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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 24, 2026

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I don't see that happening in the majority of them.

Maybe some will escape. The Eastern ones. Poland. Hungary. But most seem to share the same dynamics.

A more likely outcome is that eventually after a lot of rape and bloodshed the normies will eventually wake up. If this happens soon enough there will be riots, bloodshed and mass deportations, but then they will recover. If it happens later there will be civil wars and/or genocide.

The anti-immigration or even pro-remigration "normies" will not have a simultaneous, coordinated mass awakening. The coordination isn't there, and the institutions and in fact quite a large number of people who are also "normies" but solidly pro-immigration are actively working against them and they won't stop anytime soon. There is no monolithic entity waiting to rise up, no sword brotherhood, no organization large enough to make a difference and overcome the forces that are already practised hands at maintaining the pro-immigration status quo. Pardon me, but your vision is wishful thinking.

But I suspect the native populations will come out on top due to superior technology,

The natives and the immigrants have access to the same technology. And much technology that matters in the modern day is centralized, and those centers are in the hands of pro-immigration entities.

entrenchment in their locality,

The natives are almost as deracinated, atomized and globalized as the immigrants. Perhaps even more so, culturally.

and the ability to enlist the aid of allies in the event of literal civil war (ie the U.S.)

The US has hardly been the stalwart opponent of mass migrations the globe over. There aren't any other allies either.

Progressivism's primary path to victory is in superficial virtue signalling in which the majority of people inflict costs on people other than themselves.

Progressivism has already won the war on demographics, politics and culture. The virtue signalling has always just been one tool out of many. Europe is a dead civilization, walking on only on inertia. At the last count that I heard, 43% of all children in Germany were of immigrant stock. Not all of them may be Muslims, and not all of the Muslims may favor islamic culture over Europe, but the tendencies are clear - Europe is sclerotic, incapable of decisive action, in fact actively disposed against it, has no claim on Leitkultur, is unable to assimilate newcomers, does not deter newcomers either, the newcomers' countries of origin are not about to stop exporting people, and the newcomers are overwhelmingly muslim and more fertile than the natives. Future generations will be majority muslim. The countries of Western Europe will be muslim countries before the century is out.

Once the majority of people's safety is threatened it will fall from grace. It's just a question of collateral damage.

The time for that was ten years ago, or much earlier. People have safety and prosperity enough to remain pacified as the world that gave them their safety and prosperity ends.

I repeat for emphasis: The conflict is already resolved, the war is lost, the progressives have won, permanently and irreversibly, and anything to the contrary is wishful thinking.

I will personally continue to do what little I can to spite them, but I am under no illusions as to the course of history.

If we look at history, it's clear that a lot can change in a few decades. Europe was not like this 70 years ago, Europe will probably not be like this 70 years from now. This masochistic self-hatred is a recent phenomenon, not an inherent property of Europeanness. It has been metastasizing for decades to reach this point, but the fact that this was possible demonstrates how attitudes and behaviors can change over time. Progressivism thrives in weak, spoiled, privileged populations who value appearances and virtue signalling over hard truths. When put through a crucible of hardship and suffering with a clear causal link to Progressive policies, people become disillusioned. The story of ex-leftists come when they witness of experience leftists being awful and it actually effects them (similarly, ex-rigthists often have similar stories of encounters with awful racists).

The balance of politics to me appears to be one of negative feedback. Whichever side is more powerful and complacent with enabling their extremists to cause more harm starts to bleed followers until they get their act together or lose their power. I just don't see a plausible future in which the majority of people just lie down and be like "yup, I guess we have Shariah law now". That's not how humans work. They are selfish, myopic, and ignorant, but they are still selfish. They will act in their own interest as long as there isn't a large opposing majority stopping them. So if the majority of them are threatened the majority of them will act.

[...] how attitudes and behaviors can change over time. Progressivism thrives in weak, spoiled, privileged populations who value appearances and virtue signalling over hard truths. When put through a crucible of hardship and suffering with a clear causal link to Progressive policies, people become disillusioned.

So if the majority of them are threatened the majority of them will act.

This is true. And it was understood at least two generations ago, by both leftist and muslim thinkers (and by rightist thinkers too, but those failed to make an impact): The path to victory lies in engineering who the majority is. Demographics is destiny. There is no need to make the natives accept shariah law. There is no need to be afraid of the natives becoming disillusioned by hardship. Demographic engineering simply sidelines the natives, marginalizes them numerically, and eventually turns democratic institutions against them because they no longer are the majority.

By the time the natives rise up, it will be too late.

