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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 25, 2024

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I think context matters a lot. Crimea is 'merely' a territorial conflict. Sure, there are a few people living on it who probably have their own preference about which state they want to belong to, but the primary importance is strategic. The overall Ukraine is a bit closer. I vaguely recall that the Russian position is that Ukraine is not a legitimate state and would expect that Putin's preferred outcome would be either the vassalization or annexation of Ukraine, which would probably entail murdering enough journalists to bring them to Russian per-capita standards and so on. Likewise, if China ever gets Taiwan into their clutches, they will of course go full Hong Kong on their civil society. Of course, it is very unlikely that Israels Jewish population in a "river to the sea" scenario would be allowed to stay in Greater Palestine. A return to the medieval Muslim states of tolerance and multi-culturalism (compared to their contemporaries) seems very unlikely. In the best case, the Jews would escape with their lives, but Oct 7 seems closer to the vision of the main "river to sea" proponents. Context matters. Victory and salvation are both relatively abstract ideas which are not terribly offensive, but anyone who phrases them as "Sieg Heil!" will rightly be considered as a Nazi. In another world, "from the river to the sea" could be an innocent call for a transport corridor between Gaza and Jordan, but in this world, it is a genocidal Hamas slogan.

Regarding the Boers, the woke left (and arguably at least the maga right) loves their 'provocative' slogans which they insist should not be taken literally (while at least the more radical fringes take them 100% literally):

  • "Lock her up"
  • "Defund the police" There is of course some memetic evolution at work where the most stupid and radical slogans serve as a more costly membership signal and thus end up winning. So I am not very surprised that "kill the Boers" (which got clearly selected for being offensive, I am sure that there are a ton of less offensive rallying cries from the fight against Apartheit) became popular.

Was lock her up non-literal? Team Trump may think 'oh we aren't able to imprison Hillary Clinton right now' or 'there are other more important things we should be doing' but if there was a button that just locked her up, wouldn't they press it? Benghazi, emails, selling uranium to Russia, disappearances... they think she's a criminal.