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It always is the Cruel Moraliser[0].

[0]: https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-cruel-moraliser-uses-a-halo-t...

> Entire fucking history of USSR is littered with different power-hungry people using noble goals to chop their competitors' heads off.

Which is where I'm pretty sure the memetic tools came from to capture and wield this power over people. Where exactly? Marxism. Not it in and of its self, but along with the French Post structuralists a universal solvent of philosophy has been weaponized and let loose (and encouraged to grow) in North America... and sadly seeded to the rest of the world.

To me this looks like the end game of a small but clever team of cold war era Soviets. 1970's USA was in no way prepared to fight an idea war.

Though the country that launched it is no more, the fall out will, I fear, kill us all. How? These power game playing people will continue to ascend until they get to the top. Then, there, they will implement absurdist anti-sense anti-science policy. When? Two more generations tops. Let's say 2060, that's a nice round number, and we'll see wide spread famine and a new kind of gulag in North America.

But that's worst case scenario. Maybe it'll all fade away? I hope so. Previous washes of political correctness have come and gone. And, like I love to tell myself, from Obama's lips 'Reality has a way of asserting itself'. And these bizarre, predictable power games are tethered from reality.

>Maybe it'll all fade away? I hope so. Previous washes of political correctness have come and gone.

This wave has very strong economic foundation. Remember we used to laugh 10 years ago about those people taking $30K loans to study for basket weaving degrees? Well, it got worse. This generation took $50K loans to study social justice degrees. And these degrees taught them that the real source of problems are not the colleges that sold them the worthless degrees. Not the corporations that outsourced the production jobs they would have otherwise taken. Not the interest rates and pro-corporate policies that made many small businesses unsustainable. No, they think it's their neighbor who studied 10x harder to get a STEM degree and occupy one of the last remaining spots in the economy that pays well. And now this neighbor is a privileged $BUZZWORD supremacist who dares to have kids and wants to put them into a good school and hence must be dealt with.

And they will "deal" with them. Or, rather, us. Because burning witches and heretics had been a popular entertainment for centuries and the factors that held it back since the Enlightenment age are fading away very fast.

that sounds like what KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov describes here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bX3EZCVj2XA

His lecture video should be required viewing material and part of the educational curriculum, in my view.

For those wondering, one lecture video is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLdDmeyMJls

One of the authors of the "academic" papers which sparked this cancellation is on the board of a nonprofit that makes political children's books.

The point is "Aufheben der Kultur" - the abolition of culture. They attack Seuss because he's a beloved children's icon and a common cultural reference point we love and share. The point is to permanently taint him so we no longer have that reference point, detaching us from our shared culture so that these ideologues can shoehorn in some garbage woke propaganda to children at the youngest age possible.

Make no mistake: Dr Seuss won't be the last icon they come for.

What is this random use of German? In any case, an Aufhebung has strong philosophical connotation that implies the process of synthesis -- so you're in luck, negation never fully destroys the thing it negates, it simply supersedes it.

> a power-hungry person can have the pleasure of telling 1000 other people what to say, and financially obliterate those who don't comply

> Some people are more power-hungry than others

True. Also, some people are more violent than others, but we try to keep those away from the rest of the population and gradually titrate them out of the gene pool.

I would love to live in a society that treated insatiable thirst for power the same way.

In reality, if you try doing that, the movement will get spearheaded by a small group of cronies that will use it as an excuse to get rid of competition. I bet you can't be very power-hungry in North Korea unless you are a part of the ruling family.

Perhaps.

Before civilization, it used to be that the most violent person in the group could simply take whatever they wanted. At some point we managed to "civilize violence" by creating a special caste -- police officers -- whose career is the use of violence in a controlled way, to prevent the violent from having whatever they want. Although the police abuse this "violence license" they haven't managed to subvert it into supreme dictatorial power. The fact that almost everybody knows what the phrase "police state" means, and that it's a bad thing, is probably part of this.

I imagine there is some similar recursive trick with power-thirst, getting the political schemers to spend their lives chasing each other instead of the rest of us, the way the DEA spend their lives chasing drug lords but never make any real progress. Note that the drug lords are generally pretty happy that the DEA exist, or else their trade would not be nearly so lucrative. And the DEA are happy that the drug lords exist, or else they'd be out of a job.

It might take us a few more millenia to acquire the vocabulary needed to describe the recursive trick, let alone discover it.

> Before civilization, it used to be that the most violent person in the group could simply take whatever they wanted.

My understanding is that in hunter-gatherer societies, that is not the case and they were (and are) quite egalitarian. E.g. (https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/freedom-learn/201105...):

>The writings of anthropologists make it clear that hunter-gatherers were not passively egalitarian; they were actively so. Indeed, in the words of anthropologist Richard Lee, they were fiercely egalitarian.[2] They would not tolerate anyone's boasting, or putting on airs, or trying to lord it over others. Their first line of defense was ridicule. If anyone—especially some young man—attempted to act better than others or failed to show proper humility in daily life, the rest of the group, especially the elders, would make fun of that person until proper humility was shown.

>One regular practice of the group that Lee studied was that of "insulting the meat." Whenever a hunter brought back a fat antelope or other prized game item to be shared with the band, the hunter had to express proper humility by talking about how skinny and worthless it was. If he failed to do that (which happened rarely), others would do it for him and make fun of him in the process. When Lee asked one of the elders of the group about this practice, the response he received was the following: "When a young man kills much meat, he comes to think of himself as a big man, and he thinks of the rest of us as his inferiors. We can't accept this. We refuse one who boasts, for someday his pride will make him kill somebody. So we always speak of his meat as worthless. In this way, we cool his heart and make him gentle."

That's wishful thinking. Nearly all the tribes of the Olympic Peninsula's Pacific Coast [1] practiced chattel slavery:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinookan_peoples#Historic_c...

The Makah were required to free their slaves and abandon the practice as an explicit condition (Article 12) of their peace treaty with the United States:

https://www.fws.gov/pacific/ea/tribal/treaties/MAKAH_1855.pd...

The Quinault were required to do so as well (Article 11):

https://goia.wa.gov/resources/treaties/quinault-treaty-1856

[1] In many senses the Olympic Peninsula's West-slope rainforest is the ultimate ecosystem for hunter-gatherers: so rich in food sources that none of the native tribes had to develop any form of agriculture, yet most of them had developed written language. It was certainly the last such ecosystem to experience "first contact" (~1850 C.E.) with modern technological society, and as a result we know more about the natural state of hunter-gatherer civilization there than anywhere else.

Hobbesian.

> gradually titrate them out of the gene pool.

Where do you see that happening?

It's pretty damn hard to reproduce when you're in prison.

Conjugal visits. Reproduce before going to prison. Reproduce after prison. Reproduce while on parole.

I have a cousin in Los Angeles with three kids (last I heard about a decade ago) and he's in and out of prison all the time. I'm just having my first. Idiocracy wasn't too off the mark.

One particular strength of male humans is their long reproductive years. There are many cases of 80 and 90 year old men reproducing.

ttps://www.prisonpolicy.org/scans/bjs/vospats.pdf

> Based on admissions data for 1992 to 1994, violent State prisoners had an average sentence of about 10 years and were expected to serve slightly less than 5 years on average.

That's nearly zero impact on a man's reproductive life.

> gradually titrate them out of the gene pool

Are you advocating for eugenics?

I would add that "politics" is all about seizing and exerting power over other people's lives. And a small minority of people can seize the power if they are smart enough, even in a democracy, because the majority of people are apathetic with respect to politics and do not envision the stakes, so it is possible to win them over through propaganda and misinformation.