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Okay, it's a single tweet, and I'll still see him saying things that are a bit too "nuanced" for my taste. But this is an important tweet, as these things go, from a man who rose to prominence during the post-9/11 moral clarity, then waffled off and got "respectable" after a grueling and unsuccessful run for office in the UK. Guess what -- after October 7, moral clarity is back on the menu, boys.
("I'm starting to think that the far right, who want to defend their country and traditions, are actually the good guys, whereas the far left, who want to destroy the borders of every country, are actually the bad guys.")
Remember the good old days of Mark Steyn, Christopher Hitchens, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Oriana Fallaci, Geert Wilders, and the Danish cartoons? Salman Rushdie does. And how he must have looked at those days the way I look at today. With grief for the twenty years wasted on open borders, the ground lost, the anti-Western sentiment gained from both internal and external sources, the silencing of dissent, and the rise of naked oppression with hardly an obstacle.
The bad guys are winning. As I post this, it is the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, here in my time zone. Eleventh-hour, indeed.
Discussion (17)
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Ya think?
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The appalling thing is how many Americans -- some in relationship with us -- will only vote for the bad guys because they believe it makes them the good guys.
The lies people believe about nearly every moral and social issue --
That abortion is liberating for women rather than setting them up for sexual exploitation and leading them to scorn their reproductive faculty. . .
That the only pre-born babies deserving of protection are the ones who are wanted by their mother. . .
That the world we're living in can and should exist without fossil fuels and the engines of prosperity they drive. . .
That past suffering (frequently not one's own) justifies every bad act right up to looting, rape, and murder. . .
That children who've been infected with the trans-social contagion should be sterilized and mutilated at will. . .
That the solution to gun violence is to disarm the law-abiding. . .
. . .
With that kind of track record of blood and destruction, you'd think it'd be obvious even to the simpler mind who the "baddies" are. I know this isn't your thing, BDB, but I can only explain it by spiritual blindness. There are princes and principalities at work here that are not explicable by the material universe and evolution. How is civilizational destruction adaptive?
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From the evo-bio perspective you're politely introducing, a few points that I can think of:
A) not every change is adaptive. The fact is, the vast majority of changes are maladaptive, and this is the great filter which sieves improvement from randomness. Yet adaptive is always only relevant for a particular place, time, circumstance. That a thing may be adaptive later is a side-effect -- that it be adaptive now is is the only criteria.
B) not every adaptive change is adaptive for all who experience it.
C) not all participants in this bridge tourney are drawing from the same deck. A strain with weak civilizational impulse may develop stronger barbaric impulses. Even abstract motivators such as time-horizon have established genetic components.
Oh and there's more:
emilkirkegaard.dk
Open link
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Benjamin was/is not a good guy. Just someone was has opinions.
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As I recall, he was a free-speecher who had a presumption that the West ws superior based on presumably its freer speech. His assumption or something seemed to go out the window, and he got more morally relative about things, in my limited experience. And now he's rediscovering the basic fact that the west is objectively not just superior to, but better than the rest.
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