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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

				
				
				

				

					3 followers  

					follows 2 users  

					joined 2022 September 05 01:50:31 UTC
				


				
					

					
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				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 23, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Yeah, that's what I meant by general media strategy.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 23, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Let's not forget the events that led to the Islamic Revolution to begin with - democratically elected government cancelled imposed agreements and expropriated BP (Western oil extraction), the West organised a coup to install the Shah to get back the oil, he was so unpopular that the devout faction then successfully revolted. And now, Trump is already openly being grabby about oil again. Perhaps advances in propaganda mean we could now stop the Iranian populace from wanting to control their hydrocarbons or sedate them with short-form video enough to make them put up with the Shah, but how confident are we of this and do we have enough national executive function to never slip up with the opinion control?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 23, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think this is basically a fair assessment, and it also fully applies to why/how Ukraine has held out for so long against Russia (contra the cheerleading narrative).


In fact proxies with high capacity to absorb suffering backed by countries with a moat against immediate retribution seems to be one strategy with which the stronger powers still can be made to bleed - arguably this scheme was prototyped in Korea (imperfectly because China still had to commit its own forces in the end) and perfected in Vietnam.


However, the stars need to align for this to work, in that it must not be possible to physically sever the proxies from their backers. NK is adjacent to Russia and China, North Vietnam is adjacent to China, Ukraine borders NATO and the Houthis are a short swim from Iran. Hizbollah can't be a good proxy for Iran because they have too much hostile ground to cover, and Cuba is almost unreachable for Russia. Iran itself doesn't seem to want to be anyone's proxy (perhaps their ability to absorb suffering is not actually that high?), and Georgia failed as a Western proxy for some mixture of low capability to absorb suffering and not being that easy to reach and support.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 23, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I spent most of my time in deep-blue country, but saw what you described during trips to red areas and felt all that to be LARP. America is not actually fighting any existential wars with real imminent threats to those areas, and is not in the process of settling any hostile frontiers.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 23, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Ah, thanks. (@DeanoBongino, too) I still don't know what to make of that one - media seems to have largely come down on the side of the Palestinian misfire story, but then the media-NGO blob is almost united about asserting it was the enemy when the target is bad even in cases that are more implausible from the start, with only rare defections. Then there is what Wikipedia quotes as




In the immediate aftermath, Hananya Naftali, an aide to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, posted a tweet stating: "Israeli Air Force struck a Hamas terrorist base inside a hospital in Gaza. A multiple number of terrorists are dead. It's heartbreaking that Hamas is launching rockets from hospitals, Mosques, schools, and using civilians as human shields." He then deleted it after Israel blamed a Palestinian rocket for the explosion.




which I guess could be explained away as part of a general media strategy executed without the aide actually having any privileged information but anyhow would fit the conspiracy (IL did it, media reports whatever IL wants) explanation well.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 23, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Which story is the hospital thing referring to? Nordstream was mid-2022, shortly after the Ukraine war started, so still in the year before the current Israel/Gaza round (Oct 2023-).


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 23, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Not at all, see my parallel post for the sort of thing I'm talking about. The US just has normal messy imperial metropole vibes, not far from the convex hull of '00s Russia, England and France.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 23, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I should say that in Israel I have only been to Jerusalem and the West Bank, so I can't comment on the reportedly more "normal" state of, say, Tel Aviv. What left impressions were patrols of machine gun toting conscript girls (admittedly good fanservice) on every corner, random coffeeshops with walls dedicated to pictures of patrons who are currently serving in the military (and steep discounts to soldiers), checkpoints, body scanners, locked-down city quarters and the "countryside" being a patchwork of creepy culty settlements and Arab villages enclosed in Berlin wall lookalike concrete slabs, among many others.


