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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 31, 2025

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It's true that murder stories of 'stupid black thugs kill eachother (or try to do so only to end up shooting random bystanders) over drugs' aren't that exciting. But the British media system is eagerly saying that Adolescence is relevant, they say it has some important truth to tell us about reality. They're putting it on in schools for free apparently.

It's not being treated like a shocking fictional story like a zombie apocalypse film when zombies were new and fresh, it tells people a story they want to hear like the tedious Capitalism Bad parts of Star Wars VIII. Loads of people latched onto the incel terminology as depicting their hated group, young right-wing white men. But in reality, the incel community is quite diverse racially and politically. If you go to incels wiki, they go on and on about browncels, ricecels, the 'just be white' theory. It's not John Smith and Adam Sterling watching Andrew Tate, it's Muhammed and Daneesh. Tate even described at one point how he put up one of his camgirls in a MAGA hat only for her to do poorly, many of the lonely hopeless men he was financially abusing were left-wing. Tate didn't pretend to convert to Islam to get more of the middle-class white boy market, he was clearly trying to skew to his strongest supporters.

If you want real shock value for a Western audience, you could try portraying environmentalism and eco-spiritualist anti-development sentiment as alien plots to subvert technological development (an innately good thing) and weaken us for an invasion.

That's what the Three Body Problem did, naturally they eased this out in the Netflix adaptation, along with race-swapping half the cast to be brown, white or women.