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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 26, 2022

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It's an anglophone community the largest nationality of which is American. It's hardly surprising that in aggregate it has less to say on and less interest in stories from the Old World.

Which isn't to say that I wouldn't appreciate seeing more of them. Hell, I'd post them if I currently had the stomach to consume much news.

Some German content would definitely be interesting. European culture wars are pretty pathetic though. Mostly it is just very unoriginal unambitious people arguing over how to assemble the latest hot American cultural mess into something slightly more local. Trying to come up with "gender-neutral" ways of speaking in very gendered languages and so forth.

Much of the actual Finnish culture-warring is actually over environment-related subjects (use of forests, use of peat biomass in energy production, fur farming, veggie days in school etc.) that would be quite obscure and hard-to-approach to Americans, or over immigration, which likewise has implications that directly don't always resemble the immigration culture-war in USA. The washed-over American stuff is what might get shown abroad, but it's not comparably that large a part of the local experience.

For instance, I remember that when the big George Floyd protests were happening, some local antiracists organized a solidarity protest and two with some thousands of people, and that was obviously a direct attempt to export something from the US, but it was also a simple come-and-go event that maybe got some news reporting for a few days and was then forgotten, the sort of a protest anti-racist organizations would organize at some intervals anyway expect now with a particular news-related hook, not a vast, almost epochal event like it was in the USA.

Also, generally speaking, a community less likely to weigh in on subjects where they have no knowledge base. I appreciate Stefferi’s Finnish culture war entries, but never comment on them as my knowledge of Finnish politics could be contained in a matchbook, with plenty of room to spare.