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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 15, 2024

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I just went back and reread a lot of old discussions about "the ok hand gesture", "all lives matter", "it's ok to be white", and damore.
It reminded me why I ran out of any sympathy or mercy in 2020.

I understand the frustration. I share it. But unfortunately if one responds in kind then we are doomed to a cycle of hatred and retaliation. Peace is only possible when one side is willing to stick to it even at the risk of being stabbed in the back.

It's been decades of backstabbing.
They can give Gina Carano her job back. They can release the guys in prison for "hate crimes" because they left tire marks on a gay crosswalk. They can say "sorry" to that kid they lynched for smiling. They can stop letting DEI departments throw away people's resumes for not being leftist. They can stop using lawfare to "reduce the comfort & regularity with which those who do not accept climate change science speak". They can stop the deplatforming campaigns against anyone who tries to publish books critical of them...
If they want peace they can ask for it.

At the very least I have a list of names who still post here who could apologize for what they said about those earlier cases and admit they were wrong.
None of them are stepping up, because they don't think they were wrong to hurt those people.

They can stop this at any time, but because they won't it's not going to stop until their power is absolutely broken.
And that's going to take a lot of pain.

Yeah unfortunately that's not how it works. Repaying hate with hate just makes them double down. They will say "we were right to hate these people, let's put the screws to them even more". If your goal is to get the madness to stop, making the perpetrators feel pain is not going to advance it.

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Unilaterally surrendering also won't stop the madness.

Ok, fine. But refraining from reprisals is still a necessary, if not sufficient, condition for peace.

The left have shown that is how it works. Their punishment regime has made absurdities intro absolute dogma in every professional environment, simply by inflicting enough fear and pain on anyone who dared to speak out. Nobody in the year 2000 could have even imagined the insanity that would be enforced by the next 20 years of HR witch-hunting, mobbing, lawfare, and violence. Inflicting pain is how that was accomplished.

The post-modernists had important lessons about social discipline and punishment, and the left learned them first.
It's probably too late for the right to learn the same lesson, now that the left dominates the social control infrastructure, but they can at least try.

The very existence of your argument refutes it. If putting the screws to people got them to relent and peacefully live according to one's preferred ideology, then you wouldn't be mad because you would have relented. But in actuality, you're upset (rightfully so) and you want to hit them back as hard as you can the instant you get a chance to. Why on earth do you imagine the result would be any different when it's your (side's) hands welding the knife?

He doesn't think peace is realistic. He just wants a détente, and that requires a show of strength.

It almost has worked. There are vanishingly few people actually willing to fight back, and it took incredibly good luck to keep them (literally bullet-dodging levels of luck!).
And even they are only willing to go against the most radical 10% of the left's agenda: the other 90% has already been adopted in the Republican party platform.

So the leftist strategy worked, even if people manage to claw back 5% of what they won with it.

Not making them feel pain hasn’t muted their desire to punish. That’s been the status quo since atleast the 1980’s and things have only gotten worse.

Things that have seemed to limit them some is Musks taking over twitter which let the right organize these attacks too. Desantis punishing Disney.

I am against going after the peasantry like Home Depot girl. I see my aunt or mother in her. We 100% should be punishing the leaders and taking scalps when we can. Disney and the executive class is fair game.

I agree that refraining from reprisals, by itself, does not lead to peace. In truth I don't know what will lead to peace, it's a hard problem! I just know that reprisals are going to lead to further war. So if one's goal is peace, then reprisals need to be taken off the table.

Winning and crushing your enemies makes peace. I am not sure if a country can have two roughly equally matched cultures. It’s probably clear at this point it’s the only solution.

A key to winning will be getting the Jews on board. They dominate media and the influencer space. Democrats mistake with Hamas helps a lot on this front.

I don’t support going after Home Depot lady. She would have fallen inline once a dominate culture emerges.

Oh, yeah, I should have clarified that peace is definitely not my goal.
The shortest path to peace is the suicide of anyone who would fight back against the powerful, so that's what I'd expect anyone who prioritized peace to advocate for.

Peace is only possible when one side is willing to stick to it even at the risk of being stabbed in the back.

Peace is only possible when both sides realize if they break it they're going to get stabbed.

This is only true between absolute belligerents who are otherwise at each other's throats.

Not every disagreement has to be ratcheted up to murderous rage on both sides. Although I'm much further right than I was only a few years ago, when I talk to my historically right wing friends they're all "There will be blood." Whereas those I know on the left (often more effete by disposition, admittedly) use the weapons of condescension and matter-of-fact dismissal. Only leftist extremists, or those oddly allied to them eg BLM-types (at least in my experience) say anything about violence.

Normal (for lack of a better word) people who aren't always blowing a gasket from reading the latest outrage online do not seem to me ready to knife their interlocutor, regardless of how indisposed he or she might be politically to share beliefs.

This is only true between absolute belligerents who are otherwise at each other's throats.

We're not talking about literal stabbings here, but cancellation. There may be little actual blood, but there's been a lot of scalps in terms of getting people fired from the left (they had a tumblr dedicated to it, for instance). The right "risking" getting stabbed in the back by not retaliating isn't going to help at all; it's co-operating with a defector.

Well if you're talking in metaphors sure, I don't disagree. I suppose I'm becoming more literal-minded myself despite my best intentions.

There has been no shortage of actual blood either.