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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   26557 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 2025

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Right now is not testing the water, just approaching it. It's not boiling the frog, just touching the knob. Trump and his most ardent supporters are starting to stretch the Overton window to also include "crossing the Rubicon".

But what possibilities are they trying to approach, or to stretch the Overton window to include? Invading Canada/Mexico? Genociding the Jews? And if so, why would they try and reference Nazi imagery, which is probably the aesthetic repulsive to most people in the US? None of it makes any sense.

Some guesses -- though mostly possible, rather than probable, ones:

  • to get rid of cancel culture by targeting a sacred cow with minimal effort (activation of some hand muscles) and minimal risk (initial performers highly resistant to being canceled).
  • Musk has already drastically pivoted his public persona before, at least once, and with great results for himself. Done again to target the European alt-right audience may open new markets and means of production to him.
  • Russia significantly poached the US using certain wedge issues, and is on the way of poaching the EU in the next 5-10 years. Maybe instead of supporting the opposing groups (more left-leaning EU fractions), the "new" US admin. has decided to just poach the EU-right from Russia in turn. Esp. when some of the systemic issues (e.g. refugees) that empower those wedge issues will only be worsening.
  • weaponisation of radicalised forces to intimidate power-holders into giving that power away, or to take it away from them forcefully. See: meddlesome priest, January 6 attack, Kristallnacht, some of the assassinations in Israel (e.g. Yitzhak Rabin).
  • keep potential opposition in the form of political activists constantly exhausted. Or rather, make them spend their energy now against a literal body movement that can later be motted as a "muh heart" or whatever, so if / when something more outrageous ends up happening (deliberately or by accident), they'll be exhausted to become an OWS or pre-BLM scale threat.
  • keep the infosphere polluted with easily-generated noise to dis-coordinate potential opposition.
  • if Trump / Musk are Russian assets, it may be serving Russia as an easy way of discrediting and isolating the US.
  • salami tactics -- use a series of litmus tests to check what people are de facto letting them get away with. How much money can be saved / earned by e.g. running prisons / concentration camps with lower "quality of service" and adherence to human rights? What if illegal immigrants could be used for forced labour instead of being deported? Or if the Xinjiang "reeducation" model seems like an efficient enough solution to them to be worth of replicating, v.s. Muslims or other groups? The elites could be getting access to cheap "donor" organs too.
  • ... if the current admin is considering invasion / occupation / annexation of non-NWS states / territories, it'll have to solve the "issue" of the local population somehow. Things like forced displacements, ethnic cleansings, camps, etc could be internally risky if the frog of the domestic population isn't boiled properly to be accepting of these things. E.g. I think Russia's attack on Crimea went mostly ok domestically because by that point Kremlin had already largely defanged most of potential internal threats and erected its power-vertical. And even then it took them years and then months of aggressive propaganda still to build up towards feeling safe to officially report at least some of the damages that it was causing to the Ukrainian civilian population and infrastructure.

It's probably not one specific factor, but rather their calculation of the sum PRO / CON difference from several such factors.

to get rid of cancel culture by targeting a sacred cow with minimal effort (activation of some hand muscles) and minimal risk (initial performers highly resistant to being canceled).

keep potential opposition in the form of political activists constantly exhausted. Or rather, make them spend their energy now against a literal body movement that can later be motted as a "muh heart" or whatever, so if / when something more outrageous ends up happening (deliberately or by accident), they'll be exhausted to become an OWS or pre-BLM scale threat.

keep the infosphere polluted with easily-generated noise to dis-coordinate potential opposition.

These are the only ones that seem possible IMO

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