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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   13431 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 12, 2026

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I'd like to contrast two opinions that were posted here a while back to hopefully make a larger point.

Below there are arguments from @Southkraut posted in this chain of discussion:

By the right wing in a political spectrum that has shifted so far left that even the most tepid immigration control measures are considered the extreme of permissible politics. I'm sorry, but no, this movement to the right in no way proves that the left is not in firm control. Their electoral setbacks are, in the greater scheme of things, temporary and minor, while their social and demographic victories are permanent and far-reaching. Yes they overreached, did too much too quickly and alienated voters that way, but the left needing to spend some time without control of this or that executive or legislative and seeing a small fraction of their accomplishments rolled back is not proof of the lasting ascendancy of the right.

Even if this should be the full awakening of the natives to their intentional replacement and the imminent grab for power of the right over all the governments of Europe and even the end of all immigration, the demographic damage is done. The left can afford to let go of the reins of states for a while, or maybe even altogether. It won't change the fate of the continent at this point.

Yes we currently have an upswing of right-wing sentiment as the leftist strangelhold on public discourse slackens, but that's because the leftists, in their time of triumph, overreached somewhat while already on the finishing line. But it's only a stumble; they can and most likely will recover, and if the footrace metaphor holds, then this stumble makes no difference because the right is crawling along far behind with its legs hacked off and bleeding out.

The left has already won. The takeover happened, and it held, and still holds. All public institutions all over Europe are firmly in the hands of leftist partisans. All the predominant narratives that public discourse rests on are shaped by leftist framing. And above all, greatest accomplishment and final victory of the left, demographics are a done deal. The natives are on an inescapable track towards becoming minorities in their own countries, and foreigners will become the majority in Europe within this century. There is no fixing this, and there is no suriviving it for the right.

And below is a comment by @MaiqTheTrue:

My thoughts are that this stems directly from their view of the world. To them America and the West are a dystopian nightmare.

White Guilt, and present militarism

In Liberal circles, white people, and particularly white Americans, are racist, militaristic, and colonial. They also perceive that none of it is changing even a little bit. We support Israel which is racist and genocidal, we hold down minorities, and enrich ourselves at the expense of the non-whites of the world. And they see it as nobody aside from them actually caring.

Environment

Liberals believe that Earth will be literally uninhabitable within their lifetime. The air will be choked with pollution, the rivers poisoned, global warming creating deserts and rain forests and making things too hot. Nobody wants to do enough to fix it, and quite often want to go in the other direction. They see that nobody aside from them cares.

Capitalism

The rich run the world for the rich and everyone else suffers. Poverty is common, and all the things that should be free are instead not free. College costs too much. Health care costs too much. And again, none of this is noticed by anyone else, so nothing will change.

Trump

You might not notice, but we elected Literally Hitler in November. He’s going to build work camps. He’s going to round people up and either imprison them or deport them. The Handmaid’s Tale is going to happen. Again, nobody notices or cares and worse, half the country likes it. Which proves that white people are evil.

All of this is a profoundly negative world view. Dystopian even. Everything is terrible, and at best going to stay terrible forever, and very likely to get worse. If this is how you really see the world, obviously that’s going to give you anxiety and depression, especially if you’re hanging around others who share this view, and have few or no outside interests.

As far as I'm concerned one can also add "Sexism" and "Social media" to that list. (We can certainly say, for example, that the Blue Tribe mainly blames supposedly harmful social media trends - basically the fatal lack of external censorship and repression - for Trump's election victories in 2016 and 2024 and for Brexit as well.) And as far as the anti-anti-Zionist liberals are concerned, their attitude towards anti-Semitism is the same. Either way, this summary does strike me as spot on. Whenever I encounter members of the Blue Tribe online or even offline it's undoubtedly this pessimistic, doomerist, resentful, even elegiac vibe I'm getting most of the time, especially from single women. And this seems to have been a cultural trend since Gamergate. In contrast, I think the victories of modern liberalism have mainly stemmed from its image of representing not an ideology but the consensus among cool and smart people promoting the vision of a better tomorrow, basically someone like your cool and cheerful wine-drinking, pot-smoking aunt/uncle. It was this vibe that helped them gain electoral victories as well and now this vibe is completely dead. Now we're at a point where the political parties in the EU representing Blue Tribe normies are basically campaigning with the message to having to fight yet another great Eastern European war in the very near future which is supposedly necessary to avert some even bigger disaster or something.

I'd argue that it's actually the profound pessimism of Blue Tribe messaging and its political consequences that Southkraut's pessimism is not taking into account.

I wonder if it will ever be possible again to get a proper, ideological-Turing-test-passing account of the Blue worldview on this website, because your quote from @MaiqTheTrue for sure is not. You depict a right-winger being dramatic over an essentially true development, and imagine lined up against him an array of left-wing delusions. How easy it would be, if only we could get our opponents to see reality! (Maybe they just need to go outside and touch some grass.)

