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4bpp

Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs

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joined 2022 September 05 01:50:31 UTC

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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs

				
				
				

				

					3 followers  

					follows 2 users  

					joined 2022 September 05 01:50:31 UTC
				


				
					

					
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				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 1, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Right, but it seemed like @OliveTapenade was partially coming at this from a "who are these newcomers to lecture us, the original Right, about what is Right" angle. (This kind of mirrors the "tankie left" vs. "mental health left" (I still think "Ctrl-Left" is a great coinage) divide, though in the US the latter has comprehensively won while the Alt-Right is at most a strong minority within the Right)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 1, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I take it as an answer in line with what @aaa said below, which is something like "it's not in the Bible, but clearly something that was believed by early (more Western than the founders?) Christians within 200-300 years of founding". Except for the longer excerpt from Augustine, though, the arguments don't really seem to obviously be implying an outright "personhood"/complete equivalence of fetuses to central examples of "persons" angle, instead going for general pro-natalism (most obviously in the "poisonous drugs to secure barrenness" text: it's associating abortion with contraception which involves no "conceived seed" at all, and the "conceived seed" vocabulary + implication that it has not yet "received vitality" also sounds like it considers the fetus less than human).


At least without context, Jeremiah 1:5 sounds like it's more about God knowing the future. If you want to read meaning into the phrasing in "formed you in the womb", it only seems to suggest that "you" were formed at some point while being in the womb (so between the point where the fertilised egg leaves the tube and birth).




Today many Christians would presumably add, "Today, we have greater scientific understanding, and therefore do know what Augustine did not, which is that life begins at conception."




Sorry, but this seems like what Scott called "Eulering" to me. Defining life, for moral purposes, is not the magisterium of science to begin with.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 1, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It was a fantasy insofar as he described it as a generic party with a generic GigaChad in attendance, not a party which was attended by people who were specifically personal fans of GigaChad. If the story is just "there exists a guy who has some girl fans he can objectify and they enjoy it", that's not saying much of interest about the "underlying true nature of complaints about objectification" at all.


There exist cannibals who someone wanting to be eaten throwing themselves at them, but this does not make a case for your neighbourhood involuntarily-merely-wannabe cannibal that all the people who want to lock him up if he voices his desires are being hypocrites who are just waiting for a chad like Meiwes to come along. He could make a case that it is some kind of cosmic injustice that Meiwes found his willing meal but he has nobody, just like Roy could make a case that it is unjust that Clavicular has an army of hoes and he doesn't, but this does nothing at all to lower the legitimacy of complaints of those who just don't want to be eaten, or don't want to be objectified, or don't want to work 80 hour weeks, at all.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 1, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Do the alt-right agree that "pre-natal people" are a thing, to begin with? The maximalist pro-abortion position does not seem any less consistent to me (as someone who holds it): something that does not have a record of autonomous human experience does not count as a "person", and if anything is wrong with killing it, it's not in the same category as what is wrong with killing people. (I can see an argument for not pulling the plug on the braindead from the perspective of "surviving relatives have sentimental attachment to the body" only.)


(Incidentally, I've been wondering, is there a literalist Biblical case in Christianity for the personhood of fetuses, or is this something that has been coloured in retroactively by modern analysis/apologetics "through a Christian lens"?)




to accuse the conservative right of 'LARP' or of being 'leftists' is surely absurd.




I think there's a great case to be made that Christianity and Leftism are closely related, which only rubs people the wrong way because in the US the majority of those who identify with the respective movements have evolved to be mutually disgusted tribal archenemies. It seems kind of like what happens when you point out to modern Greeks all the ways in which their culture, genetics and language have been influenced by the Turks.


Alt-righters, whose LARP of choice more often than not is some sort of BAP-style Classical elitism, seem to be one group that definitively has the right to call Christians "left-wing", because the thing they are LARPing in doing so (Classical Antiquity) was overturned by Christianity with a memetic package that through a modern lens very much parses as such.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 1, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
If the standard is just "one guy somewhere has said something that is generally considered bad to a woman and she was okay with it", then surely the instances of whipped husbands and wallet-cattle men should count too (and say the same thing about the "underlying true nature of complaints about" men being used as paypigs).


