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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   5746 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 3, 2025

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You may remember racism being declared a public health emergency during the height of Covid. So now the new HHS secretary Robert F. Kennedy is declaring antisemitism a "spiritual and moral malady that sickens societies and kills people with lethalities comparable to history’s most deadly plagues". Since it's a malady and he promised to Make America Healthy Again Health and Human Services will be working with other departments to fight this sick sick wrongthing.

I'm thinking that Trump administration isn't "defeating wokeness", just updating it to their funhouse mirror version.

Ah, well, the costs of compromising with the left to get elected...

The idea that HHS has any reason to be involved here is bizarre.

Personally I'd rather them consider anti-semitism a plague than gun ownership, but objectively both are wrong.

One may recall the before-times; when one Geirge Carlin was considered a philosopher and social commentator par excellence. One particular insight of his, which today seems less likely to be considered insightful by those aligned with his politics, was that "Fighting for peace is like screwing for virginity.". It was always dumb, if one abhors war to such an extent, one never wages even a defensive one, one will eventually lose to those who are willing to wage even aggressive ones. And the latter will be the only ones remaining.

If one were to, in the face of an ideology championing idpol, employ liberalism, think of how small the coalition would be and how tempted each group would be to switch, given the promises of racially and sexually preferential treatment. Liberalism is a sort of disarmament, only works if ones enemies follow suit.

Can the genie of idpol be put back into the bottle? It seems not as it preys on the base instincts of the masses of prefering preferential accomodations, over meritocracy, as in the latter they the vast majority won't make. But if the game is rigged, if nepotism is tolerated, then success isn't a matter of innate excellence, which is outside of ones control, but of correct connections, which one can at least in theory work to establish.

Can the genie of idpol be put back into the bottle? It seems not as it preys on the base instincts of the masses of prefering preferential accomodations

Here's the problem: Jews are a very small minority. Anti-semitism being of central concern in the Western mind is not like preferences for the Indian undercaste, it's a product of ideology and/or elite power. It is liberalism.

One doesn't have to do this for democratic reasons and one could argue it's not even good for Jews to do this.

So there can either be pro-black or pro-jewish identity politics? Majority of US who are neither are shit out of luck.

Yeah, I've heard the term "woke right" bandied about in the last few months and I'm only starting to get it now.

The funniest part is that this is the opposite of what the people who came up with it meant.

What did the people who came up with it mean?

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