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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   2623 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 26, 2026

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Quality post, may Allah curse Universal Culture. However, I have become painfully aware that this process is happening almost everywhere, at different rates; America is just ground zero for postmodernity. America has lost much of its Americanness, but Britain has lost an awful lot of its Britishness, Turkey has lost some of its Turkishness, even Africa has lost a bit of its character. I look forward to revisiting Ukraine sometime, to see if the antidote to postmodernity is in fact brutal trench warfare.

I look forward to revisiting Ukraine sometime, to see if the antidote to postmodernity is in fact brutal trench warfare.

Spoiler: it is not.

I rather doubt it as well, given the effects of the original trench warfare, but given that it's a common talking point I'd like to disprove the theory for myself.

Britain has lost an awful lot of its Britishness

In Britain, raising a national flag is a subversive act. In the US, it is still largely not so, though in certain places it already is.

State repression of culture is not the same as the loss of culture. Imagine if in just about every place you find yourself in America, that isn't reserved to some newcoming minority or the hipsteriest of hipsters, there's still at least a drawlin' fella wearing a cowboy hat and spurs, a Southie with the broadest Bawston accent, and a Southern gentleman who says "huwhat" and "huwhy", and they all basically act as you expect. Britain's still got a fair bit of that.

I don't know about every place, but there are certainly places where you still can get that. Maybe not spurs, but otherwise I think it's still around.

You could visit the Balkans to check that right now.

I would say in my experience they are significantly less postmodernized, especially Albanians, though it's hard to connect that directly to the 1990s (I think the basic function is how rich a country is) and it's now been a long time since the war. Hungary is billed as reactionary, but it's actually well ahead of the rest of the Balkans in the process.

Hungary, thé one without the brutal civil war, checks out.

Also the focus of the tender embraces of its richest native son. One could also chart the rise of right-populism in Eastern Europe as a metric of the advances of a hostile postmodernity to which they're reacting.

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