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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 4, 2023

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I don’t think that’s true.

Kulakposters aside, it’s quite possible to feel strongly about something without concluding violence is justified.

Not sure I follow.

The author observes that Hamas is evil, but should be separated from overall sympathy for Palestine. Does she express desire for more violence after the paywall?

Not when that something is deemed more important than the lives of your ennemies.

Intersectionals have the ideological machinery to justify death camps. I can walk you through the logic if you want but it's not hard to figure out.

What's missing to materialize the piles of skulls is just people who are ideologically committed enough and have enough power.

This isn't special either, lots of ideologies have this problem. But you can't ignore the eternal issue of fanaticism by closing your eyes.

Of course they can make such justifications. As you point out, so can just about anyone else. And yet, most people don’t.

Hlynka concludes that this is lack of spine. I find it more likely that, as with modern Christians, atheists, and postal workers, the desire to commit a genocide isn’t actually there. Much easier and more satisfying to grill.

I mean with conservative Christians we have examples of them choosing money over power more or less constantly and there was a recent top level post about how it legitimately reduces the bench for the Republicans to appoint from. SJW’s seem to have the generally opposite approach.

I’m not saying that they have a plan to put their opponents in camps, but I am saying that the evidence they don’t is more ‘come on now, there’d be some evidence of it if they did’ than actual countervailing tendencies.

Being a functional member of western society is the countervailing tendency.

I don’t think choosing academia or journalism for a career is sufficient evidence to overcome those defaults. All the same incentives which keep you and me from weaponizing the state still apply!

I think what's missing is that SJW's are not the sort of people who are very good at violence, and they themselves know this. Communist revolutions that were successful may have been frequently led by the SJW-equivalents of their society, but the tooth end was forged by alliance with people that are used to using violence and who are very much not typical SJWs, often quite literally violent criminals. Your blue haired Yale students know this and are terrified of a major escalation in the level of violence that's a temperature of the room, so to speak.

Now they're very, very bad at preventing or managing this, I won't dispute that, but a bunch of mentally-ill 20 year olds whose ideology is predicated on not having to listen to their elders can be expected on making mistakes like that.