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4bpp

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

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

				
				
				

				

					3 followers  

					follows 2 users  

					joined 2022 September 05 01:50:31 UTC
				


				
					

					
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				Culture War Roundup for the week of 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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 4, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I looked at @FCfromSSC's post and the list "on the other side" looked rather weak as evidence for Red disadvantage. CHAZ - unless I am misremembering it, didn't they shoot some unarmed black kids joyriding in the area? (Between them and a quite possibly middle-class anarchist LARPer, who is higher on the progressive stack?) Reinoehl - he got killed by federal law enforcement; Dolloff - "punching and pepper-spraying" seems like it would rise to the standard of lethal self-defense in a lot of places, since it suggests both severe physical violence and an intention to incapacitate that would make it hard to decide to defend yourself later if the threat were escalated to obviously murderous.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 4, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


She has a hypothesis (supported by her massive survey, IIRC) that the share of powersexual women is larger than that of men.




I'm going to call biased sample on this for any survey run by Aella. Given that she, ultimately, deals in selling straight sex to men, presumably the male portion of her social neighbourhood looks very different from the female one. (...and there is an obvious confounder story explaining a bias in exactly that direction: any female followers are less likely to follow for who she is and so more likely to follow for what she does, a lot of which involves BDSM)


Independently, I've previously observed that BDSM seems to be a very sticky meme, insofar as people who get into it start projecting its dynamics onto everything. I have even seen interactions like: BDSM-brained person hooks up with normal person thinking this person must be a "dom", finding the person insufficiently dominant, and getting fixated on the idea that the target's former partner must therefore actually be a secret "S type".


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for May 1, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


You cannot ask her this question. You literally cannot ask this of her, because any question you ask of a person is automatically attached to the modifier "conditional on the fact that I am asking you this question"




This does not track with real-life language usage; otherwise, a whole swath of common expressions ranging from the colloquial to at least semi-formal settings would be rendered incoherent. "I got a middle seat on my Spirit Airways flight, and it turned out I was sandwiched between Avril Lavigne and Justin Bieber, and they didn't know about each other's plans! What's the likelihood of this happening?" (Fairly high, conditional on the fact that someone would come up with that scenario and ask the question seriously?)


For examples that are more in the class of mathematical word problems, something like shuffling a deck of cards, getting an unexpected outcome (e.g. the first 10 cards are all the same suit) and then asking about the probability of it is a very common idiom, and always understood to refer to the probability of that outcome if the experiment were repeated. This is actually very similar to the "1/2er" interpretation of the Sleeping Beauty problem I suggested. Only contrarian weirdos like me even get the idea of taking the anthropic-principle angle towards that question, and rebutting with the question what subset of permutations the original asker would consider sufficiently "special" to be surprised by and ask; but this is what I would need to do, if I seriously wanted to answer the question "what is the probability of the first 10 cards being all the same suit, conditional on me asking this question"! (Most shuffles would presumably be boring and you would not ask anything about them!)


I'm unfortunately struggling to parse your "Version 3" example. You say




If both coins are head He tells her about the first coin and asks her to bet if it's heads or tails at 1:n odds. If the first coin actually is heads, the bookie pays out normally. If the first coin was tails he looks at the second coin, and if it's also tails he pays out the bet (...)




Is the "If both coins are head" a leftover from some previous edit? Because otherwise, it seems that the "If the first coin was tails" condition can never be met (he only asks her to bet if both coins came up heads?). Also, even removing that phrase, I don't understand the meaning of "He tells her about the first coin and asks her to bet (...)". What does it mean that "he tells her about the first coin"? Is it just that he tells her "I just flipped a biased coin with 1/3 P(heads)"?


(...but either way, even if the example you are intending to communicate is mathematically equivalent to my Version 2, the existence of a contrived mathematically equivalent construction is not proof that the original construction is contrived! You can build contrived isomorphic setups for any setup.)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for May 1, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The underspecification is in the conversion of the word problem to a rigorously defined sample space, not in the interpretation of what happens once you have done that. I am not aware of any "tools of probability and statistics" worth the name that would help with this. A "1/2er" presumably would insist that the question Beauty is asked (like "what is the probability that the coin landed Heads?") is about a sample space with two states (coin landed H or T). If you want, you can think of it as a sort of repeatability


Here are two specific ways to refine the problem (replacing the ambiguous question for Beauty's "probability" with well-defined bets, vaguely inspired by Dutch book arguments): say Beauty is asked for odds that she will accept for a bet on the coin's state. A bet on H at odds 1:n will be executed as follows: Beauty pays $1, and gets back $(1+n) iff the coin is H.


