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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   14757 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 24, 2026

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My favourite and least favourite novels I read last year (respectively, Gabrielle Zevin's Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow and Nell Zink's Doxology) featured an eerily similar literary device. Large chunks of Doxology are set in New York City and upstate New York in the 90s and 2000s; unsurprisingly, 9/11 figures heavily in the plot. While the first act of Tomorrow... takes place at Harvard, most of the book takes place in the west coast, and so the 9/11 attacks don't feature as prominently, though they are mentioned.

The literary device to which I refer is that, while the 9/11 attacks are explicitly referred to, they aren't referred to as terrorist attacks. Not only is no attempt made to delve into the perpetrators' motives, there's barely any acknowledgement that the perpetrators had motives, nor even that the attacks were perpetrated by anyone. The attacks are essentially reduced to the status of a horrible tragedy that simply occurred on the volition of no one in particular, like an earthquake, a volcanic eruption or meteoric strike. The election of Donald Trump strikes Zink as a moral outrage, but for her, getting angry at 9/11 would be like getting angry about a heavy downpour. This framing is particularly galling in the case of Tomorrow..., as when one of the main characters is murdered by a crazed homophobic gunman, the novelist wants to make damn sure we understand the political motivations for his crime. Passive voice for me, active voice for thee.

It seems that this framing — 9/11 not as an attack that was committed but as an event that occurred — will soon become policy in at least one North American progressive media outlet:

KINSELLA: 9/11 wasn't a 'terrorist attack,' according to the CBC

The Encyclopedia Britannica people define it this way: “Terrorism is the calculated use of violence, or the threat of violence, to create general fear in a population and coerce a government or society to achieve political, religious, or ideological goals.”

By any reasonable and objective standard, that is what happened nearly 25 years ago, on September 11, 2001: Terrorism.

This week, I received a memo — presumably confidential — addressed to CBC News staff. It is authored by one Basem Boshra, who is the “Senior Director of Journalistic Standards and Public Trust at CBC News.” In Boshra’s memo, reporters are editors are told this:

“Do not refer to the Sept. 11 attacks as terrorist attacks.”

Boshra states that all in bold letters, italicized, as if to emphasize the point. To make clear it is a directive, not a suggestion.

It is not fair and it is in no way accurate. It is rewriting the historical record. It is manipulating facts to fit an ideological perspective. It is cruel and despicable. It is Orwellian.

I contacted a couple of CBC’s designated spokespeople to ask them why CBC has decided that terrorism is no longer terrorism. To ask them why “hijackings [that] led to passenger jet crashes” is not considered terrorism. I thought about asking them, too, if “murder” is considered involuntary cessation of biological functions at CBC. But I didn’t, because that might offend their sensibilities.

Here is what [Kerry Kelly] said: “CBC’s longstanding language guidance regarding the terms ‘terrorist’ and ‘terrorism’ is a preference for the use of these words with attribution, a practice shared by many of the world’s top journalistic organizations. Our general manager and editor in chief has written publicly in the past on the subject.”

I find this kind of evasiveness extremely frustrating. Last year a colleague of mine (who, full disclosure, I consider a manchild, and hardly someone I come to looking for cogent political analysis) was talking about the conflict in Gaza and scoffed at someone (I think it was Gal Gadot) who defended Israel on the grounds that Hamas started the most recent conflict and Israel was defending itself. I immediately shot back "but that's literally what happened", which seemed to stop him dead in his tracks: the relentless focus on Israel's purportedly brutal conduct in Gaza has obliterated from people's minds the simple fact that it wasn't a war Israel started. Likewise, see this article from Spiked: even progressive journalists, with their obsessive fixation on the civilians regrettably caught in the crossfire in Gaza, have essentially forgotten that Hamas and the PIJ are military organisations, with thousands (if not tens of thousands) of soldiers on the ground in Gaza:

‘That was the one image that really knocked me back a bit’, said Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s international editor, on Monday morning’s Today programme. ‘[Hamas fighters] just emerged… in their trucks, which were somehow still intact’, he said. In an attempt to explain the seemingly inexplicable, he added, ‘I presume they must have been parked in some kind of tunnel perhaps’.

Bowen wasn’t the only member of the press corps to have to scoop their jaws off the floor. Others called the ‘remarkable’ scenes a ‘stark reminder’ that Hamas continues to exist.

