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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   5859 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 1, 2025

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Alternatively, you believe that it is my tribe that should adhere to norms, and your tribe that should adjudicate exceptions. It hardly matters which is the case; you cannot now argue that Reds should not do a thing, because otherwise Blues might do the thing they've repeatedly done and are currently doing. One cannot endorse a compromise that has already been repeatedly violated.

Politics is not so simplistic that there's just "red tribe" and "blue tribe". Political parties may coalesce around it as compromises, but political philosophies don't. Also "person disagrees with me on topics" is not "person is in other tribe and should not be listened to and inherits the sins of the outsiders"

This black and white thinking helps to underline how your argumentation here is backed by emotion. You push your grievances with others onto me.

At no point do formal legal mechanisms determine this process; we already know that the Constitution and the laws supposedly based upon it are a sham.

This is actually a great example of how political philosophies aren't so tribal. Try saying "the constitution is a sham" to your average Republican and they'll firmly disagree with you. There are lots of proud and patriotic conservatives who believe in the constitution and traditional American classical liberal values.

Most citizens are not in some cultural war obsessed "burn everything down, fuck the constitution, we're at war" mindset.

It seems to me that the fewer valid uses a buyer has for the thing being bought, the more this logic obtains, and the more valid uses they have, the less it obtains. Guns have numerous valid uses to the degree that, if we are currently pretending that it matters, legal ownership of them is specifically enshrined in the Constitution. "getting super high and physiologically addicted" is not nearly so valid a use as "defending myself and my family from illegitimate violence."

Ok here's a big example then

Google says

Tobacco use is responsible for over 480,000 deaths per year in the United States,

In raw numbers, that's about 6.5x as deadly as fentanyl in terms of how many people die a year! And some of those are secondhand smoking, people who didn't choose to be harmed by cigarettes unlike an addict ODing.

Why aren't we drone striking the tobacco companies? They kill half a million citizens a year, and there's not a "legitimate use" for cigarettes.

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