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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   22308 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 3, 2025

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I’m extremely averse to all of this and I’ll tell you why.

It’s been a common trope that once the generation who knows war firsthand dies out then the naive people left behind will get the itch and repeat the horrors again for a new generation.

And right on schedule, the WW2 generation has finally died out and we’ve now got all three major military powers talking about annexation of territories for the glory of it.

You’ll probably say, but we’d only do things peacefully! No way current MAGA would ever launch a war of conquest!

And that’s comforting for me to believe and it might even be true, but the problem is that you’ve all done away with the Overton window so thoroughly that I have no functioning means of predicting just how far outside of it things might go.

A few months ago it would have been crazy to suggest that Trump would ever talk about taking foreign territory. He’s the isolationist America first guy! A few days ago it would have been ridiculous to suggest that Trump would ever talk about taking over Gaza. Sure Greenland sounds cool but Gaza, but come on, that one is wild.

I’m getting tired, boss, and it’s because I no longer have any functioning mental model of just how far people who want to expand the Overton window want to go. And the direction that it seems to be getting pulled in is one that triggers my “these guys might be the type to fuck around and repeat the horrors” sense. Sure no one sets out to do that, but it’s easy to imagine us getting drawn slowly along a road bad road. Maybe not today, or tomorrow, but soon the window might get yanked back over there again.

It seems that no matter how crazy I think something might be, once it happens there’s masses of people who will come to argue for it and why it’s suddenly based, even if they wouldn’t have done so a week ago had I suggested the same idea.

Basically I don’t trust y’all with the window. I’ve graduated from my idealistic youth stage to now become conservative to slow down further changes to the Overton window until we can figure out what the hell is going on.

Opening the Overton window doesn't mean implementing every idea that flies in, it means we have a breadth of ideas that weren't previously accessible to us. That is precisely what has been killing us--an unassailable belief that nothing could be changed or fixed.

Anyway...

I do not want the US to be the only global power. I don't even necessarily want it to increase in size. I'm merely saying that the course we've been on since 2001 has been one of mass global suicide, partly because the heat death of the United States, post 9-11, guarantees chaos and war everywhere else on the planet. Until this month I was certain it was unavoidable. Now that very weird and unexpected things are being said, in public, by the president, I actually have a hope that we might change course.

For instance, try with all of your might to imagine a State of the Union address that doesn't begin with, "The state of the Union is strong!!!" and every dumbass congressperson rising to a standing ovation. It's performative disinformation top-to-bottom. What we have happening right now is another crack in the facade--one that was failing to hide our rotten core. Prior to Trump (and it should be said I never voted for him and am not a fan) our political class had no way to stop pretending. No way to be normal, rational or real. There is a game called "American politics" it consists of lying, laundering, lamenting and lambasting. The only time the public gets meaningful truth is by accident. The 2016 Republican primary debates laid this at our feet and the Biden/Trump debate burned it into our foreheads.

Gaza is another perfect case. The truth of the Palestinian plight is they lost all claim to their lands in 1948 by dint of being conquered militarily. Someone decided that instead of resettling them there'd be some kind of humanitarian compromise...or something. Well, the outcome of that "civilized" reaction is 80 years of misery and an increasingly intractable problem. Our modern Gordian knot. The only solution is to cut the knot. Curtis Yarvin Donald Trump is the first one to publicly acknowledge it. His prescription is probably wrong and his political capital such that he is unlikely to make it happen, but he's saying out loud what has been apparent for ages to anyone with a brain. Gaza as a paradise that might actually benefit Palestinians (as shareholders--not citizens) is now on the table.

This is consistent in regards to Panama, Greenland, Canada, Mexico--all places with decades long intractable economic and political problems that hinge almost entirely on the inability of politicians to deal with anything directly.

Here's another one that's coming: defaulting on our debt. Assume this will happen because the only thing that would prevent it from happening is actually Making America Great Again, i.e. rebuilding and re-centering our economy, taking the huge --and increasing-- financial hit that's waiting for us and ensuring we have a political class that serves the polity. If we default, we tank the global economy. Defaulting on our debt would be infinitely worse for Canada, Mexico, Europe, Saudi Arabia, Japan and even China than threatening them with tariffs. If it takes some economic saber rattling to wake people up so be it. We can't afford to be weak and we can't afford weak allies.

Anyway, I find all of this craziness refreshing and long needed. I've also been on this tip for 20 years; heterodox and contrarian to the max. Feel free to dump my opinions straight into the garbage, but I do reasonably well on Metaculus, so I can't be completely insane (that's my hope anyway). The levee was always going to break and frankly this is far more controlled and moderate than I imagined it would have been. The churning Earth--the tumult of the political class is like nothing I've seen in my life nor in my limited study of history since, maybe, FDR. People are bitching about how years are happening in weeks, but that's what it looks like when reality deferred asserts itself. I'm here for it.

That is precisely what has been killing us--an unassailable belief that nothing could be changed or fixed.

I think this is underappreciated, and I think this might genuinely be the very thing that tends to cause horrors like revolutions and the like: if the popular sentiment is that nothing can be changed, then it tends not to lead to anywhere great.

Policy Starvation.

The blackpill here is "the horrors must inevitably repeat, and nothing anyone does can change that," to borrow from Turchin's ideas.

I think that’s probably true and it’s some weird epiphenomenon of the human condition for whatever reason.

It doesn’t mean I’m going to cheer on the slide back into it.

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