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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 20, 2025

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It's impossible to understand where Parvini is coming from if you don't know his meta political position.

The swaths of successes of the right right now and the enthusiasm we see isn't a victory in his eyes because it's just a trick by the elite to pivot the system back to more liberal leanings with Trump.

Parvini is a true radical who wants the system and the established elite gone, so he's long bet that Trump's return would herald "the woke being put away" and "back to fresh prince".

This article is him complaining that this process he was railing against is proceeding as he had foreseen and the whole of the right is stupidly falling for it.

People are still basking in the glow of symbolic wins so him taking the position that nothing ever happens and demanding people stop falling for every piece of meat thrown at them by Musk is controversial.

I think it's too early to tell if any of this is right. Trump will run into the wall of the deep state at some point and we'll see if he can maneuver better than he did last time. But he may be more successful than sad elitist doomer AA give him credit for.

In any case the criticism of stupidly falling for whatever is popular instead of building strategic discipline is I think legitimate. And always unpopular with radical youths who care more about excitement than victory.

Cthulhu has been swimming left, to borrow the Nrx term, for centuries, probably since the renaissance. Why a prosperous modern America where most people live better lives than almost all other humans to have ever lived would suddenly be THE civilization to reverse that is unclear.

If Trump and his advisers (Miller, Rufo etc) succeed beyond their wildest dreams we’re going back to like 1990s colorblindness with some 2010s woke characteristics (e.g. hard to see gay rights reversal when Bessent is married to a man etc). Probably not even that.

A fertility crisis would be a black swan event that could cause a reversal. The bubonic plague had a pretty big impact on labor value and social order, and that was only a 30% population reduction.

Uh, only among orientals(and not all of them) does 30% population reduction on a noticeable timeframe look likely at all.

On the other hand, the fall of the Soviet Union.

IMHO Cthulhu swimming left is an oversimplification, especially given the general vagueness of the term "left". But accepting the premise, I'd say that the end of the Soviet Union doesn't necessarily contradict the overall trend so much as it highlights how utterly dysfunctional that particular implementation of leftism was. Functioning Socialism has never been tried!

In my view, Cthulhu swims towards concentrating and increasing power. Where leftism helps that goal, leftism it is. Where leftism sabotages itself so badly that it no longer helps the growth of concentrated power, Cthulhu sidesteps.

It's going to be circular reasoning from here on out, but what other kind is there. The transition from feudalism and monarchism to liberal, democratic capitalism was not because Cthulhu actually hates concentrating power, but because feudal societies were less efficient at generating power overall. This temporary liberalisation and individualization unleashed a great deal of economic and technological power, and Cthulhu is slowly working towards getting all that under control. Relent for a few centuries so that you can reap a greater bounty once the technology including social technology is far enough along to put all that power under the control of a more centralized will, again.

And the soviet union, like the dictatorships of the mid-20th century, was just plain bad tech. It was bad social technology. It didn't work well enough at generating power, even if it was better than its competitors and centralizing and controlling it, at face value. Cthulhu found out that reining in the individual via deracination, atomization and technological uniformization while maintaining just enough individualist liberty to keep up appearances allows him to extract far more power from them than from an overt collectivization.

I think this is close, but what Cthulhu wants is power without accountability. The biggest problem with feudalism was that the ruled classes knew who had power and if that power didn’t produce a good life for them, it was simply a matter of removing those bad rulers and putting someone better in charge. With modern administrations, the real power sits in agencies where the official government requires an agency to exist and follow procedures but the agency has the power to rule, the official government is there mostly as a whipping boy. You can rage against your elected representatives all you want, Cthulhu is happy enough to let you do so, because those guys are not Cthulhu. And that lack of accountability means longevity for Cthulhu, so long as the people don’t completely upend society or some outside force doesn’t overthrow it.

…represented an economic and political transition more than a root-and-branch cultural one of the type many DR X posters want.

On the other hand the Stan’s and Azerbaijan seem to have seen an actual cultural transition. Granted the DR does not want to live in Uzbekistan but, you know- Uzbekistan Azerbaijan and Galicia are examples of their ideological transformation.

Galicia?

Western Ukraine- the part that voted for svoboda, provides the lions share of Ukrainian nationalism, has a TFR of 2, and is currently banning its ethnic rivals in Ukraine(including both their language and religion).

Same brilliant gang of thinkers who thought they could succeed where Hitler and Napoleon failed and beat Russia on their home turf?

It's going very,very well for them.

They have achieved their cultural revival. They’re losing territory for it, but they got their cultural goals- and Galicia will almost certainly be the dominant portion of a post war Ukraine.

Ohhh, I was very confused as to what was supposed to be happening to the northern Spanish province that limits with Portugal.

There’s actually a lot of Galicias out there; it means ‘land of the celts’ and is a tell tale for having been in the borderlands of a Latin Catholic empire(which western Ukraine is- it was part of Austria-Hungary and this is the reason for the dominance of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, which enforces the region’s conservatism). If you’ve heard of parts of Ukraine that were part of Poland before WWII this is the part that’s being talked about.

Parvini is a true radical who wants the system and the established elite gone, so he's long bet that Trump's return would herald "the woke being put away" and "back to fresh prince".

This is the crux of it. “The regime” acting sane and governing well (or at least incrementally better) is actually an L because governing well is better for the regime in the long run and helps maintain its stability. He would probably insist the regime wanted Caesar and Pompey was a jobber.

governing well seems to be a W for everyone who has to actually live under the regime and maybe the best we can hope for. i guess revolutionaries and accelerationists want to turn everything to shit so they can create their utopias but i feel like decent governance can inspire more decent governance.

Well it depends how much you trust the existing elite to do right by you. Parvini is in the "we must remove them by any means necessary" camp at this point, and I don't think it's as unreasonable as it sounds if you consider their ultimate ends to be evil.