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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 10, 2025

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I thought this was evident already for anyone who’s ever seen a BBC Hardtalk interview. All these institutions are prejudiced and to that end are involved in setting the agenda. It doesn’t matter if you’re right or left either.

Demonstrating bias in this context is very hard. For the most part the emotional resonance one picks up from weeks or months of accepting information from a biased source is hardly if ever a culmination of a singular aspect of that information. It's also the lack of information regarding some things, differential treatment of otherwise similar events, or the opposite. It generally tumbles along until your gut tells you that something is wrong. But by that point you're months deep into the information stream. Where it's practically impossible to do a comparison since you could not know that the source was biased or in what way.

To that extent this revelation is just a handy receipt of what everyone with a brain already knew, but could not confidently assert. To my mind a much more obvious example was the 3 day hesitation period after the Pakistani rape scandal was published about in British newspapers.

That hesitation period was very reminiscent of Swedish news publishing at the time, that centered around minimizing negative backlash against migrant crime. Which in and of itself was based on a theory that if migrants could be accepted and integrated into Swedish society, the true social cause of the crimes would be dealt with. In contrast, news publishing that stoked negativity towards migrants would only hinder integration and acceptance. I always liked that theory and its practical application as it demonstrated just how insane the progressive/neo-liberal economic project is in practice, and how inhumane and sadistic the necessary policies to sustain it are.