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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 24, 2023

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Perhaps of my favorite type of a commenter is one who keeps a poker face but is genuinely pissed and eager to cleverly snark so he just lunges and misses by a mile.

What have I got to be pissed about? I'm not writing ten paragraph responses or digging through post histories. I'm on the toilet here.

No, I do not predict American demise.

But you do predict that the "legitimate authority of the US... [will] collapse without popular support."

Covid will ≈always be a thing if it leaves permanent damage (see "long Covid"). I am mostly convinced it's real, though evidence is conflicted and the mechanism is dubious.

It's not real in the sense that I don't remember the last time I heard someone say the word "covid" IRL. Nobody cares anymore.

It's just not something that is valid to investigate systematically, except on a meta level, as a phenomenon of mass delusion – Paranoid Style in American Politics and all that.

It's perfectly valid to investigate at least some conspiracy theories. The nyr has been publishing cautiously credulous articles about it since at least October 2021.

The problem is that many conspiracy enjoyers such as yourself really care about pinning stuff on the Jews rather than conspiracy qua conspiracy, which really is not permitted in polite society.