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100ProofTollBooth

Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.

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Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.

				
				
				

				

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				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 30, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
(Tagging at @BahRamYou and @Tractatus because this is all kind of flowing together)


No one should be a chicken processor for their entire career. Or a waiter / waitress at a diner or fast casual restaurant (service staff at high end restaurants is another matter). Or the proverbial burger flipper.


These jobs should be more or less easy-in-easy-out temporary employment for people who need cash to pay their bills. If you read some of the mid century "road" novels, you'll see how a pretty common modus operandi was for the protagonist to roll into town on his last dollar, pick up a few days work doing janitorial work at a auto garage or something, and then go on his merry (usually drunk) way of philosophizing. I've written about this before. It's not so much that people in the 50s/60s were raising full families on these unappealing jobs, it's that these unappealing jobs were the equivalent of day rate motel stays.


So, problem number one is that employment law and regulation has become so burdensome that we literally have millions of jobs that are not worth having - for either the employer or employee. These are the jobs that immigrants (many illegal, all of them willing) actually end up taking. I think I actually saw the very beginning of this as I was finishing high school. One summer, I got a job at a book store - I filled out a single page application and was working the next day. I got a check at the end of the week. The next summer, I got a job at a decent restaurant. The first FULL DAY, I had to fill out pages and pages of digital corporation nonsense on the computer, then watch a bunch of compliance videos (mostly about not falling down in the kitchen or being on drugs), and then had to sign even more physical paperwork relating to me 'trainee' status. This is all so that this restaurant (owned by a corporate chain) doesn't get sued to death by various regulators for not ... self-regulating.


To put it in economist terms, the friction for labor is so much higher than it was decades ago, that it isn't worth going through that friction for some of the lower paying jobs.


For immigrants, however, employers might just skip the paper work and pay in cash. Or, if they employee is visa connected, the company knows they won't just rage quit one day and face deportation. I can't support this at present, but I also feel like the visa-employment situation has a cottage industry of consultants who help the employers manage all of the paperwork (for a fee).


But the fact remains that shitty jobs have always been shitty but, before, you could hop in and out of them, collect some cash, and be on your merry way.


The second issue is that market interference has made the cost of certain things untenable. The major one, of course, is housing. There simply isn't enough (because of burdensome construction regulations and the perverse incentives of home equity appreciation). Wages can't keep up. Wages, however, have kept up with some things that we now consider close to necessary - computers and phones. A decent laptop can now be had for less than $500. Same for a phone. Monthly cellular service is between $20 - $100 depending. nearly gig level internet at home is $100- $200 a month. Very few Americans who want a phone do not have one. Very few Americans who want broadband (and don't live intentionally in the middle of nowhere) do not have it.




All of this is to say I see "the immigration question" in it's economic context as really an outgrowth of a much bigger issue - over regulation and bureaucratization. I shouldn't care too much about low skill immigrants because, if I am competing with them, we're all essentially "taking turns" in that job pool. As we go up the skill ladder, I'm competing with fewer people and then things like community and connections (networks) become more important (which I, as a native, ought to have an advantage in). Instead, because jobs are such high friction now, I am at the bottom of the skill ladder competing with people who exist with the ability to better slide through the legal maze of employment because they are either (a) breaking the law or (b) part of a international labor movement system that penalizes me, ironically, for having been born in the right place.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 5, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I've searched for it dozens of times, including opening up old laptops and pouring over their browser histories, but I can't find it.


"It" was a blog that a FtM (that's chick-to-dude) transitioner was keeping about their ... transition. It was well written, deeply personal, and absolutely without trans ideology talking points or vibes. It was a wonderful example of an honest seeming person without any sort of ideology-induced hangups. It was incredibly and (unfortunately) uniquely informative.


The author shares one story about either beginning or hitting a major increase in the hormone replacement process. He's excited that he's going to start feeling testosterone-y like all other dudes. The week this starts, he's driving to work in traffic and someone cuts him off. He reports that, all of a sudden, he has a full blown panic attack and has to pull over to try to calm down. Perhaps the hormone replacement process has a high variance early period? Maybe he jacked up the dosage? Hmm, concerning.


I should note here that the author writes about going to a trans support group in his city. They help each other with the process as the different members are at different stages.


The author relates how he shares this panic attack incident to his group. There's an odd silence and some chuckling from some of the FtM's further along. People share knowing looks. Finally, one of them pipes up and says, "Dude .... you got "guy angry" for the first time." In a wonderful moment of self-awareness, the author writes about how he (when he was a she) never came close to appreciating what true male rage felt like. Even when "she" was 10/10 steamin' mad for some reason, it never came close to .... How a dude feels in Tuesday morning traffic when some asshole cuts him off.


I hope this jogs the memory of someone else who can point to that blog. There was a lot of good knowledge in there.


Anyway - I apply a similar view on male versus female sexual drive. It's definitely a difference in kind. It's been highlighted hundreds of times that men watch porn and women read trashy novels that end up at a sexual encounter but with a lot of very cringey situational foreplay. The male fantasy is the act itself, the female fantasy is the journey to the act. It is, however, also a difference in degree. I believe women when they say they get "super duper horny." I believe that, in their own framework of horny intensity judgement, they are at 10/10 Would Fck Again. But how does this compare to a male arousal rubric? I submit that female "10/10 Would Fck Again" is near equivalent to "Popped a bone watching that new Shakira music video on mute while at the airport bar." I'm having a little bit of fun here, so please don't try to nuke me on the rough comparison.


None of this should be taken as a judgement in validity, value, or worthiness of either male/female anger/arousal. Any moron who tells a woman, "oh, you're just girl angry, it's not that big of a deal" deserves whatever kitchen implement is launched at his head. And any idiot who tells his date, "No, but, like, I really want to fuck" deserves his future session of sullen, very alone rage masturbation.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 31, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
This is the professional website of the study's lead author


This is me reading tea-leaves a little bit, but some things stand out to me.


The majority of his academic background is in business (MBA) and a fanci-fied version of IT. His professional experience was with CACI which is laughably described as a "mid-size" consulting firm. CACI is a notorious "body shop" Beltway Bandit that makes billions of dollars off of staff augmentation for Federal Contracts. Their own website states they employ about 25,000 people.


This provides a mental model, at least, of how this study - and its accompanying malfeasance - came into being. This is a consultant in a classroom. "What does the client want as an outcome? Racism. Okay, great! We can work the numbers to make it say that."


In the Daily Caller piece that the reddit post links to, they have a screenshot of this guy's Microsoft Word comments - one of them literally says, "this is not the story we're trying to tell." This is straight out of a consulting 101 MBA class.




