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I see absolutely no evidence to support any of this. Indeed, all I ever see people hold forth as possibilities are "plans" based on pure wishful thinking and optimism bias (and sometimes religious faith), none of which, at least to my perception, can possibly work.
And you were right to, and you shouldn't have let people dissuade you from it.
I don't think my "plan" of "prep to survive nuclear war so that you can clean up the mess afterward" counts as "optimism bias", except from a highly-mindkilled perspective. I mean, I've tried my best to get civil defence considered in policy despite it not being in my CW interest to do so.
Well, first, I'd note that the fall of (the western half of) the Roman Empire was a centuries-long process, not a sudden "Mad Max" collapse, and there's a lot of ruin in a nation. So, first, expecting a sudden end to the current system — like nuclear war — and for said sudden end to come in our own lifetimes are both rather optimistic. As is having enough left intact to make "cleaning up the mess" feasible. More likely is at least another century or two continuing the current trend of slow, grinding defeat, combined with slow decay increasingly held at bay by the consumption of the civilizational "seed-corn" that would be essential to rebuilding.
My point is that to think nuclear war is good because it mostly kills the Blue Tribe is Pol Pot logic; thus, to someone not highly-mindkilled, this is, if unrealistic at all, "pessimism bias".
The reason I think nuclear war is fairly likely has little to do with the CW except insofar as the CW is weakening the USA at a time when its hegemony is being tested (in particular Taiwan looks like a potential spark for WWIII).
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The future is already here - it's just not evenly distributed. A good analogy to watch is South Africa, which got a late start on multicultural technocracy but then speedran tribal spoils and the competency crisis well ahead of us. The analogy isn't perfect (and leans more heavily into ethnic conflict than I think a fair assessment of our predicament would), but by SA's timeline the USA and Europe aren't even close to a breaking point. But this does assume a closed system.
If you want to be more optimistic, you can imagine the situation is more like 1848, where the geopolitical order everywhere is being propped up by a few Metternichs, and if they lose power, all the creaky structures in the periphery will collapse all at once. Once the hegemony of one ideology falls, we enter a Warring States-like period and some pragmatic, ruthless Qin(s) (or Prussia if we hold to the analogy) will sweep up all the statelets running insane inefficient systems.
Of course, this Qin/Prussia probably won't be running a system you like. Just not our current one.
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If you want to get involved in something where you have a decent chance of scoring a win, I'd recommend the trans issue. There are actual structures there within which people can work to push things forward.
If you want a global all-encompassing win, like the progressives have, than you're going to be pretty unhappy for a long time.
The optimistic version is that "progressives" don't really have a culture that requires destroying in the same way that they've destroyed others. What are the things they get most excited about? Harry Potter, Drag shows, Star Wars, drugged-out criminals attacking people on the subway, girlboss gatekeeping hashtags, etc, all utterly vapid and ephemeral cultural artifacts seized on just to fill the void.
The entire "culture" might be summed up by the "I Solemnly Swear That I Will Resist" cake. It exists only for immediate consumption, is already being torn down as insufficiently radical down before it's even finished, and will have no lasting impact except embarrassment and a bit of extra fat.
If that was true, no fighting would be necessary. Once the ground shifted underneath them and their purity spiral was broken, leftists would just forget their causes in exactly the same way they forget e.g. their support for Stalin in the 50s, or all the crazy shit they said in 2020.
This is the Moldbug version of an American Reaction. I'm not overly optimistic about it, but it would be the nicest outcome. One of those G-rated zombie movie cartoons where a cure brings the zombies back to life.
That's why I used those examples. Nobody had to kill millions of American Stalinists, (or American Maoists) because those people didn't really believe the things they believed: they were just chanting the Current Thing, and stopped doing it the second they stopped getting positive reinforcement for it.
Granted, we probably should have purged many of the ringleaders rather than allowing them to re-infiltrate and subvert society, and ideally we will be more cautious about tying up loose ends next time.
But the bulk of #Resistance #More_Trans_Kids! Twitter will simply be turned off just like their bot accounts, and will soon have no memory of ever taking part in it.
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I can't see it, either. Indeed, our mental pictures of "a progressive culture war rout" are very similar. It's just that, barring some better path to victory, I find that to be a preferable outcome to the alternative.
Per my comment on how the Blue Tribe's hatred for the Red Tribe is a core part of their culture, the only way to keep my people safe from Blue Tribe's unceasing attempts to eradicate our culture is to eradicate the Blue Tribe as a culture first.
There's a regular commenter over at the Dreaded Jim's blog known as "The Cominator," whose standard position is that only one right-wing regime has ever gone far enough when it comes to purging the Left enough to make a lasting difference. I recently looked up the historical figures to put some numbers to The Cominator's proposals… and it pretty much lines up with the National Center for Education Statistics's figure for the total number of people employed by US postsecondary institutions. Throw in Democrat party politicians — a figure about a couple of orders of magnitude smaller — and it'll about match, proportional to population, the level's achieved by Cominator's exemplar.
Yes, and? Eradicating the "Blue Tribe" as a culture is the goal, and if that requires eliminating a lot of them physically, then so be it.
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You're describing the attitude of southerners towards yankees before reconstruction. One amusing thread in Colin Woodward's American Nations was the apparent universal revulsion of each USA regional culture toward the northeast puritan-descendants; everyone hated the yankees, everyone wanted to avoid being ruled by them. It's a powerful demonstration of how total conviction in one's cause beats virtually any other advantage: economic, strategic, or diplomatic. The Christians in the late classical period are another.
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Well, the thing I find sad is that in theory I don't think the conflict needs to be so high stakes. Federalism offers a framework where a whole bunch of tribes could live their lives according to their values, while working together towards a common goal. The 90's media were full of "diversity is our strength" morals where "diversity" was understood as something more than skin color or sexuality. It was portrayed as values which could and did lead to conflict, but didn't rule out cooperation, and would ultimately lead to strength through complementarity.
That option just doesn't seem like it's on the table anymore, which is, again, sad.
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