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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 14, 2025

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I am so frustrated by this argument. It's always "he's just joking/trolling/taunting, your TDS is showing" right up until he does it. Then, it's immediately "he's been saying this all along, what did you expect?! This is what we voted for." I don't know if this quotidian gaslighting is invisible to those who engage in it, or if they do so willingly because triggering the libs is fun. Either way, it's absolute poison to discourse and the sharing of sincerely held ideas.

You know what's poison to discourse? Being expected to take every bit of speculative, hysterical catastrophizing with more deadly seriousness than actual things that literally happened. Member when the president had a 16 year old US citizen murdered by flying robot assassin? I member. How does that compare to an off-hand comment that was immediately followed with caveats about legality? Is it a thousand times worse? A million? Are you going to take those caveats as deadly serious evidence of Trump's deadly serious concern for the law? Of course not.

I don’t think we’re going to find any common ground, but I apologize for calling you a sycophant. That was uncalled for.

I don’t think you or any of his other sycophants have any place to call out “hysterical catastrophizing” after painstakingly justifying every abhorrent thing this man does. When the catastrophe actually happens, you’ll be here, typing away about how good and necessary it is.

I don’t think you or any of his other sycophants

Argue without the namecalling.

When the catastrophe actually happens

The catastrophe has already happened. Nobody knows how big exactly the Biden cross-border invasion has been, but it probably will have effects for decades down the line. We've got literally violent foreign gangs taking over neighborhoods in the US. We've got tens of thousands of migrants sent to tiny towns where there's no chance they can be properly assimilated. We've got one of the major parties not only completely normalizing ignoring the law and brazenly bragging about "resisting" the law enforcement, but actively working to make the maximum amount of foreign violent criminals and sociopaths to stay on US territory, and willing to destroy any institution in the nation that stands in the way. We've got higher education institutions taken over by people openly advocating genocide, violently rioting without any consequences and physically attacking anybody who looks like a Jew. And that's only a small sample of the political violence we're seeing right now. That sounds a lot like something that I'd call a catastrophe.

As to the “cross-border invasion,” I don’t think we’re going to find any common ground, because this sounds to me more like a fever dream than any description of reality. I live in a border state and haven’t any kind of “invasion” like you’re describing.

As to your other examples of excesses on the left, I couldn’t agree more! I hate that shit too! I’m in academia and argue with my colleagues about it all the time. But I don’t understand the point you’re making. We can open up the file cabinet and pull out all the worst examples of political violence and extremism over the years, but those are in a separate category from the excesses and extremism coming from the President of the United States.

because this sounds to me more like a fever dream than any description of reality

This is because you choose to ignore the reality for ideological reasons. People do that all the time, nothing surprising.

I live in a border state and haven’t any kind of “invasion” like you’re describing.

People lived in the Soviet Union and didn't see any lack of freedoms that the lying Western press was talking about. Moreover, I am sure there are a lot of people of North Korea which don't see any totalitarian regime, just the glorious rule of the Beloved Chairman. The key difference is: this has been largely done to them by somebody else, and they'd risk severe consequences if they waked up. You do it to yourself willingly and risk nothing but feeling a little silly. And yet...

In 2015, there was about 300K illegal migrant encounters on the southern border. In 2023, there were over 3.2 million. That doesn't count people being literally brought in the country by the planeload and released in random communities - without any vetting, proper immigration process (I know something about that, being a legal immigrant myself) or sensible oversight. That doesn't account for complete refusal of the collective left to acknowledge there even exists such a thing as immigration law anymore (just listen how Dem politicians spoke about illegal migration some 10-15 years ago - they were proper firebrands, nobody is above the law! Now they only remember this when they need to cook up another investigation against Trump).

But I don’t understand the point you’re making

I think my very first sentence was clear enough? We are already living in the catastrophical environment. The catastrope - at least for those people who are not willingly blind, like you are - has already very evidently happened and very perceivable. All that have been happening for the last decade-and-a-half is not normal. It is not what should be happening in a proper country, regardless of ideological differences.

those are in a separate category from the excesses and extremism coming from the President of the United States.