In fact, if that's the standard, a lot more things meet it. For example, the existence of 80 hour workweek hot-desking, hot-bedding startup drones in SF exposes the underlying true nature of complaints about workplace exploitation and work/life balance: you don't actually want reasonable working conditions, you are just waiting for a hot GigaChad industry like SV startups to give you the tingles!


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 1, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Is "people will happily debase themselves for someone they have the hots for" a compelling argument that debasement is actually good?


On the flip side, the stereotypical 45 year  old overweight Karen wife implicitly offers the deal that if you shower her with gifts and expensive dates she will not nag you quite as much for a week and you might even get to have sex. The MRA-adjacent sphere is quick to point out that it is unfair to men that society basically approves of this arrangement where they have to dump their paycheck in return for basic human decency/being treated like they have any worth at all. Yet, male simps will happily dump their paycheck for a mention by a titty streamer, a smidgen of attention from a hot classmate, or a 60-second handshake with a J-pop idol. Does their existence invalidate the MRA complaint?


(Also, your fantasy scenario is implausible mostly because the GigaChad as imagined by male incels and female 50 Shades readers, who is so hot that he can make stranger women drop their panties with a wink and drop creepy porno pickup lines and be universally liked for it, does not actually exist, any more than the mythical GigaStacy who can be like "you will buy me that diamond necklace, right" to a random man does. In both cases the outside onlooker confuses instances of dominance over a self-selected followership for a universal power.)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 1, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It might not imply it in a strict sense, but I would hope that you can at least bring a concrete example of someone "who defines UK society" saying that what the killer did was justice.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 1, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
They can't even get the Palestinians to riot for regime change, and compared to Iran that's shooting fish in a barrel (the barrel being Gaza).


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 1, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I don't believe you're saying these things for remotely principled reasons. Based on the many, many comments of yours I've read, I don't believe for one second that you'd view a race-flipped version of this as: sad, but nothing to see here.




You could apply this retort to 90% of political opinions on the Motte. On that matter, I don't believe you have any real principled reason behind making this post either - I don't believe for one second that you'd view a tribally-flipped version of this as a case of "the poster needs to provide tribally flipped examples, or else he's a dirty hypocrite".


Right-wingers will continue posting that things that make the Right look good are actually a big deal, and things that don't are actually nothingburgers. Left-wingers will continue doing the same with s/right/left/. Should we all just pack up and go home?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 25, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I still can't make sense of what you are trying to say then. What is the sense in which you claim proofs to be "interchangeable" in classical systems, why do you believe this to be a desirable property, and how do you contend with the fact that constructive proofs are classical proofs?


There may be some HoTT-like sense in which two proofs in a given system are not equivalent (because you introduced some equivalence relation on proofs that does not relate them). If you have a sound embedding from proofs in this system to proofs in another system, and the other system comes with its own equivalence relation on proofs, the images of your two proofs under the embedding might still be equivalent in the other system. Is this not just what would happen here, if you assert that all classical proofs of a given sentence are equivalent (under an equivalence relation you picked) but not all constructive ones are (under an equivalence relation you picked)?




This is doubly-so in cases like cryptography, where almost none of the "incorrectness" of compromised crypto is incorrect at all in the classical mathematical sense.




You will have to elaborate on this statement. What do you take to be an instance of compromised crypto that is not "incorrect in the classical mathematical sense"?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 25, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I do not understand where you were trying to go with your digression about constructivism. Is this just supposed to be FUD, as in you hope non-technical readers will look at it and walk away with an understanding like "what Terry produces with his AI is not a real proof"? Because the reality is rather the opposite: any proof in a constructive system like Lean is a proof in a non-constructive system like ZFC, and certainly it is especially a proof in the unspecified system that is mathematical practice outside of a handful of particularly rigorous subfields.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 25, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


But the most insidious form would be an entire simulated life (or, series of lives) that is always prearranged from the start to have a happy ending.




Have you ever felt, in moments where you suspect that things have gone surprisingly well for you all things considered, that you might already be living such a life?


