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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   32545 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 1, 2023

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I’ll be honest I think most people only care about politics for social signaling purposes. It’s as you say, maybe 10% of the adult population of the country cares about politics to any level. They don’t really see it as an object level reality.

This can be most easily seen in state and local politics. To whit, the place where the average person has orders of magnitude more power than they do in federal politics. You can get infrastructure projects funded. — by the city or state government. You can affect how hard your commute is — at the city planning meetings. You can affect (especially now that the courts have send a lot of stuff back to the states) a good chunk of culture war issues. Turnout is terrible, and even fewer attend the meetings. Like, you want to keep woke out of the schools (or put it in) — the school board meets once a month. They have committees that go through and approve textbooks. Nobody goes.

It’s actually funny to me. People don’t actually want power. They don’t want their decisions to matter. They in fact want to demand things with no responsibility, which turns out to be super easy if you’re signaling with things you have little power over.

Like, you want to keep woke out of the schools (or put it in) — the school board meets once a month. They have committees that go through and approve textbooks. Nobody goes.

When people showed up, the Attorney General literally designated them as domestic terrorists.

Like, you want to keep woke out of the schools (or put it in) — the school board meets once a month. They have committees that go through and approve textbooks. Nobody goes.

People do go, but if they actually attempt to object, the meeting gets closed, canceled, or the objectors get thrown out for disruption. Those meetings are pro forma public; the board doesn't actually want public input and knows how to avoid it.

Part of this is just normal scale impediments to organisational decision making, whatever the politics. The truth is nothing good gets done by consensus, it just ends in entropic back and forth.

Whatever the reason, it means trying to fob off the blame for wokeness in schools on people being insufficiently interested in local politics doesn't work.

That too I know. I encourage people to get on a board but public meetings with people shouting don't achieve anything for a school it has to be said.

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