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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 21, 2025

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You're missing the point about how conflicts actually happen and how tension propagates. Very, very few people are actually motivated by what happened 2000 years ago. Basically no one is acting out those kind of grudges, and it's ludicrous to suggest such, and equally ludicrous to be... grateful for past cultural and identarian destruction? There's this thing, which is real, which is called a cycle of violence, and part of how that happens is more immediate concerns always foreshadow old ones. Insofar as longer term tension exists, it's quite often intimately related to structural tensions of a more practical nature. Sure, cultures sometimes get into beef with each other over small stuff, but those beefs are always centered in the now or recent past, not the ancient past. In fact I struggle to think of any examples where 100+ year fights recur over something of equivalent negligible value like "miniscule patches of barren land".

Not to be pedantic, but here

https://theconversation.com/what-cattle-conflicts-say-about-identity-in-south-sudan-181637

Its not even permanent land its basically nomadic pastoralists raiding as has been their tradition for centuries.

Perhaps that still counts as economic necessity, but it is a choice to engage in primitive cattle herding instead of pivoting societally to productive economies. Raiding and conflict is a manifestation of intractable differences between cultures, not the cause. Bedouins are seizing on the opportunity to assault Druze with a cassus belli, not that they were content to live in peace absent external influence. Uncorking Libya resulted in Tobruk and Tripoli creating competing clan based governments immediately. Right NOW the Cambodians are assaulting the Thais over a dead temple region and the Thais are eager for a scrap due to insane local politics (tldr Thaksin clan and the royal/military both benefit from conflict specifically against the Cambodians).

There are plenty of people who WANT to exterminate their culturally distant geographic proximates. The issue is whether a unifying culture can supersede underlying cultural distances. The unifying project of "never again" has provided a stable shell for Franco-German-Anglo relations to stabilize, but this is an aberration facilitated only by tangible outcomes. If the overculture fails to deliver, guillotines follow. And we live in an era where the major cultural touchstones are torn down with no functional replacement ethos. Neoliberalism and neoconservatism were destroyed by MAGA and progressivism, but annihilating the Protestant-Calvinist northeastern spine along with the neolib/con framings leaves the USA with a much more fractured cultural landscape.