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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026

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This is a topic I've written on at some length, but rather than extrude the usual word-product, would you mind if I asked for a bit of detail in what you would consider a good response?

On the theory end, the short of it is that there's a couple prongs:

  • "Don't be ruled by people who hate you" is the first and most important rule in politics, and Reds and Blues really do hate each other.
  • "Manipulation of Procedural Outcomes" is incompatible with law or institutions generally, and is how things actually do work now.
  • "Tolerance is not a moral precept", and we all, like Ozy, love John Brown.

On the practice end, there's tracking of things like selective prosecution, obvious rule-of-law violations, sequential breakdown of core civil society functions, interlocking hostility between legislation, social norms, and official and pseudo-official process, all backed by evident grassroots social sentiment, which I and others have been discussing here for some time.

So we could approach it from the theory/model-of-the-opposing-tribe end, or we could approach it from the observed outcomes end. The conclusion of both is that it's a very bad idea for Reds to try to live under Blue rule, both in terms of the outcomes of the Reds who might be in such a situation getting ground to extinction, and in terms of everyone, given that Blues do not, in fact, have a biological monopoly on lawless violence as a response to perceived injustice.

So what are you looking for?