Since Hamas’s massacre of Israeli civilians on 7 October 2023, too many Western reporters, pundits and politicians have presented the subsequent conflict as if it involved only one combatant: Israel. In fact, watching or reading the media coverage, you could be forgiven for thinking that the Israel Defence Forces were not really fighting Hamas at all, but Palestinian civilians. [emphasis mine]

If you put Hamas apologists on the spot and get them to begrudgingly concede that a) the October 7th attacks happened; b) it was not a "false flag; c) Hamas deliberately targeted civilians, and the overwhelming majority of civilians killed were not killed by the IDF as part of the Hannibal doctrine — having conceded all that, these apologists will defend the attacks on the grounds that they were "inevitable", like an avalanche, or ice melting when it's left out of the freezer. Yahya Sinwar and his legion of followers, you see, simply could not have chosen to behave other than they did.

I'm reminded also of the massive "data desert" in the UK's Ministry of Justice conviction data. It's one thing to collect information about the ethnicity of offenders, but bury it somewhere it's hard to find or insist that it must be considered in light of socioeconomic disparities. But simply not bothering to collect the information in the first place is a whole other ball game. Also consider Coulter's law, or that peculiar journalistic tic in which a vehicle-ramming attack will be described as having been committed by "a car", as if non-self-driving cars possess agency.

I also think this framing is the underlying cause of the discourse around hypoagency, or the "women are wonderful" effect. A lot of people (both men and women) seem to really struggle with the idea that a woman could simply do something heinous without having previously had someone (i.e. a man) do something heinous to her. See the Lindsay Clancy truthers, or the people baselessly claiming that Aileen Wuornos was a rape victim who killed her victims in self-defense — some people even feel more comfortable believing that Elizabeth Holmes was manipulated by her Svengali of a boyfriend into committing wire fraud. The novel I'm currently reading, Penance by Eliza Clark, is illustrative. Her first novel, Boy Parts, was about an abusive woman whose lashing out at men is implied to be the result of her having been molested by her male secondary school teacher. Penance continues the trend: of the three female murderers, one (so far) is definitively stated to have been raped as a child, while another is implied to have been sexually interfered with by a transparent Jimmy Savile stand-in. (We haven't yet done a deep-dive into girl #3's backstory, but I'm not holding my breath for what awaits me there.) For all her talk of delving into the psychology of evil fucked-up women, for Clark, there is always a male first-mover skulking about in the background. Both of her first two novels are ultimately trauma plots: I don't think Clark could even conceive of the idea of a woman doing something awful without having been interfered with in childhood. by an adult male.

This is an interesting asymmetry. When conservatives/Red Tribers/Leave voters/gammon/Zionists/whites/cis people/men/heterosexuals etc. do something bad, you will know about it. When a member of group who doesn't meet that description does something bad, you might hear about it, as a page 4 story. But the fact that a member of that group did it won't be mentioned as prominently as in the former case, if at all. It may be framed as something that happened, rather than as something that someone consciously chose to do.

I'm reminded, lastly, of a tweet posted in response to a YouTube video titled "The Internet is Failing the Left":

The fact that this video is titled “The internet is Failing the Left” tells you a lot about the psychological / ideological differences between left and right, much in the mode of Zizek.

If I (or any other right-winger) were to make a video, similar to Burns, criticizing some larger creator like Matt Walsh, we would never title it “The internet is failing the right”.

It’s not even that my arguments against Walsh would necessarily be different than Burn’s arguments against Wynn. It’s that “The internet is failing the right” reads like a GRAMMATICALLY incorrect sentence. The non-volitional object is the active subject. The political agent is the passive object. This is not correct, linguistically. The correct language would read “How the right is failing to use the internet!” or “How our enemies who run the internet are attacking the right!”

All of this goes to show that the modern left sees itself as a passive object that is acted upon. It cannot fail, it can only be failed. Capitalism and Oppression happen to the left, and that’s bad. Maybe, in the future, change and revolution will happen to the left and that will be good. But the left doesn’t DO things. Doing things is not what the left does. It isn’t that kind of thing.

The left is like a tree in the storm that is capitalism / modernity. The rain and the wind are happening to it. Maybe it survives or doesn’t, but the action is that of the storm. The right is like a ship sailing through the storm that is Capitalism / modernity. It cuts through the tempest. Maybe it survives or doesn’t, but the action is on the part of the ship.

Conservatives do things; things are done to progressives. If progressives do things, it's only ever in response to things that were done to them. And if there's no possible way to frame something they did as something that was done in response to something else, then we'll simply say it happened, not that it was done.

