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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

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The right's "nobody wants to overturn Roe v. Wade you hysterical pansies" pivot is a good example of the same thing coming from the other side, and it's no less infuriating to deal with.

Wait, what? The effort to overturn RvW was conducted very much in public over five decades! I cannot imagine how anyone missed this!

Yeah, which is what made watching the gaslighting so upsetting, especially when all the anti-abortion guys on the motte took a victory lap after it happened. I don't have logs for it, but I'm sure some of the pro-abortion regulars do.

In fairness some of them were saying things like "holy fuck, Kavanaugh actually found his balls," indicating that they were legitimately surprised rather than going "lol libs, we fooled you all along." So it's not the most awful variant of that behavior, but there was never a moment where people went "ok, yeah, in retrospect all that panic about Roe was justified, my bad"

I am completely confused about the foundation of your claim of gaslighting. Who ever made the claim that "nobody wants to overturn Roe vs. Wade you hysterical pansies," and to the extent that anyone ever made that claim, why would anyone take that person seriously?

There was a national movement, involving millions of people, over five decades, all with the explicit purpose of overturning RvW. This was not a secret.

Sorry, I didn't keep logs during the Kav and Barrett hearings (not sure I even had an account during the first one), but hopefully one of the pro abortion posters can back me up on this one. IIRC lot of people were accusing the Handmaid's Tail cosplayers of being performatively hysterical about the possibility of Roe being overturned because of the usual "republican judges are cucks, they'd never go through with it" argument.

Edit, here's two NR articles that piss me off in a similar way

No Supreme Court appointment by a Republican president would be complete without the Left’s obligatory hysteria about the purportedly imminent demise of Roe v. Wade, that indefensible exercise in judicial lawlessness whose atrocious consequences include the deaths of millions of unborn children. Once again, it’s a political narrative with little foothold in the real world.

It has that same smug, sneering "what are you gonna do about it?" conformity enforcing attitude as other "it's not happening but you'll deserve it when it does" stuff, and I find it really upsetting.

Sure, but did anyone claim they wouldn't overturn roe if they could? NR is making fun of the idea that overturning roe will utter in some kind of vaguely-described dystopia where women are chattel.

I don't believe you understood the critique being made. Those protesters were not merely making the claim "oh no, RvW will be overturned." They were claiming that the removal of RvW would lead to something in the vague ballpark of a Handmaid's Tale dystopia. This is, at a bare minimum, a much stronger claim.

On the Republican side, a sentiment like "republican judges are cucks, they'd never go through with it" was not insincerity, it was fatalism, based on the long history of Republican-nominated Justices who refused to overturn RvW. This was a plank in the Republican platform, a campaign promise made at every opportunity, the basis of an endless number of fundraising pleas, and for nothing until Dobbs.

Edit to add: I'm not a fan of McCarthy's style there either. But I'll give him half a point for stating straight up that he wanted Barrett to be the vote necessary, but just didn't think she would.

Yeah, agreed, it's not a perfect example, and it's hard to find many from the right because they lack the aggressive and omnipresent conformity enforcement systems that the left has. I hope someone can come through with some of the motte quotes I was thinking of, which were really dismissive to anyone who thought the Roeverturn was going to happen right up until the leak, when they switched to doing touchdown dances lol. I swear to God someone here was complaining about it just last week.

"Russia will never invade Ukraine, that's crazy, you're crazy" is another one that happened on the motte, but I didn't want to bring it up because more people are still mad about it, and it didn't break down along typical partisan lines.

One rightwing example is people saying they are just stating facts about race and iq that they don't want to oppress anyone and then they post slurs and holocaust denial and blatant racism

Hey now, if that's an accusation I would never, ever even consider doing the former of those.

Was actually considering adding the impossible trinity of "the Holocaust is fake, Hitler did nothing wrong, but also they had it coming and we'd do it again", but the post was getting pretty long already.

That one's so irritating it makes me do a magical girl transformation into Simon Wiesenthal whenever it comes up. Just pick two of the three and stop bullshitting people, damn it.

It wasn't an accusation just an example of that type of dishonesty from right wing people.

Yeah, one of the things that makes me mad quickly is dismissive "but both sides" when I'm like, wait, you need to show your work. Yes, both sides of any question are made of people; people are demonstrably imperfect; both sides of any question have flaws somewhere. But not all flaws are symmetric!

The Russia/Ukraine thing is a prediction I got wrong, though not in that way. I thought Putin would salami-slice a bit more of the Donbass and get away with it again. The full-bore invasion striking directly at Kiev came as rather a shock.

Yeah, that was my theory too, although I bought into the "it's all US propaganda" take too easily. It was embarrassing enough that I just didn't say anything about the whole thing and counted myself lucky I'd never put my neck out.