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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

				
				
				

				

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					follows 2 users  

					joined 2022 September 05 01:50:31 UTC
				


				
					

					
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				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


For those people like you (@4bpp) who I assume does not actually want the destruction of Israel, what do you see as a solution?




I honestly think that either of the two no-state solutions might be long-term preferable to the perpetual continuation of what we have now. Most of the Jewish population of Israel would find its bearings in the West very quickly, and I think that a future repeat of Nazi Germany or conditions in other countries around then seems exceedingly unlikely; on the other hand, giving Israel free hand to completely wipe out the Palestinians would be the solution that in German idiom one would call a "horrible end, instead of a horror without end", and certainly would make for an interesting addition to our collective consciousness.


In more realistic and less edgy terms, I think that radically redrawing the borders of Israel and Palestine for a two-state solution that hurts both of them, perhaps surrendering half of Jerusalem and everything to the south of a line linking Gaza to it to a Palestinian state in return for everything north of it, performing full population transfer and deploying international troops enforcing the border (and possibly also a temporary "colonial regime" to "dehamasify" the Palestinian state, run not by the Israelis but by some far-removed and suitably ruthless third party like the Chinese, or even the Saudis), would in fact be achievable and likely solve the problem. The problem of Israel and Gaza as I see it is that Israel can not actually curb its cupidity towards Palestinian lands, Gaza as a state is geographically unviable (unlike the West Bank), and the Palestinians are forced to interact with Israelis for key needs as they do not have a fully independent state or economy, producing resentment-breeding interactions such as Palestinian workers having to undergo daily invasive searches as they leave their open-air prison settlement to work on non-autonomy land and in turn getting to scam and sass the Israelis in their cheap car repair shops. (Both things I've observed when visiting Israel.)




Israelis have made at least some attempts to ease up on the Palestinians and let them try to build a society, and every such easing up has resulted in more suicide bombings or October 7.




The "easing up" looked like thousands of Palestinians being killed in retaliation for a single-digit number of Israelis killed every few years. Going just by raw numbers, in the back-and-forth of action and reaction, it really looks a lot like the Israelis are constantly escalating and the Palestinians are constantly deescalating - there is not a single instance of Palestinians killing Israelis that was not followed by Israelis killing more Palestinians, and no single instance of Israelis killing Palestinians that was not followed by Palestinians killing fewer Israelis. Yet this is somehow being painted into an emotional picture of the Israelis trying to make peace, as the Palestinians escalate and push for war. It is very hard to avoid the temptation to interpret this reframing as stemming from an underlying feeling that in terms of weregeld an Israeli is worth about a thousand Palestinians.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


You and SecureSignals can keep telling yourselves that, but it's a strange narrative that ignores the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, the first time the Arab states tried to push Israel into the sea.




I wasn't intending to ignore it (and I reject whatever you are trying to hint at by lumping me in with SecureSignals), but looking at the Israeli-side list of "commanders and leaders" on Wikipedia, some two thirds of them were straight up born in Europe, and the remaining ones were born during the British administration to parents who are listed as such. This parses as invaders being expelled, not as people defending their homes.




Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005. The people promptly elected Hamas as their champions, and Hamas used that power to make war on Israel by firing rockets. Israel basically just withstood this (and built Iron Dome) for many years, until October 7.




I am quite aware of this, but as I think I argued at length I don't see any moral obligation on the people Israel crammed into Gaza to not elect a government that loathes Israel and will lob rockets into it. This list does not look like "basically just withstood this" either; the list is punctuated with fantastically disproportionate statements like "Israel launches a 22-day military offensive in Gaza after rockets were fired at the southern Israeli town of Sderot. About 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis killed before a ceasefire is agreed upon.".


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Israel-Gaza Megathread #1
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I find the position that I am reflexively most inclined to subscribe to here to be woefully underrepresented in the discourse: neither side is in the wrong. If a village of hunter-gatherers hunts some elephants, and then the remnant elephant herd tramples the village, goring women and children in the process, would you say that either the hunters or the elephants are wrong and evil? Both sides are just doing what they must to survive (and retain the hope to thrive). If anyone is to blame at all, it's whoever put them in this position where they have no other choice to begin with - but even that responsibility seems to largely lie with diffuse, impersonal and/or simply long-gone forces.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 16, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
How so? Are you claiming that any possible set of material about African-Americans is a false conspiracy theory?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 2, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think you are making a lot of very far-reaching claims without bringing a proportional amount of evidence in general, but probably the easiest nitpick is




