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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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It won’t neatly map onto a left/right divide

Pandemics and vaccines weren’t supposed to be a left/right issue either, but, we saw how that turned out.

For sure and that's a good example. On the one hand Trust The Science, on the other hand science is a fake-objective old/dead white cishet male-biased colonial-legacy Western Eurocentric project that needs to be dismantled in favor of other ways of knowing like indigenous lived experience.

Similarly with big tech / big corporations. They are bd because white libertarian tech bros but also good in the sense that eg women should see it as their life goal to build a career in them.

It all depends on who feels like that they are inside and who feel outside. Academic leftists will defend the status/prestige of academic knowledge production if it's controlled by them. Similarly if big tech supports ideologically/politically motivated "fact checking", then big tech is good.

It's often not about aesthetics and principles of whether rational quantification and cold calculation and large scale factories are good or small-scale, holistic, emotionally-nice, human-level handmade stuff is good, just who feels in control, in terms of identity politics groups.

There are plenty of conservatives and far right people who don't want to "play God", do genetic engineering, AI, etc.

This really is an issue where you at least need the Red/Blue/Gray three-way distinction.