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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25675 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 1, 2025

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Huh, so what you're saying is that the Jews really did have it coming?

Lol, nope. But I did check.

Cults are marginalized, criminals are jailed, and pedophiles are excluded from some jobs. Unproductive workers are fired (or at least not promoted), unpleasant people don't get invited to parties, and flaky people don't get trusted with responsibilities. I'm guessing I would agree with the consensus 90% of the time, but that last 10% is very important.

"[X] is persecuted because it's bad" should be the default assumption, despite what a lifetime of cultural conditioning tells me.

Cults are marginalized, criminals are jailed, and pedophiles are excluded from some jobs. Unproductive workers are fired (or at least not promoted), unpleasant people don't get invited to parties, and flaky people don't get trusted with responsibilities. I'm guessing I would agree with the consensus 90% of the time, but that last 10% is very important.

Yeah. I gotta say, mainstream conservatives seem drawn like salmon to their native pool of the worst argument to support directionally correct positions. Throughout the 2016-2024 window, "cancel culture" was the rallying cry of conservatives against the left. But that was always the worst tack to take.

  1. Bad things should get you cancelled. Even if not, it's a universal feature of human societies. Every society has the sacred and taboos, whether right or not, and violating them has always resulted in punishment or shunning. The left is more likely to eliminate inequality of outcomes than you are to eliminate cancellation.
  2. When you whine about cancellation, you're pre-emptively sabotaging yourself for when you take the cultural catbird seat back. If you've spent eight years complaining about viewpoint discrimination, you can't easily conduct a purge of the people who did the last purge, the people who kicked you out to begin with. They can then shiv in your back and seize back power at the first opportune moment.

See also: The "snowflake" insult conservatives used around 2012 for woke people complaining about representation of blacks or gays in movies. Well guess what. Now Hollywood is woke, and conservatives are holding the bag of being "snowflakes" for complaining about the representation of blacks or gays in movies. Funny how that works.

The "snowflake" insult conservatives used around 2012 for woke people complaining about representation of blacks or gays in movies

That's not what "snowlake" was making fun of, it was making fun of people who easily claimed offenses (at "microaggressions", "cultural appropriation" the word "retard" etc) and asked for "trigger warning".

Back in my day it was a word to mock people who were so unique and special that they had to make up their own term for their sexuality etc to include in their long list of labels.

(Back in my actual day people made up their own music genres not gender identities.)

Your argument for cancellation would also apply to lynching.

The flip side is that positions of power than can persecuted often draw a disproportionate share of the power-hungry and the sociopaths, and those are not the sort of archetypes I would believe only persecute the deserving (though they will happily do that).

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