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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 15, 2023

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Update of previous culture war post in May 1 thread.

The contentious marker was removed without any ceremony and all dwindled into nothingness.

Maybe other more cinematic events, like New York Subway Thunderdome fight, stole the limelight, maybe the whole thing was just too obscure to turn into major culture war battlefield.

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn is still dead and so are most of causes she dedicated her life for. Causes like communism, that moved hundreds of millions and turned the Earth asunder, are now just forgotten or reduced to cosplay attire.

As will happen to all of us, as will happen to every cause we hold dear.

I suspect you are being too optimistic to say communism is "forgotten". It may be temporarily out of power in the West, but its twin brother under the name "socialism" is still going strong all over the planet, while true commies bide their time in classrooms and government-funded NGOs, and entertain themselves destroying cities like Portland. They are far from gone and forgotten.

I'd go so far as to say that the basics of Communism are orthodoxy today, as witness all the complaints about "inequality" without even any attempt to justify "inequality" being somehow wrong.

Nah, men being born equal goes back to the founding of the US. Funny people like Moldbug might twist their words torturously to put the founding fathers in the same category as the communists, but most anyone else can see how ridiculous that really is.

"Inequality" isn't about "all men are created equal"; that's blatant equivocation. Jefferson did not mean, and no one thought he meant, that everyone should have the same amount of income or wealth.

The inequality of the day, as well as of a small century afterward, was certainly about men being created equal - and it still is in our day and age now the left has joined the right in attacking this notion by insisting it is evil white/male/straight/whatever people being uniquely evil. Equality takes more shapes and forms than underachieving Americans doing poorly, and to insist only the communists might take issue with inequality is silly.

to insist only the communists might take issue with inequality is silly.

But, in the expanded sense of "inequality" you are using, nobody is doing that.