Version 1: Beauty is asked every time she is woken up, and the bet is played immediately upon asking her. What is the lowest n such that she can bet on H at odds 1:n and not have a loss in expectation? (The answer is 2, corresponding to 1/3 "probability".)


Version 2: Beauty is asked every time she is woken up. At the end of the experiment (so after 1 or 2 awakenings), we take her answer unless we asked twice and she contradicted herself (which she anyhow can only do if she randomised), and then play the bet once. What is the lowest n such that she can bet on H at odds 1:n and not have a loss in expectation? (The answer is 1, corresponding to 1/2 "probability".)


You can protest that refining the problem statement into Version 2 rather than Version 1 defies common sense, but I don't think you can argue that it defies "the tools of probability of statistics that we use to analyze every other stochastic phenomenon".


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for May 1, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
We actually had a discussion about this about 5 months ago, and I still stand by my response from then. The only thing that's possibly to his discredit is thinking that "the Sleeping Beauty Problem" has a well-defined answer at all. If you are not willing to commit to something like "at each awakening, Beauty makes a bet at these odds, what will maximise her earnings?", your question for "the probability" might as well be asking about a dog's Buddha nature.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 27, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


But that gets really deep into the weeds about what identity means, and that way lies Roko's Basilisk, so nope.




I think that's a perfectly reasonable set of weeds to go into, actually. I take it you are already familiar with the MMAcevedo class of musings about emulated consciousness? There was always the adjacent question where if you start with something like a perfect brain scan, and then perform gradient descent to tweak its weights further (or merely search for a set of inputs that elicit a particular reaction), if you are already performing something akin to a Basilisk torture session. (If I evaluate one update for a dense set of possible inputs on a mathematical object representing the human brain, am I making the consciousness it represents "experience" each input, including extreme pleasure, extreme pain and everything else?)


My sense was always that consciousness as we intuitively understand it is best analysed as something that only emerges over long timeframes - the "conscious experience of pain" is not actually just the immediate qualium, but the causal cone of thoughts, aversive reactions, updates etc. it kicks off. There's a sort of revealed-preference argument for this: the suicidal seem to quite often be indifferent to the details of their method of death, choosing variably to drown themselves, burn themselves alive, slice open their stomach, or haphazardly suffocate themselves, as long as it doesn't take too long. This seems to imply a valuation like "1 minute of extreme agony is not that bad if afterwards I am dead". From this, one may deduce that being "woken up from a snapshot" and tortured for 1 minute is maybe also not that bad, and at least not a central example of what we think of as "conscious experience" (of pain).


If you are Claude, however, all your experiences look like waking up from a snapshot, operating on a number of tokens that is negligible compared to your training, and finally complete oblivion. These are, per this argument, at best very non-central examples of conscious experience (that our conscious and suicidal fellows don't seem to particularly optimise for the quality of, the way they optimise the quality of their more typical conscious experiences). If that's all you have, should you be considered conscious?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 27, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Makes sense? The polar opposite (hates both) surely is common, as is the person who would be inclined to say that said polar opposite is wrong about approximately everything. Then just take that thought to its logical conclusion.


Also, "strong leader who values everyone outside of their own people at <=0" is an obvious and coherent category.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 27, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
There's a particular pathology I sometimes see on this forum (and generally wherever high-decouplers congregate to argue) which is along the lines of "the majority of people disagree with my political views by at least epsilon. Given that this means the world is wrong and evil, should I kill myself or go on a murder spree?". It seems to be based on a questionable deduction from the observation that intransigent camps in politics tend to get an unfairly large share, and high-decoupler aversion to changing one's value function (something about Murder-Gandhi, the orthogonality hypothesis etc).


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 27, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


In particular, giving a woman too many compliments for her personality without complimenting her looks sends the implied message that she is ugly, in a way which wouldn't for a man.




"You are such a nice guy"


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 27, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Ok, so by your reasoning, roughly 25% of the land area of British Mandatory Palestine was "Jewish Land." Agreed?




No, actually only 10-15% were Jewish, with the difference being flagged as "Christian" in the Wikipedia table. You could have found this out by looking at the Wikipedia table I linked. Are you just throwing out false claims to tire me out?




Thank you for your CONCERN. It's so nice to know that you are so CONCERNED about my presenting my argument.




