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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   26713 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 20, 2023

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I'd say the Bottom is in agreement with what middle management is doing here. My point is that everyone is more-or-less equally swayed, and that it's not a handful of key players pushing their agenda. There's simply no need for a conspiracy - when many push and nobody openly resists and the masses cheer because all groups consume the same media and absorb the same memes and know what the right thing to do is, then of course town halls are going to fly rainbow flags and whatever else, entirely without a shadowy organization needing to manipulate anyone.

I'd say the Bottom is in agreement with what middle management is doing here. My point is that everyone is more-or-less equally swayed, and that it's not a handful of key players pushing their agenda. There's simply no need for a conspiracy

I guess I have a fundamentally different view of how this works. I think "conspiracy", or "a handful of key players pushing their agenda" is the default of how power works under any political system, court intrigue is hardly a novel concept. But since democracy derives it's legitimacy from the consent of the government, we're stuck pretending this is not the case.

when many push and nobody openly resists and the masses cheer because all groups consume the same media and absorb the same memes and know what the right thing to do is, then of course town halls are going to fly rainbow flags and whatever else, entirely without a shadowy organization needing to manipulate anyone.

There's two problems here, one is that these memes are pretty damn obscure. Grab a random Zoomer and ask them what "Trans Day Of Remembrance" is, my bets are the majority won't have a clue. The second issue is around the phrase "what the right thing to do is", this is precisely the thing decided by key players pushing their agenda, otherwise you'd expect different countries going in different directions on these issues, just through the mechanics of Brownian motion.

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