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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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4bpp


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


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

				
				
				

				

					4 followers  

					follows 2 users  

					joined 2022 September 05 01:50:31 UTC
				


				
					

					
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				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The mistake, as usual, is to confuse "left" for "the powerful interests backing them". There is nothing obviously left-coded about Germany and others deciding to send male military-age Ukrainian refugees back going forward, but the ECHR will not interfere with that. Indeed, if it did, this would piss off people far from the usual progressive coalition.


The tragedy of right-wingers is that they like selective enforcement; the picture of a gravitas-laden authority producing triumphant wordslop that puts ineloquent, unwashed, treacherous rubes who thought the letter of the law would protect them in their place warms the authoritatian's heart. They like it so much that even when they have lost all power and gravitas and the same mechanism is only used against them 90% of the time, they can't get themselves to denounce it in the remaining 10% where they still agree.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The Econ 101 argument is that you can't have deflation, because even the possibility of it incentivises entities that have cash to sit on it and wait for it to become worth more rather than spending it, thereby tanking spending and investment. You could try to cheat with mechanisms like negative interest, but this will just incentivise people to look for more ways to stash their cash where your negative interest mechanism can't get at it.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Huh, I have to say you are not among the top posters I expected to go into a doomer meltdown after the election. What gives? Did you expect a significantly different outcome? Is it El Sayed specifically?


On the object level-




Even lightly chipping away at one of the sandbox’s walls requires the legislative energy of an entire term, and all the while they can accomplish nothing else, must contend with moderates in their own faction




The lede, which is that actual conservative restoration does not have a majority, is buried pretty deep here. Really, there's a very short summary of the situation you are describing: progressive policies are implemented unless a majority opposes them, while conservative policies are only implemented if a majority endorses them. The bias is entirely implemented using the slack given by the indifferent, so the result is not per se undemocratic.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Midterms Megathread
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
In what direction do you expect such a policy to shift the election outcome, and why?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Midterms Megathread
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The difference is that Gerald Ford was fairly milquetoast presidential material, while JD Vance does not fit the mold at all in appearance and demeanor, and appears to be instinctively loathed by normies to the point that I seriously think Trump may have picked him as a threat to discourage his own removal.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Midterms Megathread
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
We have maybe about 5 people with unconditional pro-Trump values and about 3 for Israel (in the sense that "convince people of the righteousness of (Trump/Israel)" is a significant part of their motivation to post at all). They always show up for these topics, and the active user base is small enough that this is enough to make their views seem dominant.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Midterms Megathread
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'd bet that at least one of the next three distinct US presidents (including the tail of the Trump administration, mostly to cover the nontrivial possibility that it will collapse in favour of something more pro-Western in the next two years after all) will order physical military action on Iranian territory at pretty steep odds.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Midterms Megathread
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It's obviously your in-group biases showing, because a larger gap than white men's 55-43 red is right there in your numbers (women's 58-40 blue) but you presumably felt no concern that women would "continue to feel disenfranchised and start checking out of the increasingly masculinized society" when the red team was ahead.


If being outvoted on your group's preferences amounts to disenfranchisement any time it happens, then representative democracies disenfranchise most groups most of the time. If this actually led to "checking out" every time it happened for even one legislative period, most representative democracies would long have collapsed.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Midterms Megathread
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It's a favourite pastime for people who fancy themselves "high-information" to let some artificial macroeconomic metrics override common-sense observations. Another instance of this was when people were confidently predicting the swift end (in Western favour) of the Ukraine war based on GDP comparisons back in 2022.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I mean, isn't Evangelical support for Israel premised on something to the effect of "we need Israel to be strong and pick wars with everyone, so they get pushed to the brink of destruction, which will trigger a prophesied sequence of events leading to the Second Coming of Jesus"? It's hard to fault them for not reciprocating this kind of love; even if you can decouple from the creepiness of it, on a material level it is clear that their mid-term preferences do not actually entail any sort of peace and prosperity for Israel except insofar as it needs to be lifted up to fall down better. Can you blame the goose for being ungrateful when you are fattening it up for Christmas?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Midterms Megathread
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I don't get what's going on with Responsible Statecraft's




"Nothing to see here," the American Conservative's Curt Mills snarked, pointing to a graph showing voting preference averages literally flipping from Republicans to Democrats since the war was launched in February.




