The gender politics of 'What is Wrong with the World' are /wild/

I think there's something about valuing things like community in the abstract, so you end up with these romanticised ideas of what they might look like that inevitably coincide with nationalist myths rather than, like, actual material solidarity

Weirdly I got Hooker as a placeholder - apparently my spread of answers doesn't map onto anyone well enough?

Men have always been terrified that Celsus might have been right when he said that Christianity was a religion for women and slaves, have always made myths to create a more 'muscular' faith.

This is drawing on an aesthetic which kind of by definition has a strained relationship with its context, while also making very clear that the relationship isn't strained, there's no conflict. A counter culture aesthetic which isn't really counter to anything

I think to do this well it would have to be more generative, and therefore contain the risk of actual desecration, which obviously a Cathedral is not going to allow!

Yeah, I think it doesn't quite work becuase it's an oddly 90s style of graffiti, and it's so obviously an installation that it feels incredibly removed from any actual kind of street art.

This attempts the Charlie Kirk like 'I'm open to all views' but actually says 'I believe the philosophical foundations of the views of my opponents are more rigorous and worthy of engagement with than those of people on 'my side''.

So you might have a deep and appreciative engagement with a deeply conservative thinker (Schmitt, say, or Ratzinger), which says 'I disagree with their conclusions but they have something important to say,' coupled with a shallow, dismissive engagement with a 'liberal' thinker (say Judith Butler)

The problem is, when 'liberal' journalists and thinkers try the same trick, it's not a performance - they seem to /really/ value the perspectives of those they appear to disagree with on policy issues more highly than the perspectives of those they claim to agree with.

This is why Charlie Kirk is presented as a martyr for free speech and open dialogue - he appeared to take disagreement seriously, and so performed rigour and openness.

In order to demonstrate that you are sensible and fair minded, it's seen as important to engage deeply with those you disagree with, and be critical of those you agree with. This is a performance of 'rigour' designed to show that you are fair minded and not doctrinaire.

There are a whole lot of really weird ways this echoes with Chesterton's bizzare misogyny in 'What's Wrong With the World', too. And I do wonder whether the association between Plato and women is some kind of echo of the 'everyone I don't like is gnostic [feminine, immaterial, silly]' trope

Argue with a particular kind of Xn and they start talking about 'God's plan'. So you argue natural theology and they shift to 'it's Gnosticism', so you argue heresy and they shift to 'but mental illness,' as though there's a consistent idea of humanity or gender that holds across those three areas.