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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 1, 2024

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What I do consider shameful is the perfect-hindsight/moving-the-goalposts tactic of bringing up vague memories of how people rejected your bailey in the past, and then going 'see, here is my perfectly reasonable motte, and remember how the other side rejected it back then? They sure have been proven wrong!'

Another example would be justifying the anti-vaxx/anti-lockdown baileys of "vaccines are going to kill millions if not tens or hundreds of millions of people within a few years"/"The WEF is going to keep the lockdowns and forced masking and vaxx mandates on forever and ever and ever to turn humans into slaves" by referring to the "Vaccines weren't nearly as good as advertised"/"lockdowns, masks and mandates were pretty useless considering how onerous and divisive they were" mottes being arguably fulfilled.

If compliance had been higher they very easily could have pressed the mandates to being a permanent fixture of life, certainly in europe and the non-american west.

It took a major rebellion to end mandates in canada

The mandates ended around the same time in all Western countries, no matter the level of compliance. A large contributing factor was probably Omicron and everyone getting the Covid anyway, with a contributing factor of Ukraine war wrenching the decision-making class attention immediately to another topic. However, even sans these, I don't believe the mandates would have stuck around; they were just another part of the endless process of trying to find the One Weird Trick to solve Covid, and they failed.

The convoy "rebellion" most likely lengthened the process in Canada, since it made it a question of authority for Trudeau and the rest of the political class.

Another example would be justifying the anti-vaxx/anti-lockdown baileys

If that's another example, would you be willing to defend his portrayal of the trans discourse?

No, not really - the situation seems to concern the status of this discussion in the United States, and I'm frankly too unfamiliar with the actual situation there to comment at length.