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PaperclipPerfector  16d ago (text post)   30771 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 2, 2024

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First, this isn't how people often use the phrase on this site or others. When they speak of Cthulhu, they're often referring to things happening on the scale of decades or years, and sometimes even less.

This doesn't match my experience. This phrase is so niche that I don't often run into it, but my memory of it is that decades is roughly the minimum timescale involved, i.e. they're talking about decades or perhaps even centuries, not decades or years, and certainly not even less than years. Timescales of under a decade - or even a handful of decades - are so short that extreme, unsustainable things can win out - and often do, akin to a last-place team beating the first-place team in one of their dozen match-ups during an MLB season - such that people seem to believe that they shouldn't talk about them in such grand, sweeping outside-view terms, but rather with the actual inside-view specific factors.

I've seen Cthulhu mentioned in reference to Trans topics, which haven't been relevant for very long, certainly less long than multiple decades.

Someone will post a headline of the woke left winning some minor flavor-of-the-month battle, then someone will chime in with "Cthulhu always swims left" as a stand-in for "[things] always get [worse]" and "the left always wins".

Trans topics haven't been mainstream for a long time, but they've certainly been a part of the progressive movement for a long time, at least decades. It's merely another instantiation of the concept of equal rights being expanded to cover minorities, following the success of the gay rights/gay marriage movements of a couple decades ago. Heck, the mere existence of trans topics as a mainstream political/ideological topic over the past decade or so is an example of swimming leftward.

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