@4bpp's banner p

4bpp

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

3 followers   follows 2 users  
joined 2022 September 05 01:50:31 UTC

<3


				
User ID: 355


				
				
				

			

		

	














	


		


			



	

		

			

			

				

					

						

							
						

						

							
							

								
4bpp


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


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

				
				
				

				

					3 followers  

					follows 2 users  

					joined 2022 September 05 01:50:31 UTC
				


				
					

					
<3



				

				

				

				

				

					

					

					
					
					

					
User ID: 355


					
					
					
				

			


					

						
					



		

	

 











			
			

			
			

			




	


		

			
‎

			

				
				

					Hour
					Day
					Week
					Month
					Year
					
				

			


			
‎

			

	
	

	 Hot Bump Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
	



		

	






	

		
		

		
		
	

	

  







		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I feel like you are borderline nutpicking the "pro-Russian" side here, but then the nuts may be disproportionately visible because for the more realistic people on it there is nothing to be excited about. Therefore, let me just put down a prediction of "once again, nothing much will happen" for the upcoming quarter here. Maybe the Russians will finally grind their way through the rest of the ruins of Konstantinovka or Kupyansk (though the 90% confidence interval for that is more like 1 year from now), and maybe the Ukrainians will start yet another "successful" counteroffensive that will gain some 200-400km² to then be slowly rolled back over the course of the next 1-2 years at a great cost in life and treasure to Russia, Ukraine and the European taxpayer.


It is more likely that there will be some additional unpublicised backdoor decisions that will influence the longer-term trajectory of the war, such as the addition of further "gentlemen's agreements" about what sort of facilities may not be targeted by long-range bombings. From a purely military standpoint, I expect these to be detrimental to Russia (because from a purely military standpoint, I think the winning play for Russia more and more obviously amounts to escalation, now that NATO and Europe is further strained by Iran - blow up NPPs and make sure that any city in Ukraine that still can support a civilian drone workshop becomes uninhabitable for civilians, send your own leadership to the bunkers, and absorb the retaliation in kind with your superior bulk), but I do not have anything resembling a complete picture of how thin a thread the Russian economy and internal control system is hanging by, and if any greater mobilisation or damage to their own civilian infrastructure would actually result in them collapsing (in which case they maybe have no better option than to sit and wait out their gradual decline and hope for some deus ex machina).


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I don't know, these reports seemed suspicious to me. How would the Russians have gotten their hands on a sufficient number of those terminals that it would have made a difference to their operations? Throughout the war, we kept hearing that Ukraine had been holding off the numerically superior Russians thanks to their ingenuous quick iteration on top of the superior Western startup technology that is Starlink, and then suddenly, in one package, the story changes to "but actually, the Russians had Starlink too, but now they don't have it anymore, and so Ukraine will win for sure"; meanwhile, in reality, after a small jitter in favour of Ukraine that this story was timed to coincide with, we are already back to the same neverending stalemate we had before. The one OSINT-visible thing Ukrainians were doing that was definitively dependent on Starlink (drone boats operating in open water with real time remote control) was seemingly never replicated by Russia, even though other than Starlink no particularly unusual tech goes into it.


In the end, the more likely explanation to me is that the "Russia in shambles because Starlink was cut off" story was a successful plant from Elon's PR department, which was picked up by the usual pro-Ukraine social media channels to build hype for the random swing of momentum in their favour at the time.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The thing with pretense is that humans are generally terrible liars, who can't credibly pretend to anything without gradually coming to actually believe it to some degree. The people pretending to care about fairness can be casually motivated by the most brazen self-interest, but the result of all the pretending tends to be that if you then take a sufficiently powerful psychological steamroller (argumentation, rhetoric, propaganda, ritual, fancy buildings with statues of blindfolded matrons) to persuade them that forfeiting their self-interest would be fair, they by and large give up.


This is why justice and organised society works at all. Without this mechanism you just get something that looks like Somalia, and even in Somalia I gather that the tribal courts actually talk people into a lot of self-destructive ingroup altruism.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Citation needed, for such a bold sweeping claim. I have taught CS at a fairly high-tier US school for a long enough period of time, and we did not hand out As if you just "turn up". The curve was more generous than I would have liked, sure, and there were a lot of loopholes and "accommodations" and second chances; a lot of those also turned out to primarily benefit those who lacked consistency and conscientiousness, as at a "more hardcore" university you would not have gotten the allowance to strike out your lowest homework grade or have a TA dispatched to invigilate your stinky two weeks unshowered self in a separate room taking the exam two hours later than everyone else because you overslept.


