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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   11955 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 3, 2026

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I'd prefer people engage with facts rather than demanding their anger and resentment be given a populist head-pat.

If you're paying attention to the twitter kerfuffle, this isn't an ask for a populist head pat. There are specific asks.

Stop it with Iran. Deport more people. Stop it with H1Bs. Stop having high level official GOP politicians make sneaky amnesty pitches. Pass the save act.

You can disagree with whether those solutions will actually help. But it's being evaded by the um, ackshully burritos are only 14.59 in my area, and how dare you poors eat them anyway. IRAN CAN'T HAVE NUKES!

The burrito debate is also the propositional nation debate is also the Iran debate is also whether MAGA is America First or controlled opposition + foreign adventures.

Tell me if I'm getting the argument here:

  1. You feel your life is worse than your father's.

  2. When people argue your beliefs are factually incorrect, you say its about "the messaging strategy, not the object debate."

  3. Based on your feelings (which need not be true at the object level), you believe you are entitled to submit a list of "specific asks" to someone (?) who is for some reason obligated to implement them.

Can you flesh out the last part?

  1. My life is great. I suffer affordability gap between being able to achieve certain goals, which I benchmark as attainable in the previous generation. My father's life is a good personal benchmark of change because I live a very similar one.

  2. This isn't a factually disputable point. What's disputable is how much it generalizes to the American population. The messaging strategy bit is a reconizable pattern of dismissiveness from within a single party coalition to it's base.

  3. #3 is just you pretending not to understand basical political parties and acting confused. The point is not about 'entitlement'. It's about people voting for things they want. There is a current debate within the republican party about whether we've lost focus on key domestic issues, especially in reference to the war in Iran. That's the frame for this entire burrito conversation.

"It's amazing how much leftist neocon discourse is just them pretending not to understand things, thus making discourse impossible."

Well, no argument here that MAGA messaging sucks. But you know the phenomenon of all those Bernie bros who turned Trumpers? I think it not unlikely a lot of burrito MAGAs will turn into DSAers.

The fact that you initiated this as you being angry that you think your father had it better than you is why people are debating that. You did a poor job of framing this about whether or not your party is appealing to its base.

Yes, I did a poor job framing. My frame was intended to be - 'no need to debate whether burritos are actually $20.' There are real domestic policy grievances, and for example, I can look at an objective disparity in housing affordability in my own life, which is a particularly important issue for me personally. My personal anecdote was as I said, 'my burrito'. yeah yeah yeah, statistics away the actual cost of burritos. Nobody can statistics away my ability to compare housing affordability with my father's who makes an especially good control of the change and how it affects me personall.

Everyone can point to specific issues that their feel are not being addressed by the current domestic policy, and dismissing them as fake or not important is bad coalition building.

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