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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 14, 2024

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Protect cryptocurrency investments so Black men who make them know their money is safe.

...what? I'm sure men are more involved in crypto than women, but why black men?

And what does "protect cryptocurrency investments" even mean? Providing a price floor for them? Making them more regulated? How?

My bias is that crypto is speculative gambling for the mass public, though I believe there are valid use cases for it. What's next, subsidies for Amway to protect women-owned small businesses?

I watched a Sagaar/Crystal Breaking Point show on the topic, and to me it seemed funny that for some reason none of them mentioned the potentially most important reason: crypto has been historically used to protect money from various actors, including garnishing the income due to child support or other such obligations. If you have irregular or under the table income, you can store it even using cash such as with bitcoin ATMs or peer-to-peer trading, there are also other methods. Sending signals that the government will be easy on these practices may be very important for black men specifically.

I may have misunderstood, but it kinda sound like you think that the Democrat staffers who wrote that press release were thinking 'black men use crypto to hide their drug-dealing money and avoid paying for the children they walked out on, we'd better tell them that they have our support'.

Even in politics, I think you'd struggle to find that kind of jet-black cynicism

I thought it meant regulate cryptocurrency investments so Black men don't gets scammed. Not sure if these policies are fleshed out in more detail elsewhere. Possibly, there is no intention to give specific details so people can just fill in the blanks with their preferred policy.

That's probably a good idea. But black men who are into crypto presumably don't want regulation to "protect" them from it.

The issue with the ambiguity is that people really into crypto are as likely to fill in the blanks with things they're worried about as things they're hopeful about.

My guess is that they have some sort of internal polling to try to figure out what the common factors are amongst black men who support Trump, and they came up with buisiness ownership and cryptocurrency investments.

And then stopped right there and treated them like the wider cohort instead of tailoring the message to who they are targeting.

This is fucking amateur hour.

Like how does one suck at marketing so bad that they try nanny state patronizing on the libertarian leaning business owners? It genuinely feels like being talked down to because you're black.

"You're a black man, right? Vote for me, I'll give you government handouts and weed! You can even use the handout to front money to start dealing!"