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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 8, 2024

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It's very clear siding with the DSA types is more damaging. Precisely because they control most of the power already

This is an interesting consideration. However, I think it presupposes that the badness caused by extremists on the left is somehow balanced and counteracted by badness caused by extremists on the right.

I think it's more accurate that the badness on both sides is orthogonal so this sort of "we need to push the unbalanced scales the other way" logic doesn't quite apply. The example of free speech seems instructive: there was a general perception around here that the left having too much power caused a lot of unjustified censorship of the usual topics. However, while shifting power towards the right did sort of fix this, this was only at the cost of even more extreme censorship of completely different topics (evolution, gay relationships, etc.)

Unfortunately, one side's extremists aren't going to save you from the other's---the only way out is to get both sides to police theirs effectively.

Uh, there hasn’t been censorship of evolution or gay relationships.

Something about 'Ron's book ban'.

This morning I read an article about a Florida school district removing some dictionaries because they included definitions on the word 'gay'. Wether you think this is a sincere attempt to avoid litigation or an insincere stunt, I leave to the audience.