more and more devoted to it. demonic even.

Modern feminism is an oxymoron, because it treats the feminine as implicitly inferior, and with tacit disdain. It exalts the masculine ethos as the ideal, and marginalizes feminine preferences as things to be fixed , not embraced . All because it fractures the holy scripture delusion of increasing the labor supply “equality”.