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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

We write with the language we have, not the one we wish we'd thought up.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

Yeschad.jpg

If you look at the nature of the thing and not the political rhetoric, fascism and communism are more similar than different. If they were materially different, it would be obvious which Orwell's Oceania is. The whole point of Nineteen eighty-four is that it isn't.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

but it wasn't going to be captivated by communist agitators any time soon.

While I agree with you that the US is not actually in danger of imminent capture by communist agitators, a key part of the MAGA worldview is that the Democratic Party, Ivy League, mainstream media, FAANG middle management etc. already have been captured by communist agitators, and that the threat of said communist agitators consolidating power and imposing the Glorious Bugpod Future is an emergency that justifies tearing up the rulebook.

If "Drives support from small-c conservatives by exaggerating the threat of Communism" is a warning sign of fascism (and I think it is, though it is a long way from being pathognomic), then it is one of the warning signs that MAGA triggers.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

It should have been (and in some ways was!) the scandal of the century. All the more reason such mistake (giving a US president an entirely premature Nobel peace prize) shouldn't be repeated.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

The vast majority of political domestic terrorists in democracies are regionalist movements - normally full-on secessionists (like the IRA, ETA, and Tamil Tigers) but occasionally groups demanding a level of autonomy that would require the central government and its voter base to compromise their principles (like the first Klan and later the Redeemers in the former Confederacy).

Most such groups think that they have supermajority support among "their people" - they may even be right - but are aware that they don't have majority support or anything close to it in the country as a whole.

I think the same paradigm applies to the Black Panthers, Nation of Islam, and other radical Black groups in the US - the only reason that they aren't secessionist is the absence of a defined territory to secede in.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

If you truly believe you are living in a fascist country, or that fascism is a serious possibility in the near future, then you should obviously not take up arms. You should either keep your head down or flee.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

Such as JD Vance, whose only comment is to call it "pearl clutching"

He's got a good finger on the pulse. If you had the same access to 'Young Democrats' or whatever it is on a college campus, you could 'both sides' this pretty quickly. Edgy backroom shit-talking isn't the same as public mass incitement to violence.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

Now I have to disagree with our vice president here, I don't think it is pearl clutching to oppose support of Hitler.

I probably should write something more elaborate, in the spirit of cjet's post, but I'm sorry I cant be arsed to take any of this seriously anymore. I believe all this is, in fact, pearl clutching, that there is no actual moral outrage expressed by people trying to make a mountain of this particular molehill, and it's just a cynical attempt to make the outgroup jump through the ingroup hoops.

I refuse, and I will need material evidence that anyone is actually bothered by any if this, before addressing it seriously.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

All good points.

I skipped over the economic angle and indeed fascist economics is significant, it's all about advancing national interests rather than pure marketism or collectivism as you say. I think the key element is the demographic part though, fascism isn't about making the country rich but about making the people strong and populous too, Mussolini had his 'Battle for Births' and as usual, the Nazis and Japan did a better job at it with their pro-natal campaigns.

While Italy wasn't terribly racist by Axis standards, they did heavily suppress Libya and went in very hard against Ethiopia with gas and such. But it's hard to be that racist if you can't actually conquer very much. They wanted to resettle Italians to Libya and Ethiopia and parts of Dalmatia but didn't get around to it with wartime difficulties.

The People's Republic of China shares fascism's characteristic of binding capitalists, workers, intellectuals and so on under an extremely powerful and nationalistic government

Yeah China's an odd one, they've got the economics but not the foreign posture. Rhetorically, diplomatically, they're still third-worldist and anti-imperialist.

Friday Fun Thread for October 10, 2025

I'm not a doctor but isn't it true with repeated pokes it gets harder and harder to hit the veins on the same site? Like maybe she was also doing needles before?

Tinker Tuesday for October 14, 2025

I have not, I'll look into it, thanks for the recommendation.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

Top level comment is filtered.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

This is in fact lame

I know discord chats. I know signal chatrooms. I know locker room joking. I can't help but roll my eyes at this, and I probably agree with Vance the most that it is Pearl Clutching. I'd also agree with Hanania that for a private group chat this is tame (and I'd go further and say that it is in fact kind of lame for how tame it is).

There are public spaces and there are private spaces. In public spaces you should expect hostile audiences and for people to take your words seriously. You better say what you mean and mean what you say, because you be held to account. In private spaces ... well we aren't actually robots capable of perfect emotional control all the time. Sometimes you want to blow off steam, or say ridiculous things you don't mean, or exaggerate for a joke. Or god forbid, the worst of all, have a friendly audience reading and interpreting your thoughts.

