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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 5, 2024

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I feel like I’m seeing a lot of examples of news stories inciting ideological clashes lately where the news story in question is an off-case or even completely irrelevant. A non-trans athlete triggers a big kerfuffle about trans athletes. A spree killing by a Christian (second-generation) British national triggers riots about Muslim immigration.

If we’re speaking of strategy, it seems like a bad one not to pick more central examples to get exercised over.

I don't know/care if anyone made this point already in the media, but it's relevant to mention that Rwanda was never a British colony, so any argument that this is all somehow indirect blowback from British colonialism has no basis.

People don't trust the media to be honest about certain things, so they jump to what seems like the likeliest reason the media would lie. "Random stabbings of people who couldn't possibly be involved in gang beef was probably done by a Muslim" isn't a bad bet, neither is "person who looks like a man and is accused of being one is trans" (though this one is arguably less excusable because there was information available ahead of time. I think lots of TRA arguments have made it hard, as intended, for normies to separate out intersex and trans)

Not to get all Hananian about it but riots and randos on Twitter are basically uncontrollable phenomena driven by impulsivity anyway, can't expect much strategy in general.

As far as I know, knife crime of any sort in the UK is disproportionately committed by non-Muslim black youths, but that's such a pure hatefact that not even the local "extreme right-wing" wants to mention it.

I ran into the number once and it actually is a bit uncanny how the disproportion almost matches a certain racist hatestat about the US murder rate. I can see why people wouldn't want to bring it up. An absurdity but there you go.

But this was clearly not a "normal" stabbing, nor some sort of casualty of spillover gang violence like a drive-by.

People don't trust the media to be honest about certain things, so they jump to what seems like the likeliest reason the media would lie.

Well, at least the anti-media people are finally getting smarter (something that Orwell notably did not predict).

Every lie, including by omission, incurs a debt to the truth, and the media (and by extension the faction the media supports) is very indebted. And now that everyone knows they're unreliable we've gone back to the time-tested heuristic: you believe that which is in your class interest to believe.

It would be justice if those whose shops were looted seized media property in turn (those [likely-to-be] immigrants who just lost their employment along with the owners). I don't think it's come to that yet, though.