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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   8284 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 16, 2026

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So I think this parallels Pareto's Foxes and Lions theory / metaphor. Lions can take bold action. Foxes are clever and can see ahead. To function institutions need a mix of both. Over time Foxes push out the Lions using clever tricks. Eventually the Foxes face a problem where clever tricks don't work and it becomes a major crisis.

My own thinking is that people who are too physically comfortable tend to become purely socially focussed. This leads to things like "I choose the bear" where they haven't really absorbed that bears are real and can kill them.

Colder climates used to have a check with weather. The winter kept people aware that too many wrong moves could lead to their death. Technology has mostly solved that for people living in cities.

California is a good example. They decided to abandon their long term plans to expand the reservoir system as the population grew. Victor Davis Hanson talks about this frequently. There's not really a counter argument to the point that "more people need more reservoirs". But that involves giving money to the wrong sort of people to do the wrong sort of work. So they always seem to start screaming about how it's pointless due to climate change.

I don't really think the change needed is a deep shift to something like a warrior ethos. However something much smaller like a major grid failure that cut off power to Sacramento for two weeks would teach some important lessons about keeping institutions functional to all the government workers.

I think this is an important point that touches on a difference between two theories of "decadence" which sometimes have very different policy implications but which e.g. Gods of the Copybook Headings tries to merge. Pro-Devereaux would cite this as proof that decadence is an incoherent concept, from an anti-Devereaux perspective it is an interesting sub-debate.

@DradisPing is setting out an idea of decadence where a society loses the ability to build and fight at the same time, with the inability to build generally becoming visible first. The Sparta bros have a different idea of decadence where a decadent society is one that focusses too much on building at the expense of fighting.

This leads to things like "I choose the bear" where they haven't really absorbed that bears are real and can kill them.

Exactly at a certain point the overly financialized/abstractified economy becomes totally unmoored from anything resembling reality, thus decisions are made with a worldview that doesn't conceive of violence being a possibility and runs on 'The meat is made at the back of Costco' logic.

California is a good example. They decided to abandon their long term plans to expand the reservoir system as the population grew.

It's got nothing to do with giving money to the wrong sort of people (??) and everything to do with there not being any worthwhile places left to dam. There's 1400 dams in the state already.

Define "worthwhile". If you get around the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, you could dam several major northern rivers: Klamath, Trinity, Smith, and Eel each could support several reservoirs (there are old plans to build "dam ladders" up those rivers). But that's unpopular, for ecological, indigenous and financial reasons.

You could also just add capacity to existing reservoirs by upgrading the dams. There's many candidates. Again, expensive and unpopular.

Another possibility is that you could desalinate a small fraction of the literal ocean of water sitting next to California; however, this requires a lot of energy, the methods of obtaining which are unpopular.

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