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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 12, 2026

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Nationalism can't stand up long-term against urban-globalist atomization...

...and Ukraine has been less than a week from collapse for over three (almost 4) years now. The great irony of claiming that nationalism can't stand up to "urban-globalist atomization" to an citizen of the US is that the founding of the United States was in many respects a rejection of globalism. A recognition in the wake of the Seven Years' War on the part of Anglo, Dutch, French, and Spanish colonists in North America that their interests as colonists were much more aligned with each other than they were with their respective global empires. That many years later the US would become of a global empire itself is neither here nor there. See the old line about how when fighting monsters, one must be careful not to become one.

But even if I take your claims at face value. A freight train is a thoroughly artificial construct cobbled together from a bunch of disparate and often unrelated pieces. Stopping to argue the point on a level-crossing is still an invitation to get smashed flat. You are free to assert that the idea of a national identity is fake and cringe, but that doesn't mean you're right and I'm wrong. It just means that you have chosen to stand in "the blue corner" with all the other liberals and post-modernists.

Ukraine is allowed to have nationalism because it’s a convenient meat shield against Russia, and can only maintain it in practice because it’s too inhospitable for anyone else to want to live there.