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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 17, 2023

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For the people who are still all-in (at least in the US), it's not really about COVID and it never was. These are the kind of germophobes who wiped everything down with sanitizer and insisted that guests wash their hands when entering their homes long before COVID hit. When certain policies that played into their neuroticism became mainstream for a brief period in response to a specific threat, they latched onto them, and were surprised and appalled that the public abandoned them whenever the threat was over. If COVID were eradicated tomorrow these people wouldn't all of the sudden throw their masks away and stop caring about safety precautions, they'd go back to the germophobes they were in 2019 and argue that there are still plenty of other diseases out there that we should be requiring all these precautions to prevent.