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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   27234 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 11, 2023

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I guess something like the social activity related to emotionally-charged dichotomies?

I've grown more partial to describing it as bike-shedding at a societal level, and I think this make sense: the entire concept is that organizations spend disproportionate time on relatively minor but easy-to-trivially-understand issues because people think their opinion matters more than it probably should. I doubt there are many, if any, people out there without an opinion on gender (although those opinions vary drastically), sex, skin color, and all those times they were treated unfairly. Because everyone thinks they understand the big picture, arguments get exceptionally heated.

We don't spend as much time in popular culture talking about more complex issues, like simplifying the labyrinthine tax code (unless something's in it for me), or which areas merit extra research funding (astronomy? fusion? vaccines?), or how to maintain Western cultural hegemony for the next century. Amusingly, we seem mostly content to trust bureaucrats on those, probably far more than we should: see gain-of-function research funding, or any number of fraught defense procurements.

We don't spend as much time in popular culture talking about more complex issues, like simplifying the labyrinthine tax code (unless something's in it for me), or which areas merit extra research funding (astronomy? fusion? vaccines?), or how to maintain Western cultural hegemony for the next century.

These are matters you can afford to concern yourself with when your immediate existence and position does not seem threatened. The Culture War is caused by and causes such feelings of imminent threat, and so more ambitious concerns are drowned out by what at least appears to be acute crisis.

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