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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 17, 2024

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Can I ask you to try reading some right wing literature from the late 80s, early 90s? They were also convinced that things couldn't keep getting worse and more degenerate, and that a glorious revolution would happen soon.

They were wrong.

I'm always up for reading, but I did in fact read a fair amount of 80s and 90s right-wing literature in the 90s themselves. I remember quite well the triumphalism of Bush's election in 2000, and the bellicose swagger post-9/11, and how it all went straight to shit in short order, because I lived through it directly. I'm aware of the intellectual failings of Conservatism as a movement, and to the extent that I hope for political solutions at all, those hopes are not based on what is commonly understood by the term "Conservatism". Also, I am neither expecting nor predicting a "Glorious Revolution".

One of our first conversations was about whether you would push a certain button. You said you would, because you wish that button existed. I would not, because I know that button exists, and further that, in a manner of speaking, a small but steadily-increasing number of those buttons gets mailed out to random addresses every day. Against all expectations, I'm hoping that things will somehow calm down before someone decides to press one of them, but if things don't calm down a press seems inevitable. And in the end, I'm okay with that; as a matter of personal inclination, I much prefer this flag to this one.