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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   28373 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026

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I can count one of my ratchet clicks away from leftism when I first heard the performance of the poem "Whitey on the Moon."

I had my own ratchet click away in the opposite direction when I read Greg Egan's Oracle. In it, an AI from the future is talking to Alan Turing from a different parallel universe:

Robert was silent for a while, contemplating the magnitude of what she was proposing. Then he said, “It’s a pity you didn’t come sooner. In this branch, about twenty years ago —”

Helen cut him off. “I know. We had the same war. The same Holocaust, the same Soviet death toll. But we’ve yet to be able to avert that, anywhere. You can never do anything in just one history – even the most focused intervention happens across a broad ‘ribbon’ of strands. When we try to reach back to the ’30s and ’40s, the ribbon overlaps with its own past to such a degree that all the worst horrors are faits accomplis. We can’t shoot any version of Adolf Hitler, because we can’t shrink the ribbon to the point where none of us would be shooting ourselves in the back. All we’ve ever managed are minor interventions, like sending projectiles back to the Blitz, saving a few lives by deflecting bombs.”

“What, knocking them into the Thames?”

“No, that would have been too risky. We did some modelling, and the safest thing turned out to be diverting them onto big, empty buildings: Westminster Abbey, Saint Paul’s Cathedral.”

At that moment I did the "raise finger, lower finger" meme IRL. In a good way.

Have you read The Rise and Fall of DODO? It has time travel with multiple concurrent past timelines all contributing to the present. Makes changing the past very complicated. Co-authored by Neal Stephenson. I recommend it.

No, I'll take a look, thanks.

Westminster Abbey

And yet when I argue that it's not all that big a deal on the individual level if the Mona Lisa were destroyed, I get dogpiled.

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