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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   36940 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 22, 2024

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I appreciate the link and the implicit "are you sure you want to go down this road?" it contains. A couple of years ago, it felt like unbreakable blue-tribe consensus forever, which I found horrifying. Now that things have cracked, and it only took a failed assassination attempt to do it, what is team red supposed to do otherwise? The rhetoric is still that Trump is the most dangerous Threat to Democracy who must be stopped, from the side that usually makes arguments about stochastic terrorism. I see two broad types of strategic response, both awful:

  1. Claim "principles". This feels like trying to co-operate with defectbot, and seems to bring things further away from balanced, healthy discussion.
  2. Seek vengeance. This feels really good but escalates the culture war, and seems to bring things further away from balanced, healthy discussion.

I really don't know what culture war disarmament looks like. There needs to be some cross-tribe elite consensus that we stop doing these sort of things, and I don't know how you get there without first putting the shoe on the other foot for a while. The pendulum needs to swing back a little bit, then it needs to be caught.

Now that things have cracked, and it only took a failed assassination attempt to do it, what is team red supposed to do otherwise?

Has it really cracked? Will this moment of right-wing cancel power last more than a few weeks?

Well, if Cthulhu swims left, then it's natural that the tools that the left uses will inevitably be employed unconsciously as they are by the blue tribes.

There needs to be some cross-tribe elite consensus that we stop doing these sort of things, and I don't know how you get there without first putting the shoe on the other foot for a while.

The shoe was on the other foot 60 years ago. Didn't really teach them much; academia promptly generated reasons that it was totally different when they did it.

This feels like trying to co-operate with defectbot

Scott's proposal is along the lines of "co-operate, and also hire a thug to hold a gun to defectbot's head and blow its brains out if it continues defecting". I don't think this is an especially-exploitable strategy.

The shoe was on the other foot 60 years ago.

Was it? I seem to remember the Weathermen becoming college professors at prestigious universities.

One of my favorite culture war book reviews is of Days of Rage, covering how left wing terrorists in the US were supported by groups like the National Lawyers’ Guild.

Having not lived through the Weather Underground and McCarthyism, I'm hesitant to say which side the shoe was on or how much it should inform our strategy for the current state of the culture war. I do remember 9/11 (I was standing deck watch at the Naval Academy) and the culture for the decade after that. Criticism of the war effort was treated pretty harshly, and that was a time and topic of right wing (RW) dominance. But I also recall gay marriage ballot initiatives failing across the country (an example of RW dominance) until the 14th amendment got stretched around it (LW victory). And we still had Superman embarrassed to be an American enough to change his "Truth, Justice, and the American Way" into "Truth, Justice, and all that stuff" in the 2006 movie Superman Returns (LW dominance). Christianity was never protected or sacred (LW dominance). I recall more collaboration and respect between Republicans and Democrats in Congress (less hostility in the culture war). I'm surely biased, but it seems to me that "elections have consequences" defectbot has been exceptionally effective over the past decade or two at pushing the pendulum to a far left position with much higher amplitude/height than the right swing it was returning from. All of which adds up to limited utility in looking to history while swapping "right" for "left".

Is there anyone here with book recommendations about the culture swings of history, in ways that would inform right wing decisions today?

Weatherman was less than 60 years ago.

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