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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   14111 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 16, 2026

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I've been pushing basically the same line, although I didn't remember (may not have heard, though it rings a bell) the Foxes and Lions metaphor.

Yes, decadence as I see it is not so much about warrior values as about antisociality becoming in fashion, with the obvious results that negative-sum behaviour on a large enough scale results in a negative total. To take Babylon 5's obvious example of decadence (the Centauri), what is decadent about them is that they're largely run by people like Refa and Cartagia who are focused on their own power at the expense of planetary security. If the Centauri all behaved more like Londo, who on two occasions straight-up asks someone to kill him for his planet's good, then they wouldn't be decadent - they'd just be opulent - and they wouldn't be in decline.

To go through your list:

  1. Decline in "warrior values" or "warrior ethos" - yes insofar as "ask what you can do for your country", no insofar as "everyone should train every day", and the "ask what your country can do for you" side is a problem in the economy too
  2. Increased emphasis on physical comfort among elite-class males - mostly no
  3. Decreased willingness to inflict physical pain, including reduced use of harsh training and corporal punishment - this is kind of a symptom insofar as it might demonstrate sufficient social intermediation to somewhat lose track of reality, but it's not causative IMO
  4. Decline in sexual morality and/or traditional gender roles - here I'd distinguish between stuff that affects birth rate, stuff that blows up society in specific ways, and other shit. Birth rate is causative; you (for the moment) need people to keep the lights on and you can't get them all from immigration without assimilation failure and the resulting disunity. Sexual practices that don't touch birth rate can still have specific failure modes - polygyny, for one, because it winds up with the majority of men having "revolt" as the only plausible way to get a wife, and if there's HIV around it's probably not a good idea to have everyone attend unprotected gay orgies, for another. Outside of this, doesn't matter, and there have been a wide variety of sexual morals throughout history (note here that gay sex doesn't directly affect birth rate as long as people are having straight sex as well).
  5. Increasing willingness of people who are not battle-tested warrior elites (including priests, merchants, politicians, women, REMFs etc.) to interfere with military decision making - no, not this specific case, although as noted there are issues with antisocial people getting power in general
  6. Left-wing politics more generally, including increased wealth redistribution. (I'm not sure what fraction of anti-Ds would include this) - the left is a big tent, and there are a lot of things under it. The salad bowl and grievance politics are a catastrophe. Protest culture isn't quite a catastrophe but is a problem (essentially, protests belong in the "cost" column and not the "benefit" column due to their confrontational nature; they can be worthwhile, but protesting shouldn't be done for its own sake as a fashion statement). Normalisation of exploitation is a catastrophe but is not really specific to the left (there are forms of it the left sometimes enables, and forms of it the right sometimes enables - social media, for instance, is far more prosocial in China than the West precisely because of the much-greater state control of the economy).

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