At some point in the 2000s, Academia became a kind of side option career for people who aren't actually serious academics or researchers. You could pickup up a PhD from somewhere in something and then get associate or adjunct status. Sure, this salary wasn't great, but it gave you that credential to pass around as a digital hustler - you could go on podcasts, do paid speaking engagements, consult on the side for $300 an hour. It was a weird kind of self-reputation-maxxing. And that's part of the real long term rot of the academy. If you got a PhD in the 1950s or before, it's because you were almost monkish in your devotion to serious study in a field.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 29, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The WSJ published an article today about the voting gap between men and women below the age of thirty. The conclusions should be familiar to the Motte's CW crowd and I'll be diving into them in this post. What is striking and, even better, plainly quantitative, is how just how far apart young men and women are on some issues. In several cases, it's 30+ point gaps. Anecdatally, I'm seeing and hearing similar division. That the WSJ is leading with this also shows how it is now firmly in normie discussion circles.


I've always thought that the true risk to American society wasn't a breakdown
in race relations, but in gender sex relations. This is because of the plain
fact that you need the opposite sexes to get along to continue families,
communities, the nation, society as a whole.


I've tried to break it out below.


The Issues


The WSJ highlights the following issues as most divisive to least, first with those issues that women are more in favor of:


    

  1. Climate change
    2. 

  2. Abortion
    3. 

  3. Student Loans
    4. 

  4. Gender identity (specifically of children)
    5. 



Those with the biggest gaps the opposite way, where men approve of the issue
moreso than women, are (again, in descending order):


    

  1. The Trump era Tax Cuts,
    2. 

  2. Repeal and Replace Obama Care (note that overall men are actually slightly on-net negative about this, but women are 23 points more negative),
    3. 

  3. Build The Wall (men at -4, women at -47)
    4. 



Instead of thinking about these in terms of the issues themselves, I've decided
to be a little more cultural war-y (because that's. why. we. are. here!) and
interpret these issues thusly;


    

  1. "Climate change" Is a big, hard to define, but very scary bad thing. It's
mythical and functions almost like a curse. Furthermore, it is THE virtue
signaling issue. People (think) they get all kinds of social credit for
driving an EV or using paper straws etc. It has weird touchy-feely
connections to "mother earth" pseudo-religious traditions. Women under 30
probably have a higher likelihood of going to festivals like burning man and
so having a very personal connection to these "vibes."
    2. 

  2. "Abortion" is a stand in for the wild claim that "they" are trying to "take
away" unspecified "rights." It's a fantastic personalization of an "our team
good, their team bad." We're under attack is always a great rallying cry
(see: Pearl Harbor, 9/11) and if you can personalize it down to the level of
"rights" it sticks well. But what "rights" are we talking about? If this is
the number two issue for women, I have to assume there's some sort of
female-centric set of rights, right (haha)? Well, of course the thing to
point to is Dobbs and abortion. What "right" was stripped remains a mystery
but, again this is about personalization of an otherwise kind of hard to pin
down concern.
    3. 

  3. "Student loans" I haven't come up with decided case here. Part of me thinks
its just general irresponsibility of The Youths. "College was fun, but
I don't actually like paying for it." A more female angle might be "a
college degree is important today for status signaling, I'd much prefer
someone else pay for it." But that seems a little too easy. I don't have
a well developed theory here. An interesting side point is that the article
quotes that 60% of graduates are female and those female graduates hold 66%
of all outstanding student loans. Not a massive over-representation, but
noteworthy enough. My suspicion here is that a very small 1-3% of female
grads are taking out MASSIVE loans for obviously low earning majors (art
history, music, etc.) from incredibly expensive private schools. Usually the
folks doing that have family money aplenty. It's sad to me that there are
some middle class girls who are mimicking elite status at places like Williams
or Swarthmore and leaving school at 22 with $150k in debt to do it.
    4. 

  4. Gender identity. Again see points 1 and 2. This is a virtue signal
linked to "self expression" and "my right to be me"
    5. 



Now, for the Men:


    

  1. "The Trump era Tax Cuts" Honestly surprised me given the age cohort.
People generally don't start (a) making enough or (b) having to support
multiple kids until they're in their 30s to really pay attention to taxes.
Given that a lot of stories about young men in particular are about how they
don't have real jobs and live at home, this is really unexpected.
    2. 

  2. "Repeal and Replace Obama Care (note that overall men are actually slightly on-net negative about this, but women are 23 points more negative)." That Men are actually on-net negative about this (but women are far more negative) and that this is a back burner issue at the moment makes me think that this was simply all the WSJ could find for polarizing issues. Don't know what to make of it exactly but don't think it actually tells us much.
    3. 

  3. "Build The Wall (Men at -4, women at -47)" Makes a lot of sense. Men always
have a more natural inclination towards protecting their in-group. Any guy
who isn't deeply committed to open boarders is going to have a natural knee
jerk in this direction.
    4. 



How We Got Here


That's how the issues stand today. I think it makes sense to take a step back
and ask "how we got here" over the past few voting and CW cycles.


For Men, I think much or all of this can be traced first to MeToo and second,
to its slightly less witch-hunty successor, DEI. One guy in the article says he
feels like there are purity tests on the left that are used to berate men into
compliance. The article itself also says that many right-wing men don't talk
about their views with women for fear of retaliation or other social
consequences.


It's hard to overstate how deeply MeToo hit society. I was working a BigCorp
gig at the time and it was very common to hear tips from male coworks at happy
hours after work about never having a one-on-one with a female subordinate or,
at least, doing it out in the open where other people can see the whole
encounter. It was the first time I had heard of the Mike Pence rule. I've
always looked at MeToo as a weird attempt at bloodletting by Hollywood that
morphed into witch trials. There was nothing in the way of sincere
attempts to improve male-female professional relationships, just a lot of
virtue signalling and subtle actions taken to guarantee against false
accusations (see above). The net result on a lot of men was to, I think, begin
to question if "the left" and its various causes were simply new ways of trying
to tear men down. Another guy in the article states, "It would seem the white
male is the enemy of the Left."


For the young women, their quotes bring up (a) Trump being boorish and gross
dating to the 2016 election and (b) Dobbs. Again, the "abortion rights"
messaging intentionally conflates a complex issue about the start of human life
(which Americans are notoriously conflicted and contradictory on) with a more
easy to handle and generically adaptable "women's rights." This is why you see
it rebranded as "reproductive rights" most often. If it's about just You
versus "they" (who are always all male) it's an ease fight to jump into. If
it's about more than that, I think women - being generally intelligent - do
stop and think to consider the complexity. The media scored a massive win in portraying Dobbs as "taking away the right to abortion."


