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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 26, 2026

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The "I don't believe this but you do" is a form of "If you believe premise A and premise B then behavior C doesn't fit." This forum often engages in this towards the left. And while often the person using this logic is bad at modeling the thoughts of the group they're applying it to, that's not inherently a problem with the form of argument.

"Arguments as soldiers" is a way to make attempts at persuasion sound nefarious. Of course they are attempting to persuade you! It isn't a secret. It's a nihilistic world view that frames the world as two sides, and one is pre-committed to always defect you no matter what you will do, but wants to see if you are a sucker who will cooperate. You can never earn their respect, never reach some sort of compromise, therefore the correct response is maximum fuck you. I won't say such a person would never possibly exist, but it treats the extreme as the norm. It's also self-fulfilling, because viewed from the opposite side you literally are playing defect bot.

The existence of people who have contradicting goals is not some new phenomenon, it's the norm of society. Regardless of what other people do, you should hold to your own values. This is the right's version of the left's "bad faith" exemption. The left loves this similar game - "We stand for tolerance but by having a limitless definition of harm we can shun you and still be tolerant!" Now it's "If the enemy tries to use our values against us that gives us license to never consider whether the accusation is correct!" The atheist vs Christian context of the meme is rather ironic - at the risk of being the atheist in the meme, I'm still fairly confident that Jesus' big thing was being so committed to his own values that he'd let the opponent "win" thereby convincing the opposition of his righteousness.