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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 3, 2025

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It's not a metaphor. You can "race mix" but the opposite operation does not exist.

The inverse operation is ethnic cleansing, it even matches the metaphor. It's unpopular enough that it doesn't happen practically ever, but it's not a hard physical law like entropy.

Stepping away from race, it isn't irreversible for culture either. Spend a few generations sending all the nerds to the Bay Area, the creatives to Hollywood, and the performers to Broadway, and you can create local concentrations of cultural traits that are far outside the national average. It may not be ethnogenesis, but it's certainly the creation of something.

The inverse operation is ethnic cleansing,

How is ethnic cleansing the inverse of race mixing? After all, don't both, if carried to their full conclusion, result in the territory in question going from two ethnic groups to one?

As you sort of note at the end of your comment, the true inverse operation is ethnogenesis. But how much can that really happen in our modern, ever more mobile, ever more interconnected world?

I view that a little different, you can't unmix something which has already been mixed, but you can push it elsewhere and pretend that the problem has been solved.

Your example involves separating things, and it's not impossible for us to play Maxwell's demon and sort people, but society just doesn't take kind to the creation of spaces which excludes certain groups (not even toilets are exempt) so one is not allowed to reverse this process. Even if you make your own society kind of like the Amish, people will come and ruin what you're doing because the rest of the system has laws that it must enforce (for instance, it's illegal to collect rain water in some parts of the world).

But it's certainly the creation of something.

If you move nerds around the world, the total amount of nerds does not increase. You're re-ordering what already exists, you're not creating something more. So if white people have less children on average, you can reorder them all you want, the ratio of white people will tend towards zero. And in America, men and women have a poor relationship. This is not the case in Japan, but is that not a manner of time? Once American culture really gets its grip on Japan (As it's trying to), do you not think gender relations in Japan will take the same path? Is the corruption of gender relations reversible?

To really create something unique, you must isolate it and leave it alone for a while. Kind of like petri dishes. Borders used to have this kind of effect.

It's not technically irreversible, but processes which generate certain things are very, very slow. Using money is faster than earning it. Cutting down a forest is much faster than growing it. Destroying trust is much faster than regaining it. Recycling anything back to its base ingredients is tedius work. It's this asymmetry which makes so many processes unsustainable.

If you wish to grow back something which used to exist, like "Uncontacted civilizations", "Untouched wild nature", "High-trust communities", "The wild west", etc. How long do you think it would take, if such a thing was even possible? Caning is currently a form of punishment in Singapore - if we stop this practice, do you think it will ever return again? If we ban gun ownership, will that ever return again? If we rise the age of consent, will it ever drop again? If all ownership is replaced with subscription models, will we ever go back again? Do you think the sexual revolution can be reversed?