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Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 18, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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What I love about your comment is that it truly is "right is the new left". You could swap some words around and 1:1 have complaints about minority representation circa ten years ago. The stuff about hostile environments heightening objectively-small slights could be from an explanation of microaggressions, etc. I think you could work this out into a general theory of social progress where some tribe of particularists (progressives in this case) develops theory based on concrete allied cases and later on universalists (liberals) generalize it to their enemies.

But it's also the case that the left wield power in a way that fits their critique, right? If you have a movement that complains a lot about minority representation, it's going to put a lot of work into choosing what kinds of people get what roles, ending up discriminating against majority representation. Likewise the stuff about hostile environments - having identified the existence of microaggressions that cause trauma to minorities, they instituted strict speech codes that makes things comfortable for their clients whilst making things uncomfortable for their enemies.

If the US had been unexpectedly invaded by time-travelling Stalin from 1949, we wouldn't be talking about this stuff and we'd be talking about the genocide of kulaks and how the Five Year Plans discriminate against our class and sector. The rhetoric from Faction A is going to be related on some level to the actions of Faction B.

It's also mentally easier for rebels to adopt (and be trapped within) the framings of the propagandistically-superior foes. That's why you had Satanists and Pagans in the 90s/2000s and now you have White advocacy influencers.

I mean my understanding of the world is very strongly that the woke are the right from my formative years. Intensely racist and sexist, care about what you do in your bedrooms, want to ban books and thought and speech etc...

A lot of the women I know in my life who are woke act like the religious right soccer moms and some of them actually were before that became gauche.