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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 26, 2022

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No need to be ashamed, better to take action too early than too late. Whole world expected Masterminds of Kremlin(TM) instead of what we got.

If no lasting changes by social engineering were achievable, would conservatives have any reason to fear CRT in schools and their other bugbears?

Is American school indoctrination really so superior, could American schools make CRT and 666 gender LGBTQ+ values stick (while Soviet school teaching Marxist-Leninist values totally failed)?

As I understand it, these "cultural marxist" values are spreading horizontally from peers and "influencers" through tiktok, not vertically from school teachers. Am I wrong?

I did omit the «Libertarian» perspective, a variation on the Liberal one, which is, to my understanding, that organizations are not trustworthy enough to be endowed with social engineering capacities for two reasons: due to unknowability of an a priori «good» social engineering scheme and value set (thus, risks of a catastrophic lock-in or some other hard failure), and due to fallibility of people tasked with executing it.

This. Even if you see The Devil Weed(TM) as The Coming Menace (TM), you could expect Russian government fight it as efficiently as it fights Jewish Nazi Satanist homosexuals in Ukraine. No idea about capacity of government of Kyrgyzstan.

The issue is one of perspective. There was one Utopian, heavily centralized, social engineering project known as Communism. It had successfully reformatted hundreds of millions of people – in ways, perhaps, not intended by its authors, but profound nonetheless.

Yes, instead of creating perfect communist man working selflessly for the common good, the result was ultimate capitalist predator, willing to do anything for profit.

(in this funny tweetstorm Kamil Galeev blames ... Marx for post-Soviet gangsterism)

In the same way, to get back to original topic of this subthread, effect of century+ old war of drugs was to make drugs by several magnitudes deadlier than before. If drug warriors of old who panicked about opium saw fentanyl, they would not be amused.

If your effort produces great effects, but exactly opposite to what you (publicly) intended, you could not be called succesfull.

In my view, it was stopped, pushed back and then crushed by a competing and more intelligently ran system, not by the power of friendship and mutual respect and bottom-up good values and all that jazz.

All that jazz helped, to be sure.

Yea. What defeated communism? "Thirty glorious years" post war, when (social democratic) capitalist West provided better alternative to Soviet system and delivered what Soviet propaganda promised, so better than even life of top 1% of USSR was dismal compared to ordinary Western middle class citizen, so better that all Soviet propaganda was rendered null and void, that everything Western was seen as superior, that even empty cans of Coca Cola or Western beer were collected and worshipped like holy relics.

According to theory, it was supposed to happen the other way - communist science fiction described with relish future where communist world achieved true Star Trek fully automated luxury communism, while capitalist world collapsed into grungy gangster ghetto.

(one classic example is this, grim dystopian cyberpunk future created in ... 1970's East Germany)

In all secret squirrel skullduggery, USSR had always upper hand, and it, ultimately, did not mattered.

Even hard core conspiracy theorists who believe that Gorbachev and Yakovlev were CIA agents who deliberately wrecked Soviet Union, would have problem claiming that everything was going swimmingly at the time, that USSR was going to overcome and surpass the capitalist world as originally intended.