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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 24, 2025

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I think if the system is fundamentally broken, you need to take radical action to fix it. And I don’t think anyone sane can look at the old status quo and say “it’s fine, actually.” I don’t see the government as functional, doing useful things, or promoting ideas that are helpful to a civilization. And if anything, most of the indicators seemed to be moving very rapidly in the wrong direction. Slowly applying the brakes means we’re still going the wrong direction, but maybe not accerating as quickly. Instead of letting in 10 million illegal immigrants this year, we let in 5 million and pat ourselves on the back despite the fact that we’re still a net positive on illegals immigrants. Maybe we slow inflation of necessary goods from 10% to 5%. Okay, but that’s still much higher than it should be. Our school students struggle internationally, and we are not only not fixing it, but doubling and tripling down on pushing Woke on kids. A lot of this stuff is broken. Making it break more slowly is not fixing it.

At this point so much of our country just doesn’t work for the median American that I think the only answer is the wrest control from tha apperachniks running the government and to bring it to heel. I’d rather end the current departments and reinvent them because it guarantees that something will actually change. The school system will go back to educating kids and away from promoting The Narrative. A welfare system that works for the truly needy without giving money to people who refuse to work. A foreign aid policy tuned to support American interests and allies, rather than simply funding every do-gooder grant project that nets an over educated elite a sinecure for 100K a year.

Top down radical action according to rationalist principles is what got us into this mess. It won’t get us out; the system needs to be remade through functionalist path-building building, not top down design.

The master's tools will not dismantle the master's house.

You specifically can use house building and maintaining tools to dismantle all or part of a house. I've done major home renovation projects. I'm pretty clear on this.

Why not? A hammer has neither morals nor agency.

Alfred Nobel begs to differ.

As far as I can tell no dynamite was used to bring down his house.