Meet inside The Shops at Waterloo Town Square - we will congregate in the indoor seating area next to the Your Independent Grocer with the trees sticking out in the middle of the benches (pic) at 7:00 pm for 15 minutes, and then head over to my nearby apartment's amenity room. If you've been around a few times, feel free to meet up at the front door of the apartment at 7:30 instead.
Sorry Guys I'm Gatekeeping This One
This topic benefits an unusual amount from the attendees being familiar and comfortable with each other enough to engage in earnest dialogue. For that reason, attendance will be restricted to people with the "irregular" and "regular" roles in the discord, and others may be turned away at the door. Apologies to the newbies and the errants who might be interested in this topic!
If this one goes well, I will likely have more restricted events in the future. If you become more of a familiar face to us over the next couple of months, you can attend the next one :)
If you are unsure if you are welcome to attend this meetup, feel free to message me here or in the discord.
Description
This week, we'll be taking a look at a few pieces from or about the modern (post-2020s) dissident right, and considering if there are any interesting or useful takeaways.
Readings
I feel an unusually strong need to stick a disclaimer here that assigning readings in no way means that the viewpoints contained in the readings are endorsed.
Ideally read all three, but if you're short on time, focus on the Laurenson piece.
Supplemental:
Discussion Questions
Here are some sample discussion questions, but feel free to depart from the letter of them if there's a more interesting answer to an adjacent question:
- Laurenson documents extensive evidence that mainstream media systematically downplayed or ignored widespread violence during the 2020 protests. How seriously should we take this? When it comes to journalistic conduct, can you think of bright lines to draw or canaries to notice? What sorts of thresholds have been crossed already, if any? And what can you do personally in your own media diet to adjust for this?
- For those who currently or previously identified as right wing, do you have a "moment that broke you" story?
- The tech founder describes 100% of his founder friends supporting Trump by election day, but many hiding it. Laurenson notes "my hardcore Blue Tribe friends continued arguing that the media was basically honest, but more and more, I had behind-the-scenes conversations about how many of us no longer trusted it." What does widespread preference falsification tell us about the health of our discourse, if anything? Have you ever falsified your preferences? What about?
- Laurenson: "I don’t spent as much time in the movement these days; it’s turned into an echo chamber; racism and sexism are front-and-center, and most of my favorite people have left. But there was a fascinating moment in time when it truly felt like the so-called “dissident right” could discuss almost anything in a sensible way."
Have you ever experienced a space where you felt like almost anything could be discussed in a sensible way? What do you think made those spaces the way they were? If they died or became worse, what happened? - Hanania claims that modern progressive spaces operate by traditionally feminine rather than masculine norms, which are more sophisticated and subtle: "Extreme maleness, i.e., violence, is already stigmatized, and we have developed rules, norms and institutions to deal with “Big Man” behavior... At the same time, society has not yet begun to address the distortive effect female tears have on public life because it’s something relatively new and harder to deal with. Crying during a political debate should be just as stigmatized as throwing a punch, as both make open discourse impossible."
To what extent is this a useful framework? If we were to take it at face value, what might healthy, "gender-balanced" discourse norms look like? - Many of these writers suggest that major institutions (public health, foreign policy, journalism, education) have demonstrably failed in recent years. Given that most of our institutions are less than a century old and undergo major crises regularly, how surprised should we be when any given entity fails in any given decade? In other words, what do you think is a reasonable base rate for failure? What's unusual about this current moment, and what's not?
- A recurring theme is that establishment politics represents stagnation, formalism, and managed decline, while the dissident right at least offers energy and the possibility of change. How fair of a characterization do you think this is, of either side?
- If people and groups really do differ in capabilities and temperaments, how do we build institutions that work for human nature as it is, not as we wish it were? Given that every society in history has grappled with managing different groups with different capabilities and interests, to what extent are we actually facing new problems, and to what extent is this just the latest iteration of ancient challenges? Can we learn anything useful from how past societies handled diversity without modern liberal mores?
- Several writers claim to simply "notice" patterns that polite society refuses to acknowledge. Unfortunately, so do people in basically every other interest group (political groups, exercise and diet fad enjoyers, alternative medicine and woo practitioners, dating advice providers, conspiracy theorists of all stripes). How do you distinguish between legitimate and useful Noticing, and more disingenuous cases?
- Why do these particular critiques resonate now? What makes this historical moment fertile ground for dissident thinking? Is this itself a recurring pattern? If so, how does this recurring pattern tend to end?
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