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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

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https://xkcd.com/1053/

People get busy, and some of these people for some reason use whatever spare time they have to go on the motte and nowhere else. Earlier this year I got busy with work for 3 months and just didn't have the energy to constantly browse the news so I just didn't during that time. I did come here on the motte a few times to check the quality posts and that's it.

Nobody at work really talks about news/politics except for the most banal topics because it's not appropriate. The campus protest story has not come up a single time at work, or in my family, or with my friends, or in my hobby groups. I am aware of the topic because I have more time now and browse some political content online and it's talked about there, but I could have easily missed it and then I wouldn't have known about it. Or I could've easily just only seen the headlines and dismissed it as another college protest (amongst the tens of hundreds of different protests that's happened in the past decade over literally anything) and then I wouldn't have the context to understand why @Stellua is asking the question. And if I have to do additional research myself to try to understand the context, well I'm only going to do that if the post is interesting, and the post by itself is not interesting to me.

Just to give an example of how the question sounds when you don't have the context:

Have the campus protests had any sort of effect on animal rights? It seems like no.

And you would probably be asking what am I talking about? Well if I link this article here: https://veganfta.com/2024/05/09/activists-protest-animal-experiments-at-the-university-of-arizona/

Then there would be something to talk about, you'd have the context to know what I'm talking about.

It's so easy to assume something is common knowledge when it's really not. I do grant some leeway that the motte culture war thread being political in it's nature you probably do expect most people to have been aware of the story but it's not guaranteed.