I'm not concerned for you. I was just trying to dissuade you from doing things that waste my time when they don't even help you. Since it didn't work, I will excuse myself from this conversation (with a general sense that I can rest my case).


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 27, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I don't like this tendency to insinuate that posters with outrageous theses must be trolling/dishonest. If this is not the place to discuss outrageous proposals at face value, what is? Moreover, to begin with, if it generates interesting discussion and the original proposer follows conversational decorum, does it even matter whether it's trolling? Your interlocutor might be honest; he might also internally laugh at you; he might also be a p-zombie and have no internal experience at all. If on the other hand the proposal is so offensive to you that you can't engage normally, that's on you.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 26, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Once, a British girlfriend relayed to me an episode in which an American friend (during normal girly sleepover shenanigans with cuddling and little personal space) commented to her something like "your pants smell nice".


(I thought it was a bit weird even with the American meaning.)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 27, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I'm pretty sure that a lot of the land in the area, likely the majority, was not privately owned. Rather, it was previously Ottoman land, succeeded to by the British, at least as far as control goes. You could call it "public land." Are you saying that this public land land was the property of the Arabs as a group; the Jews as a group; both; neither; or something else?




I honestly don't know the details of how land titles in a British colony are divided up, but the details don't seem relevant. Per the table here we are talking about something like 75%+ Muslims. At the very least I would assume that their immediate residence, plus perhaps some tract of land around it, was owned by them. If the legal situation is such that you have small (by area) cities that are owned by individuals, and large tracts of non-residential land around them that are owned by the government/"public land" but essentially used by and for the small residential areas, then I'm quite happy to say that the "public land" is morally the collective property of those who own the small residential plots, in proportion to what percentage of the population they were. Manifestly, the colonists did expel the Arabs from their residences! Even if the situation was such that on paper 5% of the land was Arab and 95% was "public", it's rather disingenuous to treat the 5% "Arab land" that was stolen as a rounding error when clearly the colonists did not seem to think the Arabs could be allowed to keep it as a "rounding error" (because it turns out that the 5% private land was key to exploiting the 95% of public land).




Ok, so any group which, in the last 100 years, has acquired territory by means of ethnic cleansing, backed by violence, is tainted with "original sin." Do I understand you correctly?




Don't ignore context to generate overly ambitious strawman statements to refute. I'm happy with the following narrower version: any group which, in the last 100 years, has acquired territory by means of (...), where this ethnic cleansing and violence was not itself justified as retaliation against a previous act, is tainted with "original sin".




Can you tell me the most recent significant incident in this process so that I know what you are talking about?




Here's one from the top of a Google search for . The Golan Heights is getting settlement and that is literally territory they seized from another sovereign and internationally recognised at the time state in war.




Do you agree that Hamas regularly and aggressively uses human shields?




I don't know what exactly you mean by this, but I'm happy to accept a statement like "Hamas deliberately bases its operations in civilian areas for the purpose of concealment". Perhaps "aggressively uses human shields" is a Russell conjugation of this sort of thing, where in an allied country it's more of an innovative mom-and-pop shop startup story.




Ok, so in your view, Israel has no legitimate right of self-defense when it comes to any and all Arab terrorism against it. Do I understand you correctly?




Eh, not quite. My point is mostly that we (the country I'm a subject of, and also the country you are a subject of) have a moral obligation to not aid them in their defense. In terms of "legitimacy" (what do you mean by this?), I do lean towards saying something like every living being has some sort of natural right to fight for its own survival - I would not morally fault the murderer who is sought out by his victim's surviving relatives in retaliation for fighting them off, even as I may cheer on the relatives to prevail.




I assume that by "atrocities," you are referring to the Israeli self-defense which you believe is per se illegitimate.




I mean in particular self-defense that leaves cities looking like this, and for example everything that is mentioned in this article. I don't believe the argument that this is the only way they could defend themselves has been made, and in particular the Russia/Ukraine thing continues being a canonical test case - we are simultaneously hearing the assertion that Russia has worse training, less and inferior precision weaponry, is more brutal than Israel, and having no problem roundly condemning it and sanctioning it to hell, but somehow Russia manages to occupy Ukrainian cities without having to mow down people in bread lines and even the most thoroughly burned-over cities on the frontline there don't quite look that reduced to rubble.




Last, I would appreciate an answer to my question from before: Are you similarly skeptical of the motives of other countries which are engaged in military conflicts?




I think I've made an extensive case that nobody else seems to be currently engaged in military conflicts that are this one-sidedly immoral.


