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FiveHourMarathon

a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop

17 followers   follows 6 users  
joined 2022 September 04 22:02:26 UTC

And every gimmick hungry yob

Digging gold from rock n roll

Grabs the mic to tell us

he'll die before he's sold

But I believe in this

And it's been tested by research

He who fucks nuns

Will later join the church


				
User ID: 195


				
				
				

			

		

	














	


		


			



	

		

			

			

				

					

						

							
						

						

							
							

								
FiveHourMarathon


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop

				
				
				

				

					17 followers  

					follows 6 users  

					joined 2022 September 04 22:02:26 UTC
				


				
					

					
And every gimmick hungry yob


Digging gold from rock n roll


Grabs the mic to tell us


he'll die before he's sold


But I believe in this


And it's been tested by research


He who fucks nuns


Will later join the church



				

				

				

				

				

					

					

					
					
					

					
User ID: 195


					
					
					
				

			


					

						
					



		

	

 











			
			

			
			

			




	


		

			
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				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 26, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I guess this period also coincides with the decline of the latchkey kids phenomenon and the gradual de-normalization of what we would call today free-range parenting.




Exactly. The rise of safetyism and managed childhoods leaves kids with a strong death urge with no outlet for it. You can't just go out and drag race with your buddies or jump into a quarry or get into a fight. Your day is scheduled and managed and supervised. Even if you want to get into a pseudo-risky sport like skateboarding, rather than juvenile delinquents chased by cops through city streets, today's skaters are dropped off, helmets and elbow pads firmly fastened, from fleets of Toyota Siennas, at the local skate park. They've been co opted by the system.




On a different note, the notion that street gang membership and the popularity of dangerous hobbies has somehow declined in the same time period is suspicious.




The rate of high school students who have been in a physical fight in the past year has dropped from 42% in 1980 to 19% today. The rate of high school students who drink, do illicit drugs, go to parties, drive drunk, hell who drive at all, have all cratered in that time period. In 1985 teenagers made up 15% of all motorcycle riders, now it's less than 2%, and I'd bet half of those ride with their dad. We know that kids spend more time at home, less time out with friends, and immensely less time unsupervised by adults than they did decades ago. It would be incredible to claim that kids today were more likely to engage in dangerous hobbies, given that the most dangerous ones (fighting, drinking, drugs, parties, driving) are all  definitely on the decline.


I'll spot you gang membership, the point I'm getting at there is the idea that for the middle class white American youth the opportunity to get into some trouble used to be around in their own community; now the middle class white American youth lives a life so managed and scheduled that the opportunity to get into some trouble is farther away.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 26, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
And also to better safety procedures for doing the same tasks, along with teenagers and young adults engaging in those activities less.


But regardless, the opportunities to get oneself killed aren't as present. It doesn't matter that it's because of improved emergency response and car safety and medical care that I can't get myself killed drag racing, it matters that I can't get myself killed drag racing.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 25, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Spoilers




No, I get all that argument and storyline, I just don't really buy it! And that can also be my perception, the series is very reliant on the use of tropes to engage in storytelling. The reader is very much meant to come in with a pre-existing understanding of like 95% of the stuff in the story, so that Abercrombie doesn't have to waste time explaining it to us. This isn't inherently bad, but the thin characterization of Jezal leaves him open to reader interpretation, and I just don't really buy him as the spineless coward that can be manipulated at will, or buy "idiot king who is manipulated at will" as a real archetype. Jezal starts as a lazy, indolent young officer, like Nikolai Rostov in Tolstoy. He grows through his determination to compete in the Contest following his encounter with Glokta ("I'm going to prove everyone wrong by working super hard"), and again from his wounds during his adventures with Logan and Bayaz (becoming less arrogant and abrasive to his lessers, killing two men in combat, losing his looks). Then any kind of growth is just sort of erased, we don't hear about any of it again, Jezal is right back to being lazy and drunk and indolent. He's back to being the young officer who doesn't want to train for the contest. Which is fine, that's what Abercrombie is going for; but I find it boring. If prior events will have no impact on later events, then what am I reading exactly? That's not a story, it's just a series of what Joe Abercrombie thinks are cool fantasy set pieces. No one is going to grow or change, everything that happens later could have happened without what happens earlier. If you cut out the entire middle bit about the quest, and just have Bayaz install Jezal after the contest win, and Logan wander back north, nothing really changes.


