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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 5, 2024

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I don’t think it was a lie.

In the primary, he was certainly more moderate than Sanders. In the general, he played the straight man to Trump’s firebrand; I’d say both of them turned out pretty moderate indeed.

Like most administrations, Biden’s has had boring responses to boring problems. What was the moderate/normal version of dealing with inflation?

I think the "Fair Game" order on Elon Musk was pretty abnormal. Multi-agency conspiracies to retaliate against domestic dissent are pretty serious business. Yes, it's not entirely unprecedented, what with literal Watergate and the Trump-Ukraine affair (and, if you really want to dredge things up, the Sedition Act), but Biden's Musk harassment is possibly larger in scale than the former two and in any case even "on par with Nixon and Trump in abuse of the office" is hardly a "return to normal".

Like most administrations, Biden’s has had boring responses to boring problems. What was the moderate/normal version of dealing with inflation?

Not causing it with a massive vote buying giveaway after the causes of a non-central "recession" were already solved.

The border was stable. He destablized it intentionally by repealing a bunch of policies.

There was no war in Israel. He released billions of dollars to Hamas's patron Iran.

He tried to fire millions of workers over a vaccine that ended up being meh.

He stopped the Keystone pipeline more or less permanently.

He tried getting a PR win by evacuating Afghanistan in a totally illogical way just so it could happen before 9/11.

These are not moderate left wing ideas like raising the payroll tax cap by 50% or expanding school lunch programs to include a new disadvantaged class (indeed he also radically threatened to pull funding for school lunches if schools didn't enable transing the kids). They are wild attempts at reforming things significantly in a very left wing way.

I don't know, but I think I could come up with something more moderate than ensuring the executive has to participate in white privilege struggle sessions, or pressuring an already radical organization to promote the removal of age limits on transgender care.

I remember the LockMart shitshow. I also observe that it was in the long hot summer of 2020, months before Biden was elected. Trump nominally banished any training which mentioned those terms with this order; looks like Biden overrode that with another. I don’t like his framing, but I also don’t think you can describe that as requiring struggle sessions.

Point conceded on trans issues. No return to quietly ignoring them from Biden.

You've convinced me. I won't try to pretend that's anodyne.

Every. Fucking. Time. It's worse than Darwin ghosting and pretending it never happened. It's like pulling chatGPT's teeth to get it to acknowledge something against its RLHF, then refreshing the window and having to do it all over again, every time.

Nah, he's alright.

It bothers me to see it.