If I look at the tweet linked thence, it appears to show a graph where voting preference averages flipped in March 2025, and there is barely any detectable signal of anything in Feb 2026. Am I blind, or are these people all failing at reading graphs? (...perhaps they are so discombobulated that they only read the "Jan" on the left and the "Aug" on the right and assume the graph must run from Jan to Aug of this year?)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Midterms Megathread
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I don't know. Demoralisation of the other team (or some blind hope of achieving it) has been the supreme aspiration of American politicians for a while now, and nothing would demoralise right-wingers like exploiting the burned wastes left in Trump's wake to run Kamala again and win.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 26, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I thought it very likely, in that context, that @VIM's "Support for Israel" was shorthand for the things discussed in the video - military aid, political cover and so on. This is further bolstered by him later rewording the stance in question again as "unconditional support". Your wording ("against Israel existing") suggests that you took "65% are against support for Israel" to mean "65% want Israel to stop existing". In that light, I am not convinced that you "understood the claim correctly". It seems to me that you are still trying to resist attempts to disentangle those two.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'm not a US citizen (and Germany is not about to follow suit any time soon), but if I were I think I would be about 50% satisfied if this indeed went through (which I highly doubt). The other 50% would be about the US using its political muscle to help Israel against third parties (such as sanctioning ICC judges who prosecute Israeli officials, legally punishing boycott movements, or pressuring other countries against taking actions against it).


If this stopped, again under the hypothetical where I am a US citizen, this would not make me like what they are doing, but it would demote the salience of their business back to the level of dozens of other far-flung regions stuck in a perpetual cycle of bad people making each other's lives miserable.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


There must be an uncaused cause; this can be identified with God.






However, that's a long way from being a canonical Christian.




By including "canonical", you are papering over the distance in an egregious way - as if the way from that is not quite so long to being some sort of non-canonical, perhaps quite heretical, but still recognisable Christian.


In general, I noticed decades back that US Christians arguing with atheists often seemed to expend a great amount of effort to try and persuade the audience that some/any sort of supernatural force exists, but then took for entirely granted the leap from "something outside of physics" to "our version of Christianity is true". Your "uncaused cause" argument is that taken to an extreme: unlike, say, "intelligent design" or miracles, it does not even try to insinuate any sort of attributes of the supernatural thing that would give it a special connection to humans, but instead seems to be content with postulating the bone-barest of featureless mathematical artifacts. (I won't even go into how unpersuasive the argument itself is.)


This might have worked a little bit in a setting like rural parts US of 50 years ago, where Christianity was so dominant that people may not have had the meme pool to conceive of a supernatural "cause" that did not have the essential properties of the Christian god; but nowadays, when everyone is exposed to a dozen of world religions with their own creation myths and science fiction like Clarke's entropy-reverting VAC blending into science reality like AIs running convincing simulacra of humanity in fake environments, there is an infinitude of possible "uncaused causes" you would have to rule out that stand between you convincing a reader of a supernatural "uncaused cause" and you convincing them that the "uncaused cause" will punish them if they abort, fornicate or trans their kids.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I read your post just fine. It's just that I don't consider "I was X for many years" to be good evidence of understanding X. Few born believers can match the zeal of an adult convert; most of those who convert were never typical examples of what they converted away from; and your post gave me a lot of signs of strong alignment with the perspectives of your current tribe, starting with how you naturally wrote it as if you could not conceive or did not want anyone else reading ("Bad news first, good news after!").




This is utterly absurd. I'm not suggesting stealing anything from illegal immigrants, like what happened to the Jews.




Did you read my post, actually? I thought I made it quite clear that I don't think anyone would think it literally equivalent, just that it is sufficiently similar to trigger similar moral impulses. (Mind you, the Nazis surely also did not think of what they were doing as stealing, but rather as reclaiming what was rightfully theirs. Whether you see it as equivalent more depends on whether you agree with their premise, or conversely feel that the extra expenses being saved also "belonged to" the illegal immigrants in the US.)


Either way, I'm not a US voter, but I've lived there long enough (and can speak for others in my household who are) that it should count for something if I think that switching D->R around Trump 1 and back to D around now (as I would do and people around me did), and seeing the moral analogy I outlined, is a plausible pattern.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


If they had sent out monthly checks to all citizens for the past 2 years, and labeled them something like "rewards check for less illegals"




I'm not sure if you are not typical-minding yourself (presumably an ideologically fairly hard Republican) too much there. There is an obvious spin the other side can put on such a move, which is to make it rhyme with "Nazi Germany redistributing confiscated Jewish property/profits from selling gold teeth at the concentration camp". This might be quite enough to make ideologically more middle-field voters (who, unlike bleeding-heart Trump followers, are not feeling maximum spite towards illegal immigrants even if they might on the balance feel that it is just and necessary to deport them) feel uncomfortable about receiving the money; even if they think the Nazi comparison too extreme, an air of benefitting off of others' misery would stick to it.


(For an intuition pump, how would you feel about a law that caps palliative medical expenses of the "dying grandma kept technically alive on Medicaid money for years by drug cocktail and mechanical lung" type, if some of the savings came back to you as a "reward check for pulling the plug on grandma"?