And I'll again note that I gave up late in the third book, and might not have given up at all if it weren't for my current mood (newborn baby) so my criticism is limited, the book wasn't bad, just not perfect.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 26, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Why is there more stress and suffering now that would lead to the tripling of teenage suicides?




So, if you look at the CDC data, the suicide rate among 15-19 year olds has climbed from 8.5/100k in 1980, to 9.4/100k today.


But at the same time, the accidental death rate among 15-19 year olds has fallen from 57.8/100k in 1980, to 18.9/100k in 2024.


What I'm suggesting is simple: it used to be a lot easier to get yourself killed, so people who didn't want to live didn't have to kill themselves. You could get a dangerous job, engage in a dangerous hobby, drive recklessly, join a street gang, or otherwise just do something stupid. The drop off in accidental deaths of almost 40/100k is more than enough to hide the .9/100k increase in suicide deaths, it would only require 1/40 accident victims to have a death wish in their heart of hearts.


My theory: some portion of people are born with a tendency towards suicide, and this will first express itself through engaging in activities likely to get oneself killed while ignoring safety precautions before manifesting as a formal suicide if the accident doesn't occur. Suicidal ideation and unsafe driving habits are highly correlated among teenagers.


Modern safety measures thwart the teenage suicide in his effort to kill himself accidentally, forcing him to more direct means.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 25, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


You are slightly wrong here, though I think the reveal is at the end of this book. I thought it was kinda of foreshadowed but in general the character responsible is generally subtle and is very much part of the grim-dark element trope subversion element. I think thats a pretty core part of his writing theory. He wants to subvert fantasy tropes in a dark/grim way.




The lack of foreshadowing is part of the trope-subversion, things just happen without massive buildup. This can work really well as a rug-pull subverting expectations, but without a connection to the characters or otherwise caring about what happens, it ends up feeling to me like "a bunch of things happen" rather than "a story." Subverting expectations works when the writer is cleverly creating expectations and then dashing them, once I have no expectations there's nothing to subvert.




The king doesn't rape his wife because he's a coward. That's the whole point of why he was chosen to become king.




If that's what he was going for, he just didn't land that plane for me. The whole scene was anachronistic and immersion breaking.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 25, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I thought Glokta started out as a very interesting character, nine fingers I found kinda lame in that there was never any good reason for him to be the toughest and the best, he was just kind of a dude until he got REALLLLLLY MAD. The adventuring party felt kinda like adolescent wish fulfillment.




But also, I'm pretty sure you were really close to the end if you got to the wedding night and I'm a bit surprised you didn't get to the end just from sunk cost fallacy reasons.




I still might finish it, I only put it down two days ago. But I've noticed this kind of baseness or selfishness cropping up in certain (mostly meaningless) activities since my wife had the baby. Ordinarily I feel a DNF on a book as a kind of failure, a personal moral failing. With the baby in my life, and a book as a limited form of pleasure in limited free time, I simply realized I was not enjoying the book anymore and it seemed absurd to continue to not enjoy it.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 25, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
What I think he got perfect is that in a world of very clear magic, immortality, etc religion is ultimately unremarkable. Religious doubt is impossible in a world where everyone acknowledges that Sauron and Gandalf and Sauruman and Elrond are who they are. I guess you could have hobbit skeptics who say they aren't, but within the story it's all obvious.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 25, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Great! I'll give that a try, might scratch the itch for me.




And I think he treats religion - and the excruciating choices it puts us to - with far more seriousness than most of the genre can manage.




Religion is so touchy. Tolkien got it perfect, everyone else tends to either make religion too immanent and just another magical mechanic, or they go full Reddit atheism like the Eragon series which is just eye-roll inducing for me: you have magic but no supernatural?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 25, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
That's sort of my point. In 1954 you have this established idea of the story, and you can play with that in important ways, and then after it's established you can get a big kick out of it, really play with audience expectations.


Once subversion becomes your expectation, it's eye-roll inducing.


I often wonder how Tolkien's readers would have thought about the great Elf-Human romance subplots. Beren and Luthien, Aragorn and Arwen, these were (for Tolkien) Big Deals. Then every fantasy writer afterward did the same thing, to the point where if you have a human and elves, you know they're gonna bone, and if the setting allows cross-breeding any RP ruleset needs to figure that there's going to be halfsies running around in every combination imaginable. But the first time that happens, it's a big deal! It's epic!


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 26, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


What's going on here? Is my theory of mind about Alvin Bragg off the mark?




