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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

				
				
				

				

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					joined 2022 September 05 01:50:31 UTC
				


				
					

					
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				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 6, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Is this not a principled choice by Zelensky, though? There is a particular Western memeplex that is easily glossed as "weaponised end of history". In this narrative, it is the West that is always willing to look at the present, call out evil and fight for good; and its enemies consist of a freak show of backwards beta loser powers that always invoke historical grievances and cringey national myths, which no enlightened democratic Chad would give a rat's ass about, to rationalise their desire to do more evil. This way of thinking clearly appeals to a significant portion of the Western audience - general Western media reactions to Putin's occasional rambling history lessons seem to come from the same playbook as the Kamala campaign "weird" ad to much better reception, and a particularly common use of the "whataboutism" meme may be glossed as "don't derail our discussion about what you are doing now by talking about what I did in the past".


Zelensky doesn't obviously need the audience that is unwilling to subscribe to this worldview, because the alliance of devout history-enders and Machiavellians can easily remain at the levers in the West as long as the fence-sitters stay put. He has little to gain from bringing up historical context, because historical context on the balance would not be kind to him - between the mess that was 2014-2022, the now largely forgotten gas disputes in the decades before it (which one may summarise as Ukraine stealing gas and being like "what are you gonna do, stop using our territory for transit?" about it) and the awkwardness surrounding how inextricable the literal Nazis and collaborators are from Ukrainian national identity even while none of their modern backers are quite willing to take the plunge and officially rehabilitate them, legitimising the view that history matters at at all would only risk growing the elements of the Western public that are tired of the war and would rather see their tax money and attention tokens redirected to morally more black-and-white issues.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 6, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Well, there are some caveats there - if they are actually using homomorphic encryption to run the classifier, that means that Apple's servers do not at any point learn what the landmark is. If the goal is to report it to the FBI if a picture being sent has been labelled "child porn", accordingly, the phone would have to be wired up to report/send the image if the data it received, once decrypted, indicates that it was classified as such. How do you stop people from blocking this reporting functionality on their end? Adding additional user-unmuteable snitching logic to end-user devices comes with all sorts of legal, technological and security risks (and quickly puts you in a league with North Korean computing equipment that comes with daemons watermarking every document you touch, which they make it illegal to disable).


That being said, I see your argument at least insofar as the case for "it can't be done" is overstated and oversold, but I am not enough of an idealist to agree with this "just be truthful to the ruling classes and try to defend what you want on principle, the truth always wins in the end" thinking. I'm pessimistic about the prospect of a principled stand - we'll get the mandatory surveillance rectangle reporting on wrongthink eventually, because the powers-that-be really want it, and the majority of our fellow citizens probably already want it as well, or else the ruling classes will have all the opportunity on their side to manufacture the conditions that will make them want to, be it by propaganda, dissolving the cohesion of their opposition (note how effectively they split the tech anarchist scene into those who still want to keep the government out and those who think that the Nazis who want to keep the government out are the real danger) or creating real problems to which they are the solution (people want less government spying -> import scary foreigners into what to them is a scary foreign land -> old natives want more government spying to keep them safe from scary newcomers, newcomers want more government spying to keep them safe from racist natives).
As far as I am concerned, the better choice at this point is just to lie and obstruct all the way. This buys time for some technical or societal deus ex machina solution to emerge, or else at least lets us spend a bigger fraction of our remaining time on this mortal coil out of bondage.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 5, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Being jealous of your tribe's women is not exactly racism - it does not require ascribing any particular qualities to the people who take them other than that they are outsiders. Racism could then be used to rationalise why you find it bad that they get with a member of the outgroup rather than a member of the ingroup you have no particular relation to, but that's not what I was insinuating or talking about.




Furthermore, you seem to have no awareness of the scope of the problem. For one, it wasn't just Rotherham.




He was the one who started to talk about Rotherham. I'll admit I did not know about the number of other similar cases (I had only heard of one smaller one) until looking just now, though "hundreds of thousands" still seems unrealistic. (I'd guess maybe 50k as an upper bound for the last 40 years, which seems to be the time window over which the published counts run. Adding up numbers from all the cases I could find on Wikipedia gives about 10k total.)


