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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 2, 2025

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The suicidewatch subreddit has always struck me as weird, in that it expects incredibly specific behaviors from posters that are in line with the way suicide hotline call center workers are trained, but from anonymous redditors.

I honestly don't think it's weird at all. Except maybe in a sort of Tumblr-ish "weirdos online intuit where the culture will go" way.

A lot of the stuff around microaggressions, trigger warnings and pronouns essentially insist on turning first any employee in proximity and then the average person into a caregiver for those who are or claim to be fragile.

A sad story. But I wonder if the object lesson is not so much about intolerance of dissent as it is about the characteristic Christian calling of humility: humility before morality, before duty, before other people, and ultimately before God.

Atheists of a certain sort simply do not see humility in religion but the opposite so this point never lands with them. But it should raise an interesting question: Christians are tyrannical, know-it-all busybodies, how bad do the consequences of a lack of humility have to be that even their book warns against it?

Atheists of a certain sort simply do not see humility in religion but the opposite so this point never lands with them. But it should raise an interesting question: Christians are tyrannical, know-it-all busybodies, how bad do the consequences of a lack of humility have to be that even their book warns against it?

Often, Christian emphasis on humility registers simply as a way to self-license to be as unhumble as one can be, as long as the arrogance can be rationalised as being in the service of Christianity (or more bluntly divorced from the meaning of words, something that amounts to "I am clearly more humble and therefore superior"). This pattern is by no means exclusive to it - consider the tropes associated with countries that have "Democratic" in their name, or the reactions of "tolerant" left-wingers when asked to tolerate something outside of the standard bag of things to be tolerated.