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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 8, 2024

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You really don't think anything even approaching "good faith" or truth-seeking exists online? That seems not only absurdly axiomatic, but also a miserable mental space to inhabit.

I do believe in good faith truth seeking. I just think that when an interlocutor has waged an information war in the past, that puts a permanent asterisk on their "truth seeking".

I've noticed this a lot. There is this strain of internet user that believes if you can create fake websites, fake images, fake users, etc to convince your political opponents of falsehoods to embarrass them, that's just good old fashioned internet fun. And yeah, I laughed too when local news reporters beclowned themselves reporting on Jenkem. But it takes a far darker turn when you muddy the waters of real, salient, political issues as TracingWoodgrains has done, and bragged about, here even.

But I donno. Maybe I have him wrong, and at some point he publicly apologized to LibsOfTiktok for hoaxing her, and has publicly expressed that he regrets waging an information war on her.