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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 4, 2024

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The most infuriating thing to be told to "touch grass" by people whose fake email jobs seem to let them do nothing but sneer at people online. I spend almost all my time just trying to stay afloat, and don't really even have time to be doing this. I found out about that grant while driving from one job to another, noticing the obscene spending she was doing with no visible income and googling her on my phone.

There are so many things I see every day that someone needs to talk about, but I don't have time and the people who do usually seem to be actively hostile to anyone noticing it. Some evenings I come home and write a few hundred or a thousand words just trying to get across how horribly fucked things are, and then delete it after coming on here and seeing that people had already discussed it in the usual way: "this is happening", "no it isn't, and also it's good", repeat until everyone forgets about it.

Well I don't know about others, but I'm not hostile about anyone noticing it, I just think that an "everything is broken, everything is getting worse" perspective is irrational. Some things are getting worse, some things are getting better. There are many reasons for optimism if you just look for them. And we are, in the US, currently very distant from a top-tier shithole situation like living in Nazi Germany, Stalin's Soviet Union, Pol Pot's Cambodia, or North Korea.

some things are getting better

Like what?

It sounds like you're not even rebutting Tyre's claims? He didn't say everything is broken or getting worse.

I agree that the modern West isn't currently as bad as Pol Pot's Cambodia. But the point is that something like that is always a possibility, and there are reasons to believe we might eventually head in that direction.