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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 22, 2024

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I have pretty much had it with people who ranted about "trump disrespecting the troops!" now waving the flag of Hezbollah who actually killed a lot of those troops.
The next time a Democrat starts regurgitating NPR at me I'm going to end up saying something friendship-ruiningly impolite because I just can't hold in the anger at this stupidity any more. It's almost worse than 2020 because the deranged hysteria isn't happening in unique circumstances.

How do you all deal with this every day?

I don't see how the example here represents some sort of unique turning point or even a particularly good example of the set of, 'Progressives seem to hold totally contradictory values'.

They have been holding 'LGBTQ+ for Hamas' rallies since October 8th.

Trump disrespected the troops by saying stuff that a 'properly cultured' blue-triber would never say, like calling POWs losers for getting caught.

The people at protests waving flags, still don't like Trump for being uncouth in those ways. Also, I would guess less than half of them even know what Beirut is. Still, even if they did know, they mostly wouldn't care. They are perfectly happy to hold both the idea that Trump says rude things to the troops and that is bad, and also the idea that the American military-industrial-complex is a global oppressor and any and all resistance to it is justified. This isn't even a particularly contradictory pair of ideas to hold compared to their beliefs around gender.

More generally, you are making a liberal complaint to a progressive. Liberals care about being principled and consistent, creating generalizable rules, and all that other great civilization building philosophy junk that got totally abandoned as the internet and government student loans expanded the marketplace of ideas to include midwits.

I know, it's just that I'm finally hitting my breaking point. Mostly it's that a few people who were generic libs but mocked "the weird ones" have suddenly gone all-in on quoting reddit posts, with seemingly no sense that their perspective has changed.

I've always put up with this kind of thing before, but I'm this close to cutting back my circle of friends to a handful of shared hobby autists and redneck coworkers.

It's this depressing feeling that I was never really friends with a person who existed, just a living chatbot that had a new gpt lobotomy update.

That's my secret, I have no friends.