(as if this something that would ever consider being applied to a citizen of one of the other 82 genders)




Does this have any meaning deeper than dunking on the outgroup by freely associating one thing they do that you find bad with another thing they do that you find ridiculous? Presumably, the "82 genders" line suggests that you are specifically talking about progressive gender self-identification and not biological sex, which is therefore in particular open to biological men as well as women (and in fact its usage by biological men seems to be the part that takes up the majority of conservative mindshare). You claim that "responsibility" is not something that is expected of "one of the other 82 genders". Do you have an example of biological men getting out of child support payments by claiming to be a demiboy, femme or whatever other things you count as one of the 82?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 31, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Littering and fare-dodging are hardly what one typically thinks of as a "crime" (or, well, as I said above, I'm an unrepentant multiple-time criminal along with approximately everyone I know).


Responding also to @Jiro above, this is in fact the essence of the question I'm asking - is it actually for the better to arrest criminals no matter what? No human has ever lived in a society anywhere close to a 100% capture rate for law-breakers, and I for my part am not only not ready to tear down that fence but also feeling iffy about it constantly getting pushed around and climbed over. It seems likely to me that plenty of criminals with outstanding warrants continue living a mostly positive-sum life in society; some of them may have passed by my window without breaking it, passed me by in a dark alley without mugging me, and sold me food at a convenience store. I don't think it's obvious that it's worthwhile to reduce incentives for them to do so, just so you can capture some greater percentage of them. I assume the "what's the punishment for being late?" story is pretty widely known around here, too.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 31, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I have littered a nonzero number of times in my life and dodged fares even more (especially when I was a poor student). The chance that anything bad would have happened to me if I had been caught for it was basically zero, and I assume that those for whom it is not the case (i.e. the dumb and impulsive criminals you are talking about) realise this. This breeds resentment (even monkeys, I think, have been found to be sensitive to differential treatment) and presumably reduces buy-in into society from those who are at the short end of this equation.


Now, I know that people on the law-and-order spectrum like seeing criminality (especially non-white-collar criminality, i.e. the type they can't imagine themselves engaging in) in absolutes, where you are either a law-abiding citizen or a criminal who always and at all times is about as bad to the society surrounding them as they can manage to be; therefore there is no point in negotiating or doing anything other than identifying and locking them up ASAP, and in particular they would see "reduced buy-in into society" as a moot concern since they are already being antisocial criminals who don't buy in. However, I don't think this is true; most criminals probably don't engage in antisocial acts nearly as often as they could, and I'd wager they don't commit murder or even smash random windows in all situations they know they could get away with it. In fact they probably subscribe to 90% of the same society-sustaining narrative as the law-and-order crowd, with only some cutouts they have rationalised for themselves to violate it in specific ways in particular contexts. If you make criminals feel that they can't be equal members of society even on their "down-"/law-abiding time, this might just stop being the case, and life for everyone would make a turn for the worse.


(Arguably the US is already halfway there in places with certain minorities being actively fed the narrative that society is not for them, but I assume that the set of criminals that would be caught by "turnstile enforcement anarcho-tyranny" - because this is what it would read to someone whose self-narrative is "productive member of society who sometimes has to stray off the good path for very valid reasons" - is not just a subset of those minorities.)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
"Women can do no wrong" is an extremely uncharitable reading of this transcript. It seems fairly obvious to me that it's much closer to @MadMonzer's interpretation above: the author does not spend any particular thought on any negative moral valence of deliberately induced abortions at all (whether because he does not think they are morally negative, or because he does not think they are relatively common enough to matter), and is more concerned about the circumstance that women who miscarry would be treated as criminal suspects.


You could imagine a similar justification being fielded in a hypothetical world in which some subset of people is greatly concerned about the evil of pet owners murdering their pet dogs, and so every time a dog dies police have to investigate if the owner may have killed it deliberately. Someone might hold against it that the set of dog owners who are devastated by the death of their dog dwarfs the set of dog owners who would have deliberately killed their dog, and the harm done to the former by such an investigation just matters more than whatever cases of the latter the investigation will deter. Would this perspective amount to "dog owners can do no wrong"?