Trump's amplification of male boorishness ("Grab her by the pussy", "Only Rosie
O'Donnell" etc.) is probably the most generation-centric issue in the
article. I'm just elder millenial enough to remember the concepts of "boy
talk" and "girl talk" growing up (shout out to Melania). Any guy who's ever been
in an all male group outside of a professional one (so, a sports team,
military, etc.) knows how gross yet hilarious those conversations can get. That
kind of speech, however, doesn't go outside of the invisible walls. Guys speak in such over-the-top ways in locker rooms etc. as a way to signal in-group loyalty and build cohesion, but they understand it can and should only take place in those places. This
exactly what Trump was doing on that access Hollywood tape. He was making
a goofy gross joke to a fawning idiot who was going to laugh at whatever Trump
said. He didn't say it at the Met Gala. I think that the outrage was most acute for younger women shows that
a whole generation grew up without any awareness whatsoever that differently
sexed styles of language exist.


The article also brings up the Kavanaugh hearings. This is strange to me. I always though the Dr. Ford testimony was both contentless and pretty obviously manufactured in a "repressed memory" pseudo-science way.


Boys and Girls are Different


The issues, and my interpretation of them, point to what should be an obvious
truth. Men and Women have physical and cognitive differences across their
normal distributions. This manifests in society and social reinforcement and,
ultimately, results in different relative rankings of shared values. I believe Men and Women largely share the exact same values but rank them in different orders and with different weights placed on them.


Men still intrinsically respect strength and are suspicious of weakness or incompetence.
Biden had to drop out of the race because everyone, but especially men, were
thinking "no way can this guy lead the country for another four years. He does know what planet he's on." As soon as there are questions about your competency - you're toast. You can be an asshole (although I believe you shouldn't be) so long as you can get the job done.


The Trump assassination attempt probably solidified some male voters who may have been "holding their nose" in the Trump camp. See Zuckerberg calling it "badass". Trump popping up with blood on his face shouting, "fight, fight, fight" hits most guys right in the Papua-New-Guinea-Kill-The-Neighboring-Tribe lizard brain. It's watching your team spike the football in the endzone times four million raised to the power of NAVY-SEALs-KILLED-BIN-LADEN.


A basic male pattern in groups is to defer to the "natural leader." Interesting
how often that correlates to height, perceived physical capability, a deep
voice, and an outgoing and kind of domineering personality. Trump is maxed out
in all of those non-physical traits and that explains so much of his
attraction.


Women value this too (remember what I lead with) but there does come a limit in
which the domineering personality becomes overbearing, tone deaf, and, at its worse, abusive. Still - better He tends towards jerk than wimp.


A key quote from the article is “Young men just want freedom, recklessness, adrenaline.” Couldn't agree more and half of my comments here have been about the destruction of masculinity models for boys in the West. Female centric views of childhood, safetyism, and "play nice" strips boys of this and has for some time. ADHD or just rambunctious boys are getting classified as special needs.


Rather than try to find some sort of balance, I think it's accurate to say the
Left has leaned harder into this. The entire concept of "toxic masculinity" is
mostly about finding ways to make male behavior that may be offensive to female
sensibilities actually reprehensibly immoral. Returning to Trump's boorish
language, I am all for calling it out as unpolite, but making the jump to
"advocate for sexual assault" is hyperbolic. And this gets to the core of the
issue; the extreme liberal faction of the Democrat party not only looks down on
traditional male behavior, they want to make it so beyond the pale as to be
effectively criminal. MeToo ended the careers of several men who were guilty of
nothing more than being awkward jackasses who didn't understand how to flirt.
Is that worth one Harvey Weinstein? Tell me in the comments.


Swinging back to female relative values. I see a sensitivity to the prevention
of harm (manifested in fear emotion heavy issues like global warming) as well
as an appeal to authority (the state) to strictly guarantee certain highly
personal values. This is best captured in the "women's rights" meta-issue. Is
this a reference to abortion? voting rights (if so, how)? Non-strictly
governmental issues like pay equality? I don't think it matters, I think it's
designed to me a flexible mapping point. Whatever you think is the women's
rights issue is correct. All you have to agree on is that "They" (white
republican Men) are coming for it. There are two quotes from interviewed women
that reveal this:


    

  • 

    “What we’re worried about is our rights being taken away,”
    

    • 

  • 

    “If I had to guess why a lot of women are leaning very strongly toward more liberal issues, it’s that we’re afraid.”
    

    • 



Fear. Protection. "Somebody should do something!"


I think this really does women a disservice. It's the same as politicians who
essentially use a narrative of emasculation to get men behind them. You've seen
this a lot in Trump speeches going back to 2016. "They're taking our jobs"
speaks to a hard-wire male perspective on providership. But politicians love an
emotionally resonant hack. They won't change tactics anytime soon.


J.D Vance got into some hot water after his "cat lady" comments reappeared.
I do think this was an unforced error. "Virgin" is used as an insult to Men and
"old hag" and all of its varieties are used to belittle women. Sexual
capability is still a big deal and so going after it is a low blow and will trigger a lot of hot resentment even in those not targeted. When a guy is emasculated, all guys feel it even if it isn't happening to them. When a women is targeted for being "the old hag" women can feel how that lands even if they are out of harms way. Vance would do better to focus on something that is tangible to women but not so personally direct - children. "The left wants to indoctrinate your kids" has been winning (see Youngkin in VA).


The above leads us too...


Are We Really Talking About Sex?


"Some men interviewed said they were fearful of criticism by women and expressed their resentments only in private and with other men. Several said they hide their conservative views because women they know have said they won’t date right-leaning men."


I'll pair the above with the fact that both of the women pictured in the WSJ
piece are overweight. One, in a green and white dress, is obese.


To what extent are these resentments based in sexual frustration in both
directions? I'll offer the opinion, which should be no surprise, that I think
it's more about differences in relative value preferences. I don't think we're
a nation of genocidal incels and femcels. If anything, I might point the finger
more at social media and online spaces creating echo chambers and infinite
positive-feedback loops yet divorcing users further and further from normie
reality.


