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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   3976 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 23, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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Honestly the whole period felt like nerds who didn't quite get it saying "what exactly do you mean by declaring all of us Moral Mutants to be Exterminated by Progress?"

I don't think it's really accurate to analyze the Culture War as just "nerds and aspies who didn't get the memo". (At the very least, we can always ask, why this particular memo, with this particular content?)

I was around 20 when all this got started. That's really young! I was naive and I didn't know shit back then. (I still don't, but I hope that I've learned at least a few things since then). So I believed a lot of false/stupid things and I had to figure things out through trial and error.

People aren't born with an innate knowledge of history, politics, and philosophy. It has to be acquired - both on an individual level and a social collective level. Memes propagate through society and help people avoid the mistakes of the past. Social phenomena always happen for a reason - it's a mistake to think "well if people just did X Y Z then we could have avoided all that mess".

I don't think it's really accurate to analyze the Culture War as just "nerds and aspies who didn't get the memo.

There's something to it, but I agree ultimately it's a mischaracterization.

It's wrong because we didn't "not get the memo". Nerds and and aspies were the first to notice the changes in political discourse and culture. Normies were the ones insisting that nothing is happening, and if it is it's overblown, etc., etc. If anyone didn't get the memo, it was them, and all the old liberals getting canceled for not jumping on the train fast enough are proof of that.

It's correct in the sense that we obviously overanalyzed the whole phenomenon. Normies just assessed who is on which side, and stayed loyal to their tribe. We spent entire years debating if all this really means what we think it means, did we miss something, are we not being uncharitable, etc., etc., etc. With the end result being us just following in the steps of the normies, even though we realized first that something is changing.

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