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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 28, 2023

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[EDIT: At 24 hrs after my initial post I'll collect all the responses and decide what I want to do with them]

This is a poll question. The idea is to get and understand the people reading this, their takes.

In the optimal scenario, answers wouldn't contaminate the others' responses or reference others' definitions and understanding.

The question: In sociopolitical contexts, what is your personal, off-the-cuff definition or interpretation of the term NPC? Again, I'm not looking for any other thinker's or pundit's definitions of the term, but you, the commenter who responds to me. I already know the concept has already been discussed and mentioned, at length, elsewhere.

If you've never heard the term before, give me a guess of what you would think the term means and what information you pull from. Ideally, answers would be spoilered using the double-pipe notation, IE wrapping the answer with a pair of: || around their responses, without referring to anyone else's response.

To avoid contamination, I'll post my own definition as a response to this comment later.

deleting old posts for privacy

Someone doing that today wouldn't be a conformist, certainly. Even at the height of Covid, double-masking, carrying disinfectant wipes etc. was not something I remember actually seeing anyone doing and would have marked the person doing it as not conforming to the social mores, which would have perhaps meant wearing one of those flimsy blue or white masks for a time and then dropping it when everyone else dropped it. Current zero covidians - whom I disagree with and have argued with repeatedly - are anything but conformist in the sense of conforming to current actual social norms, but I still keep seeing those gray NPC wojak memes about them implicating that they're what is meant by NPC.

Current zero covidians are not NPCs, the NPC's have had their beliefs patched since 2022 and now don't mask.

A broken NPC in a town who regurgitates antiquated lines because they didn't accept their new Current Thing update is still an NPC who adopted their previous positions because they at least were an NPC.

Their understanding of the issues or the evidence didn't get better since; they're just stuck like a broken record.