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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   12461 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 21, 2026

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This is a great example of Scott's analogy of "whale cancer".

I mean, think about it. Cancer results from a series of mutations occurring by chance in a single cell. So over a given time period, the cancer rate of an organism should be proportional to the number of cells in that organism. If a whale is a thousand times bigger than a person, it should have a thousand times more cells and therefore get cancer a thousand times more often. Since humans have maybe a 1% per year cancer risk, whales should get ten cancers a year. But most whales live a long time and don’t die of cancer. Why not?

I don’t know which of the various proposed solutions to this puzzle is true but the most hilarious is no doubt Nagy, Victor and Cropper (2007). Whales are very big, so in order to threaten a whale, a cancer must also grow very big. In order to grow very big, a cancer must evolve a complicated internal structure determining which cells expand where and who’s going to secrete the factors necessary for blood vessels to grow and so on. Cancers can do that: even in humans, tumors develop impressive amounts of structure and cooperation among the cancerous cells inside of them. But as tumors grow bigger and more intricate, and cells have to spend more and more time altruistically working for the good of the tumor rather than just reproducing, some cells will inevitably defect from the plan and just divide uncontrollably. This ends up in an unhappy equilibrium. Whenever the balance swings too far toward defectors, the tumor can’t support itself and most of the cells die. Whenever the balance swings too far toward cooperators, the defectors have a big advantage again and start expanding. As a result, the tumor either remains at a fixed size or dies off completely. It might get a chance to metastasize, but the same will happen to its metastatic descendents.

Essentially the lesbian bar is full of people who hit the defect button as hard as they can. Forget careers, children, or doing anything useful for anyone. Their lives are all about validating their exceptionally niche and numerous neuroses, making other people bend over backwards to accommodate them.

I think we've all seen the damage these people can do to society. They hijack the natural sympathy we have towards victims, a consequence of our high trust society that took a millennium to build.

Fortunately, they find it difficult to coordinate amongst themselves to destroy society because they are so individually destructive that any organization full of these people will collapse into a circular shooting gallery.

Fortunately, they find it difficult to coordinate amongst themselves to destroy society because they are so individually destructive that any organization full of these people will collapse into a circular shooting gallery.

I agree that this is a weakness of Leftism, but I'm not sure I share your optimism that it's a fatal flaw. One possibility is that as the Leftist cancer grows, a charismatic and psychopathic leader will seize power semi-permanently. Someone who is Machiavellian enough to know that the next step is to clamp down and start sending members of his own party off to the gulag. Along with anyone else who threatens his rule.

So that at the next annual meeting of the Socialist Party, when someone interrupts with some point of privilege regarding land acknowledgments to gay and lesbian native Americans, that person is simply taken out and shot. No circular shooting gallery

In fact, I would argue that part of the reason Communist countries tend to be so repressive is that there's no other way to hold them together. The same process that led to the communist takeover can be expected to undermine and destroy it and the only way to stop this is through secret police, fake elections, prison camps for wrongthinkers, etc.

I do think that democracy might be something that was only viable during a short period of history, when the common people were educated enough to exercise the franchise but also retained enough masculine virtue to prioritize liberty and the enforcing the rule of law (what's the word that means the opposite of anarchotyranny).

I think we all can accept that democracy has failed in places like South Africa, and that they'd be better off with a dictator.

But Western countries might be in the same boat. If not now, then soon enough given demographic change. How are the people of England or Germany being served by democracy? Their countries are going to shit but the people don't want to "be mean" to actually fix the problems. They need a strongman to do it for them, then the sin won't fall on their own heads.

The problem of course with dictatorships is dictator selection, with the first one usually being a charismatic psychopath and successors being his failsons or geriatric party cadre members.

The problem of course with dictatorships is dictator selection, with the first one usually being a charismatic psychopath and successors being his failsons or geriatric party cadre members.

"It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried." -Churchill

Sure and it's also, "two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch". It's entirely reliant on there being lots of lambs, not too many wolves, and healthy protections for minority rights.

In any case, it's kind of a tautology that democractic countries do better. Because we simply redefine "democracy" to mean "a well-functioning democracy". The Soviet Union was a democracy on paper.

(what's the word that means the opposite of anarchotyranny)

Justice? Not sure if that's granular enough.

Re: democracy in general, I don't think any of the American Founding Fathers would disagree. In fact they'd be greatly disturbed that we're even talking in terms of democracy rather than republic, and were well-aware that universal suffrage would be a fatal mistake.

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