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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 8, 2025

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The same norm preventing this is the norm that prevents, say, the father of someone screwed up (by the father's lights) by trans ideology and surgery from going and vigilante-ing intellectuals like Judith Butler who are, in some diffuse but obvious sense, clearly culpable for the ideology and thus its downstream material effects. Lode bearing norm etc - this gets fully general in a hurry in a society with meaningful liberal pluralism, because it means everyone is tolerating other people who are (by their lights) behaving like moral monsters.

Spending time on Tumblr as I do, the argument seems to be that we don't need "the norm" to prevent this father from "going and vigilante-ing," because the force of the state will do that. One side gets to attack the other for "behaving like moral monsters," and the state will mostly let them get away with it, and the other doesn't get to attack back, because the cops and courts will come down on them like a hammer.

To provide further example in a different context — the murder of Iryna Zarutska — someone made a comment about how, if our legal system keeps letting out people like Decarlos Brown Jr. to reoffend again and again, then eventually people will start resorting to vigilantism. The immediate reply was that, no, such people would be stopped immediately, because we've had laws put in place since the Civil Rights era to prevent such "vigilantism" — or, to call it by it's proper name, lynching — and the cops and courts all know how to properly deal with any such person, even if they decide this time to leave their pointy white hood at home.