Meanwhile, in the Savile case, Wikipedia cites the police as talking about 450 alleged sexual abuse victims, and allegations and semi-open discussion of it date back to the '90s. A particular paragraph goes




In 2007, Savile was interviewed under caution by police investigating an allegation of indecent assault at the now-closed Duncroft Approved School for Girls near Staines, Surrey, in the 1970s, when he was a regular visitor. The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) advised there was insufficient evidence to take any further action and no charges were brought.[11] In 2012, it was reported that staff at the school had not been questioned about the allegations at the time.[28] A former headmistress of the school said she had been "hoodwinked" by Savile,[29] but described some of those who had brought the allegations as "delinquents".[30][31]




which really sounds quite similar - and this was apparently going on for some 50 years and only was made part of the public record after his death. Between the circumstance that apparently a single person can perpetrate abuses of this scale unreported, the Epstein/royalty connections, other European high society cases such as Dutroux in Belgium, and the little contacts I had into the chav stratum of British society (back when I was a kid making friends in MMORPGs) and stories of sugar-daddy dating I heard from there, I can absolutely believe that a big portion of those teenagers and kids would have just been groomed by somebody else.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 5, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Consider it another piece of evidence that NTR is the mind-killer. His meltdown looked like a fairly common instance of how men go down a negative thought spiral about their tribe's women being taken by the ethnic outgroup. (Using the anime culture term here might seem a tad basic, but that subculture still tends to produce some of the most unhinged demonstrations of these thought patterns in action. Though see also the legendary American obsession with the putative virility of black men.)


I'd reckon the same thousands of White British girls from low-human-capital backgrounds were sex-trafficked by old men who look like the cast of Top Gear long before the Pakistanis came along, but this would never inspire an emotional reaction from halfway across the internet. (One individual was seemingly single-handedly about 1/3 as prolific as the entire Rotherham gang, but who is fedposting about the BBC now?)


I continue to not understand why his fans assess him as a "very skilled writer and fairly smart". I was willing to grant that perhaps I was being distracted by the rambling/malapropisms/formatting and higher-IQ readers could see past the style (which he always claimed was a deliberate choice to... throw off writing analysis?) and see some spark of brilliance in the substance behind it, but the circumstance that, in what was by all accounts a parting shot in which he could no longer contain his righteous fury, he did not for a moment break with the style even as he went through an emotional outburst made me update in favour of it being genuine and him really being somewhat confused and verbally challenged.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 30, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
A breed with an army and a navy, or so it is said.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 30, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
So is it lasers or proton beams? Those two are not the same.


Either way, even if we commit to the proton beam story, I don't quite buy it. Beams are directional - they occupy an area in space that looks like a (decaying, if they are getting absorbed) half-line, not like a point, and accordingly getting them to pump a lot of energy into a compact volume that is not continuous with the emitter is going to be very hard. There have been some attempts to do this for scifi display tech by having a wide beam converging at a removed focal point and relying on some discontinuous physics (plasma phase transition) around it, but those are still at a "tabletop" rather than a "sector of airspace" scale, they come out blurry even at those short ranges, and the energy requirements are already so high that it needs to be pulsed, resulting in the plasma (that constantly pops in and out of existence) being very noisy.


Putting the focal point at a distance of hundreds of meters or even some kilometers from the emitter, rather than centimeters, would get you plasma foci that are either extremely stretched/washed out in the direction of the beam (especially considering atmospheric scattering and everything, the energy density at the focus will not be terribly different from the energy density a meter up or down the beam from it), or you would require massive emitters (so the incoming beams converge at a wide angle), which I doubt they would place at sea and would be very far beyond civilian technology levels for any sort of coherent beam, or you would require multiple distributed emitters with perfect stabilisation to have a strongly lit up intersection point of beams that are individually too weak to induce plasma, which I could maybe believe on land (but then military anti-air beam weapons would be much further along than they appear to be) but not on sea.


