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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   11824 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 19, 2026

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The silence on the ongoing global events reinforces my impressions both of the US and of this forum.

I would like to echo this sentiment. I always wait a few days after a major event to see what people in this forum would bring up for discussion and put a focus on. Admittedly, there are lots of news I would never see like the church storming in Minnesota, but the example of the Trump letter to the Norwegian prime minister was something I was itching to see a deep discussion of. But what we got was not that, just discussions around the letter, not about the letter. These events say something, they're not "thought-terminating" because I don't think these events shutdown discussions, they're more akin to "the missing missing", where the event is just so seizure-inducing, so much logic-acrobatics required, that the discussion just subconsciously avoid it.

I do have to say though that because I am not an active participant but only lurk this forum, maybe I've missed discussions before. Maybe people here are so bored of discussing Trump idiosyncrasies that there are things that are taken as a given about what a person in this forum should know.

I think it cuts both ways, as someone with a foot in both continents. Americans will pay very little attention to anything that doesn't push their personal, parochial buttons, but Europeans will instantly go to DEFCON: CHIMP over anything that mentions them as relevant to global discourse. There aren't that many discussions to be had in the inbetween space in the immediate time, because the likelihood is that this will be a nothingburger. It'll move some invisible ratchets in some directions that we can speculate about, but Trump is already announcing a big, beautiful deal that will likely end with all this passing out of the news cycle as smoothly as it entered.

Some of the problem's like the reason I didn't discuss Wolford's oral arguments, yesterday. They exist, they have meaning, they don't need any sort of logical acrobatics, and it's pretty easy to understand what their meanings are (Justice Jackson's embarrassments included despite her best efforts), but there's not much to discuss. They're just anti-scissors: even when people disagree, there's nothing to argue about.

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