Yet, sex is important and young men and young women want it. The politics
(literal and figurative) of dating certainly haven't gotten any less complex
over the years - and they now definitely involved literal politics. But it's
signalling all the way down. Am I really offended that this guy taking me out
for a $134 meal is a Trump supporter? No, I'm worried he won't be able to
effectively prioritize my emotional needs in the relationship. Am I disgusted
that this girl I'm going to SoulCycle with is wearing her Pussy Hat? No, I'm worried
she'll hector me to death if I say "retarded" once at home.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 23, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
OpenAI To Become a For-Profit Company


You'll notice that the link is to a hackernews thread. I did that intentionally because I think some of the points raised there get to issues deeper than "hurr durr, Elon got burnt" or whatever.


Some points to consider:


    

  1. 

    It is hard to not see this as a deliberate business-model hack. Start as a research oriented non-profit so you can more easily acquire data, perhaps investors / funders, and a more favorable public imagine. Sam Altman spent a bunch of time on Capitol Hill last year and seemed to move with greater ease because of the whole "benefit to humanity" angle. Then, once you have acquired a bunch of market share this way, flip the money switch on. Also, there are a bunch of tax incentives for non-profits that make it easier to run in the early startup phase.
    

    2. 

  2. 

    I think this can be seen as a milestone for VC hype. The trope for VC investors is that they see every investment as "changing the world," but it's mostly a weird status-signaling mechanism. In reality, they're care about the money, but also care about looking like they're being altruistic or, at least, oriented towards vague concepts of "change for the better." OpenAI was literally pitched as addressing an existential question for humanity. I guess they fixed AI alignment in the past week or something and now it's time, again, to flip the money switch. How much of VC is now totally divorced from real business fundamentals and is only about weird idea trading? Sure, it's always been like that to some extent, but I feel like the whole VC ecosystem is turning into a battle of posts on the LessWrong forums.
    

    3. 

  3. 

    How much of this is FTX-style nonsense, but without outright fraud. Altman gives me similar vibes as SBF with a little less bad-hygiene-autism. He probably smells nice, but is still weird as fuck. We know he was fired and rehired at OpenAI. A bunch (all?) of the cofounders have jumped shipped recently. I don't necessarily see Enron/FTX/Theranos levels of plain lying, but how much of this is a venture funding house of cards that ends with a 99% loss and a partial IP sale to Google or something.
    

    4. 



				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 11, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Mobile sports gambling is like, really, really bad, mmm'kay 


Color me in the not surprised category. The article, and the additional one's it links at the bottom, do a good job of toe-ing the line between "people should be given the freedom to make choices" and "holy shit this is sentencing those with addictive personalities to lives of poverty."


I'm not super interested in talking about sports gambling itself, although I welcome any good anecdotes, and would instead like to invite comments on the concept of "digital addiction."


There's enough literature out there now that there's a strong enough case to be made that digital technology - very specifically smartphones - can cause behavior patterns that can accurately be described as addictive. However, there is still a delineation between digital addiction and physical/neurological addiction of alcohol and drugs. As a society, we acknowledge the basic danger of these substances by age-limiting some and outright prohibiting others.


My general question would be; what are the major culture war angles on digital addiction? For kids? For all of society?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 16, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I don't know if we can say for sure that Israel intended this, but the effects are pretty substantial.


    

  1. 

    On the eve of a likely conflict, Hezbollah's entire simple comms chain is now suspect or compromised. 80% of modern worn is coordination and logistics. If you can't do that, you lose before you show up.
    

    2. 

  2. 

    The level of paranoia is going to go even further off the charts. "They got into the pagers and the walkie talkies, what else are they in?" If your Hezbollah and want to audit everything with a microchip, you can do that, but at the cost of being combat ineffective.
    

    3. 

  3. 

    Israel is demonstrating subtly to Iran that they can pull off very sophisticated supply chain attacks. "We know where you are / we know what devices you're using / we know how to hack them."
    

    4. 



I can see someone at the Naval Postgraduate School or Army War College writing a big "Grey Zone" theory of combat thesis on this in a few years.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 6, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Sam Altman Is Super Excited for a Great 2025


Link to blog post


Yesterday, Sam Altman posted this short personal blog post. The material takeaway is summarized in this paragraph;




We are beginning to turn our aim beyond that, to superintelligence in the true sense of the word. We love our current products, but we are here for the glorious future. With superintelligence, we can do anything else. Superintelligent tools could massively accelerate scientific discovery and innovation well beyond what we are capable of doing on our own, and in turn massively increase abundance and prosperity.




"AGI is right around the corner. Seriously, we mean it this time." Okay, I'll believe it when I see it and if that means I'm not worried enough about "alignment" and "safety" that's fine. Our robot overlord will smile upon me or he wont.


Sam's explicit assertion here will be debated on all the normal forms and tweet ecosystems. Thought pieces will be written by breathless techno-bros, techno-phobes, and all others. LessWrong is going to get out the Navel Gazer 6000.


None of that is particular alarming to me.


What is; the first 2/3rds of Sam's blog post.


This is because it is an amazing amalgam of personal-corpo speak that is straight out of a self-congratulatory Linkedin post. Here are some highlights (lowlights?);




Moving at speed in uncharted waters is an incredible experience, but it is also immensely stressful for all the players. Conflicts and misunderstanding abound.








The overwhelming feeling is gratitude; I know that someday I’ll be retired at our ranch watching the plants grow, a little bored, and will think back at how cool it was that I got to do the work I dreamed of since I was a little kid. I try to remember that on any given Friday, when seven things go badly wrong by 1 pm.




This three were particularly triggering for me:




Looking back, I certainly wish I had done things differently, and I’d like to believe I’m a better, more thoughtful leader today than I was a year ago.








I also learned the importance of a board with diverse viewpoints and broad experience in managing a complex set of challenges. Good governance requires a lot of trust and credibility. I appreciate the way so many people worked together to build a stronger system of governance for OpenAI that enables us to pursue our mission of ensuring that AGI benefits all of humanity.








My biggest takeaway is how much I have to be thankful for and how many people I owe gratitude towards: to everyone who works at OpenAI and has chosen to spend their time and effort going after this dream, to friends who helped us get through the crisis moments, to our partners and customers who supported us and entrusted us to enable their success, and to the people in my life who showed me how much they cared.






I think one of the points of near consensus on The Motte is a general hyper-suspicion to this kind of disingenuous koombayah style of writing. It's "Everyone love everyone", "we're all in this together" , "we made mistakes but that's okay because we care about one another."


This is exactly the kind of corpo-speak that both preceeds and follows a massive round of brutal layoffs based on the cold equations of a balance sheet. Or some sort of change in service to customers that is objectively absolutely worse. I am deeply surprised that it seems Sam has truly adopted this at his most personal level. This was not a sanitized press release from OpenAI, but something he posted on what appears to be his personal blog. Sure, many personal blogs become just as milquetoast as corporate press releases if/when a person gets famous enough, but, in the tech world, a personal blog or twitter account is usually the last bastion for, you know, actual real human style communication.