Based on this line of thought and the circumstance that the Tic Tac video had obvious and much-commented-on camera effects (features/"hair" that seemed to track sensor orientation rather than that of the putative object in the real world), I'm leaning towards much weaker energetic interference upon the sensor itself, something perhaps more akin to virtual retinal displays for FLIR. Any reports of "water disturbance" (of which we were not given any visual, even though we should assume that the US military records plenty of visible-light video everywhere it goes) can be just as easily chalked up to either metaphorical water-muddying by involved military (like, what if your superior orders you to add this detail when talking to the press?) or the usual psychological tendency to hallucinate additional detail in disturbing situations experienced in a group (you're scared; the people next to you are scared; what is everyone scared of? Isn't the water looking kind of funny today?).


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 30, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Eh, there's like two posters further down giving it some amount of credence. We've had bigger threads about the Tic Tac at the time, and my sense was that the vast majority do not buy either the UFO or the classified scifi tech theory. It's just less exciting to argue the same thing over and over again when the evidence for the theories is always of the same shape (US military whistleblower full of red flags, blurry or unclear video, lots of reported sightings surely must mean they can't all be wrong, friend-of-a-friend who is very smart and has access believes it), especially when the UFO/scifi believers aren't really anyone's outgroup.


(Though with the Tic Tac, I did actually have a favourite classified scifi tech sort of theory: US skunkworks developed a way to dazzle integrated sensor systems with coherent false readings. Intended audience was China and/or funding agencies. Efficacy demonstrated by showing that even muggle US military were completely overwhelmed by it.)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 30, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
If we accept a broad enough definition of burning (I'm for the usable-energy-converted-to-entropy one here) - something burned to get the water up first, and to fuse the atoms we proceed to split.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 30, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


People once thought that all light was fire--that all light consumed. But my house today is brighter than any pharaoh's court, and it burns not.




The steady pressure of cold electrons coming out of your wall outlet is a neat trick of civilisation, like cut and packaged meat without fur or claws or eyes, but something, somewhere, still had to burn for it.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Transnational Thursday for January 2, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The poster you were responding to was talking about 40k dead Gazans. You suggested that this number is untrustworthy, and countered by citing Israeli statements that it killed 17k Hamas operatives. The assumption that Hamas operatives are more or less a subset of Gazans seems fairly safe, but on the face of it this is not a refutation of the 40k figure. Since you seem to have structured your post as if it were one, this suggests one of two options: either you (and the Israelis?) are thinking it is in fact one (i.e. think that Hamas operatives ~= the set of Gazans they killed), or this represents the best effort at a refutation that can be made with Israeli numbers (because they don't keep count of anyone other than Hamas operatives).


In the latter case, a total figure of 40k seems very plausible - I tried to look for casualty figures for a random Israeli attack I saw on the news (Jabalya market) and found a UN one saying that "OHCHR verified that at least 42 people were killed, including 14 children and one woman". We don't have any stats on the adults, but I'd figure that the children are probably not what the modal Westerner would count as Hamas operatives (I assume they were not 17 year old children-on-paper but phenotypically obvious younger children?) and there probably would have been at least a similar number of uninvolved adults around unless one is positing Hamas was holding bring-your-kids-to-work day. (Low number of women doesn't have to be as indicative of anything in an Islamic setting as it would at first seem.) This suggests at least a something like 2:1 uninvolved:Hamas casualty ratio, which intuitively seems about right given the pictures and the apparent "if one of the floors is occupied by Hamas, blow up the whole thing" targeting approach in an area with lots of buildings of around 4 floors or so.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Transnational Thursday for January 2, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Is the premise behind that estimate that we are supposed to believe that approximately everyone they killed was a "Hamas operative", or that there is an unknown number of dead even Israel does not consider "Hamas operatives" that they didn't bother to count or report?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 30, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I can confirm that STEP is hard (I had to take it, had a bad time and barely squeezed in), but in general I'm not convinced that the Anglo-style maths exams are quite testing for the right of thing. Compared to what you get in other countries, in all of them the test-taker is bottlenecked on speed - if you are faced with a question where you do not immediately recognise the structure and have memorized a solution algorithm, it is always advantageous to skip it and jump to another one where you have rather than spend any time on problem-solving to create a strategy rather than recall it. Of course performance on such a test is correlated with intelligence to a fair extent (after all, you need to build a good mental data structure to pattern-match the problems and remember all the different solution algorithms, and to execute a possibly quite complex algorithm which might involve symbol-pushing or spatial imagination quickly), but it is correlated with discipline and commitment even more (since the person who sat down and drilled example questions will have a tremendous advantage), and in my view there is in fact a principal component contributing to "speed" that is independent of "intelligence", which naturally matters as well.


