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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 21, 2026

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No, if you’re trying to deal with someone and your counterparty suddenly loudly asks you if you’ll rule out doing some shocking thing, the correct answer is no and you should understand why. It’s obnoxious behavior; you return serve.

Anyone stupid enough to be fooled by this sort of rhetorical trick has already been tricked the previous 3,000 times, so this will simply be reason #3,001 to hate you.

And you plainly do hate us.

The conflict between American Reds and Blues continues to escalate, with no end in sight. Consensus European values are innately hostile to American Red Values and virtually indistinguishable from American Blue values. European institutions are joined at the hip to uniformly-Blue American institutions, and there is no reason to expect this to change. Anything resembling a European Red Tribe has been thoroughly suppressed and is utterly incapable of meaningful cooperation with American Reds in any but the loosest sense. Given these facts, there is no route for meaningful cooperation with Europe as it currently stands, any more than there is with American Blues. There is no way to get along, because our values are flatly incompatible; "Cooperation" means securing support for Blue Tribe in their efforts to remake America into something much more like what Europe is now, and that is not a form of cooperation worth pursuing.

I sympathize with European Red-analogues, but there is very little to be done. The overwhelming consensus in your societies is overwhelmingly hostile to everything I value, so it needs to be fought vigorously.

Would European Red-analogues, if they were had their day in the limelight, even be natural allies to American Reds? The existence of a "Blue Ummah" is, in a way, the intrinsic advantage of Blues; globalists everywhere have common cause, but nationalists can only have temporary allies of convenience. I forget if it was SSC or some other blog in the general sphere that proposed the thought experiment of some lizard species where a subset could be identified as cooperate-bots with a visual signal only visible to fellow cooperate-bots and thereby outcompeted all the others (as a metaphor for certain mind-killing minorities), but it's kind of like that except the signal is not even secret.

Would European Red-analogues, if they were had their day in the limelight, even be natural allies to American Reds?

Yes, I think so. Mutual admiration, mutual support and mutual cooperation are completely possible, provided there's a foundation of shared values. I like England and Japan, I want them to continue and to prosper. We've been allies with England for well over a century at this point; we've been allies with Japan since the end of World War II. There's no reason in principle that we shouldn't continue to be close allies with these nations for centuries to come. I'm not sure where this argument that "nationalists can only have temporary allies of convenience" actually is supposed to come from. Numerous western countries engaged in both nationalism and durable alliances spanning decades or even centuries; numerous Communist countries fought wars with fraternal socialist allies even in the short span of formal Communism.

Many communist countries were not actually particularly globalist (North Korea in particular, but also e.g. Albania; North Vietnam came out of a nationalist movement of colonial liberation that was just desperate for backers after the US sacrificed them for the sake of their European postwar order political project; I think Laos might even still forbid its citizens from marrying foreigners). On the other hand, what are actually your Western examples? I won't take mere decades as evidence of durability here, on historical clocks it should at least be 100 years to transcend the realm of suspected expedience. England and the US are, well, the same nation; I wouldn't consider German-Austrian alignment to be evidence that nationalists can trust other nations either. Proper nationalism has not even been around for that long (it is commonly taught as really taking off with the revolutions of 1848, though arguably the English and French both woke up to national consciousness earlier than that), and the whole story of Europe is that up until the Pax Americana the alliances were constantly shifting.

Many communist countries were not actually particularly globalist

Not sure where you're trying to get with these examples, he was not invoking the famous Soviet - North Korean war to prove his point.

It's not like he gave any examples of wars between Communist countries. The most obvious examples I am aware of all involved the China-Vietnam-Cambodia triangle, which I did cover with examples; I then added some more obviously nationalist communist countries because otherwise there would not be enough content.

Soviets sending their army to Czechoslovakia, or Stalin trying to off Tito multiple times, is what immediately comes to my mind.