The actual fundamental disconnect between Right and Left that your juxtaposition fails to capture is that both are driven by real urgencies based on their respective circles of concern, in a way that relief is mutually exclusive. Just zooming in on immigration concerns, the right-wing doomer view is essentially something like "are there no brakes on the replacement train at all? You already got like 20% Muslims or something in and we understand that in practical terms those 20% will never leave or decrease, why can't you even have so much grace as to pause and let us see the consequences?". In this lament, the left-wing doomer hears something like: "of all the people that are actively living and dying in misery at our hands as we speak, you have managed to save some. This horrifies us. Can't you at least take a break for a few years where you let them all die?". The Right watches in horror the irreversible ratchet of their nation being diluted; the Left watches the irreversible ratchet of lives being wasted.

Perhaps a comparison with abortion would be apt. Third-world immigrants are to right-wingers roughly as fetuses are to left-wingers. One sees a group they care about (natives/women) enslaved and oppressed for the benefit of some prop that has negligible moral value (uncivilised foreigners/lumps of cells). The other one sees uniquely vulnerable human beings who they have a special duty to protect (babies/victims of their ancestors' cupidity) being callously left to die for the comfort of the spoiled and morally reprehensible (slutty women/narrow-minded nativists). The right-wing perspective, to the Left, then winds up sounding about as monstrous as "you have already forced so many women to give birth unwillingly. Can't we at least take a break for a few years where we abort all/most of the pregnancies?"

The Right watches in horror the irreversible ratchet of their nation being diluted; the Left watches the irreversible ratchet of lives being wasted.

There's an obvious solution for this of course. If the resource on Western Goodness in certain territory is limited, we need to produce more Western Goodness in another territories, so that the lives could be saved there without being constrained by the limited supplies of a single country or small set of countries. But, of course, this obvious solution is considered the worst of all possible evils. That's where the symmetry breaks - the Left doesn't just want to save the lives, they want to save the lives in a way that would precisely replicate the conditions which made it necessary for the lives to be saved in the first place! If we take your abortion analogy, it's be as if the pro-lifers would insist on the act of birth never ever happening - while the life of the fetus is sacred, it can never be born and become a full-responsible human. Imagine there was a technical way to prolong the pregnancy indefinitely - and imagine pro-life movement that would insist on banning both abortions and births.

Right, I find it quite tragic myself that the taboo against colonialism gets in the way of that solution. Even if we have an issue with perpetually ruling over the minorities as second-class citizens, a scheme like building one colony at the source of migration and being ready to hand it over to the locals if a majority asks, to then start a new one, would probably not leave anyone disenfranchised for longer than they are if they come here and go through the normal citizenship process.

The problem is also that leftists don't want to make any concessions to those who think certain classes of immigrants might be anything but good for the main country, while rightists don't want to make any concessions to the idea that state coffers should be used for the benefit of foreigners at all. So, even though enterprising private individuals would in principle be well-placed to show viability, the only charter cities we get are business bro drug dens rather than uplift projects.

(I really think that a pure charity-colony would be a fantastic thing. Offer some country like Ghana the following deal: they will hand you(r NGO) a sliver of coastal land. You may rule it dictatorially, and treat it as a sovereign fiefdom, including the right to point weapons at the host if they aggress against you. You may freely let any subset of the host's population immigrate. The only stipulations are that once a year, you run a plebiscite of all adults on your territory, and if more than half vote to that effect, the territory immediately reverts to the host; and that it also does so if your population ever falls below some threshold. To discourage secessionist/country-building aspirations, you also may not extend the franchise to any natives. Make it clear that their only way to "graduate" and earn self-determination is to return to the donor country.)

That is very similar to what charter cities are trying to do I think. Except that not having the backing from someone with massive military and balls to use it, it is very vulnerable to plunder at the first sign of producing any value that can be plundered. Or even without it, just by virtue of being an example that things can be done differently it's an irritant to local powers that would have it destroyed just out of spite.

I did mention those. Is it a problem, though, if the city gets plundered, if you are just running it for the benefit of the host nation with the intent to eventually hand it over to them anyway? If they have the most basic sense of what's good for them, they will at least let you develop it for some time before plundering it, which gives you some years to (right-wing view) educate the natives in your image or (left-wing view) let the natives benefit from safety, money and good governance, and moreover if they have the sense they will let you start a new one after plundering the old one. If you don't value the third-worlders, in your eyes this will be throwing the same money down the drain regardless of whether the city is reverted peacefully, operated by you in perpetuity, plundered/captured forcefully, or you let the same people move to your own country to feed/clothe/police them here instead, with the added benefit that unlike in the last option, they do not wind up in your country, and perhaps even that you are making some infinitesimal progress towards making the humans you have to share the planet with better. If you do value them, you are still spending the same resources on them, and in addition are actually improving things in their home countries rather than simply draining them of everyone capable of leaving.

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