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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 26, 2026

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@Sloot has his schtick, sure, but his posts are mostly well written, often humorous, and, IMHO, do bring up excellent points even if I disagree with them and if they're sometimes too "on the nose."

But in this specific instance, I actually want to double down on my support for @Sloot.


Dispersed, grassroots social phenomena tend to have (at least) two levels of causality. There's something proximate, obvious, and discrete at the surface. That's usually where they get their name. George Floyd protests were about, ostensibly, George Floyd. Occupy Wall Street was about the feeling of financial industry excess post 2008 recession. The OG Civil Rights marches in the 60's were about ending what was then codified and explicit racial discrimination.

The second level is a broader and more amorphous manifestation of long building social change that has now reached a critical mass. George Floyd was about COVID, Trump Bad!, and the 2020 election. This actually made it kind of unique as it was not the culmination of a multi-year development (or, to be generous, only about a 4 year development during the first Trump admin). I believe it is safe to say the extraordinary circumstances of COVID are what created it.

Occupy Wall Street is a better example; this was a movement born of the slow motion economic displacement following trade liberalization in the 1980-1990s (NAFTA, China / Korea / Japan). It wasn't all about 2008. OWS even shifted and changed into the Tea Party and is now still the spiritual ancestor of MAGA style economic populism.

The 1960s Civil Rights movement is the poster child. After decades of Jim Crow, the socio-economic reality in the majority of the US made the codified racism of the South no longer tenable. This wasn't all about Rosa Parks trying to improve her commute or a couple of kids in Kansas wanting to enter the transfer portal switch schools. The Civil Rights movement's success and enduring place in the American consciousness as The Right and True Righteous Cause is evidence of its long developing scale - and, perhaps, its lack of actual success six decades after the fact (that's for a different post).


So what does this have to do with @Sloot hating women?

The subtext of the Minneapolis ICE protests is feminist LARPing finally smashing into the wall of hard reality.

We're in anywhere between decade 4 to 6 of this. This being modern American / Western feminism as a loosely defined social phenomenon. Colleges are now significantly majority female. Women have occupied every major leadership position (political, corporate, and beyond) with the exception of President (which would've been claimed as well if Hillary Clinton hadn't been the worst candidate in history). Millenial women out earn millenial men at the median. All of this female success has been great! Except for TFR, family formation, and general happiness. But, like, whatever. The Future is Female and all that.

What's happening in Minneapolis, now, is evidence that the nth-wave feminism of today has out kicked its coverage. Smashing glass ceilings and hanging tough with the boys is all well and good, but literally conspiring to disobey laws and obstruct law enforcement has real and immediate consequences. Maybe Wonderwoman didn't get that promotion at work because of actual sexism - she can keep the struggle going however she likes because she's alive, healthy, and, gosh darn it, ready to kick some patriarchal ass!

But when Wonderwoman decides that the best way to deal with a toxically masculine man in her way is to hit him with her car she can't keep the struggle going because he might respond with his own lethal force. When Wonderwoman decides to clap back at a flashbang, she might never be able to clap at all after that.

I'm being a little flippant here as an ode-to-@Sloot, but my point is real; the feminist "movement" as far as it a cohesive one and not just a vibes based mentality, has broken containment and exited reality. It is now responsible for women putting themselves into highly dangerous physical situations with potentially lethal immediate impact but under the guise of fun-and-safe "girl power" vibes. That's an irresponsible ideology. They're choosing the bear to signal how much of a girlboss they are and then are shocked, shocked, when the bear rips off their face.

@Sloot's injection of female revealed preferences in relation to military / police sartorial choices isn't him contorting his "womenz bad" theme into the conversation. This topic actually demands that we look beneath the surface level "ICE vs commies" narrative to figure out the much larger scale social phenomena at work. I believe that the phenomena is a long running social change - feminism - metastasizing into a view of the world that is divorced from reality. Human brains don't do well with cognitive dissonance. And the data shows this.

Liberal women are fighting a battle between their identity-ideology and reality. In continuing to lost that battle, it's not just a matter of ill-advised hair colors, tattoos, and a surfeit of feline companies. It is now immediate death or maiming because of an injection of self into horribly dangerous and easily avoidable situations.