WrongWinning

WrongWinning

Despite decades of evidence to the contrary, some Conservatives and Libertarians still refuse to learn that they cannot defeat the Left by accepting the enemy’s philosophical premises while scolding their own side for being too effective.

In short, they’d rather police their erstwhile allies for wrongwinning than actually win.

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Freedom is like moral currency. Its value solely depends on the value of the objective goods it gives you access to. Once you subscribe to the Classical Liberal error of setting up freedom as an absolute, the only internally consistent endpoint is nihilism.

Of course, being inconsistent Liberals, Conservatives and Libertarians draw lines in the sand which strike Leftists as arbitrary, because within the mutually accepted frame of absolute freedom, they are.

However, the Left’s self-styled “opponents” tend not to take well to having that fact pointed out.

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You can’t really blame him for unfollowing and subtweeting that snide parting shot. Directing fire at the Left involves a modicum of risk.

Then again, the fake right has proven so timid and feckless, it’s no cause for concern when they do turn their rhetorical guns on you.

Combat Frame XSeed - Brian Niemeier

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21 Comments

  1. Careless Whisper

    Re: the Hunt

    Can anyone clarify why the conservative consensus on this flick is that it was meant to be a dunk on the right? I apologize, I know it's back tracking, but the whole thing looks off to me from the get-go.
    Can you think of any previous adaptations of The Most Dangerous Game where the victim was the villain? The advance marketing didn't seem to be milking that angle either. It all came off like an attempt to scare you with what the TDS crowd is eventually calling for. Are we doing the left's dirty work for it here?

    • Careless Whisper

      >inb4 it's Hollywood so it can only be evil

      I keep seeing this from all my favorite blogs, but I'm enough of a horror nerd not to buy it. Horror filmmakers aren't as uniformly elitist and out of touch as the mainstream set. Horror remains a meritocracy; it can only be! You can't buffalo people into thinking they're scared when they aren't. Directors that can accomplish that still have a back door into the business. Uncoincidentally horror remains the last place where directors are occasionally willing to dunk on liberals; I sat in a multiplex to watch The Green Inferno for heaven sakes. Conservatives are still allowed to make horror movies; it's the last genre left where all studios care about is whether or not the picture makes money.

      To this end it seems like an imperative for liberal Hollywood to curtail any right wing sentiment here. Do you remember they did this with Death Wish? Do you remember them doing it with The Green Inferno, too?

      Why on earth are we taking it at face value that The Hunt wouldn't follow this pattern too?
      Man i think the left just weaponized us into nuking some high persuasion fiction that would have very likely made them look bad. And how nice, they kept their own hands clean so that the youth can think the right wing are the censors, again.

    • Brian Niemeier

      Let me set your mind at ease.
      >We already have all the movies we'll ever need. For free. We don't need yet another Most Dangerous Game remake.
      >It's Hollywood, and they can only be evil.
      >Nuking a Pedowood revenge fantasy isn't us being tricked into doing the Left's dirty work. Caring about being perceived as censorious is. If the prospect of censoring evil gives you the vapors, you're not of the Right.

    • nick

      Not that I won't take any small victory we can against Hollywood (I haven't watched new films for years now due to hatred for their audience), but after watching the trailer in its entirety (I don't usually watch trailers), it seems like the Conservatives would have ended up getting revenge on the Leftist hunters by the end. Still, the whole movie felt like a whole vitriolic stirring of the proverbial "us vs. them" pot and didn't feel necessary.

    • Baron Metzengerstein

      FWIW, even when you have a movie where the overall message is one thing, it's been pretty common to subvert by having the message be the opposite at the lower cognitive level. Frozen would be the clearest example in the last decade, where the song all the kids loved and sung afterward was "let it go" — the message of which is essentially "do what thou wilt"… even if the message of the movie was that the Ice princess doing whatever she wanted was ultimately catastrophic.

      Same with Lion King and "Hakuna Matatah," come to think of it, though I don't think that song was near as catchy.

  2. Grey Man

    Dude was incapable of understanding the point. That was painful.

    • Brian Niemeier

      I'm starting to think that Libertarianism is a form of cognitive dysfunction.

