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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 27, 2023

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I'm reminded of arguments about (other goals of) communism and how every one of its failures are somehow the fault of some foreign entity. At the end of the day, if you couldn't make the State wither away, it's a failure. Doesn't matter if it was apparatchik greed or the CIA that caused it.

I know too little about the topic at hand to have a meaningful opinion on it, but the discussion here reminded me of something like this, as well. Part of the responsibility of any social or political project is being robust against malicious and/or unexpected forces that come about to throw a wrench in the system. If some unexpected technological advancement or sabotaging entity successfully throws the movement off course, then the failure rests entirely on the people pushing the movement, in not taking the correct precautions or not making the correct adaptations.

I'd also say that the whole time span excuse seems either misguided or, I suspect, just motivated reasoning. If we posit that the sexual revolution started around the 60s, it would follow that the first generation of people who grew up in that environment had kids in the 80s-90s, which means that the first generation of people who grew up raised by people who grew up in that environment were entering their young adulthood in the 00s-10s. It would make perfect sense for such a society-wide transformation to have different effects on people who saw the transformation as adults, on people who saw the transformation as kids but were raised by adults who were accustomed to pre-transformation, and on people who only knew life post-transformation, raised by people who mostly knew life post-transformation. This can't be extended indefinitely, of course; at some point, the multiple generations of people living better lives makes it clear that whatever issues that came after must have been extrinsic (which then gets to the previous paragraph, that failing to account for extrinsic, unpredictable factors is just as much a failure as any other), but given what we know about the human lifecycle and societies, 2 generations seems well short enough a timeframe to draw a direct line.