Sunday leaf reversal 4: theological doubts

Basically no net wordcount here, but deleting bracketed scratch words
and replacing them with the same amount of words actually integrated
into the ms. is real (slow) progress.

diff --git a/content/drafts/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md b/content/drafts/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md
index d4f4576..b41a75d 100644 (file)
--- a/content/drafts/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md
+++ b/content/drafts/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md
@@ -224,10 +224,24 @@ In one part of his [_Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations_](https://w
 
 Moldbug asks us to imagine a Society with asymmetric legal and social rules for nobles and commoners: it's socially deviant for commoners to be rude to nobles, but permitted for nobles to be rude to commoners; violence of nobles against commoners is excused on the presumption that the commoners must have done something to provoke it; nobles are officially preferred in employment and education, and are allowed to organize to advance their collective interests, whereas any organization of commoners _qua_ commoners is outlawed or placed under extreme suspicion.
 
-Moldbug claims that the status of non-Asian minorities in contemporary America is analogous to that [...]
+Moldbug claims that the status of non-Asian minorities in contemporary America is analogous to that of the nobles in his parable. But separately from denouncing the system as unfair, Moldbug claims that the asymmetric rules have deleterious effects _on the beneficiaries themselves_:
 
 > applied to the cream of America's actual WASP–Ashkenazi aristocracy, genuine genetic elites with average IQs of 120, long histories of civic responsibility and productivity, and strong innate predilections for delayed gratification and hard work, I'm confident that this bizarre version of what we can call _ignoble privilege_ would take no more than two generations to produce a culture of worthless, unredeemable scoundrels. Applied to populations with recent hunter-gatherer ancestry and no great reputation for sturdy moral fiber, _noblesse sans oblige_ is a recipe for the production of absolute human garbage.
 
+This is the sort of right-wing heresy that I could read about on the internet (as I read lots of things on the internet without necessarily agreeing), and see the argument abstractly, without really putting any serious weight on it.
+
+It wasn't my place. I'm not a woman or a racial minority; I don't have their lived experience; I _don't know what it's like_ to face the challenges they face. So while I could permissibly _read blog posts_ skeptical of the progressive story about redressing wrongs done to designated sympathetic victim groups, I didn't think of myself as having standing to _actually_ doubt the story.
+
+Until suddenly, in the current year of 2016, it was now seeming that the designated sympathetic victim group of our age was ... _straight boys who wish they were girls_. And suddenly, [_I had standing_](/2017/Feb/a-beacon-through-the-darkness-or-getting-it-right-the-first-time/).
+
+[...]
+
+And—separately 
+
+When a political narrative is being pushed for _your_ alleged benefit, it's much easier to make the call that it's obviously full of lies.
+
+"a culture of worthless, unredeemable scoundrels"
+
 [...]
 
 that experience raised further questions about whether previous iterations of progressive ideology had been entirely honest with me. (If nothing else, I couldn't help but notice that my update from "Blanchard is probably wrong because trans women's self-reports say it's wrong" to "Self-reports are pretty crazy" probably had implications for "[Red Pill](https://heartiste.org/the-sixteen-commandments-of-poon/) is probably wrong because women's self-reports say it's wrong".)

diff --git a/notes/a-hill-of-validity-sections.md b/notes/a-hill-of-validity-sections.md
index 5ce7325..68bc637 100644 (file)
--- a/notes/a-hill-of-validity-sections.md
+++ b/notes/a-hill-of-validity-sections.md
@@ -381,19 +381,6 @@ Then I would have at least hoped Eliezer Yudkowsky to be _in favor of_ rather th
 
 ----------
 
-[Moldbug argues that this is how America treats non-Asian minorities; and that it actually has bad effects on the people themselves—]
-
-[I can see the argument abstractly, but I couldn't put my weight down on it being bad for the people themselves, until I see it happening to my people ...]
-
-It wasn't my place. I'm not a woman or a racial minority; I don't have their lived experience; I _don't know what it's like_ to face the challenges they face. So while I could permissibly _read blog posts_ skeptical of the progressive story about redressing wrongs done to designated sympathetic victim groups, but I clearly didn't have license to _talk_ about any reasons to be skeptical ...
-
-[Scott Alexander wrote about how there are different dimensions of power—
-http://web.archive.org/web/20130424233301/http://squid314.livejournal.com/354385.html]
-
-—until, suddenly, in 2016, it was now seeming that the designated sympathetic victim group of our age was ... _straight boys who wish they were girls_. And suddenly, [_I had standing_](/2017/Feb/a-beacon-through-the-darkness-or-getting-it-right-the-first-time/). When a political narrative is being pushed for _your_ alleged benefit, it's much easier to make the call that it's obviously full of lies.
-
-----------
-
 [TODO: David Xu's postrat]
 And the thing where David Xu interprets criticism of Eliezer as me going "full post-rat"?! https://twitter.com/davidxu90/status/1435106339550740482