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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   36181 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

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You simply focus on all the ways Blues hurt Reds and ignore the millions of boring policy changes where nothing of the sort happens.

That phrase does not contain a reference to Blue Tribe, because it is not a statement about Blue Tribe. It is, as it has always been, a statement about the Culture War and everyone involved in it. Sure, a million things happen every day on both sides that aren't about hurting the outgroup. But things happen every day, on both sides, that are about hurting the outgroup, and further are about hurting the outgroup as badly as possible without getting in too much trouble. Note the last part of that phrase. It's not that there aren't moderating influences; people don't see harming the outgroup as a terminal goal. It's just fun, and they want to keep doing it unless there's a very good reason not to.

Then you interpret your own bias as an objective fact of the world, which lets you make fun of people who don’t share that bias by effectively calling them stupid (which is the framing for your entire comment)

I don't think Guzman is very intelligent. If you are reading the rest of the post as a claim that anyone I refered to is stupid, whether Blues or Reds generally or Blues or Reds here, you have very much missed the point. Some people here are, in my view, wrong, however intelligent they may be. And tribal warfare is not stupid. Evil, maybe, but not stupid.

The "Culture War" is defined as waring between political factions. So if your post is entirely confined to the "Culture War", isn't it entirely circular? It becomes

[The attempt to beat the outgroup is] best modelled as a massive, distributed search for ways to hurt the outgroup as badly as possible without getting in too much trouble.

Not exactly insightful...

Your edit breaks the statement. "the last several years" is explicitly a claim about the centrality and significance of the Culture War to our social and political reality. It is not a side show, and ignoring or misunderstanding it cripples one's ability to make accurate predictions, to understand the world they live in. Sure, things happen that aren't Culture War. Mostly those things either don't matter, or the Culture War observably engulfs them over time.

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