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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 2025

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In case you haven't worked it out by now, some people think of SJ as an existentially-dangerous meme via undermining law and order. The analogy's not perfect - social justice warriors are far better at scheming than the rabid, and believing SJ is not always permanent - but you get the point.

This is the worst analogy I have read on the net all week.

First, we have a rabies vaccine. In the real world, inoculating the healthy (and just-infected) would be our main weapon against super-rabies, rather than gunning down the diseased.

Second, memes are importantly different from viruses. Memes are easily transmitted through time and space. However, they are also unlikely to infect 100% of the people exposed to them. They also do not kill their hosts, generally. While they can dominate virtually unchanged for thousands of years, they tend to last much shorter in periods of rapid technological progress. So a meme becoming dominant is not the end of the world.

Third, killing the carriers is not very effective to combat memes. The carriers of Christianity were regularly murdered in ancient Rome, and yet this did not prevent the spreading. I will grant you that communist memes did very badly in Nazi Germany, so you might say that Nero's failure to root out Christianity was simply a skill issue. Personally, I dislike societies which murder fractions of their population.

Fourth, why would social justice progressivism be a uniquely dangerous meme complex? Western civilization has survived the spread of Christianity, enlightenment, atheism, communism, fascism, liberalism, hippies, punks, enviromentalism and so on. Granted, some of these meme complexes were really bad and killed a lot of people in the name of stopping competing memes or for other reasons.

Personally, while I intensely dislike SJP, I also do not consider it as dangerous a communism was in its time. I also like liberalism a lot. Any society where you just shoot the carriers of a hostile meme is very illiberal. Typically, it will target not only the carriers of one hostile meme complex, but the carriers of all meme complexes perceived hostile. I also think that SJP is already over its zenith. In 2010, it was the hot new thing for youth looking to rebel against the establishment. Eventually, the kind of older women who would have reported young people who received visits from opposed-gender people to their landlords in the 1950s will be the main enforcers of SJ norms, and that will paint these norms as 'cringe'.

TL;DR: The battlefield to defeat SJP is the marketplace of ideas.

TL;DR: The battlefield to defeat SJP is the marketplace of ideas.

Tell me, why are we here, and not on Reddit?

Reddit is a big corporate-owned platform. The motte is freedom of speech maximalist. These two things do not generally mix.

When the exodus from reddit happened, the SJP were the most influential tribe with reddit, so they lead the charge. But if it had not been them, it would have been some other tribe instead. I wish I could say that SJ is the only ideology which ever engaged in anti-competitive behavior in the marketplace of ideas, but instead it seems almost universal. Free speech is a great idea while you are the underdog and get oppressed for speaking the truth, but once you are in charge it suddenly seems much more important to prevent your enemies from spreading their vile poison.

Eventually, the kind of older women who would have reported young people who received visits from opposed-gender people to their landlords in the 1950s will be the main enforcers of SJ norms

This has already happened; traditional Christianity (or at least, people who claimed to be them) was this for that age group up until the mid-00s until it was clear to the average participant it was naturally dying out as a morally-respected force.

TL;DR: The battlefield to defeat SJP is the marketplace of ideas.

We tried. SJP played dirty by sending goons into the marketplace and attacking opponents outside it. Fighting it only on that battlefield is a losing battle.