I understand trying to use whatever ammo you get against your political opponents. I just can't imagine any scenario where I'd condemn my political allies for this kind of leaked chat group. Especially one with younger professionals. God forbid I ever get judged for the things I have said in private spaces.

Making friends 101

I've had a mostly tame internet life because around 2009 I started considering everything I typed and wrote online to be public, even when written under a pseudonym. I try to write things that I am willing to attach to my name and identity. I do not have the same rules for spoken conversation or private group messaging. If you have not said things in private conversations that would get you pilloried and lampooned in public then I would submit that you have no real friends. Its a trust exercise. Say heinous crap, get a laugh, then they say heinous crap back. Or if its not funny, you still say heinous crap back because its a sign of trust in a society where certain opinions can get you "cancelled". Even if its your real opinion and your real opinion sucks and I hate it and think its evil, I can signal that I'm a real friend by being like "ok im not gonna hold that shit opinion against you".

And why the hell am I explaining all of this? Is everyone else just pretending this is not how the world works while we put on a public facade of 'oh yes this is so terrible, how could anyone ever say this'? Or is it genuinely secret knowledge to people about how to make friends and socialize? If its the former, drop it, we don't need to lie about the world here. If its the latter ... I'm sorry I don't mean to be harsh. But try something for me ... go nurse some beers at a bar. Try and find a lonely guy to talk with. One hour into the conversation start making it clear that you are something absolutely reprehensible. A nazi, a closet racist, a former criminal, etc. As long as it is not something directly antagonistic to the guy you are speaking with (can't be a racist to a black guy, that is hard mode and you can try it next time) they will mostly shrug it off and proceed to tell you something equally reprehensible about themselves. It can sometimes accidentally turn into a one-upmanship of "im the worst human ever". I was drunk enough to type up an example of what me and one of my friends do in the "worst human ever" one-upmanship game. But that violates my other rule of treating this like a public space.

As always I can test my acceptance of this by how I'd respond to people of different viewpoints saying this shit. And I remember "oh yeah I lived with a guy who was kinda communist". He definitely joked that me and my libertarian self would be one of the first ones up against the wall when the revolution came. I have another person I knew that is now a mayor in a small Pennsylvania town. I have video of him petting an endangered species (manatee), and saying the n-word just to get a rise out of another person on the trip we were on (I might have that on video as well). I like him more for having done those things. But I actually strongly dislike the guy. If he had not done those things in front of me, but I had evidence of him doing it, I'd probably happilly release those things.

Someone failed the trust test, or just didn't want to be a part of it all anyways. All the people that got caught saying heinous shit should resign, but mostly because they failed in the judgement test between a private and public space. Probably one of the most important social skills to have if you are a politician. This whole incident says little else.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

Well, life originated on earth about 4 billion years ago. Between that time and now, qualia has slowly come into existence. Emotions, consciousness, subjective taste, ego, and other such things. I also have reasons to believe that individuality and higher levels of consciousness are somewhat recent (say, developed over the past 5000 years). But more generally, what I'm claiming is "In a completely material universe, qualia emerged due to some unknown factors, and now it seems that these factors might be disappearing again".

Why would it outcompete an equivalent setup

It must have, otherwise it wouldn't exist. The reasoning I'm using is the same that Darwin used, survival of the fittest is a tautology in a sense. If consciousness resulted in a lower fitness, I believe it must necessarily have disappeared. Another fun fact we can deduce from this is that suffering is good (useful), and that deeming suffering to be bad (a problem) is useful as well. So, suffering is good but we're meant to think that it's not.

Some more arguments for why qualia might disappear:

What you learn in school is to be less human, less spontaneous, less biased, less subjective. The socialization process is basically destroying parts of yourself until you fit within the mold. The goal of most religions is suppressing parts of yourself (Buddhism takes this idea the furthestm though). The system just wants you to be useful and productive, and you're judged by your utility alone. In society we value fairness, impartiality, reason, level-headedness, stoicism and other behaviour at which robots happen to be perfect because they lack qualia. Most psychiatry and medicine works by numbing qualia. Most psychological defense mechanisms have the goal of numbing qualia. Most people life in constant distraction (escapism) and hate being alone with themselves. Most philosophies are designed around lowering qualia, bringing it towards zero: "This too shall pass", "Nothing really matters". It's all dead-mans morality, minimization of the human experience, a sort of suicide and glorification thereof.

