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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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More generally,

  1. That will never happen.

  2. When it happens, you will fucking deserve it.

Seems like there is a corrolary with this recent pattern.

  1. It's not happening.

  2. But it's a good thing that it's happening. (CRT in schools, double mastectomies for minors, etc.)

I think it reflects attempts to jump right over the Overton window, or at least treat it as so imperceptibly thin that it may not even have nonnegative width.

On the one side, X is unthinkable. Nobody is seriously proposing it, and anybody worried about it is crazy. On the other side, X is unquestionable, nobody can seriously find any fault with it, and anybody objecting to it is crazy. Because this isn't a conspiracy or almost ever an intentional strategy, you can see both at once when different people have different senses of whether the moment has passed or not.