I had another post a few months ago about OpenAI. One of the things that came out of the comments was a sort of "verified rumor" that Sam Altman is a pure techno-accelerationist but without any sort of moral, theological, or virtuous framework. He simply wants to speedrun to the singularity because humans are kind of "whatever" in his eyes. This blog post, to me, provides some more evidence in favor of that. He's using the universal language of "nice to everybody" which is recognized - correctly - as the sound the big machine makes right before it thrashes you. This follows a pattern. OpenAI was a non-profit until it wasn't. Mr. Altman went to congress in 2023 to beg for totally not-regulatory capture for his own company but for, like, you know the good of everyone.


The technical merits and viability of AGI aside, the culture war angle here is that while many other groups are having meaningful open discussion about the future of economic, political, and social life with AIs/AGIs, Altman (and a few others like him) are using the cloaked, closed, and misleading language that has become the preferred dialect of the PMC. As I said, it is especially abundant right before they screw you over.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 22, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Frustratingly, mentioning this to my Harris-supporting friends just gets sighs and eye-rolls, like "Why does this even matter?"




The exasperated eye roll followed up with a comment like "why does this even matter?" or "are we still talking about this is 202X" etc. should be recognized as the liberal-PMC capitulation performance.


You see no one on the PMC every really loses. At least not all at once. It's more of a slow wandering into obscurity that ends in chairing an Alumni outreach committee at bard and a memoir that sells exactly negative seven copies. If they always think they can come back, they will stay on the team.


But the subtext is clear enough; "I don't want to talk about this because I am aware that the facts are quite inarguably not on my side. I will, therefore, socially pressure you into, at least, reducing the pointedness with which you address the issue"


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 22, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
This has become my default response to any sort of national level "police misconduct" story. I believe it will remain that way indefinitely.


I've recommended the Donut Operator YouTube channel before and I will again. It's a good look into what are far more common situations in everday policing. Specifically, a lot of it is tedious "negotiation" with non-compliant people who are very likely on drugs, in some sort of mental health crisis, or just plain extremely anti-social. The thing is, sometimes this tedium very quickly escalates into a life or death situation. It's impossible for me to write well enough about it. Watch some of the videos. The speed from which we get to 100 from 0 is starling.


The larger culture war angle here is that, much like the military profession, the PMC have zero direct experience with policing as an occupation. Being a police is pretty much the last, best blue collar union job. Like most of those jobs, the pay is OK but not great and, in certain jurisdictions, is not keeping up with inflation. The candidates for these jobs are not all bearing Masters in Criminal Justice with special concentrations in sociology and negotiation tactics. They're ex-enlisted. They're former High School and Div. 3 athletes. Many of them have several cops in their families. It's a job in the classic J-O-B sense (not a "career") for most.


And what a job it is! The saying has been posted around the internet for sometime, but, as a cop, everyone you interact with, you're interacting with on "the worst day of their life." That's a bit of a hyperbole, but anything from a traffic ticket on up is a noteworthy stress event for most people. It's always been funny to me that The Largely Online have a special softness for customer service people and the aggravation and idiocy they daily encounter yet fail to see that being a cop is customer service times ten plus guns and knives.


So what do you get when summing all these things together? An overwhelming amount of peaceful outcomes. This study points to over 60 million citizens having at least one encounter with police in 2018 and this one quotes 1769 fatalities in 2020. Sure, the years aren't precisely the same and staring with the simple 'encounters' number might be too dilutive, but I believe the point remains; most of the time, the Police do a great job of not killing someone.


I think that's close to remarkable given that it's objectively one of the highest stress (and quick to escalate) occupations out there. And that's its staffed by people who have training measured probably in the weeks-to-months range instead of the many-many-years of notably less stressful PMC Jobs.


Everyone once in a while you're going to have a bad shoot. This could be one of them, or it could not, that's for a jury to decide. But think about what the larger narrative is; at the Presidential level, we're going to hyperfocus on a single incident in order to draw wild conclusions about a statistical population that consistently demonstrates in the opposite direction. No, as Scott Alexander would point out, no one is outright lying here, but the manipulation tactics are plain to see.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 12, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Marcotte is a strange single issue writer. Click on her byline and almost every headline has either "Trump" or "MAGA" in it. She is THE face of 3rd wave feminist Trump Derangement Syndrome. It truly is a bizarre obsession. It seems to me that her writing is intended for an audience of cosmopolitan women who sincerely think that a Trump election = overnight Handsmaid's Tale coming into reality. It's some sort of sexual-political BDSM LARPing because there's never a consistent causal train of thought. I've had conversations with these folks in person. They cannot articulate how the Constitution would actually be suspended or voided. There's a logical gap that's forded with vibes based projections and catastrophizing. Allusion to Nazi Germany are not uncommon.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 30, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
"That is a damning non answer" is hilarious coming from Walz.




You said you were in Hong Kong during the deadly Tiananmen Square protest in the spring of 1989. But Minnesota Public Radio and other media outlets are reporting that you actually didn't travel to Asia until August of that year. Can you explain that discrepancy?  You have two minutes.




Walz' response (bolding is my own):




Yeah. Well, and to the folks out there who didn't get at the top of this, look, I grew up in small, rural Nebraska, town of 400. Town that you rode your bike with your buddies till the streetlights come on, and I'm proud of that service. I joined the National Guard at 17, worked on family farms, and then I used the GI bill to become a teacher. Passionate about it, a young teacher. My first year out, I got the opportunity in the summer of 89 to travel to China, 35 years ago, be able to do that. I came back home and then started a program to take young people there. We would take basketball teams, we would take baseball teams, we would take dancers, and we would go back and forth to China. The issue for that was, was to try and learn. Now, look, my community knows who I am. They saw where I was at. They, look, I will be the first to tell you I have poured my heart into my community. I've tried to do the best I can, but I've not been perfect. And I'm a knucklehead at times, but it's always been about that. Those same people elected me to Congress for twelve years. And in Congress I was one of the most bipartisan people. Working on things like farm bills that we got done, working on veterans benefits. And then the people of Minnesota were able to elect me to governor twice. So look, my commitment has been from the beginning, to make sure that I'm there for the people, to make sure that I get this right. I will say more than anything, many times, I will talk a lot. I will get caught up in the rhetoric. But being there, the impact it made, the difference it made in my life. I learned a lot about China. I hear the critiques of this. I would make the case that Donald Trump should have come on one of those trips with us. I guarantee you he wouldn't be praising Xi Jinping about COVID. And I guarantee you he wouldn't start a trade war that he ends up losing. So this is about trying to understand the world. It's about trying to do the best you can for your community, and then it's putting yourself out there and letting your folks understand what it is. My commitment, whether it be through teaching, which I was good at, or whether it was being a good soldier or was being a good member of Congress, those are the things that I think are the values that people care about.