You can maybe make the "feminisation" claim about school (K-12, for Americans), but even there the story seems complicated: at first glance not being smacked with a ruler if you fail to sit upright with your back straight or have crooked handwriting anymore surely makes less of a difference for the conscientious and obedient girls. I'm more on board with the "boys used to be able to engage in fistfights during recess without having the cops called, which helped them sit still later" explanation.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
That is sort of true, I think, but as long as the grounding provided by elections persists, this seems like a natural damper on any spinning out of control. Wild defections tend to be bad for the handful of things that the mercenary voters do care about, except perhaps the hype/vibes dimension; and even there, the jury is still out on whether Trump (as a candidate whose hype value was entirely built on promising to press defect) was just an outlier in this regard. (Biden surely was the least "own the cons" candidate of the last three fielded by the Dems, and he alone  managed to eke out a win against Trump.)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Does this "people on both sides" framing that we see time and time again actually predict politics accurately? The internet, and really any sort of mass media, likes centering people on "sides" whose political position really does amount to this sort of mutually recursive tribalism (do whatever is most Right/Left, which is whatever pisses off the Left/Right the most, which is whatever is least Left/Right, which is whatever pisses off the Right/Left the most...); but those people's votes and political allegiances are largely locked in and the only way in which they have agency at all is producing and responding to hype (in states of low hype they might become so apathetic that they themselves fail to turn out to vote; in states of high hype they produce an infectious mood that might assume some of the reality distortion field nature). Meanwhile, somehow the system keeps equilibrating in such a fashion that neither "side" has a majority and so elections are decided by a marginal set of people who stubbornly refuse to hate Republicans for being Republican, or Democrats for being Democrat, and in fact are so mercenary that it is hard to ascribe to them any principles at all other than "gas should be cheap, my investments should perform well and my candidate should be hype rather than a loser".


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 11, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
When I searched "90s PC ad", this and this were the first two non-Apple hits (both dorky cyberspace digital nature CG), followed by this (office stuff). Are you sure it was not your experience that was atypical?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 11, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Regarding vaporwave, I think you are missing that it is not supposed to be nostalgia for the general 90s/00s but nostalgia for the computing of the era. This was when computing was still primarily by and for 50 year old suits working in drop-ceiling cubicles at IBM or some insurance company, plus their occasional tone-deaf attempts at reaching out to wider markets. Ads for Bryce, Lotus 1-2-3 and "I'm a PC", not Budweiser. Visions of the future for stodgy professional adults already half buried with the past. Smooth jazz and elevator music is a lot closer to the soundscape of those types of lives than, I don't know, Kylie Minogue.


Movies... my experience of that era was in Germany, but older movies were definitely a separate category that was widely enjoyed and discussed, in part due to the nature of cable TV. When one of the major channels ran an old James Bond, this was an event (sometimes even announced by an ad campaign in public transport or the like), and half the kids in my class could be expected to have watched it with their parents or at least taped it on VCR to watch later.


I largely missed the MC era (though I once took a carpool ride with two chain-smoking punk students who played their techno mixtape for the whole 5 hours), but people definitely shared burned CDs and later preloaded MP3 players with those they were trying to hit on?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for May 15, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
This preference for following ideas through to their conclusion was often speculated to be what leads in the perception of an abnormally high number of engineers and scientists in ISIS. (I should say I never quite bought it; "Arab society does not have the Western correlation between education and secularism, and Westerners are surprised to see that expectation subverted" seemed truthy and sufficient to explain the observations)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 11, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
As recently as Obama, Democratic presidents also made a show of their Christian beliefs and church attendance, and even in the '90s 90% of US adults self-identified as Christian. Do you think the "left in the US" popped into existence ex nihilo after that, freshly importing the belief system of the Soviet Union and throwing away everything that the >=40% who must have voted for them while considering themselves Christian believed in? There is such a thing as intellectual lineage, including from systems that someone now disagrees with. For centuries, Christians and Jews had nothing but occasionally murderous disdain for each other, but Christianity at no point denied straight up copying half of its holy book from the Jews, either. For a more spicy example, many a red-blooded American right-winger is quick to point out how the Nazis were more formally a National Socialist German Workers' Party, but there is little denying that they defined themselves (at least in part) through their opposition to communism!


