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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   40764 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 24, 2025

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Yeah, it seems like a shallow argument. I stand by the comment I left below it -

I think your argument about vaccines disregards the way in which the culture war eats everything. Being pro/anti-vaccines is not necessarily about vaccines - if the pro-vaccine position wins, that's a step towards the Red Tribe being demoralised and feeling that it is not worth fighting for anything because they will expend effort and lose anyway, and if the anti-vaccine position wins, that's a step towards the mirrored situation.

The common commentary all the way back in 2016 that said Trump's election will "embolden racists" had figured out this dynamic on an intuitive level. If you believe that we are tumbling towards an equilibrium where there is no fine-grained object-level policy debate but only an "emboldened" side that gets everything and a "demoralised" side that submits and saves whatever remaining energy it has to plot an overthrow, then anything that "emboldens" the side whose dictate is a bit more in your interest is itself in your interest, to a first approximation.

Generally, I am saddened by the way in which Scott's blogging has degraded since the move to Substack. A big part of his appeal used to be that he was a fairly thorough or at least balanced thinker, and generally anticipated and addressed the best counterarguments to his theses even when the counterarguments were banned from polite discourse (the "$minority is getting worse SAT scores... why could this be? By elimination it must be racism! Or does anyone want to come forward with other ideas? ;)" pattern). He seems to have largely given this up in favour of the standard American pundit playbook where you produce a steady stream of slick essays arguing for one or another aspect of your agenda by setting up show matches against strawmen of competing proposals, seemingly optimised for a usage pattern like "RT: Here's the always brilliant @ScottAlexander thoroughly debunking #ConflictTheory. Can we finally move on yet".

I think your argument about vaccines disregards the way in which the culture war eats everything. Being pro/anti-vaccines is not necessarily about vaccines - if the pro-vaccine position wins, that's a step towards the Red Tribe being demoralised and feeling that it is not worth fighting for anything because they will expend effort and lose anyway, and if the anti-vaccine position wins, that's a step towards the mirrored situation.

Sounds like sanewashing.

Who would be sanewashing what?

(I think most instances of "sanewashing" are in fact also in service of this manner of culture warring - if the crazies on your side win, that's good because it demoralises the outgroup)

Wholeheartedly agree. I don't know what happened but I can barely even finish an article these days and I stopped paying him after the first year was up. It seems like there's a lot of "own-side" bias creeping in but also just some amount of laziness. Your point about straw-men hits, that's something I see a lot of lately. Maybe it's bad incentives? A different type of audience and audience capture? I'm really at a loss, but I've definitely lost a lot of interest in what Scott has to say these past few years.

To paraphrase some musician somewhere: "Everyone has some music in them. Some have a little. Some have a lot. But at some point it all gets used up."

Scott's music is used up. Gone are the anni mirabiles of the past. His articles now have a perfunctory quality. Ironically, during his great years he toiled in obscurity whereas now he is rich and celebrated.

But he doesn't owe anyone anything and we should be glad for what we got.

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