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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   12798 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 19, 2026

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I've said before that I had stopped posting here because it's a purely American Affairs Discussion community and, for a non-American, those affairs are only instrumentally interesting due to their effects elsewhere, and they become less interesting as America recedes from the world stage. The silence on the ongoing global events reinforces my impressions both of the US and of this forum. It's a pity because in terms of the culture war, it's very significant. The Red Tribe basically won politically. Nowhere has this been made more obvious than at the yesterday's session of the World Economic Forum in Davos, that hive of globalists Alex Jones warned us all about. For decades, the narrative around these parts has been that Europe has lost its way, is Communist, is being demographically replaced etc, and only the Serious Big Brother across the Atlantic can steer the ship. Lately there's even talk that Europe is basically «over», and America is what remains of the West, and so the US must take direct stewardship over the imperiled land. For example, one of the justifications for the seizure of Greenland from a MAGA loyalist Scott Greer:

Thanks to the power of anti-colonialist rhetoric over the actions of European leaders and international bodies, China gained a win in the Indian Ocean.
The Chinese could do something similar with Greenland. It’s easy to see an international uproar arising over Denmark’s “colonial” rule over the Greenlanders and the Danes face serious pressure to give up the territory. If the Chinese find a foothold in Greenland, they could manipulate independence to benefit themselves. They can make it harder for Americans to maintain a military presence and gain control over the Northwest Passage. The Danes, even more than the Brits, would be completely helpless to stop this scenario from playing it out.

(Needless to say, every accusation is a confession; very soon, Scott Bessent EXPOSED Denmark's treatment of Greenland in front of millions! – according to some Floridian patriot. This propaganda is gaining steam in conservative sources that belong to the American influence network).

I've seen that the rumors of European death are very much exaggerated. Europe very much still exists. But the sensibility of the United States of America on the world stage is now one of openly admitted exceptionalism and essentialist superiority. We've seen the birth of an assertive Judeo-Christian civilization-state with Latin American characteristics, and it's clearly separate from what can be called «Western Civilization». The focal point of the rupture was of course Greenland again.

I mainly want to get the conversaton going so I'll just share some quotes without commentary.

Howard Lutnick, Secretary of Commerce:

HL: [Long passionate tirade against globalism] When America shines, the world shines. Close your eyes and imagine the world without America in it. It goes dark pretty darn quickly.
the moderator: Can I bring you back to Greenland?
HL: No. It's unnecessary. The Western Hemisphere is vital for the United states of America. Our national security people are on it, and they care about it, and I'll leave it to them to address with our allies, with our friends, and with everyone have it worked out. But the Western Hemisphere matters to the US of A, and the US of A as I've just articulated REALLY REALLY MATTERS to the world. When America shines, the world shines. Because they all need to make sure America is strong and powerful to take care of them, G-d forbid.

This is of course not so much Monroe/Donroe doctrine as invoking Light Unto the nations/Shining city upon a hill with some geopolitical dressing, only cruder, with more stick and less carrot than ever. The reactions are understandable.

Mark Carney, a long-term advisor to Justin Trudeau with all his disastrous policies, was projected to soundly lose the elections to Pierre Poilievre, a very US-style conservative self-identifying as a «simple goy from the prairies». What reversed their odds was Trump's tariff war on Canada plus endorsement of Pierre as his agent to make Canada the 51st state (Poilievre, being a simple goy but not insane, obviously denied any such intention).

Yesterday, Carney delivered a speech that I think ends the North American fraternal relationship and likely the entire post -WWII order. Some excerpts:

It’s a pleasure — and a duty — to be with you at this turning point for Canada and the world.

