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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 28, 2022

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There's not a lot of fence-sitters when it comes to this question.

I'm a fence-sitter. The amount of material and disturbing nature of it is so utterly beyond the pale, so absolutely ridiculous, that it's impossible to just shrug it off as nothing. On the other hand, I still find it plausible that it's just art-school, shock-the-normies, absolutely cringe bullshit. If it's the latter, these people are merely gross and pathetic rather than unbelievably evil. I guess that's a pretty weak form of fence-sitting, in which the object of the conspiracy is definitely awful in some way, but it does make a pretty big difference when thinking about what sort of people are actually in the ruling class.

That MartyrMade thread you linked originally had a podcast episode associated with it, discussing the Pizzagate conspiracy, that I don't see on the Substack anymore. Hmmm...

I agree with what you've said. Further to this, I think the 'satanic' labeling is playing itself out.

I get it, I'm right-wingish, but the 'literal satan' memes in the right social media sphere aren't bringing people to their side. They reek of 1980's dungeons and dragons moral panic.

It could be just rhetoric vs rhetoric on twitter, but it feels like a bridge too far.

Edited: making sure I wasn't directing at comment above who I agree with.

Yeah I agree the literal s_tan stuff definitely hurts the sales pitch, but it shows up in too many places for it to be some fake spicy detail added by the more conspiracy minded.

You can write pedo and satan without self censoring, bloody mary isn't going to appear in the mirror.

I like to not go too heavy on the special keywords.

Special to whom? I can understand being concerned about the glance of algorithmic Sauron when writing "pedo", but "Satan" is a word that both the Hot Topic fanfiction crowd and Reddit armchair generals will have posted hundreds of times before they turn 18.

I live in Canada, which is a communist country. That word is popular among conspiracy people, so I'd rather not post it 20 times.

In what sense is it a communist country? Do the workers own the means of production?

This is ridiculous. You leaping to the defense and trying to paint the whole thing as some kind of weird coincidence was one thing, but this is just obtuse nitpicking.

It's the exact same line communists use to claim the USSR wasn't really communist, just State Capitalist because the workers didn't really own it. It comes across as disingenuous, and desperate to defend bad people with bad arguments rather than discuss anything.

I wish I could understand why some people get so weirdly evasive and dismissive to the point of making arguments like "woah, you can't prove there was anything sexual about the drag strip show at that kindergarten!" An enemy of your outgroup is being attacked for something they did. It's presumably not even an attack on your ingroup, so what's even the point of doing the whole "maybe those words randomly appeared on that paper" thing? It just comes across as covering for them for literally no reason except maybe who the criticism is coming from.

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