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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 13, 2023

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What is the end goal of all this, in your view? Culture wars to avoid a class war? If so, why now and not, say, 20 years ago?

The end goal, or the likely outcome?

The end goal is obvious. A prosperous, equitable society free of injustice, poverty and oppression.

The likely outcome is a very large pile of skulls, when society passes some critical point and abruptly and catastrophically decoheres. Most, perhaps all of the precursors for that eventuality are already baked in to our social reality; we're now just rolling the dice until we hit snake-eyes.

Why not twenty years ago? Because that's how policy starvation works. Twenty years ago, or fifty for that matter, the easy, palatable solutions hadn't been discredited yet, so people overwhelmingly went with them rather than with the ravings of the extremists. After decades of effort those moderate solutions all failed and were discredited, so now consensus is falling in behind the radicals. The radicals are likewise failing, and so soon it will be the super-radicals and so on. Since their goal isn't actually possible, it will simply go on in this fashion until the system as a whole runs out of capacity to absorb the strain.

Answering that would require greater insight into society, and how it's run, than any of us can plausibly get, but something like avoiding class war does feel plausible to me. But the question of "why now" doesn't feel that relevant to me. Maybe they just didn't get the idea yet? Maybe it's a question of logistics - for certain things to happen, certain other things have to have happened before, and we weren't at that point yet? Maybe in the past class war itself served the same function that wokeness does now, but it got a bit out of hand, and had to be replaced?