The remaining aspects are collapsing into categories of superstimuli (porn, girlfriend ASMR videos, power-fantasy manga, slice-of-life manga, gambling, spices, reaction videos, fast food, massage, roleplaying, daydreaming) and serve as drugs to satiate or numb a category of human needs.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

Those are exactly the same things that, for instance, conservatives seek to obtain. Does that make conservatism a form of Marxism?

There is a sense in which feminism, among other priorities, seeks to redistribute various goods in society towards women, on the premise that the current distribution favours men in a way that is both unequal and unjust. But to say that that shows some connection to Marxism obviously proves too much.

I agree, but you'll notice that the comment I was responding to didn't say "Not all redistribution is Marxism." It said "What is feminism redistributing? Reproduction? Family? Male attention? Social status?", implying that it's ridiculous to say feminism redistributes anything material, or worse that the opposition to feminism stems from a desire to force them to reproduce. The implication itself would have been bad enough, but the immediate change of the argument upon the slightest amount of questioning is even worse.

Any movement advocating any action whatsoever is going to demand some kind of redistribution, because action is inherently redistributive - action requires resources, and resources need to be distributed from somewhere.

You're the one proving too much. Even within feminism, there were postulates that didn't require redistribution, like lifting restrictions on access to bank accounts, various trades, or property.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

One thought that has just now come to me - how realistic would you consider it to unify only peaceful settlements of west bank palestinians into the israeli state? I've heard relatively little about west bank terrorism during the last war, and Hamas is not nearly as strong there, so there should be a decent number.

My pro-palestinian left-wing friends/acquintances think that the only solution to the current situation is one-state, with full legal rights to all palestinians. According to them, the palestinian hatred is purely due to the oppression suffered by the Israeli, and the violence will vanish if they are granted full rights. To me, that is pure insanity - at the very least Hamas has always been very clear that they want to throw out or subjugate the jews, they enjoy broad support by the palestinian populace and obviously they are the de-facto ruling party. The most likely outcome of unification is Hamas ruling all of Israel/Palestina, with the obvious repercussion for the jews.

But this doesn't apply if you only give rights to certain communities that have been peaceful, and would send a strong signal - peace, and you can become a citizen, terrorism, and you get to live among debris. Though, I guess the left would just frame it as evil annexation, so there's that.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

I'll never forgive Eco for managing to establish his "definition" as the one every midwit on Reddit reflexively reaches for, simply by the virtue of being a fancy writer of the worst mental masturbatory kind.

It's not completely bad, but something like "a progressivist ideology aimed at a complete rebuilding of society that tries to capture the discontent of the dispossessed masses and wears a reactionary façade to appease the elites and the middle class" is a much better one, in my opinion. However, this means that Fascism 1.0, as created by the Mussolini, is only possible in an industrialized state undergoing a demographic transition, where you have a massive restless working class.

The US is nothing like that. It's a post-industrial country that does have some restless working class, but it wasn't going to be captivated by communist agitators any time soon.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

You shouldn't take Eco's definitions for anything at face value. Half his point apply to commies as well.

Tinker Tuesday for October 14, 2025

You could try libtcod (python 3), which I found on /r/roguelikedev. It sounds like it matches what you're doing.

Tinker Tuesday for October 14, 2025

have you tried using OCRmyPDF or Abbyy FineReader to do the first conversion? And then do the editing in docx/html.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 6, 2025

You mean like a critique of Marxism as "the communists took the Christian idea of heaven and tried to make it a reality on Earth, which thus failed terribly?"

Critiques like that of Marxism are a subset of the anthropological phenomenon Girard is describing. Girard's point isn't limited to a single political ideology. It's a critique of the entire modern mindset, and the desire to 'build a better world' on the back of a designated enemy. He saw this pattern repeating everywhere, from the French Revolution to modern social justice movements. The Antichrist is the principle that weaponizes compassion for victims to create an engine of perpetual conflict. It's a critique of secular humanism and its endless quest for new victims and new oppressors, a quest which leads to a permanent state of social conflict - the 'chaos marketed as order' I mentioned.

Personally, I found it always rich that a religious institution which had been a steadfast ally of the ruling classes for most of its existence thought it had any moral standing to criticize people

Then you don't understand religion. A religious institution without a belief in its moral standing is a social club. A religious institution derives its morality from divine authority. You are judging it on criteria it doesn't care about, you can't then be flummoxed that it doesn't care about your judgement.