  3. Chris Lopes

    As I understand it, The Hunt had both the hunters and the hunted as the villians. The "hero" is a member of the elite who gets mistaken for a deplorable. So yeah, it's a hard left revenge fantasy.

    • nick

      Well, that quells my only concern.

  4. A Reader

    The clincher for me is his assertion: "Good is not always objective." He may have meant "quality is subjective," but that's not what he said. What he said reduces to "there is not such thing as truth."

    • Brian Niemeier

      Precisely. That's the whole crux of the matter. All Liberalism–including Conservatism–is moral relativism.

  5. LastRedoubt

    FWIW –

    Sure, the basic structure of the plot is that the deplorables in this case are the victims and overcome their leftist oppressors.

    YET

    a) We now have a movie that normalizes/introduces to the zeitgeist the idea that if you're going to hunt humans, may as well be deplorables. Regardless of how it ends, you're going to see people lovingly focused on killing "nazis", "right winger", etc.. Because it's OK to punch Nazis, so why not get more extreme?

    At least TMDG was more straight up class warfare, from what I recall. Elites lording it over people.

    b) There are a lot of very popular villains out there.

    c) While the new death wish, since it was mentioned above, was reasonably solid, does anyone think a movie with Hillary Swank would be pushing a worldview that doesn't at some level actually push for central control by one's "betters"?

    d) Ditto the chick from the feminist fantasy "GLOW" which is full of good immigrant poz, working mommies, breaking into masculine roles, dunking on middle america, etc?

    e) There are a lot of ways b/c can work out to still dunk on "the right" – starting with the leads on both sides being women instead of the men. Any bets on the "deplorable" female lead having to show one of the men with her who's actually the biggest and baddest?

    • Brian Niemeier

      Excellent point. They can and do hide a lot of propaganda below the basic plot level.

    • A Reader

      My favorite example of this is from the first season of Criminal Minds, in which the FBI profilers, who are supposed to know an awful lot about the inner workings of the American mind, concluded that a group of a couple of hundred citizens of some western State is "heavily-armed" because they own several hundred guns between them. Doing the math, the per capita firearms ownership rate of this 'heavily-armed' (and predictably white, middle-class) group is approximately 3 guns per person. By that standard, a large number of American gun owners are living in Guard Armories shaped like houses. On a related note, militia groups are invariably portrayed as hateful, stupid, and vaguely embarrassing, if they are not actually, literally the villain of the piece.

  6. Careless Whisper

    Ok, these are some satisfying points. But now I'd like to ask if you don't mind me keeping it going, is Jonathan Swift style hyperbolic satire innately irresponsible? Do you think that this is just fundamentally a pot that should not be stirred?

    • A Reader

      I think the difference back between then and now is that folks back then were literate as folks today are not. They could recognize the satire. Folks today can't unless it's DuffelBlog or the Babylon Bee, though the Bee is basically just news that's a few months early, now.
      Worse, we have no particular reason to believe that this actually is satire. It's like the 'I was just kidding,' dodge some folks make after being called out for making a cutting joke at someone else's expense. Maybe it was just satire. Maybe they didn't mean it. Or, maybe the people who say they hate us and want us dead really do hate us and want us dead. The same folks who've been tripping over themselves to invent new corollaries to Godwin's Law in the name of their 'resistance' have also written Poe's Law in stone.

    • Brian Niemeier

      By all means, if you have questions, ask.

      My answer: You're getting caught up on form to the exclusion of content. That's a classic Conservative mistake, e.g. "Using their tactics makes us no better than them!"

      Swiftian satire per se is morally neutral. It's what one does with it that counts.

  7. Eli

    So, his parting shot proved to be both petty and passive aggressive. Truly stunning.

    • Careless Whisper

      If you meant me, I wasnt being sarcastic at all. English literature has plenty of sacred cows overdue for the meat grinder, and I'm willing to put A Modest Proposal in that category if need be. As far as I can tell it didn't end the famine.

    • Eli

      Not you. I was referring to the guy Brian got into a twitter argument with.

  8. xavier

    Brian

    The sequel will be even more lurid. It'll target the normie women in a handmaiden dystopia where soyboys and vivid coloured feminists will impose conversion therapy to over the former's white privilege racism
    xavier

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