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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 31, 2022

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Last night I watched a spooky video interview with a UK mortician who claims he has been pulling out larger than normal blood clots that don't look like normal blood clots during embalming. There are a couple of other morticians and a pathologist around the world who are saying the same thing.

The way the morticians are describing this phenomenon seems alarming. Is this some sort of congealing happening after death or is this something that might have contributed to the cause of death? Is this something caused by Covid, by any of the vaccines, or all of the above? Is it affecting a large part of the population, is anyone looking into treatment? Is it even happening at all or is it a hoax? So many good questions to ask.

When I checked the Internet the only question I saw people asking was if it was caused by the vaccine or not. And most of the time they weren't even asking. One side is absolutely certain it is the vaccine, the other side is absolutely certain it is caused by Covid and vaccines can't have contributed at all. No discussion on detection or if it's treatable or anything that I would consider a higher priority than finger pointing. Do people care more about culture warring than survival?

Do people care more about culture warring than survival?

Absolutely and they're absolutely right to do it.

There is one threat historically that will kill you, your friends, your family, and all of your children... and that's your political enemies.

The lesson of the 20th century is well over 250 million people were murdered by their own governments because they didn't hate their political opponents hard enough. They were willing to give their political opponents the benefit of the doubt, they were willing to try and live in a country in which their political opponents held power supreme power rather than resort to violence.

That was a mistake. it was a mistake of the landed farmers in Ukraine and Russia to try to live with the soviets in charge of them instead fighting to the death against their class enemies forming a government, it was a mistake of the Jews to not actually participate in terrorist conspiracies against the German government, and it was a mistake of the educated Chinese to try and live with their poltitical opponents trying to implement a cultural revolution.

No ethnicity has ever died out from having too much hatred and obstinacy in their heart. The occupants of the Stans and the Caucuses have surived thousands of years through mutual paranoia and hatred... Cooperation? Compromise? Working with your fellow man? Trusting that everyone ultimately wants what's best everyone? Not being tempted by extremism or alarmism?

250 million died making those mistakes. over 10% of the 1930 population.

The lesson of the 20th century is well over 250 million people were murdered by their own governments because they didn't hate their political opponents hard enough.

No, that is not the lesson of the 20th century. People didn't get murdered by their governments for not hating hard enough, they got murdered by their governments because their opponents were better at cooperation and unity than they were.

The occupants of the Stans and the Caucuses have surived thousands of years through mutual paranoia and hatred

This is just wrong, like all your ahistorical hot-takes.

Sure, tribal societies full of hatred for their neighbors survive, in an environment of hostility and paranoia and violence. They survive in miserable squalor, except the ones who don't and get wiped out. They watch as empires rise around them and then come and put a boot on them because people who cooperate outcompete those who don't.

People who live in societies that learn how to compromise and cooperate survive and win. That doesn't mean those societies are always nice ones, but they do make rules like "You cannot just kill anyone weaker than you and take their stuff because you can." This makes KulakRevolts sad but it vastly improves the lives of everyone else.

Cooperation and compromise is how we climbed out of the mud and built civilizations that can put people on the moon. Cooperators dream of going to the stars, people following your principles dream of murdering each other over the last rats in the ruins.

Wars start because people want to exterminate their political enemies. You observe 250 million dead and claim it's because they simply didn't hate their enemies hard enough (they should have killed more people first). In fact if everyone had followed your principles, there would have been many many more dead, but fortunately, most civilizations do not try to annihilate themselves in the orgy of mutual hatred that you advocate.

The occupants of the Stans and the Caucuses have surived thousands of years through mutual paranoia and hatred... Cooperation? Compromise? Working with your fellow man? Trusting that everyone ultimately wants what's best everyone? Not being tempted by extremism or alarmism?

That's just false though. The Turks only took over the Stan countries less than two thousand years ago. They intermarried and cooperated with the Iranian peoples who lived there plenty. Lots of Turkish groups just seem like Iranians who culturally assimilated to a Turkish identity.

Do you actually know anything about the history of the Caucasus or Central Asia? Your spelling of 'Caucasus' doesn't inspire hope.

That was a mistake. it was a mistake of the landed farmers in Ukraine and Russia to try to live with the soviets in charge of them instead fighting to the death against their class enemies forming a government

Couldn't it just as easily be called a mistake that many of them fought their political enemies ten years earlier and overthrew the Czarist government to put in place a better system, allowing the Bolsheviks to hijack the situation? The petit-bourgeoisie implemented a bourgeois revolution against the aristocratic state, only to open the door to their real class enemies who were hiding behind door number two in Switzerland. The mistake wasn't not hating Bolsheviks enough, it was hating the Czar too much. Putting Kerensky in charge to settle scores with the aristos left the state too weak to defend itself against Lenin and Trotsky.

Equally, the two clauses of this sentence contradict each other:

it was a mistake...to try to live with the soviets in charge of them instead [of] fighting to the death against their class enemies forming a government, it was a mistake of the Jews to not actually participate in terrorist conspiracies against the German government,...

Well what option did bourgeois German Jews have? Committing to terrorist conspiracies against the Nazi government would have meant inviting Country Joe for Sunday brunch, committing to keeping their class enemies out of power would have meant supporting the Nazis. Quite the pickle.

No ethnicity has ever died out from having too much hatred and obstinacy in their heart.

Numerous ethnicities have died out for that exact reason, because like the smallhold Russian farmers they harbored too much hatred against the wrong enemies, or failed to redirect their hatred in time and stuck to old grudges instead of recognizing new threats.

Huascar and Atahualpa hated each other too much to realize they were ruining their kingdom in civil war just in time for Pizarro to step in and destroy and mystify the Inca lineage forever, enslave the people and replace the majority of them, leaving only fragments and hill tribes claiming descent. (To be fair, the Tlaxcala did much better for themselves, there are still a few thousand Nahuatl speakers around)

When the Helvetii invaded Gaul, the Aedui knew how to hate the invaders and defend their independence, so they called on Rome for assistance; leading to the extinction of Gallic culture, the permanent loss of Gallic independence, and the death or enslavement of between one quarter and one half of all the Gauls living. Quite the fumble.

The Portuguese and the British both conquered significant Indian possessions with laughably small armies, because the bulk of their forces were made up of Indian auxiliaries who were in it to settle Indian scores. The country would live to regret it.

When you look at the history of European colonization, the strongest predictor that a country would avoid colonization was maintaining a unified state that could resist the Europeans. China and Japan were never colonized despite their riches, because despite occasional internal wars there was never a faction willing to submit itself to a foreign power to win an internal political battle, arguably until Mao. Ottoman Turkey held much of the Muslim world together until WWI, when the British were finally able to trigger the Arab revolt and tear the last of its colonies away from it. Even little Ethiopia would never be truly eliminated as a state, despite its weakness.

It's not enough to hate, you have to guess right as to who you should hate and how and when, and be ready to switch if circumstances change.

The lesson of the 20th century is well over 250 million people were murdered by their own governments because they didn't hate their political opponents hard enough.

...But the governments did the murdering because those running them hated their political opponents too much, so it's just straight-up wrong to say that the killing happened due to insufficient hatred.

No ethnicity has ever died out from having too much hatred and obstinacy in their heart.

Hittites? Philistines? Mohicans? Lots of little peoples who got in the way of Genghis Khan or the Persians or the Romans and were annihilated too thoroughly to even be known? If we slice the term "ethnicity" narrowly enough, I'm pretty sure there are quite a few that got a little too warlike and got themselves wiped out. If we slice the term more broadly, have any ethnicities ever died out at all?