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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 31, 2025

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I think it’s a specific case of the more general hyper-normalization. The west has mostly given up on even trying to make life better for citizens. Cops are barely allowed to do anything about crimes that happen in front of them, and resources are limited so there’s pretty much permission to do low level street crimes as unless the cops happen to witness actual and undeniable stealing (they basically have to watch you take something off the shelf, stick it in your pocket, and walk out the door, and aren’t allowed to give chase off the store property). If a guy is walking around looking for a car to break into — literally shining a flashlight into cars to see if there’s anything there, the cops can be standing right there, but until your window gets smashed, he’s not allowed to do anything. If you call the cops? They take a report that both you and they know will never be read, let alone investigated. And even with an arrest, prosecutors are not going to actually prosecute the crimes that don’t involve a corpse.

Other parts of society are accepted as always been shitty and will always be shitty. Schools are expected to suck, which is why almost every person of means tries to send their kids to private schools rather than public schools, and the first question anyone asks about a property is “how bad is the school district.” Nobody expects potholes fixed, or safe public transport. In fact, Americans hate public transport because unlike Europe, it’s basically a skid row on tracks, and if the stop is close to a place you care about, you’ll watch is skid row moves in. Nothing will get Americans to oppose you faster than trying to put a public bus stop or train in their safe neighborhoods as the6 know it’s a rolling skid row and it will ruin their neighborhood and basically devalue their house.

The west has mostly given up on even trying to make life better for citizens.

That is not the aim of Western governments and has not been for some time. At least not "all citizens". The aim in terms of citizens is leveling -- making life better for the worst off and worse for "the rich". Outside of that, governments explicitly prioritize things which traditionally man has struggled against -- predators, "the environment" -- over citizens.

edited to focus on a different aspect

Do western governments prioritize these other aspects because there is the presumption that the base citizenry is a hemostatically stable organism able to self regulate? Whether this assumption is wrong or not, this is a first order difference vastly different from the Asian societies I am familiar with. Here the governments view the citizenry as needing a level of government management to internal forces spiralling out of control or external forces from disrupting what is posited to be a delicate balance. Social shame is employed and even sanctioned by governments to effect this ethos, and it seems much less expensive than deploying active state resources to gently encourage irredentist antisocials back into the fold.