Conservatives do things; things are done to progressives.

But that's a contradiction in terms, because "conservatism" is kind of the definition of not doing things, whereas progressivism is about progress and liberalism is about maintaining the controlled chaos and flexibility out of which progress emerges.

Therefore, we must conclude that:

  • Those who call themselves 'conservatives' are in actual fact liberals/progressives, because they do things, and in the traditional left-right view are left-wing
  • Those who call themselves 'progressives' (or 'liberals') are in actual fact conservatives, because things are done to them, and are right-wing

And if we rephrase it as follows:

  • Men do things
  • Things are done to women

Then we can see that women are by definition the conservative influence they always have been, and men the liberal one. So men now find more common cause with "conservatives" because they are not actually conservative, or rather, what they promise is more liberal than what women want.

Media is generally hostile to left-wing causes when economic conditions reward rent-seeking more than R&D (which is why they were on the left's side back in the '50s-'70s, why they are not now, and to a point why they [falsely] claim to still be left), and the way they prompt that is generally by spamming any plausible invocations of Copenhagen Ethics as possible. So the behavior you see from them tracks.

As for "Republicans Leftists pounce", the reason the left can't benefit from the right violating their own morality is because the right is in control of what that morality is in the first place. Which is not a surprise; they literally exist to be aggrieved as a negotiating strategy. The left fights the right by creating and proving things, memes being the fastest and most well-known example (alternately, consider the phrase 'the left can't meme'; as explained above, this phrase gets who's left and right backwards).

The correct male/liberal behavior is just to ignore them. Once they fight it, they legitimize the framing of women/conservatives that they can't do anything right, and it's over. But, on that note...

And if there's no possible way to frame something they did as something that was done in response to something else, then they'll simply say it happened, not that it was done.

...you sure you aren't Sloot's alt account?

I don't think Clark could even conceive of the idea of a woman doing something awful without having been interfered with in childhood.

Sounds like she's the kind of woman who should try to conceive with an appropriately assertive/attractive $age_of_consent-year-old man.

because "conservatism" is kind of the definition of not doing things

I don't agree. Conservatism doesn't mean "don't do anything" but "don't do anything new".

It does seem under this definition like the parties aren't really as conservative/progressive aligned as the messaging would have you think. Under "don't do anything new", California is arguably a conservative state when it clamps down on building housing, sets strong environmental laws discouraging industry, and blocking data center construction. Alternatively, Texas's libertine rules encouraging solar build out, natural gas, and encouraging industry are progressive. Don't tell Gavin and Greg.

But that seems part of both party's ongoing civil wars: blue team seems to have inherited a lot of conservative (lacking a better term) seniors for whom that means "hands off my Medicare" and a general preference for maintaining late 20th century neoliberalism, which clashes with the DSA types wanting radical changes. Red team has a similar clash between traditionally-labelled conservatives and "you can just build things", although I'm not sure if that fight is still ongoing these days.

The confusing thing about America's constant change and upheaval is that, although dispositional/Burkean/"small-c" conservatism still makes some sense here, and it's still true that traditions which have stood the test of time are less risky than new ideas that haven't, "for many lifetimes this fact of constantly changing traditions has been a longstanding tradition". California didn't get to be California by clamping down that hard on housing and industry; that's a new idea that makes Burkean conservatives shriek, even if the alternative of endless new construction is also worrying. Riding the tiger of modernity is scary, but we're already on it, and jumping right off is scarier.

Yes, I agree that these labels are confusing and outmoded. A long time ago, I pointed out that white nationalists who want to transform the US into a white ethnostate are habitually characterised as "conservative". But to conserve things means to keep things the way they are. The US isn't a white ethnostate, so by definition anyone who wants to turn it into one can't be a conservative. Rather, white nationalists are reactionaries.

Yes. The most sensible definitions are, in my view, that conservatives are the ones keeping the ship running, which includes a lot of doing, just no changing. They are overly pragmatic and have difficulty improving anything substantively. Progressives are the ones who want us to change for the better, which is laudable, but who have a tendency to be impractical and insufficiently concerned with function, often making things outright worse.

This definition also has the advantage of making clear why we need both. The problem is, taking this definition seriously, we'd have conservatives and progressives all over the place along the political landscape. Arguably, the center left is the primary contemporary conservative element.

"Conservatives are ballast, progressives are the sails" is a phrase I've seen a few times, with a number of variations (brakes vs. engine on a car, for instance)

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