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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 13, 2023

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As a woke leftist myself:

You can't, because you are wrong.

But for real: You still can't, because this is a scissor-ish style of statement that has too much cultural impetus behind it for any counterargument that can be delivered in anything less than 1500 pages to be convincing.

Eg, you can be as rational and as reasonable as you like, but all it takes is ONE (1) clip from fox news about current culture war issue, or someone reminding them about whichever black guy most recently got executed by the cops on the street, or just remembering that a defacto legal racial caste system existed in the US until 1964, and they will instantly revert to priors: that is, you are either a bigot, or politically motivated to believe things that are demonstrably untrue.

Don't give up, live your truth and etcetera, but understand that for every "affirmative action is a prejudicial concept that infantilizes racial minorities unjustly and unfairly", there is a "there are millions of people alive today that were forbidden from owning high value property because they were not white".

There is still a lot of common ground to be found.

Left - Black people were not allowed to own high value land in the 50s and still don't own any.

Young populist Right - We are poor doing blue collar work college educated PMC class grifters are the only ones who can afford the now-heavily inflated land.

The answer is the same for both groups. Build more ! But, their hatred for each other doesn't allow them to talk about any of the issues at all.

The point is not to find consensus, but to chip at some of the provably wrong bits of the beliefs held by either side, until we reach 2 opposing but still kinda alright solutions.

eg: There is ample evidence for the left to concede that rent control does not work. Also, Dumping all the homeless/poor/society's most desperate into 1 block will destroy that neighborhood and exacerbate all of those issues. (housing projects deep in Brooklyn). At the same time, the right could also concede that an arbitrary date in the 70s does not make sense a date to have stopped building any and all housing around the US. If the city population goes up by 20%, then the city needs 20% new housing. Mafs.

Just starting there makes for productive conversation. No holy cows need to be slain. No major minds need to changed.

Ofc, in such a world the everyone would hold hands and kiss too..........but I am a hopeless optimist, so I persevere.

Hence me telling you to live your truth, even if I probably disagree with you on +/- everything.

I believe if you care enough to even ask, you probably share most of my axioms, you just disagree on the facts or the solutions.

Those are some GIRTHY disagreements, unfortunately.