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PaperclipPerfector  8d ago (text post)   27341 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 26, 2025

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I'm more familiar with the Russians who never needed to be cowed into condemning Putin by canceling because they were doing that back in Russia, with great enthusiasm, and were anxious because of potential retaliation from the Russian government, not the Western blob.

Sure, if someone's an actual activist, they're not going to have a lot of fun over there. Possibly even without activism, just having an anti-regime opinion will get you roughly the same reaction as saying something politically incorrect in the west.

True, but it's a different kind of restrictive. One could even argue prospiratorial restriction by "society" is, if anything, more natural and easier to roll with than arbitrarily-tyrannical restriction from top to bottom by faceless bureaucrats and cops.

I don't know about that. Authoritarians tend to demand fairly basic professions of loyalty, rather than changing your understanding of what a woman is, or that you think the Star Wars sequels are good. I find the former far more predictable, and easier to roll with than the latter.

I think Russia as a state will be worse off after formally kicking out all the platforms that were hosting badspeak and not having a big enough slice of the internet to compensate locally. But maybe that's just wishful thinking.

Cracking down on wrongthink didn't seem to affect western governments. Arguably Elon buying Twitter and allowing wrongthink threw much of a wrench into their work than and second-order effects of them quashing dissent.

Also, keep in mind that I was only talking about banning online dating, pornography, and prostitution. It's like I said in the other comment, western governments ban things all the time, and no one decries that as authoritarianism. We ban the sale of illicit drugs or online gambling, and while there are people arguing these things should be legal, I somehow don't see much handwringing over supposedly liberal countries that choose criminalize them.

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