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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 5, 2022

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That's... precisely backwards. They would never get anywhere near power, where it not for active protection from Ezra Klein types telling everyone it's just a couple of crazy kids on tumblr/college campuses.

The average attendee at an anarchist radical book reading club, assuming it really is a club that meets up live, may not even represent the most wacky section of anarchist radicalism, since at least they're still out and about, meeting other people and exposing themselves to potentially problematic opinions in such a space. In my experience, biggest hyperradicalism usually comes from shut-ins who essentially live their entire lives online and have a major effect on online discourses that way.

The general power of extremely online shut-ins who do nothing but post and engage in online dramas all day to affect social discourses - not just in woke way, but also in, for instance, the views of the extremely online far right seeping to related spaces - is generally an understudied topic. It may be that one of the most effective ways to give an ordinary nobody power is to bully them hard enough to ensure they won't ever go anywhere where they may meet anybody and will only process their resentment via social media.

Welllll, one of my arguments is that liberals have often managed and used these types, or redirected their rage towards powerless victims.

I can't remember who said in 2020 ( probably David Hines) that liberals consider their children joining a leftist gang to loot and burn a helot neighborhood a charming traditional rite of passage--something to enjoy and get out of their system before they grow up and become university administrators, just like they did in the 60s. They do prevent the radicals from taking power, but only out of paternal instinct and self-interest.