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 11, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I would like to think I know both well enough to distinguish between them.




Support for both Racial-identity politics and racial discrimination are pretty much an exclusively left-wing/Democrat phenomenon in the US.




Not that I strictly agree, but I am not aware of making any claim that contradicts this, unless you think that Christianity in the US is definitionally not left-wing (which I think would be false, and the East Coast universalist-leaning denominations are my specific counterexample).


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 11, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
There are more ideological inputs that went into the modern American left than just Marxism/"tankie" European communism. The universalist egalitarian HBD denial seems to be East Coast Christianity (embodied by the likes of Quakers); there is a current of native anti-intellectualism that I can't pinpoint the source of (remember how the country had to be dragged kicking and screaming into harder universal schooling by the Sputnik crisis); and "you can be anything you want!" denial of differences in individual talent is perhaps just mass-produced Hollywood fantasy.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 11, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I don't know, I doubt we will be getting solid scientific evidence on how easy it is to get a big dog without special training to mount an unwilling human who has been tied up in "receptive" position anytime soon, but per the Abu Ghraib example + other better-evidenced Israeli misconduct I certainly would not dismiss this on "these soldiers would not do such a thing" grounds.


Of course, there's no reason it couldn't be made up, either; but then if you think the NYT would make this up or eat it up from a source without properly verifying it by whatever means they have available, I would like you to apply the same degree of skepticism to press-reported atrocities even when you agree with the direction (for many here, I guess that would be Russians in Ukraine e.g. the Bucha story?).


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 11, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
More generally, is Polymarket still a reliable indicator of anything at this point? Between direct observations/experiences and a number of high-profile stories about insiders manipulating data sources like ISW, I get the sense that you have to put a nontrivial probability that any market outcome will be determined by shenanigans (of the "the person controlling the obscure WHO website deep link that will be used for resolving is betting too, and nobody will punish him for changing it for 10 minutes" type, or the "a small group of power users knows that on Polymarket 'pandemic' is taken to mean any disease discussed by Andrew Fauci on TV while wearing a pink tie" type) rather than anything resembling a plain interpretation of its subject.


Accordingly, 13% on pandemic could easily be dominated by a signal like "small group of users in the know sees that an account representing resolution manipulators is betting yes, and betting according to their expectation that the market will be successfully manipulated to yes".


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Baby Don't Fear the Reaper
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I read OP as "conditional on believing in {the Christian God, hell, eternal souls, etc}, you should believe in non-eternal hell", not as "you should believe in {...}". That makes it not particularly inflammatory nor partisan (unless we have a large contingent of ardent infernalists around), and given that this is hardly well-trodden ground for the forum I don't think it's obviously below evidential standards for the topic. You might make a charge of irrelevance, but I think we have a lot of Christians or Christianity-curious people here, and for the rest of us it's an interesting enough view into a strange mindset.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 4, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Of course it would look that way, because people who are "on the receiving end of these tactics" and don't mind it will not complain about it, and it is seemingly by design a type of "tactics" that is not apparent if nobody complains.


I guess you could counter that you would expect at least some scenarios where a "bad-faith" arguer argues against multiple people, one of them complains, and another says he is actually ok with it. There is a less universalist/more provocative explanation I could have reached for right away: the accusation is only ever levelled by our right-wing majority against presumed left-wing posters, and the right-wing majority broadly agrees that uppity left-wingers should not be welcome. There are right-wing posts that would seem to meet the same criteria of "bad faith" being applied here (switching allegiance between seemingly incompatible authorities, such as TERFs/Christians/old-school atheists, based on fit for a particular argument + an apparent expectation that the poster will look down on anyone who disagrees); it's just that nobody complains about them, so it never registers.


Maybe you think it makes a big difference that the left-wing "agitator" expects to see the people he will look down on in the responses, while the right-wing "agitator" expects responses of agreement and camaraderie and will only look down on abstract people far away and maybe one or two black sheep commenters. Making a criterion that essentially says the same sort of thing is only bad if people here disagree is a way to circlejerk reinforcement, though.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 4, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
How do you define "bad faith"? If it's merely "doesn't truly believe the point he/she is arguing", then I think the term is loaded and the case that it's a bad thing has not been made, because trying to make the most convincing argument for something you don't actually believe is an interesting exercise, both for the person making the argument and for any bystanders. If it is more about the "bad-faith" arguer experiencing personal disdain for their interlocutors in the process of the exchange, I think it would capture a lot more posters here than just those who try on different positions for sport.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for May 8, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I immediately thought of this old video. Back in the days I liked to try and pronounce "academia" to match the sketch's diction for "macadamia".


