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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026

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Has anything recently made you update in favor of Ukraine?

On the actual line of contact? No, not really. There are some positive developments. Zelensky seems to have gotten his house in order; and realized he’s the President of Ukraine, not Joe Biden’s press secretary. Ukraine’s deep strike capability seems to have developed from a cosmetic show of force into an actual problem for Russia, although I don’t know if it’s a big enough problem to help. And the fact that they haven’t spectacularly collapsed yet implies some level of durability.

The problem here is that the war has bad fundamentals for Ukraine, and the fundamentals haven’t changed. Every day burns through limited manpower. Every day the line collapses a little more—and if you actually watch the map on a daily basis you’ll see that the advances are slow but pretty steady.

Pokrovsk fell, they lost their key logistics hub by your analysis, but Russia is literally stuck there.

Pokrovsk fell, and then now the two major fortress cities it supplied (Huiliapole and Sloviansk-Kramantorsk line) are falling as well.

On a lighter note, any predictions for the next Dune movie, after the trailer dropped?

This is a transparent attempt to get me banned. The moderation staff has enjoined me from speaking on this topic. I don’t care. I will not be silenced. The whole spirit of the Dune books to show what the spirit of humanity is capable of, unrestrained by the machine and the xenos. To them take that story and cast an ayylmao actress in the lead role crosses the line from mere species-mixing propaganda to intention humiliation. And Disclosure Day is releasing at the exact same time! Why couldn’t they have just cast her in that??

Messiah is a brutal book to adapt, seeing it's mostly politics, monologues and inner thoughts.

I think that’s why they re-tooled the jihad to be more of an actual war and less of a slow-rolling political purge. It injects some action. It’s probably more realistic too, the ugly stuff tends to happen when the Revolution is genuinely under threat.