Now you could argue that testing for discipline and commitment over intelligence is actually the test working as intended and part of the required notion of "merit", and perhaps all of the above is me coping and seething because I'm a lazy and undisciplined bum and almost got humbled by this type of exam (I can't fully deny), but the question is if you really want to have something as life-changing as university admissions hinge on a metric that is so trainable and even attainable by coercion. Sure, you could say that it is good that the gifted-but-lazy kid is sidelined by the kid who, due to natural discipline, sat down for three hours every day of his last two years of school and practiced past SAT/STEP questions. What if the latter kid then is sidelined by the kid whose parents locked him up and made him practice the questions for every waking hour since he turned 12, not allowing him to socialise and withholding food if he slacks off? As college becomes more of a prerequisite for success and discipline-based exams become more of a prerequisite for college, the dominant strategy becomes something like the South Korean childhood on steroids. Sure, in the limit of everyone having to play along with this equilibrium strategy the test once again becomes the reflection of 60% discipline plus 30% intelligence plus X or whatever it was in a state of nature, but what is the cost to society?


(Then of course there are the more common objections that some last-minute transfers from other life paths, gifted-but-lazy types and "slow but deep thinkers" are in fact also beneficial for the intellectual ecosystem and need a path to admission, which is of course also more cope.)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 23, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The usage of in "Republicuck" and "wagecuck" is drawing a parallel that I would call interesting, but not exactly in the same class as a joke. Jokes are a subclass of lies (otherwise "I was just joking" would not be a defense!), but I assume that those who use those terms intend to make salient a common element (of enthusiastically giving away something that you are honour/dignity-bound to keep for yourself) between sexual cuckoldry and loyalty to indifferent companies and parties that they really believe exists. The blue shell thing could work as a joke, but I don't see how it's funny (since jokes need to be lies plus something like surprise/subverted expectations?). Of the things you mentioned so far, your yes-chad assertion that you would consider supporting your pregnant cat cuckoldry is the only one that I see really working as a joke.


Either way, jokes only really work if expectations are in fact being subverted by them. That's why "oh yeah, I killed him and hid the body" can be funny if a bunch of friends are to have a party and one is inexplicably not showing up, but probably not when the next day police turn up to search your apartment in "we are not treating you as a suspect at the moment" mode. Similarly, you could've foreseen that in this situation you would be treated as at least slightly suspect of unhealthy feelings towards your daughter, which should completely preclude the usability of this theme as a joke. In fact, the idea that a perpetrator gives himself away by making context-inappropriate jokes about having done it is close to being a stock trope in criminal fiction and true-crime media.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for December 27, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Being friendly with Russia is hardly a niche position in Germany. After 3 years of non-stop concerted media propaganda that even US mainstream anti-Trump consensus pales before, current polling still puts parties that are explicitly for leaving the American-led consensus on supporting Ukraine (AfD, BSW) at around 24%; and 41% say financial and weaponry support and 19% say sanctions against Russia are "going too far". Before the war and attendant propaganda, in early 2020, in response to US sanctions, 55% said that Nord Stream 2 should enter operation "no matter what, despite current conflicts with Russia". It looks less like German politicos were bought by Putin and more like Uncle Sam was being too stingy to buy them for once.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 23, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Well, I figured that 24 hours was a reasonable amount of time to wait so I wouldn't just be complaining while mods are asleep or discussing. I concede that I jumped the gun here and was wrong in expecting that you would let him get away with it.