I am still unsure what point you think Thiel is making when he speculates about Greta Thunberg being the antichrist, and if it is a purely theological point (which might be beyond an atheist such as myself) or a sociological point dressed in the language of Christianity. From the "secular perversion of Christian ideals" angle, I would imagine something like "Friday For Future takes the Christian ideal of humans being good stewards of creation and strips it from its Christian roots." But without the basis of Christianity, this idea becomes unsound?

Thunberg is a shibboleth. She is just a good representative of the secular doomsday cult, she's a child prophet.

Regarding Stewardship you are missing the point entirely, deliberately it seems? Or was that Marxist line literally all the thought you put into understanding Girard's thesis? The idea doesn't become unsound, it becomes dangerous. We don't understand all the ways certain sociological concepts interact, which ones affect which. Compassion is good, but decoupled from religion, from a framework of original sin, grace, transcendence, and forgiveness, it turns suicidal. It gets coopted by grifters, narcissists, psychopaths. Perhaps that is what Thiel is doing! If it is, it would have been a lot harder to figure out without Girard's Antichrist.

It is my firm belief that human virtue significantly predates any religion known today, and that Christianity has no intellectual property rights on caring about the natural world (FFF) or trying to alleviate the suffering on Earth (EA) or equality (SJ) or trying to avoid bad consequences of technology-driven change (AI safety).

Do you similarly believe Christianity has no ip rights on the development of everything you just mentioned? Because I see a pretty direct (straightforwardly direct in the case of social justice) through line from Christianity to them. They aren't just virtuous, they are virtuous according to the tenets of Christianity and built on a bedrock of assumptions that most other cultures in history found bizarre.

I agree that there is something wrong with the world, actually. Personally I would mention negative externalities (the driving force of both climate change and AI x-risk) first and foremost. Then there is the increasing spread between capital and income, and the related rise of real estate prices, global poverty, and an increase of anti-liberal patterns both on the left and on the right, the related demolition of the concept of truth, social media induced loneliness, a military conflict in Europe and the total clusterfuck of the Middle East, to mention but a few. Interestingly enough, a lot of these are things in which Thiel is either in the position to alleviate the problem and does not or in which he is actively profiting from being part of the problem.

What are you arguing now? That Thiel sees different problems to you? Actually most of those things, I'm pretty sure, Thiel would argue are symptoms of... You guessed it, the Antichrist. In the Girard sense. Dismissing his position as 'deliberately obfuscated' would carry more weight if you hadn't already admitted you have no idea what Girard said or any interest in finding out.

The entire point is that the quasi-religious framework he's using explains the rise of things like the 'demolition of truth' and the 'anti liberal patterns' you mentioned. And that by tying the religious and secular conceptions of the Antichrist together Thiel provides a way two disparate groups he belongs to - Christians who believe the bible is true if not necessarily 100% accurate and tech bros - can share culture.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

From what I understand, Mussolini's fascism wasn't particularly racist by the standards of the time, at least not until his Italy had become utterly dependent on Nazi Germany during the war and he gave Hitler some racist policies as a concession.

I'm very far from an expert on Italian fascism, but to the extent that I know anything about it, to me it seems characterized by being a strongly collectivist nationalist ideology that is both a response to and a rejection of both capitalism and communism. This is reflected in Mussolini's own path of having been a socialist when younger, then turning away from mainstream socialism because he disliked its internationalism and was more interested in making Italy great again.

Perhaps the core concept of Italian fascism was the idea of using an extremely powerful nationalist state to overcome the conflict between capitalists and workers and forge both together into dynamic collaboration that could revitalize the nation without the total class upheaval or internationalism pursued by mainstream socialism.

Hitler pursued the same concept, and in that sense Nazi Germany was a fascist state. Both Mussolini's and Hitler's ideal was that the fascist party would become completely dominant over society and subordinate all other power groups - churches, capitalists, labor movements, intellectuals, etc. - to its own will. There could still be churches, capitalists, labor movements, and intellectuals, but they would be ruled by the party/the government (one and the same thing, in the fascist ideal). Any disagreements between those groups would be mediated by the government for the greater good of the nation, and the individual interests of the groups would not be allowed to interfere with the greater goal of making the nation strong.

The key ideological difference between fascism and Bolshevism was that fascism did not seek to do away with capitalism, only to utterly subordinate it to the government, and that fascism was explicitly nationalistic in a way that Bolshevism (while it often pursued nationalistic goals in practice) rejected thoroughly on the level of ideology.

