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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 28, 2025

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More effort than this, man.

I'd think claims made without evidence can be dismissed without them, too, but okay, then:

  • Trivially, no, the Democratic party did not have some notable period of introspection where new ideas were more accepted or old ones reviewed. The few who actually tried were beaten down far faster than even the most anti-Trump parts of the right ever were; most just made mouth noises, and didn't even do that consistently. TheAntipopulist will not be updating his priors when his specific examples of "leftist"s changing their position on something turns out to just be them "suggesting it is bad to increase the salience of immigration" (aka, trying to massage media focus).

  • Trivially, no, the Left did not own up to screwing up over Biden's age. Alex Thompson wrote a book about it... with Jake Tapper and the summary he presented was that "Every White House is capable of deception", not "maybe I shouldn't have called everyone who had eyes a conspiracy theorist". Jen Psaki has her own show, and it's not titled "You Fucked Up, You Trusted Me". KelseyTUOC proposed expelling from the Democratic party everyone involved in concealing Biden's decline... while highlighting Yglesias as a great example of the New Democrats, who happened to be one of those people doing exactly that. People owned up to Biden (and Harris) losing, and that only to the extent that they're literally this next week getting feted. No one's taking responsibility; they're shuffling blame.

  • Nor anything else. Everyone's happy to pretend that they were always right: Ezra Klein will tell us that he warned that Russiagate was a fraud, KelseyTUOC that she wasn't calling Kavanaugh a sexual assaulter, ProPublica's writers insist that they're happy to talk about a story with interested polite people, but there's a simple problem that none of these things are true. As an industry and as a political party, the admission of even the clearest error is harder than pulling viper's teeth or hen's teeth.

But he's not going to engage with me, he's not going to engage with you, he's sure as hell not going to admit he's wrong, and certainly he's not going to live up to his standards.

I'm not talking to him so much as about him, given that he's blocked me. But now that he's done that, it's worth noticing how often his points, to the extent he makes any rather than just waves his hands and demands we believe whatever he makes up without foundation, are laughable.

Huh. I knew he was a old-forum poster, but I'd forgot/never noticed he was an alt of unitofcaring. Why did unitofcaring have to change personas again?

I don't know of any previous account names for TAP except Ben__Garrison. Haven't done any serious use time analysis, but would be pretty surprised if TAP was TUOC just from the writing style.

I use the Vox crowd because TAP regularly linked the Yglesias/Hanania/deBoer set here, and if any of them were supposedly central examples of the sort of moderation and introspection TAP claims exists, Yglesias and KelseyTUOC would be it. And they're not, clearly. No one is.

(Also, if I start complaining about the ways Hanania or deBoer are two-faced liars, we're going to be here all week. I'm working on an effortpost trying to draw a thread between the ATF v. SSA en banc and the Maine District 90 stuff, and I find that a lot more interesting and meaningful than 'guy compares his debate opponents to people shitting on a plate', whether that's in the literal sense for TAP or the figurative sense for Hanania).

I think KelseyTUOC just made her name less psuedoanon when she joined Vox.

Well, I might have misunderstood the association. Still, and regardless, please keep posting the counter-arguments against 'the Democrat law would totally have reformed immigration, and Republican opposition to it is proof of bad faith' in the future. I find your take more convincing, but couldn't recreate it myself from memory, and I doubt they are going to stop invoking the argument in the future.

Though I hope your boilerplate response doesn't get any wags of the fingers from mods, since I'd appreciate you to keep posting longer than not.