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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 12, 2026

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Violence is an inherently high-variance activity. Those who whine about the necessity of violence are fundamentally immature.

There's a common scene in street fights where a girl starts a fight, drags her man into it, then impedes him in the fight so he loses. This is the basic strategy of the political left, and the psychology that underwrites it is identical.

Violence is an inherently high-variance activity.

This does seem truly hard to grasp if you've only ever experienced physical violence in the abstract. i.e if you've never been punched in the face.

Even if you watch professional fights, the rulesets in those arenas are optimized to avoid the actions that can cause instant incapacitation or grievous harm/death, and the competitors are fighting with less than lethal intent.

Take away the refs, rules, and moral restraints... any given strike COULD be a life-changer or life-ender. Quadruple that if weapons are involved.

For me, and I think most 'right-thinking' humans, this means you avoid violence as long as possible because you mostly lose control of the outcomes once it comes to that.

And on the flipside, it means you don't let opponents implement violence unilaterally, both for the deterrent effect and to prevent your side from being the sole recipient of the the consequences.

But there is as you say a group of people who see this reluctance to get violence as an exploitable 'weakness'. Push the line to force some violent response and then hope for those fat-tailed outcomes to result. Then claim the fat-tailed outcome was SOLELY the fault of one side for acting out.

And it is a lot easier to implement this strategy if you can convince your low-agency ideological followers to become human fodder.


Even 'violence' against property carries this risk with it. One image that stuck with me from the BLM era is the protestor getting clobbered by a falling confederate statue.

Its a very, very stupid thing being done, on so many levels. This is fucking around with the laws of physics and finding out quite immediately. One second you're celebrating the fall of racism with your buddies... the next you're in a vegetative state.

But the human body is indeed resilient so he survived... for some definitions of that term.

Here's a terrifying line that I hope is never written about me:

Chris is blind in one eye and lost his hearing in one ear, but he’s making progress. He’s learning how to eat and walk again, and his speech is slowly coming back.

In some very similar timelines that guy is just straight up dead. In some he's grievously injured but not traumatically brain damaged. And in a few he dodges fate by a few scant inches. High variance indeed.

Incidentally, this is why I think the saying "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" is an extraordinarily bad sentiment to believe in the context of physical violence.