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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   24308 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 22, 2026

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My stance is more or less what you describe, but I was under the impression that that makes me an outlier on this forum (especially if weighted by posting activity). The majority of active posters now seem to be sexual traditionalists with enough of an authoritarian streak that they subscribe to argumentation to the effect of (1) society is rotten, (2) the existence of sexual deviants contributes to its rottenness, (3) therefore we need to crack down on sexual deviation, over any ideas that adults are free to pursue happiness in their own way.

There's a reason for that, once succinctly (if rudely) expressed by Winston Churchill -- "The Hun is either at your throat or at your feet". Live and let live, in general and with trans stuff in particular, has simply not worked -- every bit of tolerance has been used as a wedge to demand something more.

These "we have to do the bad thing to them or else they will do the bad thing to us" statements are facile. Churchill's "Hun", you must realise, is Germany, which is currently not at Britain's feet. Did the British make a mistake in acquiescing to the post-WWII European security architecture?

I'm not sure what the equivalent of utterly defeating Germany, tearing it in half, having different coalitions occupy the two halves, one for almost half a century, and only then finally letting off while still having both Germany and the UK arguably at the feet of the US would be for trans activists, but I'm sure it hasn't happened.

Did the British make a mistake in acquiescing to the post-WWII European security architecture?

Undeniably

These "we have to do the bad thing to them or else they will do the bad thing to us" statements are facile.

Then why did they, in fact, immediately do bad things to us right after pressure on them was relieved, when they loudly and repeatedly promised that all they want is tolerance?

Look at Britain post-WW2. Look at Britain now.

I’d say that’s a yes. We should have done what the French did and told everybody else to shove it and built our own security architecture.

Do you think British decline would actually have been forestalled if they had focussed their energies on continuing to forestall the Germans? I guess that if you believe things now are worse most everywhere, it's easy to point at past choices to deescalate and imagine the counterfactual would have turned out better. (But, should Japan and Korea have stayed at each other's throats? The US and Canada? Sweden and Denmark?)

The French surely had their own version of that meme, considering their rivalry with the Germans went back further and they were the ones to push the most for the punitive terms of Versailles.

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