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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 22, 2024

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"kids are never responsible for the actions of older generations, and parents are mostly responsible for the actions of their kids while they are guardians of those kids, but most of that responsibility goes away when the child reaches adulthood"

I think this is generally true, and is what most people would believe in the US.

The bible talking about killing off entire families as punishments.

Long lasting family feuds.

Feudal level countries killing off entire families as punishments.

Ongoing demands for reparations.

Of your evidence, 1-3 are pretty similar. There's two options here. The first is that killing someone's entire family is seen as the ultimate sort of punishment. This isn't really about a 2-year-old child being responsible for the behaviors of their parents, its their parents being perceived as so terrible that there's justification in inflicting the most heinous retaliation on them. The second possibility is more pragmatic: if you think their family is likely to want revenge, then killing off all of them makes sense so you don't have to watch over your back. This is especially true in feudal states where a deposed ruler's children could come back as pretenders.

For the fourth point on reparations, this is just blatant racial spoils laundered through historical grievance and narrative. It uses slavery as its primary justification, but that's mostly for convenience since leftist media has spent so much time and effort making US slavery look like one of the biggest crimes ever committed, possibly worse than even the Holocaust. In practice, though, demanding reparations just for that is untenable since the vast majority of the US population is not descended from slaveholders (didn't live in the South, not rich enough, immigrated after the Civil War, etc.). So while people pushing reparations use slavery as their primary marketing material, they quickly shift motte-and-bailey style to things like "institutionalized racism" when people ask questions like "why should I have to pay for this?".

In short, none of your 4 points really needs to have much to do with generational guilt.

The second possibility is more pragmatic: if you think their family is likely to want revenge, then killing off all of them makes sense so you don't have to watch over your back.

I've seen this argument made a few times online. One example being Twitter tankies defending the murder of the Romanov children. Another one is (predominantly Jewish) essays defending the divine command to utterly eradicate the Amalekites by pointing out that Saul's initial sparing of the Amalekite king Agag — for which failure to follow God's command Saul was stripped of his kingship — led to Agag's eventual descendant Haman attempting to wipe out the Jews in turn.

"You gotta end the bloodline and prevent any revenge killing."

This isn't really about a 2-year-old child being responsible for the behaviors of their parents, its their parents being perceived as so terrible that there's justification in inflicting the most heinous retaliation on them. The second possibility is more pragmatic: if you think their family is likely to want revenge, then killing off all of them makes sense so you don't have to watch over your back. This is especially true in feudal states where a deposed ruler's children could come back as pretenders.

In brutally authoritarian regimes in historically Christian societies- including historically quite recent ones, eg Francoist Spain- this took the form of removing children from dissident homes and placing them with regime loyalists. I think historically pagan societies like North Korea just have fewer qualms about killing children when faced with the same situations.