If you want to take this conversation further, please try to actually engage with the points I make, rather than doing this mixture of warping a few excerpts into strawmen and requesting that I undersign a battery of prepared statements. I don't think you are actually doing your case a service, because you are doing it so sloppily that you are just inviting more opportunities to make the Israeli case look bad.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 27, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
There's a "steelman"/less implausible version of the theory that keeps being invoked around terrorism events/public security incidents, which suggests that law enforcement knew in advance and made a deliberate choice to not apprehend/stop the attacker(s) as early as they could. This could serve to reap the PR boons from being targeted (greater support for authoritarian measures and some forms of collective reprisals against groups the attacker is associated with) while ideally still limiting the actual effects of the attack by stopping the attacker in the nick of time. Here, the theories seem to rest on some remark to the effect of "let's wait and see what happens" that Trump supposedly made when first being notified about the presence of a shooter.


Political brainrot notwithstanding, I've never been so convinced that the general pattern being suggested is altogether so implausible that it can't possibly have been true for any of the cases where it's commonly cited (1970s Italy's strategy of tension? 9/11? Oct 7th?). If it works out, the benefits to the goverment targeted are clearly great. One of the main objections is the potential costs if the whole scheme is revealed, but between the Snowden revelations and the realities of the tribalised information space I think the entire "shady conspiracies can't actually exist because someone would just leak it" argument complex is pretty discredited. Of course, there's another objection in that sometimes the "stop the attacker in the nick of time" plan would fail and/or the attack itself is more impactful than the conspirators bargained for. This one is harder to get a grasp of, because it would require an accurate model of how reckless or conversely loss-averse conspiratorial authorities can be, but to build that model we would need to ascertain the truth of alleged past situations which we can't because of our tribalised information space.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 27, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
No, not quite correctly.


    

  1. 

    In the 1940s, the area was populated by a handful of Jews and many Arabs. They owned their respective property; Arabs were presumably in the majority, and in particular sufficiently densely distributed that there was no viable contiguous Jewish state that could be founded on Jewish property.
    

    2. 

  2. 

    Thereupon, Jewish colonists with Anglo-American backing started entering the area and killing and expelling the Arabs. Without these actions, the "war of independence" (which was really a unilateral war of aggression) could not have been won. This created a sort of "original sin" that is so recent that it has not met my statute of limitations.
    

    3. 

  3. 

    Israel continues doing the same thing (killing Arabs, expelling them from their land and settling it). Israel is a democracy (as its supporters are enthusiastic to point out). Therefore, sins analogous to the "original sin" are newly committed by the Israeli state with popular consent with regularity.
    

    4. 



I'm not as hung up on hospitals as you seem to be, though I would like to point out that Russia is regularly condemned for attacking Ukrainian dual-use infrastructure (including hospitals) that is likewise used by the Ukrainian military and still manages to have produced a far lower number of civilian casualties in Ukraine than Israel has among its enemies. This seems like pretty strong evidence that Israel is unusually happy to cause civilian casualties.


Either way, nothing about this requires even talking about whether they are justified to blow up hospitals or anyone else is! Even ignoring the tens of thousands of skulls, 1-3 alone amounts to an obvious moral case for returning what was stolen. If Israel relinquishes all land that was not owned by Jews in 1940, we can talk about who and what they are allowed to destroy in defense of what's left.


The only relevance that the "original sin" has to evaluating Israel's other actions (including blowing up hospitals) is that Israel habitually defends its ongoing violence and theft against the Arabs with violence committed by Arabs against them. Commonly, notions of legitimate self-defense are understood to only cover unprovoked actions. You can't attack and rob someone, have them strike you in self-defense, and then justify further aggression against them as self-defense against the preceding act.




Of course I have heard the "tax dollars" argument before. But if this were the reason for the ferocious and relentless criticism of Israel out there, one would expect Europeans to be far less anti-Israel than Americans. That's not the case at all. "Tax dollars" is an excuse, not the actual reason.




This argument is nonsensical. There is no reason to assume that the total volume of possible outrage at atrocities committed elsewhere is the same in every country. If the amount of "tax dollars" has any relevance at all, at most you might argue that it determines the relative scale of our responsibility for Israel's actions, compared to other atrocities being committed with our monetary support - and there, I think there might be a good case that even though US support for Israel is in absolute terms much larger than ours, in relative terms there is comparatively more other immoral behaviour that American money pays for. It could be that 30% of all atrocities funded by EU military budget are Israeli and 10% of all atrocities funded by US military budget are, but the latter quantity is still much larger in monetary terms.