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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 9, 2024

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I don’t think that’s true, because this is something that absolutely hits the sensibilities of the PMC who have been basically able to ignore the problem because it’s not affecting them. Pets are in many parts of the PMC class a very sensitive point. They don’t have to care about blue collar rednecks losing jobs to immigrants. They only have brief conversations with rednecks when they show up to fix the HVAC system or repair the roof or install a floor. But having an immigrant steal your beloved pet and eat it is something that the wine moms are going to be upset about. These are the same people who are trying to certify their pets as support animals so they can take them to Walmart. The idea of losing their pets in that way would be horrific.

If you grew up in the era when people still read newspapers or watched local news on TV (i.e. you were born before about 1990) then if-it-bleeds-it-leads media incentives meant that you were subject to intensive coverage of lurid crimes and a media narrative that crime is out of control. This narrative was completely unresponsive to the large drop in crime in the 1990's, with the result that low-information voters think that crime continued to increase, and use this fact to justify cocooning their kids. You could live somewhere as peaceful as the Zurich suburbs and still fill a local media crime blotter with sufficiently lurid stories that crime would be out of control in the minds of people who consume media crime coverage, and a crucial part of the education of a blue triber is understanding this.

Even if it was true, "One Haitian immigrant in one small town killed and ate their neighbours cat" being signal-boosted nationally by partisan media is exactly the sort of crime coverage that blue tribers have learned to tune out, and frankly that everyone should have learned to tune out.

Still too optimistic.

I don’t think that’s true, because this is something that absolutely hits the sensibilities of the PMC who have been basically able to ignore the problem because it’s not affecting them. Pets are in many parts of the PMC class a very sensitive point.

And race isn't? Arguably it's the sensitive point. If it was refugees from Scotland you might have a shot.

Your mistake here is assuming people are going to treat this as a neutral rational argument and not a plate of political sewage; they will react with visceral disgust. 2rafa's post about how people react in Britain to bringing up uncomfortable immigration facts is how it'll actually go:

It reminds me of real life conversations I’ve had with white English people, intelligent, center-right conservative types, about groups, identity, mass immigration, genetics, civilization, and they just shut down. I don’t mean that they shut down the debate, they’re usually polite enough and I wouldn’t discuss ‘edgy’ things with people I didn’t trust anyway, but they shut down internally. They display the exact pigheaded stubbornness that the Seattle video interviewees do, the strange combination of [post] Christian guilt complex and superiority complex and absolute, ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’ type emphasis on propriety above policy

In the American case they'll simply refuse to even grant it unless it's absolutely unavoidable. And even then, you might get some of the "pigheaded 'what of it?' stubbornness" with the more left wing types.

There are some things people of good character and breeding just don't want to hear, let alone talk about in polite conversation. "Black savages are eating people's cats" (which is how it'll sound to them because, let's be real, that's what the DR is saying) is as close to the top of the list as I can imagine. You really need the 4K video. And something that hints it wasn't one deranged person.