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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   12362 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 10, 2026

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We Won

On Sunday Morning, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went on ABC's This Week and proclaimed, "Woke 1 was crazy". The immediate context was AOC defending Wisconsin DSA governor candidate Francesca Hong, and so a lot of people are clowning on her for handwaving away everything that happened in 2015-2022. To the extent that this is about who you should vote for in the Wisconsin governor's race, I agree with the criticism, but I want to take a step back and appreciate how far we've come.

Think back to remember how it felt in the dark days of 2020 and 2021. It was far from clear that the reign of terror would ever end. Every week another subreddit or Twitter poster was banned. Facebook was removing posts supporting Kyle Rittenhouse as a policy. "Abolish the Police" was treated as a serious (if aspirational) policy proposal. Above everything else, the worst part was the psychological damage, the feeling that the entire world was going insane; that it was just you and a few guys from a Harry Potter fanfiction forum spinoff who were capable of the miniscule amount of critical thinking required to know that removing Aunt Jemima's face from bottles of pancake syrup did absoutely nothing to help black people.

The fact that even the left-wing of the Democratic Party is campaigning on health care, tax policy, and Palestine instead of racial humiliation is a big deal. There is a temptation to equate "woke" (more specifically "woke 1") with generic liberal Democrat stuff, but that's not really true. Conversely, it becomes easy to overlook some of Trump's greatest accomplishments. Turning DEI and Critical Race Theory into curse words and ending affirmative action were huge. People said it couldn't be done, and then they were done so fast that everyone forgot by the midterms.

As an aside: I never understood the people calling AOC unattractive, and still don't. I find the "Zendaya is ugly" thing easier to understand (not that I consider her unattractive either).

She's objectively above average (for the US, at least), but her face is less attractive that the rest of the package. She has the eyes of a Starfield NPC.

Zendaya is just "girl pretty".

Everyone’s got different tastes and thus everyone has their own “average”. I’m really only into whites and Asians so they’re both starting with a significant handicap.

AOC is like, kinda cute, maybe. She’s not UNattractive.

Zendaya on the other hand is about as sexually attractive to me as a bowl of fruit. I think “girl pretty” might just be a way for women to sabotage and confuse each other.

I’m really only into whites and Asians

Insert obligatory argument over whether Hispanics can be counted as white.

Is there some argument against the "some are, some aren't; depends on ancestry" position other than the "race doesn't exist" SJ-adjacent one?

AOC is obviously not supermajority-white-and-Asian, so it's not surprising that someone only attracted to whites/Asians has reduced attraction to her.

I was just making a half-joking reference to the US federal government's recent race/ethnicity reshuffling.

I personally can't see much difference between indigenous Americans and heavily tanned Europeans, so all Hispanics look basically white to me. But that obviously is my problem, not Primaprimaprima's.

I personally can't see much difference between indigenous Americans and heavily tanned Europeans, so all Hispanics look basically white to me.

Just curious, where did you grow up?

If someone said they couldn’t see any difference between Slavs and Germanics I could forgive them. I especially understand not being able to tell Japanese and Chinese and Koreans apart, since I can’t really do that either, although I’m told that people from those countries have little issue with it. But not being able to tell the difference between South American mestizos and Europeans (even heavily tanned Europeans) is just wild to me. Like, bordering on willfully obtuse.

I especially understand not being able to tell Japanese and Chinese and Koreans apart, since I can’t really do that either, although I’m told that people from those countries have little issue with it.

I haven't lived in Korea for too long for my experience to matter, but my experience with Korean relatives who live (and only ever lived) in Korea is that this is a lie we like to spread out to the rest of the world because it makes us feel superior. We have less issue, but it's a stretch to say that the issue is little.

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