I’ll speak today about the rupture in the world order, the end of the pleasant fiction and the dawn of a brutal reality in which great-power geopolitics is unconstrained. But I submit to you all the same that other countries, in particular middle powers like Canada, aren’t powerless. They have the power to build a new order that integrates our values, like respect for human rights, sustainable development, solidarity, sovereignty and the territorial integrity of states. The power of the less powerful begins with honesty. […] It is time for companies and countries to take their signs down. For decades, countries like Canada prospered under what we called the rules-based international order. We joined its institutions, praised its principles, and benefited from its predictability. We could pursue values-based foreign policies under its protection.
We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false. That the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient. That trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And that international law applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused or the victim. This fiction was useful, and American hegemony, in particular, helped provide public goods: open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security, and support for frameworks for resolving disputes. So, we placed the sign in the window. We participated in the rituals. And largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality. This bargain no longer works. Let me be direct: we are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition. Over the past two decades, a series of crises in finance, health, energy, and geopolitics laid bare the risks of extreme global integration.
More recently, great powers began using economic integration as weapons. Tariffs as leverage. Financial infrastructure as coercion. Supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited. You cannot “live within the lie” of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination. The multilateral institutions on which middle powers relied— the WTO, the UN, the COP—the architecture of collective problem solving — are greatly diminished.
We are engaging broadly, strategically, with open eyes. We actively take on the world as it is, not wait for the world as we wish it to be. Canada is calibrating our relationships, so their depth reflects our values. We are prioritizing broad engagement to maximize our influence, given the fluidity of the world, the risks that this poses, and the stakes for what comes next. We are no longer relying on just the strength of our values, but also on the value of our strength. … We are rapidly diversifying abroad. We have agreed a comprehensive strategic partnership with the European Union, including joining SAFE, Europe’s defence procurement arrangements. We have signed twelve other trade and security deals on four continents in the last six months. In the past few days, we have concluded new strategic partnerships with China and Qatar. We are negotiating free trade pacts with India, ASEAN, Thailand, Philippines, Mercosur.
[…] Which brings me back to Havel. What would it mean for middle powers to “live in truth”?
It means naming reality. Stop invoking the “rules-based international order” as though it still functions as advertised. Call the system what it is: a period where the most powerful pursue their interests using economic integration as a weapon of coercion.
It means acting consistently. Apply the same standards to allies and rivals. When middle powers criticize economic intimidation from one direction but stay silent when it comes from another, we are keeping the sign in the window.
It means building what we claim to believe in. Rather than waiting for the hegemon to restore an order it is dismantling, create institutions and agreements that function as described. And it means reducing the leverage that enables coercion.

We are taking the sign out of the window. The old order is not coming back. We should not mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy. But from the fracture, we can build something better, stronger, and more just. This is the task of the middle powers, who have the most to lose from a world of fortresses and the most to gain from a world of genuine cooperation.
The powerful have their power. But we have something too — the capacity to stop pretending, to name reality, to build our strength at home, and to act together. That is Canada’s path. We choose it openly and confidently. And it is a path wide open to any country willing to take it with us.

Others are saying similar stuff, have been for a while. Merz on the end of the Pax Americana, Macron obviously.

The engagement with China is a common theme, spearheaded by Carney. His partnership with China in particular is prompting Americans to fantasize of seizing Alberta. Maybe that'll happen too.

You really should follow the WEF content on your own to form an opinion though.

The other day @TiltingGambit said:

Cultural export from China is crazily uncharismatic. And this is why, in my view, the US would end up with all the allies in WWIII and china would end up with the dregs of the international community. Nobody likes china, nobody outside of china knows what's going on in china, and nobody in china knows what's going on inside china either.

I am not sure who's going to be American ally in WWIII now. It's my impression that @TiltingGambit has been projecting, because he, as a true American, felt that there is nothing worth learning about affairs of barbarians in China, Europe or anywhere else. This is a very Qing-like attitude. Yes, there's significant consumption of MCU capeshit, we all write in English, Americans are the top content creators on Tiktok, I'm just not seeing how this translates into political loyalty.

So. The costs of winning the Culture War. Any takes on this?

I am actually Chinese and China is nowhere as great as you think it is. 99% of what is written about China in English is narrative and lies, and about 85% of Chinese-language content about China is the same. So if you are a foreigner making your opinion on China's tightly controlled PR vs the open media of the West that has its laundry hanged out to dry, and siding with China, you're just as foolish as the pro-Soviet boosters in the NYT who didn't see the Holodomor.

