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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026

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So... is there a reason you asked how we could interact in ways other than criticism?

Because I find it so unpleasant that I haven't replied to any of your posts in something like three years now despite telling you to stop and go away, and detailed why, but you keep coming back. I told you I'd rather be able to read your writing than just block you and move on.

No, it is not. A coherent claim has to have some clear logical support. There needs to be an X thus Y component; otherwise it's just an ipse dixit.

I see. I wasn't familiar with the formal definition of coherent.

And this sort of game is what drives me bonkers about HR815 getting used as a cudgel. You're not "specifically referring to that bill", and you aren't even saying it's an example or part of your example now, but you're also not going explain any level of specific support that could be falsified, to confront any of the reasons people might disagree, and you're not going to recognize that the people defending it here had to constantly lie completely miss details about every single section.

I'm 'not specifically referring to that bill' because I'm trying to avoid this exact conversation with you where I get linked a 30 comment thread that takes a law degree to parse! No, I don't have an example of case law where 'The legislature can explicitly give litigants the standing to enforce “shall” rules,' and it doesn't sound like mr populist did either. You won that argument, and you'd win this one.

But then, I can probably name less than a dozen case laws starting with Roe v. Wade, and I don't trust you to not be Eulering me. Why, in your view, were Lankford and other senate Republicans so incompetent as to draft an immigration bill that was harmful to their interests? And why discount the funding for enforcement, border wall (previously a major sticking point, with the border wall being hugely unpopular to the dem base), CBP, etc?

No, my position is not "we will never trust any legislation on immigration again". My position is that any compromise on immigration needs to have immediate, serious, and costly compromises paid by the group that has spent half of the last forty years exploiting and ignoring the law for their own purposes, instead of people insisting that it's a compromise because it's an immigration bill and Ezra Klien lied about it.

That's foolish. You say that Border Patrol won't report real numbers, that the courts won't enforce the rulings or grant standing. Besides, anyone on the left who actually suffers consequences will just get a pardon or a friendly DOJ/DA will refuse to prosecute them, and they'll inevitably win cushy appointments in NGOs or university faculties. Not to mention, democrat politicians see 'words as a mean for deceiving humans.'

If you think fedposting is bad, you probably will do a better job arguing against it by arguing against it, instead of just going nuts shoving words in other people's mouths.

Why don't you try arguing with them yourself before lecturing me about it?

Trivially, as I demonstrated in the link that coincidentally wasn't worth responding to, it's actually pretty unclear how incompatible it is with winning in the court of popular opinion or passing laws in congress.

How did you trivially demonstrate that rhetoric is incompatible with winning popular opinion or passing laws?

EDIT :/ Just as trivially, the DACA 'deals' had a different result than you might remember. /EDIT

I conflated the 2017 and 2019 DACA debates. In 2017, he chose to try and end DACA rather than take a deal. In 2019, how does it go? Ah - the time for rapprochement is before someone else is (about to) have power over you.

More critically, if a policy someone in the media gives a bad name, mean words, and sketchy misuses of DoD funds are all that it takes to make someone not-moderate on that position, you're going to have to give up ever Dem politician on the national level in the last thirty years, especially on gun control.

If the left ever elects someone who acts the way Trump acts, you're going to lose your mind.

And, of course, this had zero impact on Bill Clinton's then-active campaign for a federal assault weapon ban, which passed in 1994 and only ended when an unrelated Republican wave coincided with a sunset provision. Wasn't even controversial at a federal level until a couple complete nutjobs spent five-plus years digging into it and revealed that the official story in both cases had more holes than Ben_Garison's Lankford story, and even then you didn't get national television heads suggesting that maybe you can't shoot people or burn them on a pyre for being annoying and 'resisting arrest'.

What's your point, that the left can send in the feds to shoot up conservatives and still win elections? Or that violence is Popular, Actually?

(Not that one in a hundred normies could tell you what, say, LaVoy Finicum was protesting, either, but he didn't have a vagina, so he doesn't count.)

Indeed, the operative difference between LaVoy Finicum and Renee Good was their genitals. And you also might be surprised what normies could have told you about Lavoy Finicum six years ago.

No one cared. Progressives don't give a damn about women getting shot. They care about what's politically useful, and what's on the television. And, hell, I'm not saying conservatives are different! (although I personally try to care; in addition to my IRL work, I've pointedly tried to stick to 'don't speak ill of the dead' for this specific example.)

Your link is broken. But progressives care about what's politically useful, and what do you think those politics are a means to? Personal riches? Power? Please, teach me what truly motivates progressives.

Make your reply so that you don't complain about the 'reply and block,' then I'm done. My family and job deserve better than me wasting an hour of my day on this and coming home in a bad mood.

It's me saying you're being a jerk, and Go Away.

Fine, done, have fun.