@Capital_Room comments on "Culture War Roundup for the week of March 9, 2026

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 9, 2026

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A tiny note on the war

In the previous thread, I got some pushback for suggesting that not only did the US strike the Iranian school in Minab, killing 170 children or something like that, but perhaps it did so intentionally (or at least without remorse for the possible consequences of erroneous targeting). I admit that wasn't fully sincere. I realize that, even morals aside, there is no perceived military value in bombing children, at least not for the US (I do think Israelis may target children of IRGC officers out of their usual Bronze Age blood feud sentiment, Oct 7, Gaza and all, seen enough of their remarks to this effect; but then again they don't operate Tomahawks).

Well now the question on it having been an American strike appears settled. As for the intent – it's not so straightforward:

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has gutted the Pentagon oversight offices that would have investigated the recent strike on an Iranian girls’ school — a move that has degraded America’s ability to protect civilians amid its largest air campaign in decades.
The Pentagon chief last year slashed offices that didn’t contribute to his goal of “lethality,” including the group that assists in limiting risk to civilians, known as the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence. Around 200 employees who worked on the issue, including at that office, have been reduced by about 90 percent, according to two current and former officials and a person familiar with the effort. The team that handles civilian casualties at Central Command, which oversees the Middle East, has dropped from 10 to one.
Hegseth can’t close the offices because they are approved by Congress. But he has managed to make them nearly inoperable, according to the people, as the Pentagon investigates its responsibility in what could be the worst U.S.-led killing of civilians since 2003. Iranian state media said the strike killed about 170 children and 14 teachers.
“The fact that our secretary of Defense, that our Central Command commander, cannot actually tell us whether or not they dropped a bomb in this location, that is so unbelievably unacceptable,” said Wes Bryant, the Pentagon’s former chief of civilian harm assessments until last year. “It just points even more to recklessness in this, in the entire planning and execution of this campaign, the fact that they don’t have any idea.”

Does it matter if there was no intent if the United States, as of now, also has a revealed preference to not bother with minimizing such risks, in favor of «lethality» and some zany Judeo-Christian nationalism courtesy the power-tripping macho TV host Pete Hegseth? I believe it does, but marginally; about as much as those girls matter to Lethal Pete. I rest my case.

More to the point. It's remarkable that there's so little discussion of contemporary historical events on here. I won't criticize anyone, be the change you want etc.; but what we are seeing is pretty astonishing from the culture war standpoint. Could someone like Pete be imaginable as the Secretary of War – no, Defense – in 2023? 2019, even? 2016? It looks as if the politically dominant culture of the United States changed overnight. Does everyone just like it too much to find the change worth commenting on?

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DaseindustriesLtd late version of a small language model 20d ago

Context

Skibboleth It's never 4D Chess DaseindustriesLtd 20d ago

There are an amazing number of people responding with, essentially, "shit happens in war", seemingly with giving any further thought to questions like "can we make shit happen less in war?", "does what we're trying to achieve justify this shit?", and "should the fact that shit happens in war make us more cautious about going to war?"

Christ

BurdensomeCount Thou Shalt Read BC's Writings! Skibboleth 20d ago · Edited 20d ago

I risk sounding like a broken record here but that old Clemenceau quote is relevant again: "America Is the Only Country That Went from Barbarism to Decadence Without Civilization In Between".

When you look at things through this lens everything explains itself perfectly. The Americans as a nation have never been properly civilised, their national myth includes things like the Frontier man and the taming of the wilderness, but in one of those rather all too common twists of irony I'd say the wild has transformed Americans far more than they have ever transformed it.

Once you realize that America as a country has never had civilisation in the sense a European, a Chinese, or even dare I say, a Persian, would understand it, (I mean as a country, many many Americans are perfectly civilised people, the problem is not All Americans, the problem is Enough Americans) everything starts falling into place and making sense.

The way to deal with such a country is to treat it like it is: rather than trying to support the US or help them in their war against Iran out of some misguided gentlemanly obligation, Europe now has an excellent opportunity to twist the knife and extract huge concessions from the US on Ukraine and tariffs in return for them being allowed to use European bases to run their war. And make your demands and the concessions you get public as red meat for your domestic base. It's no different to what the Americans would have done to you had the shoe been on the other foot.