Nope. To fix the catastrophe, you need to act unlike you'd act in a normal situation. If your neighbor parks their car somewhere that inconveniences you, the right way is to politely ask them to move their car. If your neighbor parks in front of a fire hydrant while your house is on fire, then the firemen would break the car's windows and run the hose through. Impolite, but necessary. Now imagine this neighbor actively impedes the firemen from extinguishing the fire, runs around spilling gasoline and brags about it because you are, in his eyes, an evil person whose house deserves to burn, and also there's nothing bad in a good fire, as long as the right people are getting burned. Would you try to handle this the most polite way possible? Likely not. What has been happening is not normal, and thus we get somebody who is not acting in a usual way to fix it. Because fixing it in normal ways has been tried and failed, many times over. So yes, these "excesses" are very much the same category - it's these excesses, continuing and multiplying for decades, what convinced people (including myself) that what has been done before - nominating and electing polite, smooth talking, consensus-seeking people who would try to solve things in polite, consensual, mutually beneficial ways - is not working, and actually threatening the society's very existence.

A catastrophe like straight up murdering a minor citizen? Should I follow the other side's MO and just ignore inconvenient events like my augmented reality censors them away? Or an abhorrent catastrophe like deporting an illegal alien with a deportation order... to the wrong place?

You guys have been breathlessly, hysterically screaming about endless catastrophes, a new one every week, for literally every week the man has been in office. Remember when he was going to put all the gays in camps and legalize rape and Handmaiden's Tale and kill all the Muslims and start WW3 and start WW3 and start WW3? Of course not. Because remembering all the failed hysterical catastrophizing might offer some perspective.

You guys

Who is "you guys"? @cheesecake_llama calling "you guys" sycophants is not good, and neither is you generalizing right back.

There is nothing to be gained by an exchange consisting of little more than sneers about which side is more in denial and cultish.

I criticized the “Handmaiden’s Tale” chicken little-ing on “my team” for years, because unlike the MAGA cult, I don’t feel any compulsion to twist myself into defending whatever insane bullshit “my team” decides to push any given week.

Nobody is crying about an alien simply being improperly deported, don’t be disingenuous. Administrative errors happen, I get it. The problem is that he was sent indefinitely to a torture-prison without due process, while the the government is arguing at the same time that 1: they want to send citizens to the same place, and 2: if they fuck up, there is literally no remedy.

I’d just like you to imagine if Biden or Obama were advocating this sort of thing. The people on this website would be calling for armed rebellion.

I criticized the “Handmaiden’s Tale” chicken little-ing on “my team” for years, because unlike the MAGA cult, I don’t feel any compulsion to twist myself into defending whatever insane bullshit “my team” decides to push any given week.

Well, you didn't do it here under that name. If you can link a single example elsewhere, I'll be thrilled to be wrong.

Nobody is crying about an alien simply being improperly deported, don’t be disingenuous. Administrative errors happen, I get it. The problem is that he was sent indefinitely to a torture-prison without due process, while the the government is arguing at the same time that 1: they want to send citizens to the same place, and 2: if they fuck up, there is literally no remedy.

Sorry, just need to stop to clarify here. The prison you're talking about is the one that turned El Salvador from a murder capitol of the world to safer than Sweden, right?

Do you hate the El Salvadoran people? Do you want them to be tortured and murdered en masse by rapacious warlords and banditos? Victimized and preyed upon in even greater amounts? Or is this just the meme?

If not, then maybe that stark difference ought to be taken into account.

And even then, I still don't buy your take. Let's establish some facts. He was deported to his home country, and his own government imprisoned him, as they do with everyone affiliated with the rapacious warlords who murdered and terrorized a fuckton of their people. He already had multiple days in court before judges, and had a deportation order.

Imagine if the US government had caught the "not to El Savador" clause in time, then had a quick hearing where it was determined that his asylum claim was obviously false, and the grounds for the "not to El Salvador" clause were obviously voided by the changed facts on the ground (e.g. his mother no longer owned the business, and the gang he claimed would harm him no longer exists).

Would you suddenly be OK with him being deported?

If we deported him somewhere else, and that country then deported him back to El Salvador, would you be OK with that?

Because your actual logic looks a lot like "We can't deport this criminal, because his native country will do normal things they do to criminals to him", and that might be literally the most perverse logic I've ever heard. Again, it comes back to endless empathy for offenders, and none at all for the people they hurt. It's so fucked up I'm not even appalled. I hit some overflow error and ended up reluctantly impressed at the evil clown logic.

And again, NONE OF THIS justifies being worried about citizens being deported.

I’d just like you to imagine if Biden or Obama were advocating this sort of thing. The people on this website would be calling for armed rebellion.

Per our prior correspondence, which you ignored, Obama did things many times worse (e.g. assassinating a minor citizen for fun) and I never heard anyone call for armed rebellion over it.

How do you think abhorrent things a politician does should be addressed? Can you outline a few steps based on the brought up example of Obama executing an American citizen without a trial, and killing his innocent 16 year old son in the process, and provide a few links that show how you have followed those steps yourself?