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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 2, 2025

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I think a lot of political-extremists-by-night-milquetoast-law-abiding-citizen-by-day people, i.e. most people who comment on politics online, do actually sincerely believe that open war should be waged against their political extremist enemies, but at the same time it should obviously not be waged at the expense of the milquetoast law abiding citizen life they enjoy. It's easy to say that yeah, you support breaking out the long knives, but at lot less easy to go the extra mile to actually accept that you might lose everything you value and enjoy in the process.

So in my view it's not - not consciously - all just empty rhetorics and jokes to be in on.

Rather, the calls for violence come with the unspoken assumption that you and the people on your side can crush the despicable enemy without much resistance, because that's how people talk themelves up. Obviously my side will win, we're on the right side of history, our values are better, our enemies are idiots. But when someone nominally aligned with you goes through with acts of political violence, you suddenly realize that you aren't the well-regimented, organized and coordinated forces of good about to exterminate your weak and irredeemable enemy - you personally are sitting in comfort and luxury at home while your cause's champion is a deranged mass murderer who just killed a bunch of random people, picked a fight with the very establishment that guarantees your comfort and luxury, and got absolutely crushed by it. Your actual political enemies didn't even get to factor into it.

And there you are, left holding the bag full of needing to square that okay, that guy's intentions technically aligned with what you demanded, but obviously he's not supposed to

  1. be a lunatic who attacks random people instead of the enemy's champions
  2. be ineffective
  3. endanger your comfort and luxury (firstly by putting you in the establishment's sights for wrongthink, secondly by highlighting how suicidal your violence would be were you to commit it), which you aren't willing to risk no matter how infinitely evil your enemies are

Everyone who isn't Uncle-Tedding it by going off the grid entirely is a first-world citizen first, and a political extremist second.