I seem to recall one of our own being unfairly profiled as Israeli agent, but at this point, I have to ask. Are you an agent of the People's Republic of China, or have any relation to a corporation that does extensive business with them? Or are you some variant of Maoist Third Worldist?

Note that there's nothing wrong with being any of those things, but the pretense of being a neutral observer chuffing about American degeneracy is wearing thin. Please explain why you believe the communists in China are more trustworthy partners that the Americans.

No. You admit being Canadian, perhaps of Chinese ethnicity. Maybe a Taiwanese or a Hong Konger at that, given how you specify not getting into fights with «Mainland» Chinese here. And I do not know when you've last been to Mainland China and how long you've lived in Canada, but you write like an Indian, with the over-the-top emotive rhetorical flourish and confident pride in your eloquence that I have never seen a Mainland-educated person display in English (then again I could be accused of much the same). You might even believe this alone makes you better than them, you assimilated so well after all, and the Chinese are known for strong internal racism. However, I'll allow that you're probably a first-generation immigrant, seeing as how you attack fellow immigrants and give them this boomerish no-nonsense advice on fitting in. You are also not particularly informed about the conditions of either American or Chinese economy, given that we've seen a spectacular refutation of your June thesis («The American economy is not dependent on imports from China») here with the October MOFCOM Surprise that forced the US into a humiliating climbdown. I'd say >5 years since last stay in China. Right? The idea I'm seeing among people routinely doing business with China, the knowledge of Chinese way of life is completely obsolete within about 5 years.

More generally, I put extremely little faith in «I'm from X and here's the ugly truth» type takes, ironic as that is, given that I'm sometimes providing such opinions on Russia. Many people are dissatisfied in the condition of their nation; those are the Russians saying they're inept orcs and the frontline will crumble in two weeks, the Americans complaining of their intolerable wage slavery to the middle-class Shanghainese on Rednote, and of course the Chinese who've internalized the more charismatic white narrative about their inferiority, or just grew dismayed of the grift and striverism. But many Chinese including my friends in various walks of life and in different countries hold views opposite to yours; and many Chinese outside China are straightforwardly coping, starting with their patron saint Gordon Chang and the COVID refugee cohort that had accepted a permanent QoL hit in emigration and thus sustains itself with news of the coming Chinese collapse. Whereas most Chinese dissidents, in my experience, are straight up mentally ill (excluding eg. Ai Weiwei), and there's no talking to them. I've visited a local Falun Dafa branch, the food was okay, but my takeaway was «wow, if the MSS ran this thing, they'd find little to improve for the purposes of lulling the US into complacency». That's the nervous system of the overseas anti-CCP Chinese and much of the Western conservative media, their newspapers informing Republican policymaking – a hive of loudly insane religious freaks who couldn't cut it in China. It had put some things into perspective for me.

It's also quite condescending to assume that a foreigner, one from a former Communist country at that, is naively engaging with «tightly controlled PR». Your homeland's PR is hilariously tone-deaf and transparent; if the MSS or whatever were employing people like me, they'd get much further, but they treat propaganda as a sinecure for officials' failsons. My opinion is based on primary sources, not on «PR». I can literally see who's doing what, with what dependencies, with what labor, and the Chinese are doing about 50% of the interesting stuff in the world, delivering us the world that's moving forward twice as fast.

Please explain why you believe the communists in China are more trustworthy partners that the Americans.

Mainly because the average quality of Americans and the Chinese doesn't matter so much – institutions that serve as the bottlenecks do. The CCP imposes some standards of competence and prosociality, as opposed to the American beauty pageant, and Xi in particular is like 3 standard deviations above Trump in personal integrity, which has effects downstream. Xi's ministers are humans, Trump's are weird hypebeasts; Xi's policies are motivated by long-term rational self-interests, Trump's by petty cruelty and delusions, therefore the Chinese in aggregate become more predictable and more reliable partners. This is trivially obvious to a neutral observer from going through their biographies and watching their actions, and actions of both countries, for several years.

If I were a Maoist Third Worldist, I would not be saying that China is not really Communist.

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