Followed by this absolute banger from the mods;




MB: Governor, just to follow up on that, the question was, can you explain the discrepancy?






Tim Walz is the politician you get with a highly censored and early prototype ChatGPT. You can see that he's snatching bits and pieces of talking points and stringing them together in loosely probabilistic ways, but there's no coherence. It also lacks that wonderful post-modern impressionistic word salad of both Harris and Trump.


The Democrats really love doing this. Back with Hill Dog, they chose Tim Kaine and, IIRC, leaned in to calling him "America's Dad." Walz pick reinforces something that's obvious but hard to see - the Democrat party is absolutely loathsome of effective masculinity. A squishy assistant football coach who was part of the National Guard (but never deployed) is just fine. Or a "technically I was in the Navy!" gay dude. But an actual Man with hard coded male sensibilities is a non-starter.


I think the election is mostly back to a 50/50 toss-up, with some big risks for Harris (the longshoremen strike and fallout from Helene being the first of the October surprises). What is not a 50/50 toss-up is the relative Male-Female support. Regardless of the winner, the exit polls are going to reveal a societal level bifurcation at the sex level.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 19, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
This 'idea' has zero percent chance of ever happening. And it's not because of rich people lobbying.


It's because it would catastrophically destroy all markets (public and private) overnight.


This is because the price of anything is different at different times and, before an actual transaction occurs, is only an approximate representation of what a theoretical buy and seller would agree on. There are plenty of reasons zero buyers and zero sellers would want to proceed with any transaction at a given time.


Example A would be startups. Startups raise cash from investors to get off the ground, develop products, market and sell them, enter new markets, acquire other companies etc. Their "valuation" at any given time is largely a projection of possible future revenue and/or a future reasonable acquisition price. It is not, in anyway, a guarantee of a spot cash price for equity. I think Anduril, the cool new defense technology company, has something like a $15bn valuation after its last funding round. To make the math easy, let's say there are 100,000,000 shares outstanding all with equal seniority etc. (this is a toy example. The realities are always more complex, which factors in later). Is anyone going to pay anyone else the $150 / share in the secondaries market for Anduril? Fuck no. There are maybe some early investors who got in at $10 (or less!) who may want to sell at $50 or something to lock in gains, but the biggest holders (including insiders) are holding out for an IPO or acquisition.


These are multi-year equity holders. What does their tax situation look like? Are they taxed every year based on new VC funding and the follow on valuations of the company? If that's the case, they would end up paying more in taxes than they invested in the company while being unable to liquidate their holdings in a thinly traded private market. Investing in a start up would become financially impossible. Perhaps evening just starting one on your own. What happens then? Only incumbent, large, highly traded public companies can be invested in - but you still have to pay tax on your not-cash winnings. Very quickly, there are only a few nationalized companies doing any business t all. Retail investors mostly hold cash which inflates away to nothing and there is zero new capital formation and investment. That's stagnancy and inflation - aka stagflation - and is the very model for how to kill a country and, very likely, pave the wave for a populist demagogue to seize power.


Taxing unrealized capital gains is literally taxing a business for existing and operating as normal, but with some sort of arbitrary number thrown on top of it as "valuation." If that number is wrong, which it will be sooner or later, you divide the business by zero and it not only ceases to be viable, it implodes overnight.


Much like price controls, this is an "idea" that reveals profound economic and financial illiteracy. It is 100% vibes based in a Robin Hood aesthetic and is designed with all the depth of most sloganeering. It should be viewed for what it is, a very public display of a lack of interest in developing meaningful policy in any direction.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 27, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


is on the brink of descending into tranny.




Epic freudian typo.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 30, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Real Nice Economy You Got Here. Be A Shame If Someone Broke It


This clip of Harold Daggett is popping up all over twitter. The immediate aesthetics are comical; the accent, the glasses, the jewelry. If it looks like a mobster and sounds like a mobster....


There's enough discussion on the Presidential Race in the VP debate threads. The CW angle here is how the image of the "American Union Man" has always been 99% hagiography. They have been lionized in Bruce Springsteen songs and other pop culture kitsch since the 1990s at least, but the hard economics stopped working in the 1970s. Unions are a tax on everything downstream of them. Functionally, it's racketeering and extortion. They owe their bewildering continued existence to the fact that they function as a bedrock reliable voting bloc with lockstep leadership control .... until now?


We had the teamsters refuse to back any candidate earlier. Your modal longshoreman is almost certainly a Trump voter. But Trump despises Unions. So ... what's happening?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 16, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Really great write-up. Thank you.


Your response is valuable because it demonstrates the mix of slippery-slope, bad faith reporting, and sleight-of-hand that poisons the abortion debate. Americans are notoriously self-contradictory in their opinions on abortion. Thus, re-framing an issue has an outsized impact on changes in opinion. I like your consistent use of alternative headlines to point that out.


There are very few pro-life folks who are zero-exception pro-life. Rape, incest, and life of the mother are the default exceptions. But the focus shouldn't be on the exceptions (which will always be a small percentage) but on the modal abortions and the contexts that produce them. The article (and your response) do a good job of highlighting that abortions are often the product of repeated bad life choices and general irresponsibility. I don't think being generally kind of a fuck-up should be a life long sentence for poverty, but there is a limit to what you can be absolved of. Denying a child from being born is far, far past that line.


Going back to the culture war angle, it gets difficult to even "hear out" pro-life arguments because they get so slippery. Obama used to take the median liberal position on abortion that was summarized as "safe, legal, and rare." That last part made the conversation at least possible. It wasn't like we were having parades for abortion or anything. The median liberal position today seems to be on-demand abortion access for any reason, potentially into the third trimester or even at birth. Point out how crazy that is and you get responses like the ProPublica article - "women are literally dying because of these anti-abortion laws." It isn't moving the goalposts, it's making up new rules as you go while also manipulating the score.


