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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 13, 2023

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I want to identify and discuss a stealth-CW trick that I find particularly irritating: the use of (predominately left-leaning) CW positions used as examples in some other piece of work. I mostly notice this in technical articles: you might be reading an article about writing a program that prints to the console, and the example code will say something like:


print 'Eat the rich'  # or some other lefty slogan

I find this quite insidious: it normalizes left viewpoints in a way that's hard to argue against. If you try to say anything, you risk being accused of derailing the discussion with irrelevant politics or otherwise being a Bad Person who violates the norms of a forum. Has anyone seen any examples of this and/or successful arguments deployed against it?

Somewhat tangentially, I don't really understand how "eat the rich" isn't read as a really, really extreme position. Yes, I know that literally eating people is tongue in cheek and it isn't earnest advocacy of cannibalism, but the underlying sentiment really is that people that have too much money should have their wealth expropriated by force. This seems at least as ideologically extreme as the sentiments implied by 14 words styling, but one is read as being a literal Nazi and the other one is just a cute hippy slogan. It's really quite remarkable how communist-adjacent positions are inside the Overton Window.

Somewhat tangentially, I don't really understand how "eat the rich" isn't read as a really, really extreme position. Yes, I know that literally eating people is tongue in cheek and it isn't earnest advocacy of cannibalism, but the underlying sentiment really is that people that have too much money should have their wealth expropriated by force. This seems at least as ideologically extreme as the sentiments implied by 14 words styling, but one is read as being a literal Nazi and the other one is just a cute hippy slogan. It's really quite remarkable how communist-adjacent positions are inside the Overton Window.

Because people saying nazi slogans mean it, while people saying communist slogans are LARPers in clown costumes.

No one is afraid of contemporary communists, everyone, and especially the rich, knows no world worker revolution is coming, no one is going to seize means of production, no one is going to expropriate the expropriators.

The class war is over (ending on the right). Deal with it.

But realistically everyone knows that David Duke or Nick Fuentes would also not leave mass graves behind them, they’d implement outside Overton window policies that are either popular or barely underwater(like immigration restriction, or hard bans on affirmative action).

No one on the left is really worried about David Duke or Nick Fuentes because they are the controlled opposition. The woke correctly identify them as woke-leftists in all but name. The enemy will always tell you who he is afraid and in this case who the woke left is afraid of is obvious. It's people like Rogan, Gabbard, DeSantis, and of course the unholiest of the unholy Trump.

What? Duke and Fuentes? The ADL describes fuentes as a "white supremacist leader, organizer and podcaster who seeks to forge a white nationalist alternative to the mainstream GOP". Wikipedia describes duke as "an American white supremacist, antisemitic conspiracy theorist, far-right politician, and former Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan". What are you talking about? Who on the 'woke left' identifies them as woke leftists in all but name? How?

Hlynka is a true believer - East German Christian Democrat. He thinks the Socialist Unity Party has corrupted the pure communism found in the writing of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ (Martin Luther King), and that if they only stopped being so corrupt, exaggerating the capitalist threat to mask it's own corruption, and shooting people; we would suddenly live in a happy classless society. That violent repression, and permanent revolutionary rhetoric is necessary to avoid the collapse of the inherently dysfunctional communist (colour-blind) regime, escapes him. He will go to his grave claiming that the rare capitalists he stumbles accross are actually Stasi.

Do I get it right.. ... are you accusing Hlynka of being a right winger of the 'democrats are the real racists' school that is quite prevalent among right of center Americans ?

People who think racial disparities in achievement or criminality would disappear if blacks had the right culture / were properly motivated etc ? I don't think he is - he's far too online and clever for that, but it's a type that exist, and I've no idea what to do about them.

He is an anti-racist (not the Kendi type), anti-white identitarian conservative, basically the meme of a “based black man” civic nationalist