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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   17424 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 1, 2025

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Scott Alexander wrote something about this tension.... (TL;DR version: limited central government enforcing very robust exit rights.)

Please, please link to the original version of "Archipelago", not to the (horrible) revised edition.

Can you spoonfeed us on in how far the revisions made it horrible?

It would almost be easier to list examples of the things Scott didn't change in "Archipelago":

Archipelago diff:

Oh holy shit. All sorts of changes.

  • Nuked sections I and II
  • Purging lots of "left"/"liberal" in section III->I, either removing the references entirely or changing to "modern"/"individualist"
  • Removed worldbuilding in V->III, removed or reworded all references to "World Government" with "united government / UniGov"
  • Section VI->IV, removed this section entirely:

This is pretty funny, because the idea I’m pushing is rather explicitly reactionary. Like, I think it would be fair to call this the single core idea of reaction. All that stuff about kings and gender roles and ethno-nationalism is to some degree idle speculation about what kind of Archipelagian community would end up most successful, in the same way transhumanists sometimes speculate about how things should be run after the Singularity.

Yet I think its liberal credentials are impeccable.

Yeah, a purge of the neoreactionary stuff.

He claims to have done it because the piece got popular and he was embarrassed that so many people were reading about his conworlding, but replacing the rich mythology of Micras and Pelagia with literally "a wizard did it" still robbed the piece of much of its pathos and gravitas, and deleting all mentions of Mencius Moldbug and Patchwork was an act of cowardice unbecoming of a scholar.

"Archipelago" diff check.

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