I wonder if a lot of this is the aftermath of the Daniel Penny acquittal: intentionally aim low to get a conviction rather than shooting for the moon and getting egg on your face.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 25, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It's a great line, the first time you hear it. Like maybe in 1954 when LOTR came out. By the fifth time it comes up in a book, it's a cliche, this is actually exactly how it goes in the stories, because this is what all the stories do these days. The story was always going to go exactly this way.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 25, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'm unfamiliar with it, would you recommend him? I'm on kind of a fantasy kick, I want literary junk food, but the quality of some of this just drives me off.


I'm not against strong female characters, even in a patriarchal setting, I think that female agency exists and is often underestimated in patriarchal settings! I even think you can do ye olde feminist trope well with the right context created.


What bugs me about Abercrombie is the unevenness: there's casual sex, and casually strong women, but then there's also "oh this can't be you're a commoner and I'm a noble!"


For all GRRM's flaws, and I think the setting gets sweaty after too many pages, I'm looking for more ASOIAF, but maybe with a more contained storyline and less bloat. Given that ASOIAF has to be one of the most bloated fantasy stories ever told, that ought not to be hard to find.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 25, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I was in the mood for cheap fantasy and a lot of people recommended Joe Abercrombie's First Law series as being really good. And it's not that bad, I got midway through the third book so it can't have been that painful, but it's reminding me of the degree of schlock that exists out there in the world, that I haven't really interacted with.


The tone is hopelessly GrimDerp. On the one hand Abercrombie wants to have a brutal world where people are constantly torture-murdered for no reason by mysterious government agencies, a cynical "gritty realism" where characters on a DnD adventure say things like "This wasn't how it went in the stories!" On the other hand, everything is super lightweight, with no effort at realism or serious effort at world building or character creation. Religion is supposed to be a scam, I think, but there's no effort at actually building a religious foundation to the work. The world is weirdly modern, with "bathrooms" and dentists, but no real attention is given to what level of development exists or doesn't exist in the setting.


Characters have no consistent values. Sex is post-Sexual Revolution casual but look out oh no there's the medieval patriarchy, but also characters don't actually do anything interesting when confronted with it they just kind of shrivel. The women are too open and powerful and feminist, but supposedly acknowledged to be exceptional but we don't see any other women so... He wants to create complex characters that do bad things sometimes but also have heroic qualities, but misses the mark, the sins don't have much weight and the struggles feel fake as a result. The best books that use grimdark settings present us with likeable characters that we identify with, that act according to their own internal sense of right and wrong with a consistent moral compass, then deliver a result that is so brutal and discordant that it creates psychic discomfort in the reader and makes you think.


The writing is idiomatic to modern English. The "brutish uncivilized northern barbarians" will use phrases like "That's the point of fucking exercise." There's no real dialect within the text across different regions, other than the fantasy-Africans using the racial slur "pink" for the fantasy-Europeans, as in "I'm stuck here with this group of pinks" or "you don't know what you're talking about, pink;" which might be my favorite racial slur for white people of all time.


The example that finally got me to give up on the third book was this: a character becomes king through a series of completely unforeshadowed unlikely coincidences. He gets an arranged marriage because, you know, of course he does. His wife, on their wedding night, refuses him, knees him in the testicles, and makes clear she will never sleep with him. And it's very confusing to me why he doesn't rape her, or at least consider it and give a reason why he can't. The setting has been persistently grimdark up to this point, and we're dealing with a feudal patriarchy in which this marriage was arranged, the character himself is shown to be of questionable moral fiber at numerous points. But then his wife refuses him on his wedding night and he just...tolerates it? This is what I mean when I say creating a morally grey-dark grey grimdark universe can create an interesting values dissonance, how does one deal with a refusing wife when one's marriage is a political creation to begin with? Is it, in fact, the king's duty to rape his wife and seek to produce an heir? Alternatively, he can deal with the political consequences of an annulment, which could be severe but are necessary if she won't do her wifely duty. What doesn't work is telling me, the reader, that the young king just sits there and stews. That dog don't hunt.