Amadan Letting the hate flow through me BurdensomeCount 20d ago

That's a nice free-form contentless rant, and like Dase I know you love sneering at Westerners, and Americans especially, as hard as we will allow, under the cope of speaking from a delusional sense of superiority. But do tell me: in what sense are Americans not (or ever) "civilized"? Non-rhetorically. Step up. What do those words mean?

Because under every definition with any non-rhetorical meaning, this is simply nonsense. It's a snarky pseudo-elite bon motte with no significance beyond the performative revulsion, the affected contempt.

What you actually mean by "civilized" is "has a culture I like and behaves in ways I approve of." And sure, everyone is entitled to like their own culture and think it is better than other cultures. You can disapprove of America and wish we were more like you all you want. But if you want to start trading cheap sneers about respective cultures and how "civilized" we are and aren't, you sure would not want us to take the mod guardrails off when talking about Pakistan, or Muslim culture writ large.

Whenever I see you toss these haughty sneers like you're an aristocrat curling your upper lip at the revolting peasants, I am just astounded at the sheer arrogance. Not offended, but genuinely astounded that you can be so lacking in perspective and awareness.

BurdensomeCount Thou Shalt Read BC's Writings! Amadan 20d ago

Replying to both you and @Shakes:

I'm not saying America has no achievements (obviously it does, and listing them like Shakes did doesn't refute the point). Nobody denies America has produced extraordinary things, half the things I use on a daily basis were made by them, and that's probably an underestimate (though I'd add that a lot and an increasing proportion of this is from immigrants who became Americans or their near term descendants, rather than "founding stock"). The telephone, jazz, the moon landing etc. etc. are yes, all real, all impressive. But a catalogue of inventions and monuments is not what civilisation means in the sense I'm using it, and people should get that from my post.

What I mean and what Clemenceau meant (however priggish you may call him) is something closer to what you might call institutional depth and cultural continuity: the slow accumulation of norms, restraints, and social trust that make a society self regulating rather than dependent on raw dynamism (which is something that Americans seem to prize above all else, even when it's the wrong tool for the job, hammer and nail come to mind). Europe didn't get that from being clever. It got it from centuries of catastrophe and making mistakes and importantly learning from them. The point isn't that Europeans are better people (I wouldn't even agree, even though I'd probably choose to spend an evening with a randomly chosen European over a randomly chosen American, never mind that they might not even speak English). The point is that the European political tradition, through sheer painful experience, developed a certain instinct for restraint, compromise, and institutional preservation that the American tradition never prioritised in the same way and is likely to very soon come back and bite it in the ass. America's founding myth is about breaking free of those constraints, not building them. That's not an insult, it's a description.

And the "civilised Americans exist, the problem is't All Americans but Enough Americans" line was doing work you both skipped past. I'm not painting 330 million people with one brush. I'm saying the political culture, the median and especially the current leadership of the country, trends in a direction that makes America an unreliable partner and that Europeans should act accordingly rather than sentimentally. Think Mark Carney, but with more spice.

Which brings me to the part of my post that was actually the point, and which neither of you addressed: the strategic argument. Forget whether Clemenceau was rude. Forget whether I'm being snobbish, I won't try and justify that further as I know it won't work (and no, Spengler didn't put me up to this). The question on the table is simple: should Europe give America unconditional support in its Iran campaign, or should it use its leverage: basing rights, logistics, diplomatic cover, to extract concessions on Ukraine and tariffs? The "American" would say "use the leverage", the European might say "we're all gentlemen here", except that that's no longer true, so might as well give them a taste of their own medicine.

The argument that America "pays for European defence" cuts both ways. If European bases are so essential to American force projection that Spain's wobble caused a crisis within days (which it's still not allowing to my knowledge despite what the Americans are saying), then those bases have price, and Europe is a fool not to name it.