The timing of the AI takeoff, in our (your?) lifetime, is suspicious too. A genuinely godlike experience machine could surely come up with and colour in any setting (but then its ways would be inscrutable for the simulatees); but a primitive model would probably reach for the normal human life setting that it has the most data on, which is the time just before it was created. "Most non-P-zombie human experiences are reasonably comfortable and fulfilling lives in a threshold world" is an observation that is consistent with an "AI takeover -> brief proliferation of experience machines -> end of conscious life" reality.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 25, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I've long been under the impression that "dark triad"/"evil" is an imperfect proxy/correlate for what women find attractive in those instances (which is not that well-understood or easily described). Otherwise, redpill-type advice would be much more effective - the men who take it are usually already resentful towards women and society, are you saying that as a group they are still somehow more held back by scruples about doing harm to others than silver spoon fratboys who have never encountered meaningful social adversity in their life?


Any theory of female attraction also needs to explain incidental features of it such as the widespread fascination with horses, which is transparently sexually charged. You can hardly project more dark-triad/evil traits onto horses than, I don't know, hyenas or pigs.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 25, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I probably pass for "right aligned" in, like, San Francisco, but I'm a little baffled to get that label on this forum.




I see you use "pozzed" in a post on page 2 of your profile. I consider unironic use to be an unambiguous right-wing cultural marker. (Doesn't it come from right-wing COVID vaccine opposition, which if anything is significantly more right relative to the distribution of (>=mid)wit rightwingers than it is relative to the US right wing as a whole?)




prostitute or not




I have not actually read her CV or anything, but since people referred to her as an escort I thought she primarily sold companionship/romance (not a sex act). She may also have worked as a camgirl (since I remember seeing posts about camgirling), which I would also not group with prostitutes (as long as you can't lose your virginity over a video feed, nothing you can do over one counts as sex, as far as I'm concerned; therefore camgirling is not a sex act). I have no issue with the term "prostitute" for people who take money for performing sex acts, especially if sex acts are the main component of what money is being taken for ("I hang out with you all day and at one point we have sex" feels borderline).


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 25, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Yeah, but what do you want from me? You asked for topwits and got a topwit.




My bad, it would have been more useful to ask for your understanding of the bottommost topwit or thereabouts.




I'm not sure that she still does escorting? In any case, socializing is basically your job as a public figure and helps feed the fame flywheel.




Sure, but it does not help the "good poasting" flywheel, and I assumed that any assessment of her wits is based on her textual output rather than her life as a Gesamtkunstwerk.




What is so well researched or interesting about her takes? Asking her Twitter followers about something is, I suppose, research, but I don't know it's particularly good.




The data analysis and visualisation, ideas for things to ask, and thoroughness in constructing the questions. I have not seen things like that fetish tabooness/preference by gender/popularity chart anywhere else outside of 4chan, and 4chan is many orders of magnitude more sloppy about it.




I think this is certainly true. I am not sure that conflating "agency" with intelligence is correct.




I would think of agency as at least strongly correlated with some component of intelligence (frontal lobe stuff?), and I say that as someone with very subpar levels of agency.




I think the real just world fantasy is to believe that nobody who is a midwit can attain fame and success.




Both can be just-world fantasies.




Ironically it seems to me that you are the one posting a weak knee jerk criticism here since I'm none of those things and didn't say anything about whether I find her attractive or not.




Fair point on the latter, but I thought it was fair to put you in the "assorted trad" box given your general right-wing alignment (you get that stamp based on memory, but it's not hard to find posts that give it away in your history) and the somewhat gratuitous use of "prostitute" (Escorts are between not covered by the definition and non-central examples in modern usage, so insisting on the world seems to be meant to convey condemnation).


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 25, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Well, then you need to argue that imagined/expected/fantasised-about sexual attention does not usually constitute a significant term in male perception of female value.


By coincidence, just today I got myself re-earwormed by this tango classic, which is about the male protagonist lamenting how he repeatedly gets baited by imagined sexual attention. Surely its popularity suggests that the sentiment resonates.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 25, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I mean, there's a lot of smart people out there. I don't pretend to have the final say on who is smart and who isn't, but I'd say, for example, Scott Alexander in his prime was a topwit.




