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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 16, 2026

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The issue is that hundreds of years pass between anything of note happening. Steppe raiders come and go, the concentration of wealth and population, and thus power hugs the same locations it always does.

Respectfully, my version isn't making any kind of grand sweeping claims. We know what will happen if we leave a culture of bacteria on an petri dish with ample food and a zone of penicillin; the bacteria will eventually mutate into antibiotic resistance. This tells us nothing about what will happen on the scale of any individual bacteria.

I'd also point out that the original claim isn't that Weak Men Immediately With No Lead Time And Uniformly Make Hard Times, only that they do eventually. You can consider either the weak or strong aphorisms to lack sufficient predictive power to engage with, but vague isn't wrong, and my model doesn't try to claim what either you or Devereaux seem to expect it to.