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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 5, 2024

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That poem is reflecting the elite/prole equilibrium in a high-trust, high-cohesiveness, homogenous society with decent state capacity, to name a few of the variables that no longer obtain. Applying it to societies with enough trust that credit cards work is unwise.

One thing to note is that the british officer class did/does have a sense of noblesse obligee, with higher casualty rates in officers than in men for WW1 and WW2, and even now I hear less grousing from tommies about their officers than other countries (to be fair I haven't spoken to infantry for a decade, so I might be missing something there). Again, the homogenous culture of US and UK militarIES has a flattening effect, and the british especially seemed to reserve racialized denigration of their soldiers to dismissal of foreign levies especially the sepoys/rajputs (though Gurkhas and sikhs enjoy consistent appreciation among British commanders). Modern western societies are fractured enough for this to largely no longer hold, and frankly we saw the first iteration of this crack during Vietnam where an unfit officer class rushed through low quality command school earned the ire of black and white grunts alike.