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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 1, 2024

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Is there any merit to this far-left group's position?

This is challengingly broad. Let's hypothetically grant that they're correct on the historical proposition that women's suffrage was enmeshed somehow with white supremacy, and also grant that white supremacy was necessarily a bad thing.

Then we're left with an interesting question whose shape crops up everywhere - "this good thing is all tangled up with a bad thing. Can we still endorse or celebrate the good thing?"

To which the answer is, in real life, normally "it depends on the balance of good things to bad things". But objects of thought and discussion in daily practical life are kind of naturally bounded in extent - if we're assessing whether a day at the park was a good thing, we're likely only to assess the day in question, and won't trace back the park-day's genesis to several years beforehand.

But in academia or serious thinking, we're unbounded. A thoroughly partisan advocate of American indigenous peoples can rue the Mongols' failure to do to Europe what they did to Baghdad as A Bad Thing - since a powerful Europe was able to come and wipe out indigenous peoples in the Americas a short time later. For such a partisan, the Roman empire is probably on net a dreadful thing.

"Is there any merit to this far-left group's position" then hinges on whether you think the project of de-Europeanising and specifically de-Anglicising the US is a good or bad thing.