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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 2, 2026

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And yet, our society has been built on a sharply limited willingness to make such finer distinctions...for the entirety of its existence and right down to the present day.

Society has been built on a lot of things for the entirety of its existence and right down to the then-present day, until people started to realise that it was wrong.

The Industrial Revolution greatly facilitated this process, which is why I consider degrowthism/primitivism/anticivilisationism to be unwise on the level of tickling a sleeping dragon.

I observe that such fine distinctions have been remarkably rare when it seemed desirable to coordinate consequences against my tribe for its perceived misdeeds.

I do not like the wokists' excesses either; that's why I came here!

We've had hate-crime laws for generations.

Because many (of at least the central examples of) hate crimes have two parts: the direct victimisation of one or a few individuals (e. g. a Black person beaten after registering to vote), and the threat to thousands or millions of others (other Black people deciding whether they ought to register to vote).

We've firebombed cities in wartime

Which, if you are referring to Dresden and Tokyo, I do not condone. (If we hadn't done so, we could've added charges for Coventry to the Nuremberg Trials.)

Your principles may or may not be wrong, but they are certainly irrelevant because they have never and will never be implemented in the real world.

When Columbus sailed the ocean blue, communication faster than a horse or sailing ship had never been implemented in the real world.

Freeing women from the drudgery of hand-washing clothes had never been implemented in the real world.

Eradicating an infectious disease had never been implemented in the real world.

In other words,

Well, first of all, through God all things are possible, so jot that down.

Society has been built on a lot of things for the entirety of its existence and right down to the then-present day, until people started to realise that it was wrong.

This would be a good argument if it came with evidence that people had, in fact, realized that it was wrong in some generalized fashion, as opposed to realizing it was wrong exclusively in the context of when they were on the bad end of the consequences.

I do not like the wokists' excesses either; that's why I came here!

A lot of people don't like a lot of things, and yet those things persist.

To the extent that the excesses of woke have been pushed back, they have been pushed back by tribal identity and tribal warfare. Vibes, papers and essays accomplished nothing; re-electing Trump accomplished much more. Opinions are irrelevant, what matters is what people are actually willing to do.

Because many (of at least the central examples of) hate crimes have two parts: the direct victimisation of one or a few individuals (e. g. a Black person beaten after registering to vote), and the threat to thousands or millions of others (other Black people deciding whether they ought to register to vote).

you are describing the pathway from the individual to the collective. You cannot actually quantify the collective impact of a crime against a black person in any meaningful way. Hate Crime laws do not attempt a rigorous analysis of the individual impacts; they simply assume collective impact and proceed from that assumption. And modulo some quibblings about strategy and focus, they are correct to do so: Collectives exist, matter, and must be managed if complex society is to continue existing. Naive atomic individualism is a delusion that cannot be sustained in the real world.

Which, if you are referring to Dresden and Tokyo, I do not condone. (If we hadn't done so, we could've added charges for Coventry to the Nuremberg Trials.)

Whether you condone it or not, our society clearly has condoned it, and will continue to condone it in the future. Your disapproval is a personal quirk, not a reflection of the moral structure by which our society maintains itself.

Well, first of all, through God all things are possible, so jot that down.

"The poor will always be with you." Reality intrudes.