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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 18, 2024

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international happenings:

-princess Kate announced that she has cancer. for some reason it was such an important secret that she first released a doctored photo of her with her kids which only fed the rumor mill. kind of a letdown from the batshit crazy conspiracies the internet was cooking up

-after vetoing a bunch of gaza ceasefire proposals at the UN, the US finally put forward one of its own, and China and Russia promptly vetoed it back.

-mass shooting in a Russian concert hall. the US embassy was warning about an attack a couple of weeks ago. ukrainians, islamists, false flag, some other mystery group?

This kind of comment would be perfect for the Transnational Thursday thread.

I will expand a bit on that and say that the OP is not a good top level culture war post.

First, it raises three different items of news whose only connection to each other is that they happened on the same day. This makes a bad experience for readers with selective interests because they can not selectively skip all that boring geopolitics to gossip about the royals or whatever.

Second, none of them qualify as CW stories as posted, IMO.

If some prominent woke groups were calling the reporting on Kate a distraction from the fact that a lot of non-white, less privileged women also have cancer, that would be a culture war story.

The UN vote on Gaza is probably a CW story, but it would require a bit more fleshing out. How did the proposals differ? What is the narrative from either side? Did the US put forward a resolution which it knew would be vetoed?

The concert hall section is probably the best part of the submission, with the caveat that not much is certain at this stage. Still a bit more substance would be helpful. (Why would Daesh hate Russia? Putin's support of Assad, perhaps? Of course, Putin is suspected to have orchestrated terror attacks before.)