If you bring up the fact that there's only one way to make a baby (sex) and suggest abstinence and/or sexual discipline, you aren't looked at as extreme, but as childishly out of touch. What, go without sex? Yes. Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying. No one has ever died from not fucking. In the most dishonest and illegitimate response to that idea, there are people who will say that practicing and preaching abstinence is actually some sort of reverse sexual-slavery that dehumanizes specifically women. Once we linked sexual activity to the amorphous "personal expression" we let the genie out of the bottle. The argument goes: "Anything you tell me to do is oppression and potentially violence. Anything I demand from society is actually a guaranteed human right that has been withheld because of systemic oppression."  Heads-I-win-tails-you-lose.


Taking a look at my own history that went from casually pro-choice to rigid pro-life, I'd assert that if you draw any firm line in the sand you are setting yourself up for a slow (though possibly accelerating) drift towards a pro-life stance because the opposite end keeps getting more extreme. Yes, I know this is a version of the "we're the normies; they just keep getting crazier!" argument, but ... I think the craziest are saying their quiet part out loud.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 15, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


but let’s be honest here that Trump the Character is uniquely toxic for American politics




Don't assume this is a consensus feeling. It is absolutely not.


What does "toxic" mean? I hear it all over the place. "Toxic masculinity," "Toxic work environment," "Toxic relationship." But what does it mean besides "bad ++" ?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 19, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
As is become habitual for you, excellent writeup.


The problems for the "hot brilliant war hero ladykillers" archetype gets complicated with details, scale, and scale's inverted cousin, depth. Let's approach this from a few angles.


"1. We want strong men. Warriors!"


I do bemoan the fact that Congress is now only 5% or so military veterans. And, of that, an elevated amount are non-combat veterans (this in a nation coming off of 20 straight years of deployed warfare). And isn't masculinity in crisis? Shouldn't we have more ass-kicking real life G.I. Joe's on Capitol Hill?!


Well thank god for the likes of Eli Crane, Dan Crenshaw, and Marcus Luttrell! Not exactly. These guys are all former SEALs. They're badass credentials are unimpeachable. And they're wildly ineffective in congress. This is not only objective but obvious. One of my favorite examples is Eli Crane who for some reason decided to go on record with a gossip columnist for politico. This is bizarre. Politico is a DC specific news outlet that covers the "deep inside baseball" of Congress and The White House. Their reports are often ex-communications junior staffers and they live and die by their connections to politicians and their offices. There's a lot of quid pro quo and handshake deals. To be en effective politician, you have to know how to handle the press. You can't be too coy, you can't be an open book.


The one thing you don't do is go on record, multiple times, talking shit about your colleagues personal lives. It doesn't matter the party affiliation. There are 530+ members of Congress with complex networks of personal friendships, loyalties, and favors. Saying crazy shit about each other's policy positions is totally fair game, but you don't tell a reporter - on record, cited by name - "yeah, actually, that person drinks too much." This is because it will then be impossible to get anything done because no one wants to spend time with or trust you - you might dime them randomly in a gossip column.


But Eli Crane isn't thinking this way because Eli Crane is a SEAL. That's a hypermasculine world where everyone talks shit about everyone all the time. If there's a real problem it is handled directly and head on - "hey, bro, you and me slug it out in the parking lot." That was his professional calibration for years. And I am very happy we have thousands of other men like him on our side with their guns pointed in the other direction. But the job of "warrior" today (in the most traditional sense -- being an Air Force cyber general doesn't quite relate) is a hyper-specialized role because today's true warriors are the best in history; they are in the best physical shape, with the longest and most rigorous training, with an insane level of technological proficiency, and a support structure that costs billions of dollars.


Applied to other domains, however, they don't generalize well. So, back to the archetype, the problem here is that what the archtype assumes (at a higher level of resolution) is the JFK (and generations past) version of a warrior; a dashing young officer (because enlisted is low class, ew) who did a few years of service but not a full career, maybe saw some combat, and was in an elegant role; Navy PT boat captain, a British Cavalry officer, WW2 Fighter Ace.


Navy SEAL, Green Beret in GWOT? And enlisted? I dunno ... those guys can get into some shit. Again - I firmly believe these are the most pure form of "warriors" we have on the planet today. But the archetype model I started with above doesn't want that, they want Romance Novel Ready Warriors.


"2. Shooters gonna shoot and cads gonna cad"


This is more directly related to @FiveHourMarathon 's post. Can adultery be heroic and masculine if done correctly? If I am flying around bedding starlets instead of masturbating with my goon goggles on, my wife could maybe find some pride in that, right?


The problem here is when we consider scale, both large and small. It's possible to read the JFK sex files, chuckle, roll your eyes and go "Different times. Guy was an asshole. Got laid a lot, though." But what you're dismissing is the real human toll it all had on people like Jackie, Marilyn, and the countless nameless secretaries who undoubtedly went through all kinds of mental and emotional anguish (and, in some cases, physical - STDs, yall).


Okay, but, that's a couple dozen (a hundred) people. And it's not my problem. Can't we still, you know, try to support the idea of "Responsible cocksmen-ery"? No, we can't, because people will be irresponsible and, frankly, bad at it and irresponsibility and incompetence at scale are awful for society.


If men are suddenly "empowered" (lol) to run around like JFK trying to seduce the pants off of every waitress, it ends with the emotional and mental anguish of full families, with violently acrimonious divorces, with kids with fucked up families, and, on the harsher end, with actual no-debate-about-it sexual assault. Additionally, if I a have reasonable suspicion that my drinking buddy wants to Oval my Wife's Office, I might get a few whiskey's in me and decide to take a swing at him. Remember, men kill each other for money/drugs, respect (hierarchical preference in a male dominated space), and for control over specific females. Making Adultery Great again is a good way to Make America Murdery Again.


The archetype fails, here, when it's extropolated to scale. The sociological mechanism of monogamy-marriage is explicitly to create high social penalties to being a cad so that society doesn't eventually devolve into jealousy-motivated murder madness.




Was the adultery somehow necessary? Or an inevitable side effect.




It wasn't at all necessary and, mostly as you pointed out, the product of the lack of concept of real consequences for multiple generations of a family who had grow up as the elite of the elite of the elite. There's a reason they called it "Camelot" - the Kennedys, specifically, are the closest American got in the post WW2 era to anointing our own royal family.


As they say, one of the the best things you can do for your career is die. JFK catching a hot one from Lee Harvey Oswald's blammer prevented what I think was a highly likely outcome for his presidency - nothing gets done and JFK flames out publicly when his affairs become too much for Jackie to bear. The seduction of the Hot Young President gives way to the ugly truth. Goldwater wins in '64 - running on an even stronger "morality" platform.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 5, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Relevant historical point -


A big part of the the sexual history of SF (gay Mecca, summer of love, polyamory etc.) is that in WW2, you could get kicked out of the Navy for being gay and that was the port they discharged you in. So, you have a bunch of young, fairly in shape gay men in the same spot.


