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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   5631 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 6, 2026

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Since nobody seems to be bringing it up, I will:

"Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP"

It really is Poetry.

Over time, I've lost faith in religion. I no longer believe in deontology. I doubt objectivism. I don't think consequentialism produces meaningfully outcomes. I find modernism passe. The rationalists seem kinda irrational. I've done the calculations: utilitarianism doesn't math out.

I think I'll have to RTVRN to tradition: I think Plato might have had it. Maybe Aesthetics as Virtue was the true path all along.

It seems that the aesthetics someone chooses to project and their aesthetic sense (taste? values?) are better predictors of what they will do and who they really are than anything else. It seems that half of my political values boil down to aesthetics in any case: I find trump-hegseth-vance-desantis et al to be disgusting and contemptible; I have more respect for Rubio, but the last Republican I could really get down with was Mccain, purely off of his aesthetics, even if choosing someone as gauche as Palin disqualified him from my vote (Romney was too morman for me to handle, I'm sad to say).

Likewise with the D's: Their candidates have been universally superior to the republicans these past 8 years because they would rather be eaten by wild dogs than put "Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP" up in lights and then line up behind it, but I have the most good vibes off of Bernie, Buttegieg, and Mamdani; also probably for purely aesthetic reasons.

I think this might actually be rational: just by observing the aesthetics an individual chooses to portray, you can make a judgment vis. how they intend to act in a way that is much harder to fake than "Saying shit". Kamala was a social climber totally absent of virtue, and campaigned like it. Bernie is a crusty old marcher, and acts like it. Buttigieg is a bloodless technocrat, and looks like it. Trump is a neuvo rich venal tasteless rich guy, and governes like it.

All this to say: I think I'm just going to be unapologetically ruled by my aesthetic sense from now on, and say that we can allow some grace. Maybe Duublya had a stutter, you can get an aphorism wrong and it's fine. It's ok. That being the case, if any politician in the future sits down and types out something as fucking sauceless and cringe and gross as "Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP" and thinks "This is great, fucking SEND IT"; they should probably go back to screaming at the cocain ghosts in an alleyway stop blighting our eyes with their garbage.

The final resting place of TDS: acceptance that it was just aesthetic snobbery all along. The greatest political actor in the US since FDR, vanquished both parties, slew the Bush and the Clinton dynasties, co-opted the Kennedies, rewrote the political playbook and realigned the party system, the international treaty system and US policies more generally. One day they'll probably teach this little banger in 300-level poly-sci classes, in the same chapter as the Fireside Chats.

So gauche!

It so happens that if you are too stupid and malicious to consider consequences, you can do a hell of a lot as the president of the United States of America. You can do great things indeed. The greatest. It's a tremendous force, this office.

For example, you can kill a whole civilization.

You can realign everything into a crooked parody of itself. You can throw a temper tantrum and wreck international treaties, replacing them with your preferred club of third world kleptocrats. Easy-peasy. The hard part is getting into that office, but thankfully even the smart Americans have grown tired of treating things seriously, and so happily elected a random moron.

For example, you can kill a whole civilization.

Have you made similar objections towards "death to America" or "death to Israel" coming from Middle Easterners, including Iran? Or is this one of those "America isn't civilized, so it's fine to destroy America, but Iran, whew, that's civilized" ideas? Or is the reasoning perhaps that it's hyperbole when Iran says it but serious when Trump says it?

Well, I had higher expectations of the USA than Iran personally. Makes sense to me people would find such rhetoric coming from the POTUS more notable than similar rhetoric coming from a mob in a third world country or from a notorious extremist theocracy.

I note that at least going back to the Bush administration (and probably back into the mists of time, but I haven't checked) that there is a significant subset of people who simultaneously want to claim moral superiority and seethe at being held to any kind of standard.

  1. yes, it is hyperbole in the case of Iran. This has been covered enough. Iranians have, in fact, never had the genocide of Americans or even collapse of the American state to be their policy.
  2. Iran cannot credibly threaten death to America, or even Israel, for it has no means to inflict such death. On the other hand, the US can credibly send Iran to the Stone Age, or whatever, with near-complete impunity.
  3. I do have double standards. An ostensible vanguard of the Western Civilization cannot conduct itself like an insular theocracy it says is ruled by "crazy mullahs".
  4. This victim posturing is exactly what I've been talking about, it's unbecoming of a superpower.

Iran cannot credibly threaten death to America, or even Israel, for it has no means to inflict such death.

Which is why it was working on nuclear weapons.

Their nuclear program was completely obliterated less than a year ago.

Obviously not, since they still have the enriched uranium, a nuclear reactor, and other parts of said program.

...or because they don't want to be regime changed.

Ali Khamenei made those objections already, stating that it means opposition to U.S. government policies, not the American people. Hard to imagine a greater authority on the matter.

Besides that, rhetoric coming from a protest or some mass gathering is slightly different than rhetoric coming from world leaders. 'Glassing the place' became a common term for what many Americans said should be done to the middle east, I don't suppose you think that's the same as an official statement from a national leader? Though Trump has now narrowed that gap.

Ali Khamenei made those objections already, stating that it means opposition to U.S. government policies, not the American people.

If that counts, it should exonerate Trump too; Trump said in the same statement that he didn't want the civilization to die. It's even above in the link!

A major difference is that right now the US bombing Iranian cities and has the capacity to inflict catastrophic damage on civilian infrastructure while Iran is not bombing American cities and on their best day could inflict minor damage.

So is it ok to threaten genocidal destruction so long as you don't have the capacity to actually carry it out?

From a Banksian perspective, aspirational Fully Automated Gay Space Communism says "yes", but still has to manage "real threats" (ideally non-kinetically, but not always). I don't think we're there (yet?), so I wouldn't call that a fair expectation in 2026.

I don't know how you inferred that from what I wrote, but I want to raise two points.

Firstly, and this is unbelievably important: evil behavior from others does not excuse your own evil behavior. There's a kind of self-conscious human orc who feels the need to justify their own brutal impulses by pointing to the depravity of others, but they don't actually seek to resolve anything.

Secondly, power implies responsibility. The fact that one party can act on their threat and the other cannot is absolutely a reason to care more about the one than the other. You should not be threatening genocide, period, but you definitely shouldn't be doing it when you are currently in the process bombing the shit out of the people you're threatening to exterminate.

I don't know how you inferred that from what I wrote

You were replying to someone who asked if you raised similar complaints over Iran calling for death to America for decades with the argument that a big difference between the two is that the US is currently bombing Iran and has the capacity to inflict significant damage while Iran currently isn't and cannot. I'm not saying anything excuses anything else here, I'm just replying to the argument you made.

It's not okay, but it's self-evidently better. With great power comes great responsibility etc.

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