Better still, assume for the sake of argument that by getting rid of various lower-class mistakes, abortion is a net economic positive. This at least seems plausible. Do you think the net favorability of legal abortion means that handing out "rewards checks for less unemployed single moms" would help the Blue vote?)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 26, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
You are the one who called the parent poster's comparison "misleading", after he posted a video that drew conclusions about support for El Sayed based on polling for "reduce or eliminate military aid to Israel" and "favorability of AIPAC", and suggested that the more appropriate criterion (to determine who would be willing to vote for him) is "categorically against Israel existing". I don't know the post from "a couple of weeks ago" you are referencing, and maybe in your eyes all the anti-Israel opinions you have seen form one homogeneous blob, but I could only evaluate your post in the context of the one you were directly responding to.


El Sayed seems to be (implicitly or explicitly) campaigning on reducing support for Israel. Per the video, this is a popular position. As I understood you, you were trying to argue that (1) stopping Israel from existing is on the other hand not a popular position and (2) this implies a majority will not vote for him. But for this reasoning to work, you need a significant number of potential voters to believe that supporting him actually amounts to "against Israel existing". You have not proven this, and seemingly not seen the need to prove this. This is highly reminiscent of the leftist strategy to equivocate "remove subsidies for gender transition"/"reduce positive media depictions of transsexualism" with "deny trans people's right to exist".


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Random Musings on the State of TheMotte
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Good progressive liberals. It was a term of affection.




Show me an example.




"affirmiitve action for left-wingers"




How is it affirmative action? There is one proposed standard for everyone (do not use terms for members of your outgroup that they generally consider to be slurs), and the only group that is pathologically incapable of abiding by that standard and is trying to argue that it is unfair that it is applied to them are rightists. The rightists are the ones whose position rhymes with minorities being propped up by DEI in the US school system here.




Last paragraph




Well, I'm not "people". Don't Goomba-fallacy (ugh) me. (I do suspect that he would have caused much less affront if his name was not constantly clothing each of his posts in a stench of pointless provocation.)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 26, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
So, if he does win, how much will you update towards "the voters don't know (/believe) (...)" and how much will you update towards "they know, but they like Hamas more than Israel"?


(To begin with, voters are not uniform! It could in fact be the case that the majority of voters believe he will give money to Hamas, and the majority of voters likes Israel more than Hamas, but the majority of the former group likes Hamas more than Israel, and so he wins on the votes of that set \cup the set that does not believe he will.)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 26, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I mean, is he campaigning on "Israel should not exist"? You can play the game where you replace the outgroup's policy position with what you think they actually believe/what you think will be an inevitable consequence if they get their way/what you think gets listeners to take the threat of it as seriously as you do, but then the correct comparison is not to the mere motte of the reference position ("transing children under any circumstances") but the result of playing exactly the same game with it. Many leftists have in fact already done that very thing, down to the exact substitution you used!


So, how do you figure the number of Americans who are categorically against Israel existing compares to the number of Americans who are categorically against trans children existing (in the classic culture-warry "denying our right to exist" sense)?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Random Musings on the State of TheMotte
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Where exactly was I insisting that Darwin was treated unfairly?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 26, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
If they made themselves popular with the populations rather than just the leadership, maybe terrorism would be less of a problem.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 26, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
That count is too naive to be useful for decision-making. Ditching Ukraine would cost the US the affection of a big chunk of the European political class, which would not be unlikely to catalyse all sorts of downstream costs from further lawfare against US tech megacorps to rich countries ditching Mastercard/Visa/the petrodollar. It would make Russia more friendly, but these would be very modest gains. Ditching Israel would cost the US the affection of Israel, and some subset of the Jewish diaspora, and in return gain it massive soft power with the entire Islamic world. Nobody knows how to quantify those expectations, and so there are no objective utilons to count.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Random Musings on the State of TheMotte
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I mean, your case would be more compelling if you could show even one person who uses the term while neither personally disliking transsexuals or transsexualism, nor engaging in some sort of reclamation exercise.


This is like the troon discussion all over again. Not only is this line of reasoning proving too much ("baboon does not diminish/insult the primates! coon does not diminish/insult raccoons! Why would they be an obvious slur against (...)?"), if you actually believed it you would just find yourself constantly surprised by reality, specifically why certain classes of similar-looking words keep coined by groups of people for other groups they hate and why the target groups keep reacting negatively to those words being used to them. Yes, some leftists famously use a strategy where they pretend to not understand something that is common sense but not backed by an articulate theory that looks good in front of an audience. That doesn't mean you should lower yourself to their level; if you think that you should do that because some leftists somewhere got to, that's a textbook example of fighting the culture war here, as opposed to discussing it.