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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 26, 2026

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I feel the need to be against any kind of policy that just casually wastes the lives of people who are fuckups.

I'm reminded of one of the observations of @Corvos (emphasis mine):

In practice, most of these are 'virtuous circle' things. People with more career opportunities have more career direction, people with more social experience have better social antennae, people pick up hobbies from friends, people who are sought out by the opposite sex understand the opposite sex better. And everyone else, sooner or later, finds themselves outside the circle of lamplight eating chicken tenders or browsing tik-tok makeup videos in a messy apartment because they're not going to manifest 1-5 into being by sheer force of will and they know it. They no longer have access to the virtuous circles, and from where they are (tired from working 9 hours at a bad job, shy, or poor) the activation energy is higher than anyone can reasonably ask of them.

This state of affairs results not particularly from a lack of male-only spaces but from modern society being mostly opt-in. There are no longer mandatory social occasions like church, balls, or village meetings, there is no longer a mandatory social group (extended family living nearby) and there is no longer mandatory (arranged) courtship. We could resurrect these things, and I think we should resurrect these things.

The old social structure functioned in a way that propped up people with low levels of agency in various ways so that men who were otherwise likely to end up as failsons turned out to be doing-mostly-OK-sons. This was based on the unstated assumption that their labor and investment was needed in society. Now this assumption is no longer there.

Yeah, no, we're not getting them back. There's no available course of history through which we retvrn.

Us low-agency fuckups are just outmoded. A formerly marginally usable resource, made obsolete. Time to die.

It's still possible for modern civilization to collapse though.