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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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There was a small thing about that's been around since at least the Affordable Care Act. Ghoul's the one that's persisted most, I think. Of course, that turns back into the "inherently bad" -- you could at least write a steelman that they were about criticizing conservative policies, rather than conservatives qua people.

I think there's a pretty sizable number of things along that realm, once you're attuned to noticing them. Their very nature as not politically-aligned makes it harder to notice when they're pointed a specific direction, but that doesn't make it less common.

That said, I think a lot of this distinction is more attuned to Blue Tribe preferences than to generalized ones. Not just in the sense that socons and even non-socons see many of the covered examples (controversially, being gay; less controversially, being queer) as something you do rather than something you are, or that both actual racists and not were often making that Chris Rock Skit as a serious argument, or that the Blue Tribe has put significant effort (for, tbf, reasons not entirely under their control) to define or frame their desired focuses as innate and immutable.

But there's a far more serious matter of it not being especially clear why anyone should find one to be acceptable, and the other an abomination. Why is abuse of parenthesis worse than prolonged mockery of 'magic underpants'? What part of the many bannable terms for correctly calling someone gay in offensive intents are worse than incorrectly calling someone a cousin-humper? Why, given how bad racism and sexism are, are false claims a person is or is motivated by them harmless, no matter how ill-founded or plain false? Why are one of these things a "name that humiliates, demeans, or shames those it's applied to", and the other not?

((I mean, the practical answer is probably that there's been enough organizations with enough power to make these things not mere social faux pas, but potentially a source of legal liability should an employee do it even off-hours and off-premises, or a business not react to it promptly when done by a customer, while the other direction there's... uh, people claiming TERF is a slur, and no one believing it.))