(On the object level, miscarriages are common! Among the people I know well enough to know such details, more have miscarried at least once than have successfully had children without a single miscarriage.)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 2, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Comparing those three to Jan 6th (or even seeing them as strictly worse, considering the clear murderous intent) seems fair to me. That doesn't mean the LA stuff is.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 2, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The case that trans operas in Latin America are useless to American interests has not been made. Whatever you think of trans operas in the abstract, it seems quite likely that transing a neutral country will bring it culturally closer to the American universal culture fold. This makes it less likely that it will randomly kick out or tax American businesses, thumb its nose at American products, back Russia or China in some international affairs matter or even host a Chinese military base. The trans operas might well be the by far most cost-effective way to reap those benefits, and it's not even clear if they benefit the trans agenda at home all that much.


If South Korea had a nationalist faction that opposed k-drama on aesthetic grounds, would it make sense for it to prioritise going after its foreign distribution?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Quality Contributions Report for July 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
This entire discussion seems to be missing the point. So what if it did harm LoTT, was done in anger, or even amounted to a culture war low blow in the vein of organising a cancellation? We have plenty of unapologetic culture warriors on this forum, and the whole point is supposed to be that the rules create a neutral ground where they can interact with each other in a civil fashion. As I see it, instead the pro-LoTT crowd here has managed to organise and execute a harassment campaign on this site against Trace as revenge for having been a particularly effective culture warrior for the other side, while the moderators looked away. This is a failure of moderation.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Yeah, it sounds like our moral intuitions are really greatly different. I don't know what was the trigger for that, but I felt visceral disdain for the whole notion of innocent civilians in a democracy for as long as I can remember - the whole thing just seemed like some sort of pickpocket's attention trick with moral responsibility where a large swath of people elects politicians to enact their will and serve their interest, but the voters refuse to take responsibility for their government's actions because they're just civilians and politicians refuse to take responsibility because they are just following the voters' will. As I see it, conscripted military in a democratic country are the ones who it is least just for someone attacked by that country to retaliate against, because they are coerced into doing what they do and often are not even allowed to leave before completing their service. The civilians who vote and their elected representatives, and to a lesser degree even those who don't vote but freely choose to stay and benefit, should be fair game.




From where I stand, this seems a totally bizarre statement.




Is it really that bizarre? As an intuition pump, what does the total morality thing say about obligatory meat consumption? Does the wrongness of the Inuit hunter who tries to kill the walrus to feed his family and the walrus that gores the hunter trying to kill it sum up to >=1? I would consider dodging this question by saying that the walrus can not be a moral subject to be a copout.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


This is true to a point. It is also true that Israel was once far larger than it is today. The Israelis captured huge swathes of land through force of arms in defensive wars, and has mostly returned that land peaceably. The Israelis left the Gazans to their own devices in 2005. The common narrative that Israel is constantly expanding is ahistorical.




I don't accept "defensive" (would you label Russia's Ukraine war thus as well? After all, Ukraine was constantly attacking Russia's acquisitions in the Donbass), and if you keep seizing x units of land and then returning x/2 of them as a "gesture of goodwill" when settling with a thoroughly defeated adversary, this doesn't register as things being a wash regarding your expansionism.




I see this logic - not that I agree with it, but I see it. What I don't see is how your logic is not fully generalizable to the Israelis. They have also been wronged by Palestinian actions. How can it be in your paradigm that Palestinians have the right to invade Israel and kill every Jew they see, but then the Israelis do not have the right to bring indiscriminate death down upon the Palestinians in retaliation? (for the record, I do not believe either of them have the right to do this, nor do I believe that Israel's response has been indiscriminate.)




As I argued in a parallel response to @RobertLiguori, I perceive an asymmetry between initating unjustified violence and retaliating to it. If the Palestinian actions that wronged the Israelis were morally just, then any given act of retaliation for them is at least significantly less just than if the prior action were not. On top of all of this, even just looking at casualty figures, the Israeli retaliation for any Palestinian action is wildly out of proportion - generally, any conflict seems to look like "Palestinians killed n Israelis; thereupon Israel killed 100n Palestinians, with another 5n Israeli soldier casualties".




While I don't think the analogy is particularly fair, I will point out that there is only one moral paradigm in which the shooter in your story is unambiguously justified, and that is blood feud. That is inherently a might-makes-right morality. The shooter will soon find out the hard way that that the Mafia have no more scruples than he when it comes to killing children.




