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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026

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Here is the list of the topic of top level posts in this thread since the viral ICE shooting.

  1. Minneapolis
  2. Minneapolis
  3. Minneapolis
  4. Iran
  5. Minneapolis
  6. Minneapolis
  7. Greenland
  8. Venezuela
  9. Minneapolis10
  10. Doctor Toilet hookup
  11. Minneapolis

Seven out of Eleven posts and they're by far the largest threads. It's probably too late at this point but I'd like to suggest that in the future mods should exercise some judgement and make a megathread on events like this that are likely to generate a ton of back and forth discussion with an expectation of new information coming out over the course of days/weeks. Both because it is more convenient for the reader to be able to check a dedicated thread and because it makes it much easier to find the more general discussion for those of us who find the interesting angles of the subject to have already basically been exhausted.

It is pretty interesting on the meta level that the shooting was a good enough scissor that it generated much more discussion, vs. the abduction of a sitting (if not quite legitimate) head of state by the U.S. and the ongoing revolution fomenting in a country of 90 million people, and a major regional power.

Something something near mode vs. far mode.

I think you're on to something but that it's kind of more mundane outgroup vs fargroup stuff. The ICE protestors are genuinely closer to me ideologically in most respect than chauvismo parties but they exist in my life in a much more visceral way. During the BLM protests I stood on my roof and watched people that rhyme with this group ram a U-haul into store fronts on my block, I have footage of it on my phone.

It makes sense for you to be noticing stuff that is in your community.

But I guess from the 10,000 foot view, most should not be nearly as attentive to one lady being tragically gunned down when there's real, world-altering activity afoot somewhere else.

But I guess from the 10,000 foot view, most should not be nearly as attentive to one lady being tragically gunned down when there's real, world-altering activity afoot somewhere else.

I disagree on both a practical and a philosophical level. I (predict that) I am never going to interact with a Venezuelan government official, and I don’t believe that geopolitical avalanches ever actually affect Western people’s lived experience on the ground that much. So what happens to one woman in American suburbia is in fact more relevant to me than what happens to one man in Caracas.

Neither of them are very relevant to me, but at least Good is actually sorta kinda in my reference class, and I can actually sorta kinda take actionable lessons from it (most importantly: don’t let my wife tell me how to drive)

Oh, I agree with that, I'm the one here complaining about how overrun the thread is with these post. My basic position is that this stuff is what we're going to be arguing about when we lose the raise to build a silicon god to the CCP. I just understand why that is even if it depresses me.