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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 28, 2025

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As I said, I don't think this is really the reaction any of you had to the comment. Charitably, I think that you feel this way consciously, because you dislike racism, and so you avoided letting your mind make this hard-to-explicitly-articulate, but obvious inference.

I mean I know it's the internet and all but I really do try to be genuine in all of my posts. I am 100% serious when I said that looking at "Tatishe Nteta" doesn't clock any particular ethnicity to me. Like, sure, maybe if I sat and looked at it for 30 seconds or so I might make some guesses, but that's not where my brain went, and I'm not in the habit of staring deeply into every single comment. Again my first reaction was "I feel out of the loop - did I miss something?" because I also tend to assume good faith first. My brain, in other words, got sidetracked by trying to guess the OOTL bit, then skipped past the comment until I saw there was a mod post below. It took me ages to clock who this Hanania guy is and still I don't really have a strong sense, for example, so random unfamiliar name-drops aren't unexpected, that's my stronger prior expectation.

Anyways, I object to posts on this forum that rely too much on innuendo and consensus-building and things like that, so even if it didn't have a racial angle I'd still be annoyed at a comment just going "Oh." We aren't mind-readers, and shouldn't have to be, and often overly-short comments waste everyone's time on extended side-bars because they aren't explicit enough. In other words, everyone here should have a vested interest in avoiding Poe's law traps. I think you agree, right? Someone is welcome to make offensive statements and argue for them, but they have to argue for them, not just rely on innuendo to do all the work. And honestly, I never even disputed the fact that his name might be relevant information -- I just want it to be, again, explicit.