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PaperclipPerfector  11d ago (text post)   25289 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 9, 2026

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Sorry, missed this at the time, but I liked reading it so here: a late response in kind in honor of intresting prose.

You sit in some People's Republic of Museums and you spit on the few who dare to do instead of waiting to die. Because they do with so little class.

They ain't doing shit, what they have is the consent of the people who actually do shit to pretend to own the land the go juice comes out of; as opposed to Iran who owns their go juice land by their own blood and effort.

Has Howard Roark no taste? Why does he insist of making gawdy metal things, why doesn't he just lay there and die? Is Hank Rearden not a dangerous fool making monuments to his vanity instead of giving his all for boomers and children like good Jim Taggart?

Much like those jagoff fantasies of a shitty writer and welfare leach, the Gulf state imagine themselves captains of industry when they are pathetic ticks living and dying by the consent of their betters; the great historical cultures of the world that walk their goat paths and deign to not instantly obliterate them.

A few poor bedouins lucked on some, not much, but some, oil. And those poor bedouins were sly enough to turn this not into an endless war, not into a brutal theocracy, but into one of the most successful cities in the world.

And people like you, who feel small in the presence of achievement, will instinctively need to lower it. The search of greatness must simply be a sign of one's vanity. Poor Yankee doodle so classless he thinks the feather in his cap is macaroni.

But it's not low. Greatness is great. Bending a desert full of essentially nothing into a paradise is nigh miraculous and demonstrates clear ability that commands respect to the wise, or at least, the sane.

They took their great gift and turned it into ashes and CO2; they received their inheritance of 5 talents and built a glittering babylon on sand, the great whore of the world who accepts all abominations. Where is their world bestriding colossus? Who builds their great monuments, forges their weapons, who is it even who constructed the substrate of their society? It's not called the Petro Riyal or Dihram.

In the end if it does get destroyed, the world will be worse for all the people this city has welcomed and one of the few places in the world that rewards skill with opportunity will be lost, hastening our spiral towards world spanning destruction and mayhem in exchange.

Damn you and damn all like you who worship death.

Unless it changes, when it gets destroyed the world will continue turning, having gained nothing and lost nothing. The great river of crude and trade and lucer will lurch and slosh until it finds it's new level, and collect into new tributaries and oxbows and lakes, and the opportunity to rise will have been squandered on libidinal ephemera.

Damn you and damn all like you who worship mediocrity and pretend it is virtue.

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