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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   15675 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 19, 2022

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I had this conversation IRL yesterday with (strangely) an Indian who nevertheless has the persona of an Extremely Online American Liberal.

Basically the attitude was that running foreign election meddling is "legit ops that every country should do", but also identifying and defending against having their elections meddled with is "legit counterops that every country should do".

Russia isn't bad for running ops in Anerica (and, by analogy, America isn't bad either for running ops in Iran), but if you're American then you should ID and ignore Russian ops' talking points.

I had this conversation IRL yesterday with (strangely) an Indian who nevertheless has the persona of an Extremely Online American Liberal.

Basically the attitude was that running foreign election meddling is "legit ops that every country should do", but also identifying and defending against having their elections meddled with is "legit counterops that every country should do".

This doesn’t seem to track with my perception of online progressive couch warriors, usually they’re harder on the US I thought?

Or do you mean liberal as distinct from progressive like it is outside of the US?

"I am large, I contain multitudes."

The American left has a nuanced relationship with US criticism. Anticolonial/antiwhite/antiAmerican sentiment can be a lever for redirecting the institutions, not necessarily for abolishing them. This is compatible with aligning the FBI towards American interests. There's also the fact that Trump isn't currently steering the White House. Like it or not, that influences perception of acceptable vs. unforgivable foreign policy. Consider the withdrawal from Afghanistan, which (I believe) would have been entirely politically flipped had it happened two years earlier.

Right-wing culture warriors have some incentive to oversell any hints of antiAmerican sentiment, of course.

Honestly I was thinking of the Chomskyite (or, well, Chomsky-sympathetic) left. Am I overestimating the number of critics of that sort?

Not sure. My impression is that they're a lot quieter in the post-Obama years. Foreign policy was a lot more exciting when it was Bush doing it. But I don't know how realistic that impression actually is.

Well, there was the thing about Obama and drone strikes, but it didn't get that much attention and it really only started around like 2015.

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