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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 29, 2024

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And third, that Google is politically biased and Silicon Valley hates the right should not be news to anyone at this point. So what's the point of making a fuss about it, or any other similar little issue in the endless flood of them? And the more important question, the one I find myself asking more and more when people vent about this or that "outrage" by the other side, and the one I'd like to ask all the people griping on Twitter, is "so what are you going to do about it?"

...remind people that relevant truths remain relevant, duh?

This seems far more like an appeal to fatalism than an argument. You re-issue safety reminders regularly not because 'things be dangerous yo' should be news to anyone, but because there are a lot of reasons people may not be thinking of it at a specific context- whether they are districted, unfamiliar with a specific context, or they've just forgotten. You warn people that the stove is hot not because the idea that heat = pain is novel, but because they may not notice the stove is on / they are drifting dangerously close.

You also remind people that other people do not love them / hate them so that they are appropriately on guard, less likely to expose themselves to bad faith actors, and spare themselves the many harms and heartbreaks that can come with emotionally investing in the wrong people. And you do this regularly, because people are stupid / the heart wants what the heart wants / people always vulnerable to emotional appeals or deliberate manipulations which bad-faith actors know to use. If anyone has figured out a way to perfectly protect people via one pro forma briefing that people have to sit through, they're keeping the secret very closely, and everyone else has to regularly revisit topics and refresh awareness and retrain on already trained things.

Even setting aside that the human population is not eternal and static and not holding the sum total of human knowledge in their heads, and thus new people are learning new things every day, 'it is not novel' is not the same as 'it is not news-worthy.'

...remind people that relevant truths remain relevant, duh?

Daily life in our modern world isn't enough to do that?

And still, much like "raising awareness" in general, this isn't actually doing something about the issue.

Edit: I'd recommend watching the whole video. Hopping over and over from outrage to outrage — one day "I can't believe [X] did this!", the next "I can't believe [Y] did this!" — is not productive. It is, in Parvini's metaphor, just so much slop for the right wing proles to lap up like fat, dumb pigs at a trough. Focus on the whole, not the individual minor incidents. Fight the disease, not the symptoms. And, again, don't vent online — do something.

Daily life in our modern world isn't enough to do that?

Given the routine failures of people on a daily basis in the modern world, obviously not, unless your daily life includes daily reminders as to why things are they way they are, which it generally does not.

And still, much like "raising awareness" in general, this isn't actually doing something about the issue.

Raising awareness is always a prerequisite for doing something about an issue, whether to advance an agenda when you have the power to, or to resist the imposition of an agenda when you don't.

Hence why the common anti-resistance tactics to undermine resistance often start at countering awareness. This can be by denying there is anything to resist (this doesn't happen), obfuscate coordinated or concurrent efforts (no one is trying to make this happen), and to denigrate even minor opposition as futile and pointless effort that should not be pursued (you can't change it and so shouldn't bother doing anything anyway).