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PaperclipPerfector  8d ago (text post)   32102 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 24, 2025

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I think you should be more specific about the subset you have in mind.

My first thought was “Civil Rights era Southern Democrats,” a group which unapologetically grounded their racism in conservative thought. But those people are mostly dead now, and their legacy is a good bit more complicated.

If you’re accusing Bob Jones fundamentalists or scientific racists or based post-Christian vitalists of confusing prejudice for conservatism, you’ve got to do more work to establish it.

It's not a unified subset. It's a disparate collection of individuals with discriminatory beliefs which they nevertheless consider to be an integral part of their political identity, though you can point to specific groups in some cases. Religious conservatives are a big standout on the gender and sexuality front, but they're hardly exclusive. Insofar as there's a real unifying theme, it's the "facts don't care about your feelings" aesthetic that many conservatives (especially younger ones) adopt, which IME mostly ends up glossing prejudice as "realism".

To put it as plainly as I can: whenever you find right-wingers saying "I don't think I can be open about my political beliefs because I'll be ostracized", it's never about fiscal policy or foreign policy or even touchier things like immigration or criminal justice. You can think we should slash welfare or defend aggressive foreign policy or declare that Christianity is the one true religion and your left-wing peers at college may think you're an asshole (or a rube), but you're not going to be a pariah (nor is the TA going to mark you down on your essay). The sticking point is basically always about either gender/sexuality or race, and often beliefs that would be considered boundary-pushing even in conservative milieus. For example.

  • -10

Russ Roberts talks about the reaction he gets when he talks about some pretty basic free market economics. I know he's told a story where he used the phrase "they edge away from you". I think it had to do with minimum wage. I may or may not have also gotten the phrase "they stare at you like you're an alien" from him, which I used here, in context of a not-even-boundary-pushing sort of take on sexuality. Perhaps the moment has passed, because the political battles have been won, but at the peak of the cultural pressure cooker, trying desperately to win the political battle, it really was the case that even the most mild doubt of the Dogmatic Position was heavily disfavored.

it's never about fiscal policy or foreign policy

This is literally just that one reddit meme that they change every time there's a new sacred cow

Do you want some gun rights examples? Because oh boy do I have gunnie examples; shall we start with the people who did get fired for putting twenty bucks toward Rittenhouse’s defense fund?

Even for gender/sexuality, the progressive taboos are far more often dependent on matters that are not controversial, or worse are only controversial to the opposing direction. There’s fair argument against misgendering a trans school shooter, but it’s not some universal standard, and people did still lose literal careers over (liking a tweet that did) it.

shall we start with the people who did get fired for putting twenty bucks toward Rittenhouse’s defense fund?

This was construed as supporting a murderous racist, not just a pro-guns position.

Yes. Yes it was.

Falsely.

I’m not gonna say that’s an exception the swallows the rule on its own. The wrong position on the ACA or AWB might be cited as wanting to kill poor people, before found justification for firing, and there’s other times where positions are seen themselves as evidence of disqualificating in capability, such as where just having the wrong background had an academic review board talk about ‘beating that college out of her’ (and, tot’s coincidence, not hiring her) . Of course, most stuff gravitates to race and sexuality as most controversial, regardless of the facts on the ground, and especially if Skibboleth is trying to distinguish ‘criminal justice’ and ‘immigration’, that makes for a self-parody. An RPG forum I once frequented formally banned any support of ICE or defense of antiabortion laws (and informally banned any serious criticism of BLM); there is no position that modern progressives will fail to call racist or sexist or both.

But let’s look again at Skibboleths claim:

The sticking point is basically always about either gender/sexuality or race, and often beliefs that would be considered boundary-pushing even in conservative milieus.

Not ‘understood as’. Not ‘painted as’. Is.

To put it as plainly as I can: whenever you find right-wingers saying "I don't think I can be open about my political beliefs because I'll be ostracized", it's never about fiscal policy or foreign policy or even touchier things like immigration or criminal justice.

It is in fact often about immigration and criminal justice.

To put it as plainly as I can: whenever you find right-wingers saying "I don't think I can be open about my political beliefs because I'll be ostracized", it's never about fiscal policy or foreign policy or even touchier things like immigration or criminal justice.

I just had someone on an unnamed forum say that he wanted me banned (fortunately he is not a mod) for "supporting genocide" by defending Israel with respect to Gaza. So forgive me if I think you are not being accurate here.

A weirdo leftist failing to get you banned for sharing a conservative opinion seems like evidence in favor of my point.

The amount of pushback on the leftist was zero. I didn't get banned this time, but I can't risk continuing to talk about it either.

And it's not hard to find places where being open about right wing political beliefs unambiguously gets people banned.

it's never about fiscal policy or foreign policy or even touchier things like immigration or criminal justice.

In my experience, I lost a huge amount of friends for my dissident opinions about policing, immigration, and COVID. My most recent girlfriend broke up with me because I disagreed with her that it wasn’t “fascist” for the Trump administration to detain children and separate immigrant families at the border. I lost a ton of friends for opposing strict COVID lockdowns and mask mandates. And of course I started losing friends as early as college because I expressed tepid opposition to the Black Lives Matter movement.

Believe me, the opinions I express in public are far more tame than the things I say here, and also I started getting anathematized in certain circles even when my worldview was far closer to the progressive mainstream than it is now.

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