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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   29974 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 1, 2024

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Our daughters' daughters will adore us / and they'll sing in grateful chorus / "well done, sister suffragettes!"

But not for too many generations after that, alas.

I'm reminded of the statue of Ulysses S. Grant being pulled down and can only conclude that, if social progress continues to operate as it has, eventually the progressives of today will be swept into the same historical bin as their adversaries. Give it a century and "CancelSuffs" themselves will have their moral improvement over the suffragettes judged insignificant.

One might ask whether one could or should be okay with that state of affairs, but I think even if one is, it's going too fast. Being so quick to tear down societal heroes (I do think a century for this is quick) is to live in a perpetual revolutionary terror, where instead of building a new and stable and hopefully improved status quo, the heroes of yesterday get guillotined tomorrow. Try to shorten the moral arc of history too much by bending it too sharply and it may spiral out of control.

Give it a century and "CancelSuffs" themselves will have their moral improvement over the suffragettes judged insignificant.

You don't need to wait a century, we're doing it live. Canceling the Cancellers is half of Cancel Culture's schtick - there's a top level post on Neil Gaiman getting MeTooed in this very thread, for example.

Try to shorten the moral arc of history too much by bending it too sharply and it may spiral out of control.

A few years ago I would have pushed back, as the capricious nature of the mob somehow felt like it was an advantage for the movement, but these days it does feel like they're running out of mana, so here's hoping for the spiraling out of control.

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