Anyway it's fine enough as a book if you want schlock, but I forgot how much schlock there was in the world. And it's making me think about the recent discourse in themotte about "female characters" and similar, in that so much of complaint about the lack of quality representation of such-and-such is that people read garbage and call it literature. There's great genre fiction, but there's also so much junk, and this isn't even close to the junkiest junk, and I think that the complaints about things like "rounded female characters" are a matter of expecting genre junk to be literature.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 18, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
And I'm pointing out that out of the four sports you list




Hockey, soccer, basketball and rugby




Hockey and Basketball are both in varying crises of audience engagement, while Soccer and Rugby have never conquered American territory already committed to their sports despite billions of dollars invested in the process. People have predicted that the more action packed sports would surpass the traditional American sports for generations now, to say nothing of the various other sports stood up as more exciting modern games for the modern man. Pardon me while I head to the local Jai Alai game, lucky I was able to swap my professional lacrosse tickets to a buddy for these.


One can stand up a just-so argument for why a sport is boring that will feel super intuitive to people who don't like the sport. The existence of these arguments, or how good they feel to you as an intuitive matter, have little or no predictive value for the performance of that sport over the next several decades.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 19, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Kamala Harris could have made attack ads against Trump [on foreign policy].




She really couldn't do that. Because ((assuming Trump had a sufficiently coherent view of his own foreign policy beliefs that he more-or-less knew that he'd be bombing Iran within a year or so of returning to office)) Trump simply lied about that intention, saying repeatedly that there would be no new wars, that Kamala in fact was the one that would start a war with Iran and get us into World War Three.


The alternative thesis, that Trump is so inconsistent in his foreign policy beliefs that he sort of stumbled into the war with Iran so he wasn't lying about his intention he was simply unable to carry it out, is too insulting to Trump to be taken seriously outside of MSNBC, and cashes out to the same thing as lying anyway.


There exists no subset of Republican voters that will be so offended by Trump refusing to commit to bombing Iran or supporting Israel during the election that it would harm his chances, while there is a subset of Democratic voters that will be so offended by a heel-face turn against trans rights that it would harm a Democrat's chances. That's the difference.




I think a more appropriate apples-to-apples question would be something along the lines of "Are you categorically opposed to war against Iran?" Certainly there are a lot of Americans who are categorically opposed to transing of children under any circumstances.




A stronger argument might be this poll showing just 42% support and 56% opposition to using US troops to defend Israel from an Iranian attack. That gets pretty close to categorical opposition.


Polling only ever gives you broad stroke ideas, specificity is impossible. I don't think we need to ask the categorical question here because this particular war with Iran is pretty general in its execution: Iran wasn't really doing anything in particular to trigger this war that Iran hasn't been doing for twenty years, Netanyahu and Trump just happened to pick this particular time to do it. None of the justifications offered publicly for this war are any more or less persuasive today or in March than they were in 2024, 2018 or 2012. Probably moderately less persuasive to the public than they would have been in 2006.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 18, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I like tge game, but if you’re not used to turn-based play where you get time to set everything up 4 times and run the play to see what happens, it’s kinda boring and I think it makes the games longer than they need to be.




And if you're not used to Soccer, where there's only maybe three goals a game and another three serious chances and the rest is just cardio, it's boring. And if you're not used to basketball, where leads are transitory and the points barely feel like they matter until the fourth quarter, it can feel boring. Boring is in the eye of the beholder, it's silly to pretend that something that people pay money to watch is inherently "boring."


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 18, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Skateboarding back in the days of the X-Games I was addicted to; and I used to skate when I was a teenager, along with a younger cousin of mine.




Is skateboarding still a real thing? When I was a kid it was at the peak where it had been domesticated enough that skate brands and stores and whatnot were everywhere aesthetically, but it wasn't so dangerous that people got arrested. Now it mostly just feels like another kind of gymnastics, with classes and parks and camps and instructors.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 19, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Ooooh that's the one! Send out a flyer encouraging people to tithe 10% for Israel, as trump linked pastors have urged!


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 19, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I agree, the real Ramaswamy strategy is too politically incorrect to report accurately. Vivek isn't saying "I think she's a liar." He's pattern matching "woman with estranged mother who married a molestor stepdad = Trailer trash broken home loser with bad genetics."


It's a profoundly Unchristian attack vector, which I think will backfire on Ramaswamy particularly because his biggest weakness is already his paganism.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 19, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I'm not sure that this is an apples-to-apples comparison. Disapproval of how a war is being handled is not the same thing as categorical opposition to such a war.




