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PaperclipPerfector  19d ago (text post)   35132 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 3, 2025

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I find the whole tree of threads after OP's post somewhat disorienting, like being in a room full of people talking at once past each other. When a poster says "the issue", is it the FAA scandal? Or, per SteveAgain's original top-level post, the reception on Reddit and Hacker News of Trace's post of FAA scandal? Or, per OliveTapanade's first response, is "the issue" the arguments-as-soldiers tactic:

He's just right! There's no way to justify a norm like "never criticise bad things if my side is responsible".

Or is the issue the pervasive and corrosive effects of DEI and the philosophy that spawned it, which appears to be your point, since you differentiate the FAA story specifically from "the issue itself":

How did he do a better job identifying and advocating for the issue? He did a better job reporting on that particular story, but when it comes to the issue itself, how has he done a better job identifying it than anyone from James Lindsay through Lomez to the seven zillion witches posting here? How has he done a better job advocating for it, than Chris Rufo? Last I checked he was advocating that people vote for the candidate that would ensure more of this would keep happening.

And that's just the confusion in our branch of the conversation. OliveTapanade's reply happened in the context of the previous replies. Crushedoranges advocated for Trace to pick a side (and, presumably, do the arguments-as-soldiers):

The fact that TracingWoodgrains doesn't fully come over to the right because of this and doggedly is determined to stay in the principled center makes me completely unsympathetic.

TequilaMockingbird recalls that Trace was indeed more partisan before:

Back in the twenty-teens he was a vocal advocate of the sort of "full spectrum information manipulation" that has become the standard. Where he once bragged about fabricacating evidence to pwn LibsOfTikTok he now wonders why nobody trusts him.

In this context, OliveTapanade's main point therefore:

Set aside what you think about him as a person. On the specific issue here, he is just unambiguously correct.

Where "the issue" is, specifically, the hiring practices of the FAA that began in 2013.

Yep, that's what I was going for. It's possible I've expressed myself poorly, but the point I wanted to make was to separate out the FAA issue itself from one's judgement of its author.

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