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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 15, 2024

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You left out the part where once the obvious disaster becomes visible, we clearly recognize that shit is fucked up, but we need to keep sinking resources into the problem because otherwise The Bad Guys Win. Sure, all our efforts up to this point have been squandered when they weren't actively counterproductive, but you don't want to lose, do you? That's quitter talk!

...I appreciate that this, and the post it's replying to, sounds uncharitable, but at some point on the intersection of human failure, incompetence, and hubris, the charity simply runs out. I watched corpses flap in the slipstream of evacuating US aircraft when Afghanistan collapsed, after TWENTY FUCKING YEARS of this bullshit. We've got the documents now that lay out how there never was a plan, how no one involved who mattered in any way was even attempting to win in any meaningful sense, at any point, ever. At some point, you need some basic level of confidence that the people you're talking to are capable of basic pattern recognition.