All the numbers I've seen indicate that support for the war climbed slightly after it started compared to pre-war polling around questions like "Should the US launch strikes against Iran?" or "Should the US invade Iran?" but we can't get an apples-to-apples comparison because nobody polled the question "Should we launch a surprise decapitation strike against Iran in cooperation with Israel?" because that policy was never put on the table as something we might do. It was done completely as a choice by the executive branch, without any attempt to inform or sell the war or what it meant to the American public. Clearly the element of surprise had advantages in terms of the military's ability to launch decapitation strikes against Iranian leadership, but it also has costs.




Assuming for the sake of argument that this is all true, why don't Democratic candidates such as Kamala Harris simply disavow the unpopular position, e.g. state that they oppose trans-identifying-men in women's locker rooms; oppose "transitioning" for youth; and so on?




So I'm not speaking about some hypothetical ideal here, just what Democrats were like in 2008. Barack Hussein Obama publicly opposed gay marriage, saying publicly that while he supported civil unions he thought that marriage was between a man and a woman because then "God is in the mix." Dan Savage told his readers at the time, vote for Obama, because he's lying about his support for the gays, and even if he isn't he's better than the alternative. Democrat freaks used to comfortable with accepting that their leaders would sometimes need to swerve in public, but trust them to take care of them when they came into power. Trump's super power is his supporter's belief that he's lying about all the things they don't like.




That may be a factor, but also I am pretty confident that Israel and even oil companies are more popular among the general public of Republican voters than trans-identifying-men in women's locker rooms are among the general public of Democratic voters. That being said, if it's really true that only 56% of people are in favor of banning medical care for "youth gender transition," I may be out of touch.




Coincidentally, the latest Pew Polls show Favorable/Unfavorable for Israel (the state) at 37% favorable and 60% unfavorable. Slightly higher for "the Israeli people" and much lower for "the Israeli Government." So Israel is slightly less popular than "transing kids." I would assume, though it's hard to find numbers on this as it's not exactly ethical polling practice, that transgender people are more popular than "transing kids."


I agree that it's tough to get an exact 1:1 between policies across different fields, and for the most part the median voter is foolish and incapable of thinking about tradeoffs so you're going to get overlapping impossible policies if you just go off public polling.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 19, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I started to say "Come on even the Democrats can't be that stupid" but then I heard myself.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 19, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Sure and these flyers appear to be sent mostly to Republicans as a turnout tool.


Send flyers to Hispanic and Democrat households from PATRIOTS AGAINST THE GREAT REPLACEMENT telling you that more than 80,000 American soldiers are married to illegal immigrants, and we need to DEPORT THESE WOMEN NOW, and urging you to vote Republican so that ICE can continue to do important work like literally exceed the Gestapo in venal lack of honor.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 19, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


It seems that much more than the Republicans, the Democrats have positions which are very unpopular, very embarrassing, but which they still are reluctant to disavow. To be sure, I am a conservative so I am possibly biased on this issue, but if anyone can identity a few analogous issues on the Republican side of things I would be interested.




I would suggest, speaking as a perpetually disappointed Republican, that Republican politicians do have a revealed preference for pursuing toxic, unpopular policies while in office. They simply lie about them if confronted with it in advance, and often continue to lie about it afterward.


Trump's war of choice with Iran is actually managing to be less popular than transgender kids. Pew polling shows 56% of Americans favor banning medical care for youth gender transition. While close to 2/3 of Americans polled disapprove of the handling of the Iran war. It should be noted that there has probably been an uptick in approval for a war with Iran after the war started, compared to approval for starting a war with Iran beforehand, though I couldn't find definitive polling on the topic.


But if in 2024 you put out a flyer saying "Don't elect Donald Trump, he'll start a war of choice without seeking public or congressional approval, raising gas prices;" Donald Trump would simply say that he won't start any wars while in office. Reminiscent of George W Bush running on reducing America's role as global policeman.


Democrats have a unique problem regarding issues like Trans rights and Reparations where they can't publicly disavow these policies, because the parts of their coalition that want these policies are insane spoiled children lobbying for status rather than for material or political success. Where the Zionist lobby or the oil companies are sophisticated enough to not care what you say about them in public as long as you deliver in private.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 19, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I hope I never have to hear about Kamala Harris again as long as I live.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 19, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Republicans have been doing this for a while. I used to get tons of text messages about Kamala Harris' purported sexual conquests with a "you go girl don't let the republicans keep you down" vibe.


If Dems don't like it they can fight back. Put out a flyer telling people to vote Ken Paxton so that he can help the president run for a third term and rename Texas Trumpsas.