Unlike traditionalist conservatism, fascism was also profoundly revolutionary in its ethos. It did not seek to conserve existing mentalities except to the degree that they would be pragmatically useful, it did not seek to return to a pre-modern way of being, it had little use for religion other than for pragmatic reasons, and it had no issues with technological progress. Like communism, it sought to create a new kind of man. It had totalizing ambitions. In the ideal fascist future, there would be no distinction between individuals, the party, and the state. In this perhaps it was influenced by the recent experience of total military mobilization during World War One. The fascist state perhaps sought a similar, but perpetual mobilization of all society in the service of the one goal of national strength, even in peacetime.

Another key characteristic of fascism was that it explicitly glorified struggle and conflict as a means of both spiritual and material renewal. Fascism considered peace to be a lower state of being and believed that man could only fully fulfill his potential in combat, whether literal or metaphorical. This is another key difference between fascism and communism. The professed ideal of communism was to bring about a new society in which class warfare had been overcome for the people's benefit. Communism glorified being a warrior for the sake of the cause, but the image of the ideal society that communism sold to people as its ultimate goal was a peaceful one. Fascism, on the other hand, considered war in itself to be a good thing, something that elevated and spiritually purified human beings. Communism, on the ideological level, claimed to seek to overcome social Darwinism. Fascism, on the other hand, considered social Darwinism to be inherently good - it just sought to reduce or at least master social Darwinism within the nation, in order to become better at social Darwinism in competition between nations.

There are various powerful political entities today that share some aspects of fascism, but none that I can think of really have the whole package.

The People's Republic of China shares fascism's characteristic of binding capitalists, workers, intellectuals and so on under an extremely powerful and nationalistic government that manages their conflicts for the supposed greater good. However, in its current form it does not actually have (although it might claim that it does) fascism's profoundly revolutionary ethos.

Trumpism also, to a much much lesser extent, shares the idea of binding capitalists, workers, intellectuals and so on under a strong nationalistic government that manages their conflicts for the supposed greater good and rejects both pure profit-seeking capitalism and the social upheaval of communism. Hence the ethos of right-wing populism, the tariffs, and so on. However, while Trumpism might in practice to some extent be collectivist, it does not explicitly glorify collectivism - on the contrary, no matter how collectivist some of its policies might be in practice, on the level of ideology (that is, on the level of the image that it seeks to convey) it actually glorifies individualism, or supposed individualism, and it glorifies small government no matter how much Trumpism in practice might actually strengthen the government. On the level of ideology, Trumpism promises to free society from the excesses of the left, not to subordinate individuals to an all-powerful state. The music of Trumpism also has strong notes of a desire to return to a supposedly better past. In this it differs from fascism. Fascism sought to make Italy great again, but just in the geopolitical, nationalist, and martial sense. In other words, it was nostalgic for the Roman Empire's martial ethos and geopolitical strength but as far as I know it did not want to return Italy to the social conditions of the Roman Empire, except insofar as the Roman Empire reflected its own goals of social strata united under a powerful state. Also, unlike fascism, Trumpism does not glorify endless combat and struggle. Trumpism instead claims that, with the problems caused by the left eliminated, society will just be nice and hunky-dory.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

Freud was a much bigger influence. But, a quote from him, to highlight the issues with the genealogical approach:

The Communists believe they have found a way of delivering us from this evil. Man is wholeheartedly good and friendly to his neighbour, they say, but the system of private property has corrupted his nature... psychologically [communism] is rounded on an untenable illusion. By abolishing private property one deprives the human love of aggression of one of its instruments, a strong one undoubtedly, but assuredly not the strongest. It in no way alters the individual differences in power and influence which are turned by aggressiveness to its own use, nor does it change the nature of the instinct in any way. This instinct did not arise as the result of property; it reigned almost supreme in primitive times when possessions were still extremely scanty; it shows itself already in the nursery when possessions have hardly grown out of their original anal shape; it is at the bottom of all the relations of affection and love between human beings.

Freud was a classical liberal in his politics. But we can draw a very clear line from his thought to the Frankfurt School. Can we then conclude that the Frankfurt School was anti-socialist? No; the existence of a genealogical relationship is interesting and often a useful lens to view things through, but to stop there without looking into the content of the theories can lead to very wrong conclusions.

Tinker Tuesday for October 14, 2025

GameMaker was good enough for Hotline Miami, so you could try it. If you're married to Python, you're stuck, as there aren't that many Python game engines that have enough plugins for you to skip the boring stuff.

Tinker Tuesday for October 14, 2025

I have to second this. Godot, for all that it infuriates me because it doesn't suit my very specific use-case, is actually a really good starter game-engine. It's lightweight, easy to use, and contains all the essential bits and bobs.