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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   23916 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 3, 2026

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Shortly after the invasion of Ukraine, my dad mentioned the capital of Kiev, then stopped and corrected himself: "sorry, I should have said Kyiv."

This was a conversation we were having in his kitchen. There was no one outside of the family in attendance. I don't know who he was doing this performative virtue signalling for. Very embarrassing for a man of his advancing years.

What I find really funny is that, right before the war, I was in Ukraine, and I said "Kiev" - my guide's face darkened, he took me around the back of an armoured van, and he explained "I know this is what you say in the west, you should not say that here, it's sensitive, might cause trouble. You say Kyiv" and coached me on how to pronounce it like a Ukrainian until I got it right. But it's nothing at all like how westerners now pronounce "Keev", it's more like "Kyuff". I know that you should never expect libs to understand any of the cultures they valorize, but this drives the absurdity home to me every time it comes up.

I don't find that especially odd or embarrassing. If he wanted to change to using "Kyiv" in public for any reason (fitting in, supporting Ukraine, virtue signaling, etc) the way to do that is just to build a habit of calling the city Kyiv instead of Kiev, which includes in private conversations in the kitchen.

It's rather silly to change the English name to Kyiv considering our pronunciation sounds considerably closer to the Russian pronunciation for Киев but that's neither here nor there. But unless you are a diehard about still calling it Lvov or Lemberg I don't see what's so bad about consistently using Ukrainian transliterations for cities in Ukraine, no one really uses the spelling Kharkov or Uzhgorod either.

I remember chicken kievs being mass-renamed chicken kyivs, too.

Following the time-honored tradition of Freedom Fries and Liberty Cabbage.

And, oddly, french toast.

What, really? What was it previously called?

German toast, mainly. Only that didn't sound so great during the first world war.

So after 9/11 when they wanted to call it 'freedom toast' it was extra-deliciously ironic.

Don't forget Liberty measles!

It’s a guilt thing. By not using the ‘correct’ non-Russian name he was letting down the Ukrainian war effort. Men of a certain age feel really strongly about this.

Men of a certain age and specifically-low testosterone levels. Beards, beer, bacon, fedoras?

If you haven't already, I think you will really enjoy reading this article: https://newrightpoast.substack.com/p/the-four-commandments-of-reddit

In concurrence with @Terracotta below, I can't feel anything other than second-hand embarrassment for this article. The author spends, per Firefox's reader mode estimate, "33-42 minutes" whining. All these things apparently just happened to him and his tribe out of nowhere. It does not even occur to him to ask the question where exactly his people went wrong, if they could have done anything different then or now, or to consider that they might have any sort of agency at all.

On that matter, chances are high that his bewildered grandma was in the class of people who were calling another sitting president as "Obongo" in their FB posts (but calling the current one "Fuckface von Clownstick" is where moral degradation truly has gone too far?). I'm yet to see an instance of that tango being danced by a single dancer.

Yeah, read it when it came out (but thanks). Wordier than it needs to be but I think it nails several points that aren't typically discussed anywhere else.

The sad irony: 99%+ chance the author of that article looks exactly like one of the men pictured, only wearing a cringe button-down instead of a cringe slogan tee. Whatever the opposite of Reddit might be, it's certainly not posting novella-length denunciations of soyboys on a Substack with the word Poast in the title.

That grandma whose conservatism he so reveres is twice the man he is, and I bet he never visits her, either.

IIRC Dudley New-Right does actually have children, which puts him head and shoulders above most of the people he's mocking in this post. But I take your point.

This may be a hot take here, but I’d much prefer the mainstream becoming 2010s era Reddit (and old Something Awful) than what has happened, Reddit becoming “mainstream”.

They may have been ugly and cringe, but they were fun and libertarian. Mainstream would benefit from more of that. Now Reddit is ugly, cringe, prudish and miserable.

No, well-dressed men in their seventies who remember the Cold War and feel strongly about the necessity of Standing Up To Russia.

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