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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 21, 2024

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“I do not want our work to be weaponized,” she said.

By which she means politicised, while herself choosing to act politically both by withholding from publishing and using the frame of threat protection to justify her political choice.

I don't know if Jesse Singal has changed his tune, but this always enrages me. There is a political party that is pro child mutilation and sterilization. The entire rest of the world is against this practice, even countries that once upon a time were more open minded about it. The pro child mutilation and sterilization party keeps doubling down, and the Jesse Singal's of the world point to the "Lets not mutilate and sterilize children" party as "politicizing" or "weaponizing" the issue. Because his side can only do good things, and if his side is doing bad things he can't possibly ignore, he must somehow blame them on the other bad side which can only do bad things. Even when they are championing the side of the issue he believes is correct.

I get there is a significant contingent of "Vote Blue No Matter Who" NPCs, but it's astounding to me to witness someone who breaks from the "It's not happening and if it were it would be a good thing" programming, sees the bad things, writes articles endlessly about the bad things, and then still turns around and choses to die on the hill of the party of the bad things.

There is a political party that is pro child mutilation

No major politician or political party supports this, unless you're talking about religious stuff like Jewish circumcision.

Unlike the other parties, which are all pure as snow?

Funnily enough, Jesse posted this just an hour and a half ago:

I haven’t become a conservative since [I was 23 years old]; I’ve just become more skeptical, and much, much more aware of the fact that conservatives have no monopoly on groupthink, intolerance, and other forms of bias. I also no longer think that you can just flip a “Liberal Policies” switch and it will fix things, at least not in real life. Just look at cities like San Francisco, which are run entirely by liberals and leftists and beset by serious problems stemming from or exacerbated by the governance decisions these supposed “good guys” have made.

It's all well and good to make mouth sounds about how your team isn't all good, and the other team isn't all bad. It's another that when pressed on any specific issue, you start doing summersaults about how the only reason you side does bad things is because the bad side is riling them up with their "heated rhetoric". Push come to shove, on any specific issue, I've never seen him admit his side bears the moral culpability for any specific wrong. Nor provide a path forward where his side should just admit they are wrong and stop doing the thing he admits is wrong. His only "answer" to the mass sterilization and mutilation of children, last I saw, was that Republicans needed to stop making an issue out of it first so that his side (the side that's been pushing it in the face of all reason, evidence or morality) could break from the trance and backtrack without any political consequences.

Because that's likely to ever happen.

I also can't read the entire article because it's paywalled. Maybe he gets there.