"Magical dirt" isn't wrong, it's just a lazy causal method. Magical dirt is real, it's often just the product of historical randomness.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 17, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The reason(s) for this is even worse.


If you can document that you posted a public job notice, you can demonstrate to the Feds that you are "equal opportunity" employer - even when you wanted the job to go to a specific friend-of-an-employee already. Seriously, this is how it works.


Part of it is also used by large public corporations to send noise to hedge funds. Hedge funds will scrape job postings as a rough proxy for expected hiring (and, therefore, demand) for certain companies. A bunch of ghost jobs can confuse the HF algorithm.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 18, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


think about what kind of emotions must have driven him to that place, and have a little empathy.




But emotions can be flawed and often are.


If I see a stereotypical homeless schizophrenic person raving in the street, I definitely "feel" for them, but I'm not about to indulge their delusions of being Jesus Christ.


The thing that's never made sense to me about Trans ideology is that it seems to be firmly planted in the feeling and emotional camp for justification. If you really, truly feel you are the wrong gender, then, apparently, transition is a remedy for that. But there are thousands of people who, daily, really, truly feel that they are depressed, angry, lonely ... and still thousands more who deeply feel they are Jesus Christ. For this later group, we identify that that doesn't meet with reality and, therefore, that dissonance is a disease (or illness, whatever the preferred nomenclature is) and we ought to help that person through it (to the extent that they are capable. There's another thread in here about forced institutionalization, but let's stay focused). I would assume that any psychiatrist who has a patient who swears up and down that they are Napoleon reborn, and then offers that patient a prescription for Fancy French uniforms, they would be rightfully stripped of their professional license.


I have no problem with the idea of men or women wanting to dress, act, "present" as the other gender. If this provides joy and happiness in your life, that's wonderful. But the forced Kafabe of reality is a problem because society should never prioritize emotional comfort over truth (for adults ... we get to play a little fast and loose when raising children as they have to be taught emotional maturity gradually). The word games around "sex" versus "gender" don't make any meaningful distinction and only serve as a way to force conformity and create lines of demarcation for in-group and out-group.


Mostly, I think the trans issue is the same as the left-handed gun owners issue - there isn't one. For an vanishingly small percent of the population, they have severe mental and emotional issues that may or may not be alleviated through medical intervention. Many more are simply gay or lesbian folks reconciling with themselves. Some have generalized self-image issues. For example:




Sometimes -- during some periods in the past, at any time the thought would occur to me, which was quite often -- I want to be female... it's less common now because I don't indulge it as deeply -- I've almost never wanted to be what I actually am, male, except instrumentally... Why? I don't know why, that's just what is. Sucks to be me that I'm actually male, unlike half the human population.




Sorry to lightly edit your own words, but I think you can see how reading this could make someone think that it isn't about male-female, but more generally about self-conception/self-image acceptance. You could sub in some words about "fat" vs "skinny" and the sentences and ideas would still be coherent.


But the Trans-Ideology cult are none of those people and, instead, have taken up that cause as a political cudgel. Agreement with the ideology is far, far more important than empathy to the actual humans. Both of these are far, far less important than an accurate relationship with reality and the Truth.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 29, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'll admit the phrasing could be improved.


I was trying to go exactly where you went. There is no "women's rights" issue that isn't abortion. The closest could be the "pay gap" concept which, if not utterly overstated, is also something government can't do much about on its own.


So the question becomes, why say "women's rights" instead of "abortion rights" I think the answer is obvious from the rest of my post - anything that makes it very directly, personally, emotionally about YOU is more effective than a de-personalized partially abstract issue. "They are coming after your body!" is the most personal thing you can say - and that is literally what's being thrown out at women (particularly the young one's, I wonder why).


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 7, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Watch for staff turnover.


If this really was "the plan all along," I would expect most people to stay put.


If there was some moment where Trump "realized" that this was a massive economic blunder, he'll move or fire people, while still claiming "yep ... plan all along"


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 8, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Exactly. It's a pretty bog standard ThinkTank wishlist of policies and politicos that they want to put into some of the literally thousands of political appointee positions that follow any election. Every other major ThinkTank does this.


The "fear" of Project 2025 is a strange media / twitterati / very-online-people invention. I think it allows a lot of vague gestures to the idea of shadowy planning by unnamed (but somehow very influential) "party insiders." They kind of did this with the Federalist society people after Kavanaugh and Barrett got confirmed. It's quite literally the same as, all of a sudden, telling you friends, "Did you know that the GOVERNMENT is, like, storing all of these old BOOKS in these, like, secure buildings and you have to get an official identification card to ACCESS them?!"


All you've done is dramatized a dusty old library


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 6, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
There's an economics paper to be written about this.


Start up valuations are mostly a game until they're not. Signaling is a big part of it. If I'm raising at any stage (pre-seed, seed, series A, B, C etc.) I have to look around at the other companies who are raising at the same time, I have to figure out what VC firms are expecting over the next several years, I have to look at the IPO markets. That is how I create my own valuation, not my internal metrics (cashflow, margin, customer churn etc. etc.) The game of it is building a narrative that takes your internal metrics and creates a direct path to the du jour valuations.


If I don't do that and ask for less money, I am inadvertently signalling that I am not as high growth as the other companies I'm competing with. If I do that, no one will invest in me. Sure, you're going to say "but a real value investor---" No, that's not how big time VC works. Now, there are under the radar investors (I hesitate to call them VCs because they're too smart for that label) who purposefully try to find companies at good prices and don't care about the competitive pricing environment. But, the VC world being highly relationship and network driven, it's not like any company can flee to these "smart" investors. If you don't know them already, you don't knew they even exist.


So, most companies, especially those with first time founders, are playing the Big VC game. Investors will quite literally tell you "You have to take 5 million, even though you only asked for 3 million. If you don't, we're walking away. Also, make sure you spend all of that - we can't have a bunch of extra cash."


Why tho?


Because the VCs themselves have to make their fund performance metrics work; their IRR, their Multiples. A funny thing developed over the past two decades, however. This article is legendary for explaining it; deploying capital really fast creates its own outperformance even up to billions of dollars. So, if I am a VC with no particular investing talent but a lot of money (which is most of them) I want to find as many companies as I can (the later the stage the better, up to about Series C) and just cram huge amounts of money into their face. Because it works.


Even if it doesn't make any sense.