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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 12, 2026

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And that means you have to make a decision. Because when the gun turns against your tribe, the nature of war is that you don't get a choice of which tribe you are part of. If we decide that killing middle aged women for being turbolibs is ok, I can't decide that I'm not part of the tribe, my family and my friends decide that for me. I can only decide whether I'm ok with their deaths or not.

I find it so difficult to see this perspective. Literally all anyone has to do to achieve complete safety is not deliberately antagonise and obstruct members of the police force or equivalent as they go about their duty. You see a bunch of agents, you give them five minutes and you don't get in the way.

Do they really think that ICE are on some spree killing of middle-aged white women now?

Non-violent resistance and civil disobedience are things, actually.

A few people might believe that their government is always morally right, axiomatically. Most believe otherwise.

A lot of people will concede that a government can become so evil that it is imperative to violently oppose it. I think that is a popular idea in America, in the abstract.

But what if government does evil, but not on a scale were you feel justified waging total war against it?

Then people often employ methods to hamper the goals of the government, especially the goals they find morally objectionable, without resorting to violence. Perhaps you just 'forget' to add the fuse in half of the bombs you build for the Nazi war machine. Perhaps you use your privileged status as a white person to help slaves escape to the northern US. Perhaps you give aid to civilians persecuted by a regime. Perhaps you just decide that you did not see a petty theft.

The specifics vary widely over axes such as personal risk, effectiveness, cause. Morality being subjective, some causes you will agree with and some you won't. I don't share the world view of anti-abortion activists, so I would view the attempt to sabotage an abortion clinic by welding their front door shut as property damage. However, I will vastly prefer an activist who employs such tactics to one who has decided to just blow up doctors instead. The former is an annoyance, but at the end of the day we are merely disagreeing about some details how civilization should work. With the latter, there can be no peace or common ground.

Nor is non-violent resistance necessarily ineffective. The underground railroad freed a lot more slaves than John Brown did (debatable indirect effects like the ACW aside).

Good was obviously believing that using her plot armor as a white US woman to hinder ICE was moral. (Like whenever a human does something, there were also signaling considerations involved, but to pretend every action is just caused by them is too cynical by half.) She was likely willing to deal with fines and the like for her cause, but probably did not expect to be shot.

I have criticized her rather harshly for her fatal decision, but on reflection I think I was wrong to characterize her as 'cosplaying #LaResistance'. Her beliefs are not my beliefs, I would have preferred for her to work and donate to some EA cause area (not that I am one to talk, there). But for all these differences, she was faced with something she considered morally wrong in her society and did not react by mashing the defect button as much and as fast as possible, e.g. planting IEDs against ICE.

TL;DR: 'She should just have stayed at home, and nobody would have shot her' only works if either you believe your government to be infallible or your own moral beliefs to be fundamentally true while every other belief is just a silly error.

The right to peacefully protest is a direct Constitutional right. A direct right. I think there's reasonable room to disagree about, and interesting discussion to be had, regarding the line between obstruction and protest. From that framing, obviously protesting/obstructing is risky, sure, but that's an official state-approved exercise of rights as much as free speech is or as much as the right to a jury trial. There's considerable meat to the argument that a right left unexercised is effectively a dead right.

Time, place, and manner restrictions, applied in a viewpoint-neutral manner, have been repeatedly held to be fully compliant with the First Amendment. The First Amendment doesn't give you the right to scream directly in someone's face, if that would be disorderly conduct in any other circumstance.

Do they really think that ICE are on some spree killing of middle-aged white women now?

At the least, if you have a middle-aged white woman in your life that you care about, please talk to them, make sure they know real people in grass world love them, and research de-radicalization strategies.

If you know of some, unironically I would like them. I do have a brother that is thankfully living abroad right now, but who otherwise I'd be genuinely worried about them doing something very rash at an anti-Israel protest. He does know we love him at least.

Thankfully the middle-aged white women in my life are much more liberal than me but still reasonably sensible. It's the middle-aged men who spam me with 'did you see what Trump did today' and 'this would never have happened before Brexit'. (I'm in the UK).

EDIT: I realised that you meant 'middle-aged' as in 37 and now I feel old. I was talking 50-60.

You have an optimistic middle age! That at least seems like a good thing