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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 31, 2022

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Pedo lifestyles are outside of the Overton window but only for the time being. There's no magic principal limiting the endless expansion of rights and tolerance. It'll never happen, and when it does, you bigots will deserve it.

(1) You can make predictions, but you can't use them as premises without evidence. If anything, Western societies seem more worried about pedophilia per se (rather than e.g. homosexuality) than in the past, and the age at which people are seen as being able to consent to sex seems to be rising pretty much everything. So the evidence seems to go in the opposite direction from your prediction.

(2) I don't think anyone claims that there is a magic principle. If you can't describe people who disagree with you without resorting to rhetoric, then maybe you would benefit more carefully and calmly about the controversy. You could read up more about contemporary sexual ethics and then come back to this debate, because at this point you're acting as though you don't know even the basics of contemporary conceptions of consent.

(3) The law of merited impossibility is a great point, but I am unconvinced that it applies in this case.

I think you know what I mean, but in case you don't:

"You do you"

"Speak your truth"

"lived experience"

Just a few popular phrases in the current zeitgeist that demonstrate our society's relativistic outlook. You can care about saving the whales, or global warming, or whatever, but if you claim that your cause is the _most important _ and that others must get on board, you're an asshole who needs to mind his own business. However I won't deny that recent progressivism seems to be bucking this trend.

Modern societies certainly tend to be less prescriptive about some issues, but people seem to quite regularly preach. And it's not just the woke progressives: I hear liberals telling me that climate change is The Most Important Thing Ever and conservatives telling me that Defending Western Civilization is the Most Important Thing. Is there more relativism than I'd like? Yes, I'm sure we agree a lot about that. However, it's an exaggeration to say that it's ubiquitous. And as you suggest, wokeness has made society more moralistic in some areas than it was even within my lifetime.

What? This isn't what I'm talking about at all. This example stretches "political" to meaninglessness. People have suffered from war since people began living in cities, are you trying to claim that a 12th century German peasant lived in a world as politicized as that of a 21st century American?

Yes, it's a matter of historical record that politics didn't leave the peasants alone (Medieval soldiers didn't eat due to great logistic networks or large salaries) and that there were advantages in being a loyal vassal of your master if you were a serf during the frequent periods of violence. Garrison duty and labour responsibilities during wartime were a fact of life for peasants. Under some systems, they might have to travel far from their homes to fight.

I don't think that it's stretching the definition of "politics" to include being asked to fight for your lord or being pillaged by the soldiers of some king. Of course, it wasn't politics in the sense of petty regulations of people's lives - the Church and your parents would do enough of that. True, peasants couldn't vote, but they also weren't without say (it's a modern myth that there is no mass politics without mass voting) and I took "you may not be interested in it, but it is interested in you, and it's not going to leave you alone" to include when politics infringed on the lives of ordinary people. As much as I dislike diversity statements or pronoun pronounciations, they pale in comparison to what a Medieval or Afghan peasant endure(d) as a consequence of political events.