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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   7255 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 19, 2026

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The fact that you resolutely will not do that under any circumstances shows that those issues are, in fact, important and worth talking about.

I don't think that logic holds water. If A and B disagree on many things, A cares deeply about X, and X is largely indifferent to B, it may well be that B pretends to be extremely worked up about X to fight A. In fact, there is a clear strategic advantage in doing so: as long as B is attacking A about X, A will have to sink energy into defending X that it could be using to defend other things, but if A ever decisively wins the battle over X, B, who never actually cared, won't actually have lost anything it cared about, so it's all upside.

This could be true if contesting X costs B less than A, but that's certainly not true here: trans issues are losers at the ballot box for democrats and everyone knows it. 'Kamala supports free gender-affirming care for illegal immigrant convicts' was disastrous for her campaign. She certainly didn't bait right wingers into attack her on that point as some devious stratagem to waste their efforts, they dug and dug to find a statement that could be interpreted in that way because they knew it was a winning issue for them. She, very simply, would obviously have been better off giving the issue up -- her especially, given she skipped right over the primary.

A cares deeply about X, and X is largely indifferent to B, it may well be that B pretends to be extremely worked up about X to fight A.

Well in that case, it wouldn't really make logical sense for B to argue that A's beating the drum on issue X is just an attempt to distract from some more important issue. Both sides are taking the position that issue X is important. Ok, so B is being dishonest and hypocritical, but so what?

I don't think that logic holds water. If A and B disagree on many things, A cares deeply about X, and X is largely indifferent to B, it may well be that B pretends to be extremely worked up about X to fight

Tell me which issue you want me to vocally support or oppose in return for vocally opposing immigration and transgenderism in progressive spaces, and I'm pretty sure I will give it to you.

If you think Reds are "largely indifferent" to trans ideology and its integration into taxpayer-funded schools, I think you will find the real world a very surprising place going forward.

I can't actually think of a single real-world example where this pattern plays out. A similar pattern, I think, is the one where objectively-small-potatoes policies are seen as a test of control, and so have massive resources dedicated to them, because both sides understand the power of precedent and control of the default.

This is in Texas. Trans ideology is illegal in government schools.

Now that doesn't mean it doesn't happen, but it does mean that at a government policy level, the sort of thing that might be changed by a single election(and if democrats win a trifecta in Texas then they've probably also won the power to override vetos in the federal government and will simply pass whatever they want) is a thing that the reds have decisively won.

I don't believe this, and I don't understand why you would claim it. Undocumented immigration is illegal. Affirmative action is illegal. Weed smoking is illegal, or was until very recently. The Constitution itself offers ironclad protections to free speech and the right to keep and bear arms, in a purely hypothetical way that has no actual impact anywhere Blues win political power.

Laws that can't and won't be enforced should not be referenced as reassurance that the things the law bans aren't a problem worth worrying about. Show me the people in jail for breaking the law, and then we can talk.

(tried to belatedly edit the following into the first post - here it is as a reply)

I'm not saying that in this case the right's opposition to trans rights or immigration is displaying this kind of hypocrisy. But I don't think the left's refusal to concede those points proves otherwise. Lawfare is a good example: the Left may keep suing Trump over January 6th without actually caring about it half as much as they pretend, because they already maximally hate Trump whether or not he really tried to do a coup - but whether Trump himself wants to be seen as a guy who attempted to do a coup is a completely different question and it would be hugely damaging for him if he conceded "yeah, whatever, I confess, I tried to become dictator-for-life" in some bizarre effort to prove his accusers don't actually care about that.

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