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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 1, 2025

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it is an inherently unstable state of affairs unless you believe majority-Muslim nations are inherently incapable of ever advancing to a point where they pose a serious military threat to the West

They don't and can't, US/NATO nuclear forces could reduce political Islam to ash within half an hour. The US and NATO could operate airpower imperialism and permanently extract resources from MENA at will were it not for other powers like Russia or China who'd interfere. The Arabs are bad at fighting, worse at making weapons, only Turkey and Iran are vaguely decent and they're still massively outmatched. Pakistan's nukes could be destroyed on the ground, not like they have the range to hit the West anyway. Indonesia hasn't done anything of importance in all of history. Sub-Saharan Africa is even easier to dominate. Terrorists are very easy to fight. Just whisk the whole population off to labour camps, repress them until they accept that their culture is just some funny dances and that their god is nothing before the power of the Chinese Communist Party.

But in actual fact, the Islamist/MENA rabble get subsidized London apartments, their rape gangs papered over for fear of racism, tv shows glorifying them, 'religion of peace' memes, obnoxious public prayers, Islamophobia training to raise their status, basically the privileges of a noble class. They get the gains of military superiority without any proof-of-work. Airpower imperialism is not even considered because that wouldn't help us 'turn Afghanistan into a democracy' or 'free the Iraqis'.

The danger is not from without but from within, from a political system that is even more grossly weak and pathetic than the militaries of the Middle East. The Somalis in Minnesota got away with their clumsy, incompetent scamming for so long because they are on a completely different level in political ability. They recognize there's a conflict over wealth distribution, they have a concept of 'us' and 'them', they recognize their own interests are advanced by crying 'racism' and so they loot and extract. The Israelis do the same thing, they play retarded Westerners for fools, extracting military and diplomatic/political aid.

Islam is not going to get world domination through military means, that kind of political strength is the only thing they have. And the mindset of 'how can we help these guys' is why the West is losing, why we lost to a bunch of quasi-literate goat-herders in Afghanistan. If we conceptualize these people as malfunctioning Western people whose welfare we try to maximize as we try to reprogram them, then of course they can and will easily beat us. If we conceptualize them as real actors working under real incentives who might unironically try to exploit us, people to trade with, help (when it helps us) or hurt, depending on the situation, then we can't possibly lose. 'Brainwash harder but in a touchy-feely liberal way' isn't going to work without the superintelligence addendum. It's morally inferior too, waging wars to mindbreak and culturebreak a population of over a billion is extremely aggressive Borg behaviour compared to mere wealth-extraction.

They don't and can't, US/NATO nuclear forces could reduce political Islam to ash within half an hour. (…)

I don't disagree with your analysis in terms of the current state of affairs, I'm just saying, this isn't a law of physics. Give them another hundred years, then what? Two hundred? Five hundred? It's not as though they have to independently invent nuclear weapons or anything, just stockpile. It just seems inescapably foolish to me to say "it's not ever going to be a problem to have a population of a billion who fervently believe it is their duty to wipe out the West from the planet for the glory of God even if they destroy themselves in the process". Maybe we'd better ignore them for the time being, but something's got to give eventually.

You hit on something that's at the core of failed western thought and has ruinous implications for foreign policy.

America (and by and large, chunks of Western Europe) have this fundamental understanding of the universe where obviously they're the best, and considers that downstream of their political system, ideology, and culture.

They can't conceive of a world where that isn't the case and considered that a won argument because the liberal democratic tradition won so hard. Why don't you like American hamburgers? The French now prefer it to the jambon-beurre, that must be because the hamburger is superior.

It codes as incredibly, moronically arrogant to people outside that culture, and of course, they don't realize this at all, because for them it's like arguing about the sky being blue or water being wet. The idea that people would freely and willingly choose religious warfare in 2025 isn't something they can even conceive of, let alone the idea that this still fuels conflict worldwide.

freely and willingly choose religious warfare

I was reading a history book talking about Episcopalian death squads running around killing Presbyterians in Britain, in the 17th century. About half the book is a game of musical chairs where various sects are persecuting eachother, none of them even that distinctive besides the Puritans who just hated fun... totally different mindset to today.

Likewise, just the other day, I was reading on twitter about how Sunnis were bullying Shia and Sikhs in British 'multi-faith prayer rooms', hiding their prayer books and similar. How they'd treat others were they in charge is pretty clear, they're pretty pushy even as a minority. You don't want to be Shia in Saudi Arabia. There are some actual differences in nationality for this, so it's more explicable.

I think it'd be funny to tell social liberals sanctimoniously 'read more and educate yourselves about history!' but it wouldn't work.