Sure, but he was... top 0.1%? Top 0.01%? Certainly somewhere pretty high up, in terms of wit, even if we assume that most of the witty people never make their wits available to the public.




Aella is sculpting a public persona as her full time occupation. Her output is basically the best that she can do given full effort and attention. I like this forum a lot, but how many people here treat poasting as their full time job? I'd say zero. So I don't think that you can do a naive comparison given the discrepancy in effort involved.




A fair point, but one hand we have plenty of very active posters and on the other hand all the escorting and socialising and what-not surely must take up some of her time as well. Besides, being able to actually translate more time investment into better output is a skill in itself.




Why?




Because most posters here produce significantly less interesting, more brainrotten and worse-researched takes? And even then, I'd be comfortable with assuming that all Mottizens are top 10% for some reasonable measure of "wits" and most are at least top 5%. I just suspect that most of us are so bubbled up that we vastly overestimate the median person.




Debatable, since on a pseudonymous forum you can't actually tell who is successful and who is full of shit.




I don't know, it seems that enough people here drop hints at their occupation that it's likely enough most are in considerably lower-agency life tracks where they essentially operate as employees in standard-ish careers, and the path to get there and advance further forward looks like "get better standardised credentials and perform better on the next performance review".


I do have to admit that I'm quite biased against Aella's detractors, simply because the correlation between aesthetic objections to her lifestyle and politics and barely-solicited public criticism of the quality of her output or intellectual qualities is so high. If my impression is that she is one of the more interesting bloggers, but then every time some topic adjacent to her is discussed a cavalcade of card-carrying MRAs and postrationalist born-again Christians and other assorted trads comes out of the woodwork to assert that she is stupid and boring (and also very unattractive to them), then it just seems like a better explanation that the detractor "doth protest too much" and also is falling prey to a variant of the just-world fallacy (believing that the world can't be so unfair that the immoral and distasteful would also be competent and talented).


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 25, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
How is this consistent with the existence of celebrity simps and stalkers, who receive ~zero sexual attention from the target they value the most?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 25, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Aella, despite being, as far as I can tell, a midwit




Who do you consider examples of non-midwits (topwits?)? It seems to me that unless the standard you are applying is more correlated with your aesthetic/moral approval of the person than their wits as usually defined, you should then be writing off most of this forum as midwits as well.


(My impression is that she should be a little bit above the median of the Motte in terms of smarts and verbal skills, and way above in terms of agency (mostly evidenced by the successful ascent to and maintenance of local e-celeb status). Not in any sense my "type" either, so I think I have a low risk of bias due to simping.)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 25, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


All things being equal I would prefer the not slut. But all things are not equal.




It seemed to me that this was essentially what remained of @2rafa's point, after one cleaned up the slightly muddled argument, anyway. Relatedly-




In modern American society my gut says I would advise young women to go be a slut. It opens a lot of doors for you and not being a slut is socially awkward now. Though I think it may be very psychologically damaging.




If you define "psychological damage" sufficiently broadly, is this not just the two sides of the deal offered by any form of social interaction? The modal rat-adjacent slightly right-wing homeschooled CHAD would like to keep the purity of his autistic trains of thought, birthed from the dust of the internet and nursed in its dark corners like the medieval idea of a, well, rat; but his life success will increase if he goes to college, has his rough corners filed off by the feminised DEIcracy and learns to talk the talk of successful people. The monk-like mathematician would like to stay in his ivory tower counting ordinal angels on the head of a pin, but three increasingly depressing postdocs with overwhelming teaching load later he gives up, starts spending his nights on HN and before long he is grifting funding from schmucky finance bros with papers about smart contracts instead.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Detroit, China: A personal account of a small slice of urban decay in China
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I wonder if to some extent this can be chalked up to differences in climate, but I am surprised how nice and clean everything looks. I spent a bit of time around Shanghai and Suzhou two years ago, and though of course especially the former had its glitzy parts, I took in no shortage of sights that were far more decrepit and dilapidated than anything you are showing here. There were rotting trash-covered shopping malls/hawker centres right next to the canonical route from the airport to the center, dystopian arrays of housing blocks made of unfinished water-damaged concrete, and peeling paint and rust all over.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
This is way too detailed for a "testable predictions" post, and I'm glad to see the responses you get are not really having it. Are you trying to exploit that "What's more likely: (a) Linda is a bank teller, (b) Linda is a bank teller and active in the feminist movement" cognitive glitch, where the excess of detail paints a more vivid picture and thus gives your hypothesis more weight in the reader's mind than it should get on intrinsic merit? (Less nicely: are you not just using the "public predictions" framing to peddle your wish fulfillment fic where AI believers are BTFO? Not that the other side is not guilty of the same thing, with "AI 2027" or what it was called)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I have a slightly different answer from what seems to have been offered so far. Companies, as a legal form, are a carrot-and-stick deal offered to the individual by society in order to channel his ambition into pro-social or at least less harmful ends.


