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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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Your post brings to mind something Jonathan Haidt has been saying for a while, which is that modern SocJus/idpol/wokeness/progressivism/etc. is performing anti-Cognitive Behavioral Therapy on the populace (one contention of his being that this is largely responsible for increase in mental health issues among teenagers and teenage girls in particular). CBT teaches various techniques for dealing with negative experiences, such as decatastrophizing - not jumping to the worst conclusions based on the data - or taking ownership of one's reactions - instead of "this made me feel bad," it's "this happened, and I reacted by feeling bad." These have obvious direct negative counterparts in SocJus, with microaggressions being explicit calls to presume some sort of bigotry from ambiguous behavior, and claims that speech that one deems as hateful are directly responsible for literally harming that person.

From my mostly nonexpert layman perspective, as someone who grew up immersed in the antecedents of modern SocJus, I definitely think there's a lot of truth to this. One example that really struck me happened way back in 2016 after Trump got elected, and a lesbian I knew was literally shaking for fear that it would be at most a couple of years before she would be sent to death camps. I recall being baffled by how absurd a belief that was, and how clearly her suffering was caused by all the people who had actually convinced her that Trump would be the next Hitler, rather than by Trump and his ilk.

Yeah, I saw the anti-CBT stuff. I also noticed that it really set off the anti-anti-woke people that I tend to see around (I.E. the people who are not particularly woke, but have a strong dislike for communities like this). I would agree this is fairly similar.

One example that really struck me happened way back in 2016 after Trump got elected, and a lesbian I knew was literally shaking for fear that it would be at most a couple of years before she would be sent to death camps.

The thing is, some people just don't get the message that you're not supposed to actually believe this, that this is just hyperbole and exaggeration. That's along the same lines of what I'm talking about, which I do think is somewhat narrower than the anti-CBT stuff, but I also think the effects are substantially more drastic. And the other part of it, to be blunt, is that I think there are people who are just "wired" in such a way to take things seriously. I'd identify as that type of person. It's not that I'm overly serious...it's just that I strongly believe you should live whatever beliefs you have. That you should say what you mean and mean what you say.

Down below there's a thread about living rather than professing your values. That assumes that said values/ideology is actually meant to be lived anyway. Which in a lot of these cases, I truly don't believe is the case.

Deteriorating mental health among liberal teen girls in particular. IIRC conservative teen girls are doing better than liberal teen boys on that front.