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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 15, 2025

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I think Tyler Robinson was a bit of an incoherent memelord but also this whole thing is downstream of a bunch of phenomena condoned by the Left. I don't think he'd have found himself in a weird trans furry gamer polycule 30 years ago. His upbringing is significant in that being stereotypically red tribe have him the competence and ability to pull off the (admittedly not super difficult but impractical for somebody starting from 0 gun knowledge) shot.

I see enough of myself in his standardized test scores, epic memester streak and moderate Aspergers. I feel that the lack of a job, meaningful educational success and an (actual) girlfriend are all downstream of the current moment. If he had one of those, this likely doesn't happen.

I mean, red tribe failsons who washed out of trying to make it blue have been a thing. The question is why are they turning violent just now- leftism(and actual left, like left of the dems, leftism is generally an ideology of losers) has been a thing there for a while, the bartenders from Iowa who dreamt of becoming moviestars but shared an apartment and can’t get cast anywhere have always been on the left.

“___ is an ideology of losers” is one of those phrases that is basically always going to demand more effort than this.

Nietzche was a loser and his ideology is for losers. Usually the people who are proclaiming that God Is Dead and that Game Theory Is The Way are the sickly, marginalized, unattractive, and resentful. The purveyors of the ad hominem are often the best targets of their own devices.

Nietzsche was a highly accomplished philologist, who, despite not being as popular alive initially as he became later had a fair amount of admirers and friends.

Calling him a loser is ..pretty weird.

God Is Dead and that Game Theory Is The Way

He said the former but was almost certainly not a fan of the latter.

From their perspective, Charlie Kirk "denied their existence" every time he got up on stage and talked about transgenderism, and so they naturally decided to deny his existence in return.

The left has definitely been intensifying its long standing equivocation between speech and violence. Indeed, even silence, the act of not speaking, has been described as violence. Nothing except eager agreement and affirmation is interpreted as a violent attack that should be responded to in kind.

There is a flattening of responsibility across complex systems. Every utterance of criticism or mocking remark is stochastically upstream of persecution and pogroms, and so they are to be treated as morally equivalent.

This kind of left-wing rhetoric has been getting more and more extreme across my lifetime, and it now seems orthodoxy on too many college campuses. While there have been people expressing these kinds of sentiments since the 60s, it is now more mainstream than ever before. While for many such words are mere political hyperbole, for too many, especially those who are too young to remember otherwise, this rhetoric is just the political reality of the world they were raised in.

The scary part is that within this worldview, all political action is fundamentally violent, and even the personal is political. There is no distinction between politics and violence, speech and murder. The only reason not to use murder to achieve your political objectives is a lack of power, and every public utterance is just an attempt to tilt the scales of stochastic violence against your opponents.