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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 16, 2026

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If your policies are actually adaptive for society, in a darwinistic sense*, then all you need to do is hold your ground, maybe perform non-salient actions to advance your cause, and eventually people will stop fighting you. In particular, they will begin to adopt the policy voluntarily as your correctness becomes more and more obvious, though perhaps in a way just distinct enough to preserve their ego and in-group identity. (e.g., the emergency of "sex negative feminism" as traditional gender roles re-establish themselves out of pure darwinistic imperative.)

This might seem like a naively optimistic strategy, but that's just an artifact of survivorship bias in favor of how mass movements are commemorated. Pretty much every change to the status quo has some sort of popular support, and is matched by some sort of popular protest. But we only remember those changes as being "non-violent movements" when they advance motives leftists are primed to recognize. When they fail, they get condensed into a memory hole labeled "reactionaries scared about change". For example, the luddites and before them the anti-enclosure protests. Leftists would be a lot more gleeful about claiming them as proto-anarchist movements if they'd succeeded... but instead, nobody even remembers them.

* I use this terminology to emphasize that a policy being a utilitarian or moral good is neither sufficient nor necessary. Policies that help a society self-perpetuate succeed because societies without them collapse and therefore lose the ability to fight.

The Luddites were never nonviolent though, were they?

before them the anti-enclosure protests

Amusingly, "open range" versus "closed range" remains a salient political topic in the US from time to time.