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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 16, 2024

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If it really doesn't matter because it's so rare, people could stop freaking out over Trump/Vance dropping these claims.

This makes zero sense. If it doesn't matter, then I don't want Trump dropping claims like it matters. He'd be misrepresenting truth. Lying, as the saying goes.

This makes zero sense.

Same to you, bro. If you lie about something that doesn't matter to me, it's not going to matter to me. I can't wrap my head around getting worked up about it.

Do you really not care about the impact of mass media lies on the society around you, or are you unaware of it?

I think it's more that I tend to care about the things they lie about.

When you say it doesn't matter, do you mean:

  • the few cases of animal eating are blown out of proportion
  • even if Trump blows this out of proportion it won't lead to consequences
  • you don't care about the consequences to the migrants and adjacent people?

The first one. And my issue here is that instead of saying that, we started off from "it doesn't happen". Likewise, if progressives wanted to say any of the latter two, they should literally say that, instead of pivoting to them, after their initial claim becomes less defensible.

There are very few things that don't happen at all. "Even if you could find a few singular cases, there is no significance to them" colloquially means "it doesn't happen" in my book.

This was in response to Vance and Trump going on about "they're eating cats" like it's a daily ubiquitous occurence. I'm fine with the reply being "no, it doesn't happen". Not in Present Simple.

It's not about it being a daily ubiquitous occurence. It's that something extremely rare and shocking goes from "never seen it before in my entire life" to "not unheard of in my part of town", even when it's practiced by an overwhelming minority of people. It was the same problem Europe had with Syrian refugees, and the following wave of terrorist attacks and sexual assaults. It was a very small minority doing them, but it was still a social problem.

You'd expect a media campaign to make something "heard of". And sure enough, the next time someone sees their Haitian neighbour grilling meat, are they going to put it into the "business as usual" bin or into "could be someone's cat" bin?

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