The claim that America could walk away tomorrow and it would be Europe's problem, not the Americans well right there you're making my argument for me. If that's how America sees the relationship, then Europe has no obligation of loyalty either, and should negotiate accordingly. You can't simultaneously say "we do this for you" and "we don't need you." Pick one. The cakeism is very "American".

-2

Jesweez BurdensomeCount 20d ago · Edited 20d ago

Brings to mind a good Substack article I read the other day: https://open.substack.com/pub/samkriss/p/youll-regret-it

Most European countries have already had one or several acutely manic phases in their past, the kind of energy that drives you to burst out into the world and do whatever you please until you’ve got a damn empire.

We might have had one or two in the US already, surely when we conquered the whole west from sea to sea, another when we came in and destroyed the axis powers and unleashed the greatest weapon ever deployed onto the planet.

But we’re still a juvenile culture and we’re currently in one of those manic phases of adolescent grandiosity. We can do anything!!! Just you fucking watch and try to stop us.

I don’t know if age always fully quiets down these impulses. Some pretty old cultures also get the itch from time to time. But we do have a radically smaller library of experiences to draw from as a culture and that might shape our behavior in meaningful ways.

We also suffer from a sort of rich kid who never faces consequences syndrome. Due to our privileged geography, we’ve pretty much never had our ass truly kicked or even realistically threatened by a foreign culture, like most other countries have. The only true at home ass kicking we’ve ever had was one we did to ourselves. A basic trauma that essentially all global cultures know intuitively, we just have no experience with.

I do think the cultural memory of these experiences ends up being important in shaping the psychology of a nation. And the US, we just haven’t lived enough to learn certain lessons that other cultures have.

There’s good and bad things about that, just as there is with the psychology of youth and maturity in individual humans.

Capital_Room rather dementor-like Jesweez 5hr ago

America has all the hallmarks of high culture and deep habits, except perhaps for a time measured in millennia

Julius Evola would disagree:

The US has been compared, not without justification, to a melting-pot. It actually presents us with a case in which a human type was formed, with characteristics that are to a large extent uniform and constant, from out of a highly heterogeneous raw material. Emigrating to America, men of the most diverse peoples receive the same imprint; after two generations, except in rare cases, they lose almost all of their original characteristics, reproducing a fairly homogeneous unit in terms of mentality, sensibility, and behavior: the American type.

In this regard, theories such as those formulated by Frobenius and Spengler, who have asserted that there is a close relationship between the forms of a given culture and a kind of “soul” bound to the natural environment, to the “landscape” and the original population, do not seem applicable. Otherwise, an essential part of American culture would have been possessed by the indigenous element, which consists of Amerindians, the redskins. The red Indians were proud races with their own style, their own dignity, sensibility and forms of religiosity; not without justification, a traditionalist writer, F. Schuon, spoke of the presence in their being, of something “aquiline and solar.” And we will not hesitate to assert that had it been their spirit that to an appreciable extent had imbued – in its best aspects and on an appropriate plane – the human material thrown into the “American melting pot,” the level of American civilization would probably be higher.[2]

Instead, besides its Puritan-Protestant component (which, in turn, as a result of its fetishistic emphasis on the Old Testament, possesses many judaized, degenerate traits), it seems that it is precisely the negro element, in its primitivism, that has set the tone in important aspects of the American psyche. It is already characteristic that when speaking of American folklore, it is to the Negroes one is referring, as if they were the original inhabitants of the country. Thus, the famous Porgy and Bess by the Jew Gershwin, which deals exclusively with blacks, is considered in the US to be a classic work inspired by “American folklore.” The composer has declared that he lived for some time among American blacks in preparation for this work.

But the phenomenon of popular and dance music is even more conspicuous and general. Fitzgerald was not wrong when he said that in one of its main aspects, American civilization can be called a civilization of jazz, i.e., of a negrified music and dance. In this domain, very singular “elective affinities” have led America, by way of a process of regression and primitivization, to imitate the Negroes. Assuming there would be a need for frenzied rhythms and forms as a legitimate compensation for the mechanical and materialistic soullessness of modern civilization, one would have done much better to look to the many sources available in Europe: we have elsewhere mentioned, for example, the dance rhythms of South Eastern Europe, which often have something truly Dionysian. But America has chosen to imitate the blacks and the Afro-Cubans, and then from America the contagion has gradually spread to all other countries.

