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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31032 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 16, 2023

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Tangential: if you want some entertainment, watch this debate between Destiny and a believer in the Schwab conspiracy.

The fact that some people on the right unironically fall for this is embarassing. It reflects not only a lack of baseline critical thinking ability, but a complete inability to figure out where political and economic power actually lie (and with whom they sit).

Argument-as-soldiers can always come across as embarrassing, but it's a solid tactic. Who cares if you miss on a few targets? The point is to generally fight, not get bogged down and wring your hands over some unfortunate person caught in the crossfire. The US did not stop invading Iraq just because a few civvies must have accidentally died, though I would trust the military to not be completely indifferent to this because it has much more dire consequences.

I normally sigh whenever people here bring up "the woke" or whatever no matter the topic, but I'll do it in this case. For all the posts about "peak-woke" or "a return to sanity/reason", not one of them seemed to grasp that losing a battle was not equivalent to losing a war. To use a recent example, Hamlin University, the site where a professor recently got accused of bigotry for showing a historical artwork depicting Muhammed made by Islamic artists, backed down on their support of the students who called for the professor to be removed. But for every case like this, there are probably more where people just decide to not deal with the hassle of fighting at all and capitulate.

It's only a reasoning test if you assume your enemies are interested in truth to its own end. Otherwise, it's just a casualty of the culture war.

To use a recent example, Hamlin University, the site where a professor recently got accused of bigotry for showing a historical artwork depicting Muhammed made by Islamic artists, backed down on their support of the students who called for the professor to be removed.

No they didn't. The professor is still jobless. The most they admitted was that they may have gone too far by calling her "Islamophobic."

I don't think I said what exactly they did in response, but even so, this just proves my point. That professor doesn't get to come back (most likely, though not guaranteed). If Hamlin and their students write history, they'll debate the morality of this firing at that time, but they won't back down overall just because they overstepped.

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