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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 13, 2023

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The end goal, or the likely outcome?

The end goal is obvious. A prosperous, equitable society free of injustice, poverty and oppression.

The likely outcome is a very large pile of skulls, when society passes some critical point and abruptly and catastrophically decoheres. Most, perhaps all of the precursors for that eventuality are already baked in to our social reality; we're now just rolling the dice until we hit snake-eyes.

Why not twenty years ago? Because that's how policy starvation works. Twenty years ago, or fifty for that matter, the easy, palatable solutions hadn't been discredited yet, so people overwhelmingly went with them rather than with the ravings of the extremists. After decades of effort those moderate solutions all failed and were discredited, so now consensus is falling in behind the radicals. The radicals are likewise failing, and so soon it will be the super-radicals and so on. Since their goal isn't actually possible, it will simply go on in this fashion until the system as a whole runs out of capacity to absorb the strain.