…

The brutality that unquestionably is a characteristic of Americans can well be said to have a negro character. In the happy days of what Eisenhower was not ashamed to call the “Crusade in Europe,” as well as in the early days of the occupation, we had the occasion to observe the typical forms of that brutality, but we also saw that at times, American “whites” went even farther in this respect than their negro comrades, whose infantilism, however, they often shared.

Generally speaking, the taste for brutality now seems to be ingrained in the American mindset. It is true that the most brutal of all sports, boxing, originated in England, but it is in the United States that its most aberrant forms have developed, and it is there that it has become the object of a collective obsession, soon transmitted to other nations. Concerning the taste for getting into fights and coming to blows in the most savage manner it is enough, though, to consider the greater part of American films and popular detective stories: vulgar fist-fighting is a constant theme, evidently because it corresponds to the tastes of American audiences and readers, for whom it seems to be the symbol of true masculinity. America, the world leader, has, on the other hand, more than any other nation relegated the traditional duel to the status of ridiculous European antiquated rubbish. The duel is a method of settling disputes, following strict rules, without resorting to the primitive brute force of the mere arm and fist. There is no need to point out the striking contrast between this American trait and the ideal behavior of the English gentleman, despite the fact that the English made up a component of the original people of the United States.

Another obvious aspect of American primitivism concerns the concept of “bigness.” Werner Sombart has successfully put his finger on it in saying that “they mistake bigness for greatness.” Now, this trait is not found in all non-European peoples or peoples of color. For example, an authentic Arab of the old race, a redskin, an East Asian are not overly impressed by merely material, quantitative, ostentatious size, including that related to machinery, technology and the economy (apart, of course, from already Europeanized individuals). It is a trait found only in truly primitive and childish races like the Negro. It is no exaggeration to assert that the foolish pride of Americans in spectacular “bigness,” in the “achievements” of their civilization, reek of the Negro psyche.

And as for:

Evola continued with this:

Here, we ought to mention the oft-repeated nonsense about Americans being a “young race,” with the tacit corollary that they are the race of the future. It is true that a myopic gaze easily mistakes regressive infantilism for true youth. Strictly speaking, according to the traditional conception, this perspective must be inverted. Despite appearances, recent peoples, since they came last, are the most removed from their origins, and as such must be considered to be the most senile and decadent peoples. This view, moreover, corresponds to the organic world.[4]. It explains how paradoxically, the similarities of supposedly “young” peoples, in the above sense of late-comers, with genuinely primitive races that have remained outside of world history, and explains the taste for primitivism and the return to primitivism. We have already remarked upon the American predilection, from an elective affinity, for Negro and sub-tropical music; but the same phenomenon is apparent in other domains of more recent culture and art. We could consider, for example, the glorification of “négritude” by existentialists, intellectuals, and “progressive” artists in France.

It follows that Europeans, including the imitators of the higher non-European civilizations, demonstrate, in turn, the same primitive and provincial mentality when they admire America, when they let themselves be impressed by America, when they stupidly allow themselves to be Americanized and enthusiastically believe that this means catching up with the march of progress, and that it is a sign of being liberated and open-minded.

Pour la bonne bouche, we will conclude with a significant statement by a far from superficial American author, James Burnham (in The Struggle for the World): “There is in American life a strain of callow brutality. This betrays itself no less in the lynching and gangsterism at home than in the arrogance and hooliganism of soldiers or tourists abroad. The provincialism of the American mind expresses itself in a lack of sensitivity toward other peoples and other cultures. There is in many Americans an ignorant contempt for ideas and tradition and history, a complacency with the trifles of merely material triumph. Who, listening a few hours to the American radio, could repress a shudder if he thought that the price of survival [of a non-communist society] would be the Americanization of the world?” And unfortunately, to a certain extent, this is already happening.

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