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The Culture War Singularity is already here
I was once very interested in the culture war, and in many aspects of the culture war. I am a staunch atheist so I cut my teeth in online debates arguing about evolution and the existence of god in the early 2000's. That felt like a side topic to all the important policy debates at the time. The war in Iraq and Afghanistan. The national debt. Censorship of free speech by the religious right. How to deal with islamic terrorism. George Bush and Dick Cheney. The military industrial complex.
Many of these overlapped, but they also generally felt like separate and distinct things. I ended up stumbling across libertarianism because I ran into someone complaining about government spending, and anti-war. I felt like they kicked my but in a debate simply because they didn't allow for my easy auto win argument at the time "oh you care about government spending, then why don't you care about the massively expensive war in the middle east?"
Nowadays it feels like the culture war is collapsing. Not like a structure collapsing into the ground, but a star collapsing into a black hole. Everything is funneling into fewer and fewer topics. The main two that have come out of it all are Donald Trump and AI. You can collapse most people's views into what they think about Donald Trump. If you know that you basically know all the rest of what they think about political topics. For the few where this is not true, the dividing line is instead AI.
I find myself ambivalent/uncertain on both topics. But my ambivalence is not a path out of the stereotyping. It just leads to a different set of assumptions about me, and most of them are probably pretty accurate.
Both topics feel like they will either come to a conclusion by 2028 or implode in such an epic catastrophe that they will continue mattering for the next century at a minimum.
Or is this all just me becoming jaded and bored with the culture war? Ignoring topics like Transgender, feminism, race relations, metoo, and global conflict to shoehorn my pet theory into the world.
I don’t think this is true. I think it’s much more common in vibes based semi autocracies like Turkey and Russia. In America there seem to be plenty of Trump supporters who disagree with him on AI, or the Iran War, for example.
Most Trump supporters disagree with him about the Iran war and about half of them do about AI.
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