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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 5, 2024

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I've commented before that it's fascinating to watch this happening after decades - certainly enough decades to cover my entire lifetime so far - of the left explicitly saying that non-normie, non-anodyne social views that go against the status quo and make normies freak out should be not just tolerated and accepted, but celebrated merely due to the fact that they are oppressed by the majority. Which points to a couple of possibilities. One is that such statements were always just cynical, dishonest ploys to gain power by fooling the gullible or desperate. Another is that this is a case of "Jesus would agree with all of my social views, so you, as a follower of Jesus, should agree with all of my social views. Oh me, I'm not backwards enough to follow Jesus, I'm just hoping that by invoking Jesus, I can manipulate you into agreeing with me." That is, since the left lionizes the "weird" - often explicitly, using the exact same word - it doesn't carry much negative affect to them, but the right does denigrate "weirdness," so it affects them. Based on my perception "in the wild" of how the "weird" insult and, more generally, the claim that the leftist social views are just the normie default now, have landed, they seem about as effective as the typical case of an atheist trying to use the Bible to convince a Christian to agree with his social views. I'd guess there's definitely aspects of both going on there, which is pretty expected with any such wide scale phenomenon around such a large ideological/political bloc.