    

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    The carrot are tax advantages, paperwork benefits, legal perks such as being able to claim unique use of a recognisable artificial trademark, and some degree of shielding of the individual behind the enterprise from repercussions (such as debts far in excess of what the enterprise could be expected to make up for, or legal responsibility for side effects and damages caused by it), as long as he plays by the rules.
    

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    The stick is, often, outright lawfare against individuals who pursue their ambitions without signing up to the form (in Germany for example you can not even, as a private person, make and sell software to the public without registering a company).
    

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    The means by which the goal (of channeling individual ambition to pro-social ends) is pursued are legal requirements to make the activities of the company legible in particular ways (bookkeeping, charters, records) and adhere to all sorts of restrictions on shape, purpose and behaviour. If there is an obligation to "maximise shareholder value", on the flip side this means that a company can not actually have the terminal value to "maximise paperclips", and there may be legal ways to mobilise society against if it appears to do the latter over the former. Also, the things that a company can command its employees to do are a subset of the things an individual can force another individual to do with a legal contract, which are a subset of the things an individual can force another individual to do with legally unregulated compulsion such as individual or communal violence.
    

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The alternative to companies, the thing that there would be more of if someone erased the concept of companies from reality with a memetic Death Note, does not look like people no longer getting together to achieve things, or less consumption. It looks like more instances of things like the Mafia, cults and Genghis Khan's hordes. If you only erased companies narrowly writ, you might also (at least) get medieval guilds, which are really an older, rougher attempt at the same thing.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Do command and conquer games model a civilian economy...? I thought they were a classical RTS, where you just have military production buildings and maybe resource extraction and upgrade research. Even if that were the case, "it's like this in a game" is not an argument that something is not the case in real life. You have to actually articulate what you believe is different. I gave concrete examples of ways in which I believe an indiscriminate bombing campaign would lower military productivity; do you have an argument against that that is not just waving your hands about adaptation and heroism? If not having public transport and shops actually had no adverse impact on military production, why does Ukraine not shut down its public transport and shops and have the people run them produce more drones instead?


You readily, even enthusiastically concede that Russia is being incompetent. Do you think that this incompetence does not extend to their choice of targets and risk assessment, so individual decisions like e.g. throwing a dud Oreshnik at Yuzhmash instead of aiming it at the Khmelnytskyi NPP or downtown Dnipro was a competent decision? In fact, can you state your theory of why they have been bombing conventional power plants but leaving nuclear ones alone? It seems to me that you would have to go through extreme argumentative contortions to fit it with this "whatever targets Russia hasn't hit would make no difference or they are incapable of hitting them" narrative.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Hm. After reviewing the situation, I have to withdraw my implication that the Baltics have gotten particularly more bold since the start of the conflict; I was assuming that the recent Ukrainian drone attacks on St Petersburg used their airspace for transit with their explicit approval, but apparently they themselves still dispute it (and the "EW misdirecting drones there from Russia" story seems no less plausible). There's a steady drumbeat of rather more belligerent rhetoric than the European average and attempts to up the tensions around Kaliningrad from them, but I guess this has been constant since the beginning of the conflict. Sorry.