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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 28, 2022

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Most people won't take it as anything other than light entertainment. Some people may believe it's true, however. And I guess some of those might believe in some ur-Aryan white master race nonsense, but I can't be bothered to get het-up about that.

I'm reminded of when Paradox Interactive, a Swedish gaming studio who does historical strategy games like Crusader Kings (about the dynasties of the middle-ages) and the Victorian eras, started getting tarred for having too many white supremacist fans.

I have long been convinced that such complainers miss a rather critical point. If you believe someone is a awful white supremacist, what would you expect them to be doing if they weren't dumping hundreds to thousands of hours into video games?

You're thinking with consequentialist ethics, the complainers are thinking with virtue ethics.

The most extreme case of that I recall seeing was about 15 years ago, when Ron Paul was given $500 by some white supremacist, and Paul infuriated people by saying he didn't plan to return it. I would never have imagined you could get that many ostensibly liberal people to agree that giving money to fucking Stormfront was a moral imperative. But if you think one level up, the obvious "evil people wasting their time and money is good" might get outweighed by "what if they aren't wasting their time and money, what does that say about the supposedly non-evil people they're fans of". ... and then if you think two levels up you have to wonder "really, how high are the odds that the evil bigots are actually making a brilliant Machiavellian maneuver", and trying to thwart them by giving their money back seems foolish again, but for a minute there it made sense.