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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   8655 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 6, 2026

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The most notable progressive belief that serves the same function (feigned confusion toward or rejection of male/female definitions) is mostly harmless, though; worst case scenario, it wrecks women's sports, which no one actually cares about anyway. The Trumpist version has given us the highly escalated Iranian situation, which is much more costly.

It also wrecks the crime rates, which people do care about.

The most notable progressive belief that serves the same function (feigned confusion toward or rejection of male/female definitions) is mostly harmless

I think you can find it anywhere that a progressive who is smugly "pro-science" will completely ignore inconvenient science when it gets in their way of supporting abortion, trans essentialism, or racial handouts.

I think the most costly progressive belief is something like "we should not punish antisocial behavior if we can tell a story where that antisocial behavior is downstream of prejudice around race, gender, or class". While Trump has obviously been acting like a petulant toddler lately, it's not like handing uncontested power back to the progressive "adults in the room" is likely to go particularly well. Probably less badly but that's not a very high bar to clear.

it's not like handing uncontested power back to the progressive "adults in the room" is likely to go particularly well. Probably less badly but that's not a very high bar to clear.

We are in agreement. I might gesture at "let's hand power to people who would do better than either," but unfortunately I don't see a way from here to there.

worst case scenario, it wrecks women's sports

This is probably the least worst case scenario for progressive beliefs like this: it looks the other way while thousands of little girls are raped (Rotherham et al), spends hundreds of billions on public infrastructure that still doesn't go anywhere (CA HSR), lets loose violent criminals on their own recognizance to murder people on the train (sometimes Ukrainian asylum seekers), openly constructs race and gender-based spoils systems, and often-as-not in other countries (Venezuela, Cuba) refuses to even consider public opinion and starts ignoring elections.

Not going to say there aren't a similar number of equivalent failure modes on the right, either: civilization has always been a delicate dance to align incentives to avoid violence.

The belief that American police officers are gunning down unarmed black men willy-nilly led to the 2020 riots (causing something like a billion dollars in property damage), and the subsequent police pullback (resulting in the murders of an additional ~10,000 young black men).

Well, given that the Iran war's direct costs are already estimated to be in excess of 20 billion, a couple hundreds more in funding are being requested and this does not even include figures for random damage like US embassies and bases in the region let alone indirect costs due to more expensive fuel and what-not, I think we are some orders of magnitude past that. (We'll see about the deaths depending on whether they actually proceed with a ground invasion.)

(And no, the "military budget is just money reinvested in US companies" argument won't do much here; it's still money that means part of the economy is retargeted towards making things that explode rather than twinkies. You could make absolutely the same argument about BLM damages since presumably the damaged storefronts were also rebuilt by US companies, too. What's the qualitative difference between "fire a missile and pay for a replacement" and "shatter a window and pay for a replacement"?)

If you are going to balance costs you have to also balance benefits, though it is too soon to do so.

It's going to be "too soon to do so" in the anecdotal Zhou Enlai sense for a very long time, and on top of that hopelessly subjective (is "US police are now scared of casual violence towards black do-no-gooders" a benefit or not? Would "Israel occupies part of Lebanon" be? Would "US Evangelicals ecstatic because they think the Rapture has drawn closer" a benefit or not?).

The Iran war is likely not going to have anywhere near the same amount of benefits as its direct costs. At the very least it's unlikely free Hormuz transit is ever coming back.

If a life is worth $10M, that's $100B in damages over a couple years. Not small, but by the end will likely be dwarfed by the Iran War.

Though, your example does bring to mind another that probably will be comparable: COVID and the response to it. I'm not sure what proportion of the blame to place on progressive litmus tests for that, but it's certainly substantial.

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