Why are blood feuds might-makes-right, except for the trivial sense that if you don't even have the might to take a potshot at the enemy team's weakest spot then you are really left with no recourse? Either way, blood feuds seem to have been the default mode of justice for functioning human societies for the overwhelming part of human history. I understand that they are questionable from the perspective of someone living in a functioning modern state and we have found approaches to justice that work better, but all of these presume that there actually is a functioning state that is willing and able to mete out non-blood-feud justice. The whole conundrum of the Palestinians is that there isn't - nobody could judge the Israelis for driving them out of their homes, levelling their cities or killing them in the tens and hundreds of thousands. Any candidate sovereign that could force the parties into court by force of arms is making a show of looking away and whistling. In this setting, blood feuds empirically seem like the best social technology that humanity has discovered.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 31, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


If you had been caught, you would have been fined.




I'm aware. (Not sure about littering, where I lived.) It was a calculated risk I could take.




If a dumb and impulsive criminal is caught littering or fare jumping, they will be fined as well. If they have outstanding warrants, they will be arrested -- because they have just been caught for something other than littering or fare jumping as well.




The bottom line still is that they couldn't take what for me is a calculated and very bounded risk. Fast food can give me gastric distress, but sometimes still is the best option; fare dodging can give me a 40 euro fine, but sometimes likewise is the best option. If criminals were reliably arrested on sight in gastronomic establishments, would they think of it as "shucks, guess it was my bad for doing crime once" or as "fuck this society that has made it clear I can't live in it normally"?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Ivermectin: Much Less Than You Needed To Know
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
To give an overview of what I believe is a reasonable bounded-rationality basis to dismiss this objection:


    

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    I am not equipped to evaluate the claims in Alexandros's post in detail without significant effort and time investment (despite being a working academic in a quantitative field).
    

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    I'm not particularly worried about COVID and the societal excesses of the response seem to have already died down, so I personally don't see much value in learning about a surprising therapy for it. It seems unlikely to me that even if something like the contents of this post became widely accepted as truth, the societal response next time something COVID-shaped happens would be much beter.
    

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    Superficially, it seems there is no particular reason why something like Ivermectin (an antiparasitic that apparently works by disrupting the metabolism of fairly complex multicellular parasites) would work against COVID (a virus). I have a strong prior on most medicines claimed to have a minor beneficial effect on popular therapeutic targets actually being completely ineffectual (as this has been my experience).
    

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    On the other hand, the "parasite load" story seems superficially plausible.
    

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    Due to the culture-war dimension of Ivermectin, whose efficacy the red tribe in the US has entangled its social status with (no point in recounting the way this happened here), there is an obvious motivation for members of that tribe to produce compelling-looking arguments for its efficacy. Since Alexandros posts around this community, he seems a priori likely to harbour Red sympathies.
    

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    Moreover, there is a "contrarian" tribe that is motivated by taking down the rationality-orthogonal "trust the science" wing of the blue tribe, and therefore would also derive utility from successfully Eulering in favour of Ivermectin. Many people seem to talk about the abrasiveness of Alexandros's tone. This increases the probability that he's Red or Contrarian and would therefore have the motive to come to his conclusion.
    

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In short, a situation that seems fairly symmetrical to "read this long and extremely compelling essay by a Harvard academic who is also a Twitter superstar using Science and Logic to prove that Blank Slatism is true". If you had unlimited time and resources or a particularly high stake in finding out whether desirable qualities of humans are genetic, sure, by all means you ought to read it and analyse the argument. For most everyone else, it would be more rational to ignore the essay, leave your prior largely unshifted and spend the time it would take to read on something with higher expected utility, like planning tomorrow's healthy breakfast or getting on top of your todo list.


Things that could convince me to take the essay more seriously:


    

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    Establish that the author does not stand to benefit from Ivermectin working, e.g. has impeccable blue tribe credentials.
    

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    Establish that rehabilitating Ivermectin would benefit me personally a great deal.
    

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    Propose a plausible mechanism by which Ivermectin (specifically!) might work against COVID. Some general handwaving like "it modulates the way the immune system operates" won't work; lots of drugs do that, so I don't see why specifically the one that the Blues are raging against and the Reds are swearing will prove once and for all they should actually be in charge should be the one that happens to modulate it just right.
    

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  • 

    Relatedly, but harder, shift my prior regarding medicines that purport to do anything more complex than targeting one particular well-understood metabolic pathway not working.
    

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				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 9, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


It's probably not something I should make a habit of, but I feel compelled to give some support to Israel here. Israel didn't steal any land any more than anyone else won or lost land before and after World War II




The difference is that WWII land loss mostly affected belligerents, who had legitimate beefs going back centuries. Israel was built at the expense of Arab villagers who didn't really do anything to anybody. If you get injured in a mass brawl, you can't just go on to maul a random bystander and excuse yourself by saying that everyone in the mass brawl you just came out of suffered injuries.




