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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 23, 2026

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Look - I used to find your comments and insight to be a part of the special sauce that this place brought that I couldn't seem to find anywhere else.

But lately I've lost that feeling, and if I recall correctly you are a hair's breadth from catching a major ban.

I don't want that to happen, but you have to stop with some of this stuff. I'm not sure if it's meant to be rhetorical flourish but some of what you are saying sounds just as bad the worst TDS /r/politics user.

Yes the U.S. and the current admin has plenty worth complaining about, but saying the U.S. is a "clearly fascist nation committing genocide in the name of a crude ethnosupermacist theological doctrine" is wrong on so many levels that it has to have taken work to come up with that.

Calling Americans barely human? Come on man.

Like what the fuck are you doing.

If I was to try and deliberately write a comment to get me banned and convince Americans that Europeans have nothing worth listening to it would be like what you wrote.

What happened??????

You're [America is] on the side of a clearly fascist

Just being persnickety but I'm pretty sure a "clearly fascist nation committing genocide in the name of a crude ethnosupermacist theological doctrine" is referring to Israel.

That said, I agree that Dase is overstating his case. I personally always found his ideas interesting and his style to be an unfortunate barrier to the ideas, but I guess that's how he likes it.

Oh oops if I mixed that up but going on to add "you're ruled by millenarian fanatics worse than Shia Muslims" I'm fairly sure that's in reference to the reporting about U.S. leadership.

Also things like the later "Hegseth, Trump – are barely human but instead some degenerated swine from a Fromsoft game."

I mean that's Nazi talk. The level of dehumanization is I think new and totally collapses much of value of the contribution since you know it's all hiigghhhhly colored.

that's Nazi talk

Please, no, not that can of worms again.

If you insist, please lead with an opener about your exact definition of nazi.

Systematic dehumanization of someone you dislike and leadership figures of them is a classic sign of disordered thought processes that often lead to things like the rise of authoritarian states, ethnic cleansing, justification of deaths of people in that group (ex: Charlie Kirk).

I'm not a person who throws around Nazi very often, can't remember the last time I did it - but referring to people you disagree with as subhuman animals and drawing connections to literal demons, shit that's a pretty good reason.

You can be mad at Americans and their political stances without hitting that level of rhetoric.

It's not about Nazis specifically, it's about the modes of thought that lead to behaviors the Nazis are famous for. "That's Khmer Rouge" thinking or "that's woke thinking" are equally appropriate.

It's not about Nazis specifically

How about "fanatic", "crazy", "demagogue" or "ideologue", all of which refer to more or less suitably vague but not historically burdened concepts?

I don't think those are quite strong enough for how significant the espoused rhetoric was - yeah Nazi is a loaded term, but people who make that much of an effort to dehumanize are up to some bad business most of the time.

Demagoguery can result in someone being hyped for the latest tech product.

I think "dangerously dehumanizing" is probably more accurate, for the reasons you elaborated on: Nazis are just one subcategory of that. I don't like that the euphemism treadmill has left us with no more-extreme synonyms for "dangerously" (though post-Charlie-Kirk I'd say "atrociously dehumanizing" is fair), but in the end reaching for the word "Nazi" doesn't permanently take us off the treadmill, it just pulls "Nazi" further onto it. Godwin's Law is decades old now, and if you run the risk of someone mistaking your serious point for hyperbole regardless then you might as well make the serious point as precisely as possible.

(this is all analysis in leisure and in hindsight; obviously you're not going to spend this much time analyzing every single word you use and I'm not upset that you might have chosen one slightly-suboptimally)

Ironically this has generated an element of perverse incentive - the comment has generated a lot more engagement because of people taking issue with the word Nazi. It's superficial engagement, but it is engagement.

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