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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

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After the lefty reaction to the Kirk assassination I absolutely don't care about this, and will never care about anything like this from my own side ever again. OP wildly overestimates the number of fucks the right has left to give.

After the lefty reaction to the Kirk assassination I absolutely don't care about this, and will never care about anything like this from my own side ever again. OP wildly overestimates the number of fucks the right has left to give.

Do you believe that all of politics can only be summed up as "left" and "right" and that it is impossible to be both against killing people like Kirk and against racism/neonazism/etc?

If you do believe this, then why do Republicans like Gov Scott, Elise Stefanik, Roger Stone, etc seem to be able to denounce the chat without saying positive things about killing Kirk? Are they fake right wingers or something?

  • -14

Do you believe that all of politics can only be summed up as "left" and "right" and that it is impossible to be both against killing people like Kirk and against racism/neonazism/etc?

Yes.

Let me put it like this. When a high profile Jan 6 defendant gets tenure at a major university, and becomes the mentor to the next president, I might be willing to entertain the notion that I have enemies to the right. If the town my daughter is growing up in doesn't flip from 80% white to 30% white over her lifetime like mine did, I might be willing to entertain that I have enemies to the right. If I can look up resumes in my field and not see that 50% of them have some variation of "we prioritize hiring diversity", I might be willing to entertain that I have enemies to the right.

But my life has been made so infinitely worse by my enemies to the left, I don't understand why I could possibly care about these theoretical enemies to my right. They've literally never done anything to me.

You appear to think of politics entirely on the basis of whether policies create material problems for you in your life (and, granted, in your daughter's). Don't you have a concept of politics as rooted in moral values unrelated to your own personal fate? Is there any amount of evil that people to your right could wreak on strangers that would outweigh making the trains run on time in your specific neck of the woods?

  • -14

You appear to think of politics entirely on the basis of whether policies create material problems for you in your life (and, granted, in your daughter's). Don't you have a concept of politics as rooted in moral values unrelated to your own personal fate?

1990's colorblind liberalism is dead and it wasn't the right wingers who killed it. Since we now live in some kind of post-liberal racial spoils hellscape, I'll be voting for my own team, thanks.

I ask again: how do you justify this morally? Some might say that unpleasant circumstances when doing the right thing will give you a material disadvantage is when it is most important (and indeed admirable) to behave ethically.

  • -14

How does a soldier morally justify shooting the enemy instead of his squadmates? Traditionally, it was by begging forgiveness from God, though I have no idea what the modern recommendation is. The point is, it's in almost every case a secondary concern to victory.

Yes, but the more apt analogy to the problem I had in mind is the temptation to commit war crimes that would increase your odds of victory. "Well the enemy have started torturing toddlers for information, so we might as well do the same thing" = "Well the Left aren't doing anything to rein in their evil loonies, so why should I lift a finger about evil loonies in my own tribe?". In both cases, ethics dictate that if you actually hold a moral belief that [torturing children in wrong]/[a given Tribe has a responsibility to rein in its crazies], you should hold fast to that principle even if your enemy violates it first and indeed, even if it places you at a material disadvantage in a given set of circumstances. Fair-weather principles are not principles at all. They're just norms.

Is this true though? Is not the real reason why war crimes are forbidden and disavowed by us that we do not wish them to be inflicted on us? You could call this an application of the golden rule of ethics, but it looks more to me like an iterated prisoner's dilemma. If a "war crime" is committed and nobody knows about it, is anyone actually going to care? Who writes the history books, after all?

Was ethics the reason why we have (so far) avoided nuclear annihilation, or was it actually a more bloody-minded calculus that the only winning move was not to play?