If Israel is an ethnostate (it probably is), it's not a very good one. Do you think that Nazi Germany would accept having a populace composed of 20% Jews?




I mean, they are clearly working on it. South Africa, generally recognised as pretty evil, always was minority-European.




Even forcibly moving every Gazan out of the area probably would not fix the problem, because they are extremely intent on getting their territory back, and distance does not stop the likes of the Houthis and the Iranians either.




Would it fix the problem on the Israeli side? They have already also grabbed parts of Lebanon (more, recently); how do we figure there would be a real limit to their quest for Lebensraum?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 9, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I would care significantly less what they did if I weren't forced to be complicit in it, by way of taxes if nothing else (which also forces me to in fact be okay with some amount of being blown up by Arab terrorists in revenge, because per my own morality I do deserve it); but yes, I do in fact think that a 1:100 valuation, especially from a capable state, is an unacceptable defection against peaceful modernity as I envision it. In my ideal world, every state brazenly implementing such a value function in favour of its own citizens ought to be ganged up on by everyone else, until only countries that assign reasonable value even to foreigners remain. ((1) I'm not sure what sort of ratio I'm okay with; (2) I'm happy if all of Israel's enemies are next, should they prove that they still have such a preference function after Israel has been obliterated. Israel at least has provided circumstantial evidence that their relative valuation is not confined to a handful of countries.) Think of Russia/Ukraine as the usual comparison case - in the case of those two countries, neither actually dares to "treat their enemies as enemies" in the Israeli fashion, because they know full well that being the first to do so would invite massive Western retribution (if Russia does it) or at least a nearly as fatal downturn in Western support (if Ukraine does).


As for (1), it's not just the US. (I'm not American! The USS Liberty episode was just the starkest display of cuckoldry I could think of, and probably more compelling to our American majority.)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 21, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
In your eyes, is there any threshold that Trump could cross with his actions whereupon making a show of being opposed to them would no longer show one's "true colors as a rabid partisan"?


As I see it, the unpersoning thing is a valid, if silly and ill-thought-through, answer to the question of what the judiciary could do if its orders are ignored by someone too powerful to go after with the forces at its direct disposal. If you think it's an "rabid partisan" thing to consider, then, it seems that you think that someone who is not a partisan or not rabid should not be thinking about ways the judiciary could enforce its will in this case at all. Do you believe that Trump has a mandate to power uncircumscribed by the judiciary?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 3, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
If your kid got run over by a young man (who have the highest odds of causing fatal accidents) and this was picked up by misandrist feminists, who would proceed to milk the hell out of it to fuel a campaign to raise the minimum driving age for men to 25, would periodically contact you to appear on their campaign trail, and called you a "cuck" if it turned out you were uninterested in their agenda, can you not imagine wishing that your kid had been run over by an old woman instead? Does that make you a "cuck"?


(On that matter, we don't even need to use driving as an example. Men commit the vast majority of violent crime. Are relatives of victims who are not on board with feminism cucks?)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 3, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Where did he advocate for "full spectrum information manipulation"? He did, and advocated to, feed false information to a prominent social media sneering celebrity. Surely social media sneering celebrities do not represent the full spectrum of information; are you contending that they represent something like the pinnacle of purity and sacredness, so somebody who is willing to deceive a LibsOfTikTok should implicitly be willing to deceive anyone and everyone else?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 3, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Robert E Lee's face was literally liquidated, symbolizing the liquidation of white America.




Doesn't that seem like a bit of a stretch? Surely unless you are either an identitarian Southerner or a slavery advocate, you'd see Lee as a champion of an outgroup people who went to war for the right to keep slaves, not as a champion of your people. The war he fought probably was the single biggest act of deadly white-on-white violence in the history of the US, and given that the census just before it records about 400k slave owners in total, even the case that he fought for the interests of the significantly greater numbers of whites is a bit dubious. (There's room for some quip about temporarily embarrassed plantation magnates here.)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				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
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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 9, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
...and then the "left woke" can point at your "good tribal politics" to argue that white supremacism is a real threat and galvanise support for non-white racial supremacism. This feeling of inevitability ("the alternative... other tribes simply take from you... don't bother... doing anything about it") surely is what toxoplasmosis feels like from the inside.