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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 13, 2026

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Everybody needs to be a victim now in at least some way.

Because for some groups it gets rewarded with status, attention, accommodations and money. So of course people seek those things.

And the loss of stoicism (which of course is 'toxic masculinity') causes people to be less respected for accepting that bad things happened to them, without demanding compensation in some way. So people no longer get pushed away from a victim mentality by shaming, and get pulled towards it with rewards.

Yet both the capriciousness and unfairness of who gets rewarded and how much, logically results in everyone feeling hard done by, even those groups with great victim privileges. Because there is always a group who (temporarily) gets more status, attention, accommodations and money.

It's because they want to be angry. [...] Weirdly enough, "the world is better than you thought" is seen as a bad thing to learn! They want to be a victim of a bad society.

Have you considered that many people may simply feel extremely dissatisfied with modern society, but have not been handed a narrative that correctly explains why they feel this way, so they latch on to whatever narrative floats around.

However, then those feelings are still real and they do matter. You cannot reason away feelings. If things in society create an increase in bad feelings, then this is an issue, even/especially if we don't know where these feelings come from.

Someone naive might think "good news, data centers don't use much water!" or "good news, vaccines don't cause autism and there isn't an autism epidemic, it's just diagnostic drift" or "good news, cops don't really kill that many minorities" or "good news, schools are not giving litter boxes and trans surgeries to cat identified kids" would be received with a smile

Funnily, all of your examples are not cases where things are actually getting better over time, but your 'good news' is merely that things are getting worse, but not as much as some people are claiming. We have more data centers, which is a reflecting of the online world taking over, with many major downsides (including that the online world itself is enshittifying), but it takes a bit less resources than some thought. Yay? Autism is on the rise, but we have no clue why or how to fix it. We just know that we can't address the issue by going after vaccines. Yay? Migration issues are making people unhappy all over the world, but the minorities don't get shot by the police all that often compared to how often they kill each other. Yay? There is a huge rise in trans identification, including for young kids, who get experimented on medically, but things have not deteriorated so far that furries get medicalized. Yay?