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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 4, 2024

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Meanwhile, on the socialist left, where there's more distrust of the experts (particularly of the mainstream economic and foreign policy set in the West), there's an aversion to conspiracy theories, since it's seen as an "easy", lacking explanation for things that have deeper structural causes

Every single explanation for why actually existing socialists states have been failures and horror shows rests on a giant conspiracy theory. Sanctions, reactionary forces within the state, take your pick. Hell conspiracy theories are a good part of the reason why said states became horror shows to begin with, since they resorted to conspiracy theories about kulaks and speculators as an explanation for their own failures, and punished these people accordingly.

Ie. socialists find it weird when right-wingers bang on about the WEF, specifically, despite WEF representing a group of capitalists, since the suggestion seems to be that the problem is just that there's this cabal of bad capitalists and if we just expose them and... somehow... get rid of them, then capitalism will start working properly and all would be good again.

Yes_Chad.jpg

"Systemic" explanations are a cope of the autist. Libertarians think they can create a good system by drafting just the right constitution, that will keep the state small for sure this time. Ancaps think they can create a good system by just abolishing the state. Socialists are scattered across a similar spectrum with regards to capitalism. Hlynka's Cat is laughing at them all.

The fact that we've been stuck so long acting systemic explanations are better because they're systemic probably says something about the usefulness of our academic elites, but that's another story.