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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023

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Will you have the moral courage and willpower and hard-heartedness the next time a George Floyd level event happens, to say, “I don’t give a fuck”? When the news shows you some incident with horrible optics and constructs an expansive and emotionally-manipulative narrative around it, will you stand firm and reject fundamental elements of that narrative? Will you say, “it’s completely fine that this happened, and we should change nothing about our society to prevent it from happening again”? Or, like the previous times, will you say, “I understand why you’re angry and I agree things need to change, but do you have to be quite so extreme about your response?”

Does this really require hard-heartendess though? The hippie era ended not because people became tough, but because everyone got sick of them--the people, the ideology, the empty promises, the same blah tunes, etc. The same thing happened with the early 90's environmentalism craze: it was everywhere, absolutely everywhere. We had recycling lessons in school. There were cute cartoon characters of mother Earth on TV. There was probably some take of the President segregating his trash or some such thing. And you had PETA or the Sea Shepard and people chaining themselves to bulldozers. What about the trash barge that couldn't find a port that was scaring the whole country into thinking we'd all drown under an ocean of garbage?

It all faded away. Well, not all of it. Recycling is somewhat enforced, even though it doesn't appear to work much. And people mostly rejected EVs until mostly recently when they became--almost--as good as ICEV. But, in general, people got tired of being told they're immoral idiots who are destroying everything every minute of every day.

That's my hope at least. It's too early to tell, but the recent news about Rowling makes me think that the crowds are getting tired of listening to same tired old stuff all the time. Perhaps we here are even more tired since many of us have been audience to this show for a decade or more.