Europe is sclerotic, incapable of decisive action, in fact actively disposed against it, has no claim on Leitkultur

I'll take the other side of statement, and say that they are perfectly capable of it, and what you've been describing is a result of that fact.

Please elaborate.

It's not that deep, but looking at everything that's happening in Europe, I find it hard to believe this is happening as a result of naive optimism and/or a misunderstanding that was cemented by our leaders being sclerotic and indecisive. Any native pushback is being coordinated against with military-like precision and discipline. Media are deployed to create hit pieces, information is censored, vast resources are deployed to ensure things go the way they are going now (orders of magnitude more than it would cost to prevent them from happening).

Simply put, I'm taking the "treason" side of the "stupidity or treason" dillema.

[I'm speaking generally of many different countries' leaders around the world when I say: I believe] It's because they think they need more workers or else everything will be even worse. They think a declining population is "the end of the world" / has worse consequences than anything else, so they HAVE to shore up population numbers, by any means necessary.

[IMO] They're wrong. They've overlooked how bad the consequences of other things can be. A declining population is not the only possible situation with very bad consequences. But it's what they think.

Is "Prioritize maintaining population numbers over everything else, therefore coordinate with desperate skill to knowingly go against the wishes of your people, all with a self-satisfied attitude/assumption of knowing better than the benighted rubes" stupidity or treason? IMO could be described as either. The attitude problem encourages the hostile "treason" assumption. But I call it, really, hubris.

They think they're doing the right thing for the people they think they know better than. Well, and I think I know better than them.

(BTW. I realized this most thoroughly and clearly from reading The [End of the] World] [is Just the] Beginning by Peter Zeihan. Great title BTW. And he details what he expects the consequences of depopulation will be.)

It's because they think they need more workers or else everything will be even worse

I don't buy that, because a cursory look at the relevant numbers shows that immigrants are a net financial drain. That made some sort of sense for intra-European migration, but makes zero sense for the sort of immigration that people create drama over.

And if they really actually believed that argument, they would have a public debate on it, not lie and scramble to control the conversation.

My observation and experience is that they're part of a newish culture (not really "woke," more its '90s-vintage predecessor, though I guess some of them have evolved with it) that assumes that opposition to immigration is motivated by racism/bigotry/xenophobia, and therefore is not amenable to argument. That's why they don't bother to argue. (Rounds off to arrogance / attitude problem.)

(I think some might claim they tried to argue in the past and it didn't work. Because of "the rubes'" racism/bigotry/xenophobia. So they learned not to bother. I might argue that hey friends, that was ~50 years ago, times might have changed? But for people who were raised by parents who had "learned that lesson" in the 70s-or-so, it's not a decision they themselves made, it's a thoughtless assumption they grew up with and haven't thought to reconsider.

I'm not different. I just happened to experience an SJ mobbing around 2010 and I reacted by reconsidering my assumptions, including "If I was targeted like this and didn't deserve it, I guess some of those other (previously targeted, now anathema) people I'd been thoughtlessly dismissing as Obviously Evil Racists maybe didn't deserve it either, I'll see what they actually have to say." Others just...weren't lucky enough to have had that type of experience.)

It's epistemic closure / a mental trap. I'm enough adjacent to them (that is, "third culture kid" types) that it makes me sad. They've culturally evolved "into a corner." Their assumptions prevent them from course correcting. It's just...sad.

Oh and (for the same sad reason)--

The reasoning goes "We won't have enough people; this will give us more people; this is what we need to do."

(You can see some of this in The [End of the] World] [is Just the] Beginning; I think it's fair to summarize his position as "Countries won't have enough people; I politely acknowledge some citizens fear potential negative consequence of this, but this will give some countries more people; the countries that will be able to do this are the lucky ones, because all the other countries won't have enough people and the consequences of that are what matter.") It never occurs to them to check if these specific people will actually help the problem or not. In theory it seems like they would (goes the thought process); why wouldn't they?

Their culture assumes the blank slate. It wouldn't occur to them that one group of immigrants might improve the situation and another group might worsen it. All groups are interchangeable. Anyone saying groups might not be interchangeable is doing so out of racism. And this isn't a consciously-held, easily-questionable "belief," it's a bedrock assumption (like yes they'd agree all groups are interchangeable, why are you asking, are you racist? But it's not a belief they typically have to apply consciously, it's an unconsidered assumption).

Kind of fits in with Toynbee's "the ruling class loses creativity and gets stuck in old modes of thinking which prevent flexibly responding to new problems" theory.

Understood. You may be correct. Perhaps it is treason. But it can't be all treason - I do see a great big lot of stupidity.