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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 8, 2023

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I foresee some trouble for the wokes to explain why Russians are actually bad.

This is a strange take to me. Have you heard much in the way of woke takes on foreign policy? Wokeism can easily pin any invader as bad. It fits neatly into the broader oppression dynamics as well as the hatred of imperialism. They also vaguely see Russia as fascist, and many comfortably assert that red tribe and/or Trump has a love affair with Russia, which is reason enough to hate them, and has broadly built a "current thing" alignment against Russia for years. I have constantly been seeing woke people disavow tankies in spaces where they were previously tolerated or at least seen as a lesser evil. The real question is whether they will be willing to acknowledge the importance of the US's place in the world if that's what it takes to stand against something like Russia.

There was a lot of drama in my woke spaces over games like Call of Duty portraying poor innocent Russia as bad, back in 2019. These kinds of arguments were very common and have suddenly become extinct.

Wokeism can easily pin any invader as bad.

Russia invaded a number of places before Ukraine, and nobody had any trouble with that. Georgia, Moldova, Syria, Central Africa...

They also vaguely see Russia as fascist,

Well, Russia is fascist, but I don't see anybody on US political scene daring to officially recognize the fact, even among the wokes. For the wokes though, "fascist" is a bad word to call everybody they hate, not a political taxonomy term, so they can't hate somebody for being fascist - they call somebody fascist after they already hate them. And since everybody by now knows the link between Trump and Russia is wholesale fake (it doesn't mean they wouldn't LARP as if they believed it's true, but they know it's false) - unlike the link between Russia and Clintons, say - again, they link Trump to Russia because they hate Trump, not the other way around. In Obama years, people who thought Russia is a threat were laughed at. In Trump years, people who thought Europe needs to beef their defenses against Russia were laughed at. So we back to the question why would they hate Russia enough, per se. They don't hate Iran and North Korea and China - at least no more than political expediency requires them to perform - despite those being no less oppressive than Russia (though currently not invading their neighbors). Is the invading the only thing? So if Russia is beaten back to their pre-Feb-2022 borders, would the hate go away?