However, I do still think that you are making it too easy for yourself by reasoning that looks like a "people from both sides get mad about the moderation, so it must be that we are actually quite fair". There is scarcely a time or system in history that did not draw complaints from people who wanted to pull further in the direction in which it was already biased; I'm sure even the leftiest of Mastodons get people telling the admins they are being fascist, too. I can only hope you have some good internal metrics about the results of what you are doing, because by the main external ones (alignment of prolific posters, upvote patterns), you are really not doing well.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 23, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
You are the one who brought in "cuckoldry", which is normally understood to denote your sexual partner being taken by somebody else (and possibly you enjoying the (f)act). What did you mean, then? The fantastic cuck chair hypothetical you wrote after makes no sense either if you are really only using the phrase as hyperbole for "I would prefer her to not have sex, but I subsidise her having sex" and nothing more. Would you really be using the same vocabulary if we were instead talking about your cat getting it on with the neighbourhood strays when you did not want to deal with kittens?


Also, I don't see how wanting your son to be tall/athletic is anything like not wanting your daughter to have sex. One will get someone who shares your genes laid more; the other will not.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 23, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I don't see any evidence that that propaganda campaign ever encroached in this particular walled garden. A much more salient founding event was when Scott talked about toxoplasma, and how "countering" a political meme actually makes you a vector for the very same meme - that's why to date, we have rules on paper about discussing the culture war and not waging it. If you prefer to take cues from the other side, Moldbug was on to a related thing when he talked about power leakage. The moment your forum/institution/whatever becomes a political fighting force of any import, it also becomes an asset worth capturing. Few factions would care to encroach on a forum that autistically discusses current events while prohibiting its members from openly taking sides or showing emotion, but once this forum actually starts producing innovations in fighting against one side or the other, this calculus surely changes.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 23, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
At least when I signed up for it, this forum was not for developing and executing an efficient counterstrategy to the Kamala campaign, but for being able to discuss the culture war with people from all sides involved without having to deal with the sort of brainless dunking and bingo-board automatisms that define Twitter, Reddit and all the other political forums. Your post is not conducive to this: we already very nearly have a right-wing monoculture, and I doubt that any stray left-winger will be particularly encouraged to stay and contributed when they see a highly-upvoted post that describes their friends and allies on Twitter as inhuman automata. They would probably think of those Twitter users described as being the ones who are actually fighting off hordes of inhuman bots, and their canned responses as the only way those allies of theirs are managing to keep the upper hand over an onslaught of repetitive astroturfed narrative attacks.


If you really think the Twitter posters you are describing are literally bots, then you are frankly out of touch with reality. If you think they are not literally bots but it is strategically correct to treat them as such, then you are not noting and analyzing the propaganda campaign but fighting it.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 23, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'm not sure if it's more appropriate to describe "my interlocutors are not human" as a different stage in the lifecycle of the very memetic parasite you are bothered by, or just a related species - but I do not think it is in any sense better.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 23, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The statutory 24 hours having passed, I'm saving it for my "things the mods are surprisingly okay with when they directionally flatter their biases" highlights reel.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 23, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Well, one argument goes that that's why environmentalism attracts the "blue-tribe conservative" types. A German friend dismissed the Green party something to the effect of "CSU [centre-right] NIMBYs with a vacation home in the countryside" back in the noughties, long before the "leftists are now the establishment" meme really proliferated. In the end, it can just be conceptualised as different preferences as to what to conserve - the environment, or the oligarchy of those who burn the environmental seedcorn most efficiently.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 23, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
In the US, there is an obvious countervailing force that encourages non-white ethnics to treat their ancestral land as some sort of totem animal, which they are honour-bound to defend. In the light of that, you may be observing something like "Aztec empire puts out big information campaign about the dangers of jaguars in the jungle. Everyone now reports a bad opinion of jaguars, except for the Jaguar Warriors. Should we be worried that they will sell out their fellow humans and go live among the big cats?".