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 4, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
If that's what he's doing, what's the problem? If anything I think it has been to the detriment of this place that arguments have come to be dominated by true believers of some cause, whose local feeling of success, identity and tribal interests are all tied up in "winning the argument" and not ceding any ground.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 4, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


for mainstream Christians




I guess here we also bump into another free variable in the "Christianity is right (and it's actually aliens)" scenario: do we only want to assume that Christianity's initial version was a true revelation of cosmic realities packaged up as memes digestible for the Mediterranean of 2000 years ago (and every elaboration humans added on since might be a corruption, even if done by overwhelming consensus), or do we have to assume that one or even multiple branches remained under "divine" guidance or inspiration until now, so the space opera would also have to fit at least some innovations that don't strictly follow from what was in the 1.0 release?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 4, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


What about the incentives created by forcing doubting fathers to raise kids that aren't theirs or pay their wages to a woman who tricked them? If there are multiple kids in a family and just one is in doubt then guess who that father likes the least? I'm sure that kid is not having a pleasant time even if the parents stay together.




Unfortunately, under the old ideal of the family (the mother runs the house, the father slaves away at a day job and maybe is home on the weekends every now and then to give some words of stern admonition to the kids), the incentives there don't matter so much. The father's role is to provide resources, and exist as an abstract sort of role model and stabilising force.


I don't have access to stats, but I would assume that out of all the "cucked" men in the world (who are stuck with a less than certainly affair-produced child in a marriage), a bigger fraction continues more or less playing out the above role than actually resorts to violence or spiteful self-sabotage. To begin with, I would think that the woman actually having an affair when the couple is trying to conceive correlates pretty well with such a family model, because otherwise the woman simply would not have enough opportunity to cultivate one. If my partner managed to get an affair baby, my first reaction would be "when the f did she manage to sneak that in"; outside of work we are basically together all the time and we are pretty well-aware of each other's social calendars too.




business example




I think this once again misses the circumstance that the cucked husband is not some random bloke grabbed off the street. You seem to want to pick a random employee, or the ugliest one, or whatever, but why are you so resistent to picking the most obvious default-responsible one, which is the CEO? If you made the example say that some employee embezzled money from an LLC, but the state refused to investigate and just put the CEO on the hook for it, we would be getting closer to the marriage situation.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 4, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
So, per the barberpole theory, OP is worried about being mistaken for the sort of people who are worried that they could be mistaken for manual workers?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 4, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I don't think the red light comparison quite works, or at least it exaggerates the injustice in a way that is not conducive to a fair discussion of the subject (effective as it may be as polemic). From what I understand, the situations where the man is on the hook are those where he was married to the woman who had the child, and the justification is essentially that integrity of the nuclear family, or at least material safety for the child, is valued higher than justice for the man. (Contrary to many arguments, a ban on unilateral paternity testing even in alimony/child support proceedings protects intact families too, because not having it would incentivise doubting men to divorce so they could get the test.) They are not arresting a completely random guy just because he was easy to catch, and there is a good being defended (the family that is involving him, his wife and the disputed child) that is much more specific to him than the "recompense for red light violation" good that could really be fulfilled by just about anyone.


It's hard to build a plausible analogy with cars, but perhaps we could imagine a hypothetical society that takes valuing privacy of private residences to an absurd extreme. In such a society, if someone was murdered on private property, by similar logic the property owner could always be on the hook, unless everyone who entered the property consented to an investigation: someone has to be punished for the murder, the registered property owner is easiest to catch, as the owner he is felt to carry some measure of default responsibility for what happens in it anyway, and the alternative would be a sudden unexpected violation of privacy of everyone who went into the house which is roundly agreed to be a greater evil than the possibility of sending the owner (who anyhow would look a bit lame for not being on top of what's going on in his home) to jail innocent.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 4, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think your parent poster meant "women are better than men", not "there are more women than men".


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 4, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Right, I do take that into account. I think the bias will significantly persist through any communities that link will be reshared in. I couldn't imagine even telling about Aella to any women I know, apart from my SO (who I talk to about all forms of LW degeneracy anyway), let alone trying to get them interested in a poll of hers.