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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 24, 2025

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Personally, despite differing with conservatives on many things, I espouse a lot of heterodoxy that's anathema to progressives and would happily warm my hands on the embers of the torched institutions.

I'll just point out here that if you don't want to build a mountain of skulls, some of those institutions will need a replacement at least moderately close to ready before you torch them.

Of course; there are obviously many load-bearing institutions that can't be burned to the ground without many disastrous ripple effects. But there are also a great number of institutions and/or subfields - including many of the Truth-producing academic fields and news sources which are most crucial to the spread of the ideology - which are not hugely critical to baseline functioning, and are kept alive in part through public money that frankly shouldn't be going towards producing propaganda-disguised-as-science with infinite degrees of freedom. Arson of these institutions is a public good, in my opinion.

There is, indeed, a reason I said "some of those institutions".

I'll just point out here that if you don't want to build a mountain of skulls, some of those institutions will need a replacement at least moderately close to ready before you torch them.

How is torching these institutions going to produce a mountain of skulls?

There are certain institutions which, if removed for an extended period, will result in a modern society rapidly depopulating due to the heavy optimisation required to sustain modern population densities. Military, police, public utilities, hospitals, pharmaceuticals, agriculture, plus the tax collection apparatus to fund some of these, and a pipeline to train people to do these things. I'm not saying you have to preserve the specific institutions that currently do these things, but "torch them all now and then start figuring out how to replace them" won't cut it. You cannot take them all offline for months without a mountain of skulls; it'd be the Great Leap Forward all over again.

Not coincidentally, most of the institutions you've mentioned are least-penetrated by wokeness. Police, particularly outside cities, are notoriously not woke. Burning down the police in cities gets you the 1980s back again... but so does letting the wokeness continue to spread. Public utilities and agriculture... not woke at all, so far as I know, except perhaps marketing departments. Burning down hospitals and pharmaceuticals gets you a small pile of mostly old skulls at worst. In pharma's case you probably just have to burn down the marketing department anyway.

Burning down pharmaceuticals means that a bunch of currently-negligible bacterial infections become big threats again, and illnesses mostly-eliminated by vaccination start to come back. The worst-case scenario is probably another plague epidemic with non-modern fatality rates (there is plague in the USA; it's just very treatable with antibiotics), although modern garbage disposal might be enough to keep that at bay (pneumonic plague does spread human -> human, though).

Do not underestimate their value just because you don't have to use them all that often; IRL, maintaining a good state can be really, really cheap compared to the bad state (see: iron lung argument).

And you do still need university-equivalents to train the chemists, although this is admittedly far less urgent.

I mean, there are definitely woke-captured institutions we cannot simply go without. Medical schools, for example.