(This takes especially curious turns when the monolithic "Asian" identity means Korean-descent kids protesting the Japanese embassy for letting white people try on kimonos at a Monet exhibition, when average actual Koreans tend to wish the US had cancelled Japanese culture after WWII as punishment.)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 23, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I do not understand why you consider keeping your reaction to yourself to be dishonest - a forum is not a YouTube reaction video where the point is to feel a simulacrum of human connection by empathising with the uploader's expressions. There are things that can only be done in the textual format precisely because I don't need to know how you feel about the issue, and you don't need to know how I feel about it, and so we can exchange thoughts that otherwise never would make it past the wall of irreconcilable feelings on the issue between us. If you do however think that putting your feelings out there is necessary for your posts to not be "hollow", or something that looks like a number of seething people talking to each other while pretending to be automatons is unpleasant to you, there are still ways you could have done it that would have made more allowance for a conversation that is not one-sided to proceed. Just say that you are angry, and are finding it hard to stay level-headed, and then move on; and if you think that the rest of your post would not have enough to fill the hollow if that anger were filleted out of it, then maybe the post does not need to be made.


You may not appreciate what it would be like to post in an environment where this level of emotional polemic is levelled against you. I think I could take a shot, just for the impression: "The way I see it, the pro-death-penalty crowd has more in common with the common murderer than their supposedly 'pro-crime' opposition. They both agree that some of their problems are best solved by killing, and only disagree about the right targets. What they have is essentially a coalition of the bloodthirsty (as seen by the correlation between the pro-war, the pro-death-penalty, and the pro-gun-rights who get giddy fantasizing about shooting a black kid running away with their TV) and the victims and their relatives. I have nothing but contempt for the former, who cynically seduced the latter at their morally weakest." Would you feel particularly encouraged to engage in a discussion with an opening post like this? What if it were upvoted at +30 and bathed in supportive responses?




most people would not be affronted by a poster referring to Bashar al Assad as evil, even if they disagree, for example.




If this forum had a sizeable contingent of Alawites who had part of their family slaughtered by Islamists and saw him as the rampart that stood firm for years saving the rest of them from the same fate, while the world community was hypocritically slandering him and heaping apologia upon the "democratic rebels", or people like my Telegram-addicted relatives who believe that the people in Assad's "torture chambers" are largely the burn-infidels-alive-in-cages types, perhaps they would be.




There is obviously some venting involved here. Even so, if someone's actual position is that it's good that Kaboni Savage has been pardoned, that Joseph Biden has demonstrated his wisdom and mercy, and that I'm mistaken about the evil being done, there seems like plenty of space to do so. I interpret the disinterest in doing so as less about my failings as a poster and more about how actually indefensible this executive action is.




What principle is fairly argued in a hostile frame like this? This is as much of a concession of space for disagreement as it would be if someone posting an anti-gun-rights diatribe, based on several instances of contemptible people being sold guns after some pro-gun decision (and perhaps some people disliked by the pro-gun group still not being sold one, too), invited people to argue for the wisdom and civic-mindedness of selling a gun to the most repulsive instance of a gun owner.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 23, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I don't understand the point of this post, apart from venting about your outgroup. Sure, the omissions from the commutation list are notable for being obviously due to consideration for CW optics, but is there no explanation you can think of for being against the death penalty that is not being "pro-crime" or thinking that there is a possibility of punishing the wrong person? This is not the first time this topic has been discussed on this forum, or elsewhere, but you add no new arguments, dismiss the wealth of existing arguments for and against (seemingly out of conviction that tapping the "evil" sign about those you want to see executed should be all the argument one needs?), and do little to even encourage others to have a healthy discussion, by declaring your contempt and anger for those who disagree with you and throwing around colourful invectives like "demonic".


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 22, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Why would they want to cover it up if the Houthis did it? I'd have thought that the US military would be happy to glass Yemen and Iran, but are worried that popular and muggle politician sentiment isn't behind it and they'll be dinged for warmongering - a case of Iran/proxies hurting American national pride and almost killing one of its finest would be just what they need. More likely that they'd cover up such an incident if it were Russia/China/NK, where popular enthusiasm for a military adventure could easily pull ahead of how beneficial the military thinks it would be.