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PaperclipPerfector  19d ago (text post)   35144 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 3, 2025

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We're trillions of dollars in debt, facing major issues from cans that have been kicked down the road for decades, we've got China and Russia and maybe WWIII, and AI that may or may not be civilization-threatening issues on the horizon - all of these things, IMO, are more important than the "SJ" stuff we like to argue so much about here.

Not disagreeing (I'm on record as saying I'd vote for our SJ party if they had word one about civil defence), but SJ (and the reaction to it) seems to be what's driving the polarisation, which is AFAICT what you were discussing.

But when you say "make SJ a political non-starter" - as much as I personally think most SJ stuff is a distraction, it's a major plank for Democrats, so you're just saying they should unilaterally disarm (i.e. abandon all the things they stand for). Sure, it's nice to dream your opponents will abandon all the goals you don't like and focus on the things you care about.

I'm not making any demands. I'm pointing out that there are levers Trump/Vance 2028/the Republicans have access to that might alter political demographics* such that it's impossible (or at least vastly more difficult) to assemble a winning coalition while holding to SJ, and thus such that the Democratic Party will have to either jettison SJ or keep losing (and of course I defend their right to pick either), which is a third option omitted by your previously-proposed dilemma of "either set up a one-party state or get everything rolled back later". I agree with pulling some of those levers (the academia one is particularly justified, IMO, as this seems more like "undoing creepy enemy social engineering" than like "doing creepy social engineering in its own right", and the lever Elon Musk already pulled of "buy and uncensor Twitter" seems to have gone pretty well) and not with pulling others, but either way I have essentially no input into which ones the Republicans including Trump do and do not pull.

*To quote B5, "I'll tell you something, my friends, the world is changing every day. The only question is, who's doing it?"; people do change their minds, people do get born or immigrate and start voting, people do die or emigrate and stop voting, and the state of the public square and the education system and the immigration system affect all of those.

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