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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 30, 2025

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singularly terrified of the massive increase to the ICE budget

They're not that strong though, glorified policemen. The US Army or Marines could surely roll right over them with numbers and heavy equipment.

Also, is there any need to use language like ingroup and neargroup? Do you just mean friends, leftists, liberals, progressives? Fiscal conservatives? Or do you mean well off, upper middle class, highly educated people? Or maybe you mean civil servants? I'm left guessing here. Surely being more precise would be better.

I think less precision is better because more precision would just be unecessary detail. The exact ideology of my in and near groups doesn't matter when the core fact I an trying to convey is that there are people who I emotionally care for that the OBBB negatively affects. Trying to frame that in ideological terms would just ovscure the truth.

The most telling aspect of AI art is what I call "extraneous detail." As a reaction, I've been making a deliberate effort to avoid that in my own writing.