On the other hand, in Turkey... yeah, the Atatürk cultism was a bit out there, and I should say I haven't ventured far outside the European part (including however places like Edirne, not just Istanbul), but you can see the same sorts of stray cat populations all over Greece. The fancy buildings are mostly Ottoman, if sometimes imitating European imperial idiom. I don't think not drinking is more alien than Jewish dietary laws, and to my German-influenced eyes most of the US was plenty weird about alcohol (arguably more so than Istanbul, where I had several bottles of Efes with local tweens in a well-trafficked public square without a problem).


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 23, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


(2) A disinformation war is happening in regards to whether a school in Iran was hit, and if it were hit, whether its destruction was caused by Iran, Israel, or America.




Something has to be said for the incredible success story that is "stop hitting yourself" as a propaganda strategy. From what I can see, it was first deployed successfully with the Nordstream pipeline bombing, after which both sides in the Ukraine war have been routinely throwing it around for every less than unambiguously "clean" impact (though the only case I remember where the self-hit was unambiguously established in the end was the Kramatorsk train station thing on the UA side). Now, with this case, you can't open a normie comment section without encountering people posting that the Iranians must have done it themselves and deliberately (going beyond even the "failed AA/launch" explanation) to all-around applause.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 23, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Having been to both (as a rootless piece of Euroslop who spent close to a decade in the US), I would say Turkey felt much less alien than Israel, and the latter's pervasive militarised Manifest Destiny frontier society vibes had everything to do with this.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 23, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


The humans who control American weapons are elected officials running DoD, not the defense contractors at Anthropic.




So can I trust you will still have the same position once the Executive reverts to the Dems, if Palantir is the company objecting to some way the woke DoD wants it to make its tools usable in?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 23, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Punishable with up to 1 year of jail e.g. in Germany; and yes, if your Karen neighbour figures out you were not technically allowed to, she will absolutely report you.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 23, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I'm not saying it's impossible or hasn't happened, but I just haven't seen a case yet that could support the assertion that there are people who want trans people dead or genocided.




You can go into just about any 4chan thread to convince yourself of the existence of such people. It's just that once you filter out the LARPing, the incompetent, the cowardly and the ones who rationally decide that the legal consequences are not worth it, not a lot remain.


Either way, I don't think there is much productive discussion to be had from reheating this topic in its direct form for the nth time (it at best devolves into questions of whose feelings it is more important to protect, and more often just involves flag-waving and rallying the for/against troops for messages of support or outrage).


Instead, let me ask a different but related question: In many European cultures, it is common practice that people who hold academic degrees (in particular PhDs) can list them with their name everywhere, replacing the appellation (Mr/Mrs/Ms) where available. So your doorbell, passport, ID etc. would say "Dr. Smith". This conveys not only bragging rights and a culturally reinforced feeling of achievement, but also a lot of practical advantages in everyday life: bureaucrats are nicer to you, postal workers are less likely to break your package, neighbours are less likely to call the police if you barbecue on your balcony at 2AM. Usually, who is allowed to put "Dr." is quite stringently regulated, with steep penalties: it is tied to degree program accreditation for native universities, and for foreign ones there is usually an extremely long list of arcane criteria involving research intensity ratings and what-not, which also sometimes requires you to pay money to some local agency to issue a document certifying that your foreign degree conveys the right to be consider a "Dr." nationally for this purpose.


Now suppose you were a resident of a European country, but had studied at a US university. Let's say you are also reasonably invested in US politics. You learn that your country has recently updated its title carrying accreditation rules, so now only PhDs from US universities that have [sufficiently strong, sufficiently subdued] DEI initiatives are accepted. If you do not have your documents updated and promptly remove the "Dr." from your doorbell, you risk steep administrative fines, or worse. How do you feel about this? Do you think it is fair game or are you going to protest?

To begin with, in what ways do you figure this scenario is similar, and in what ways do you think it is essentially different from the gender ID one?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 23, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
If you want to do nitpicky exegesis, this only singles out "ourselves and our Posterity" as the intended beneficiary of the "Blessings of Liberty", since the "to" can't attach to any of the preceding clauses (provide for the common defence "to" ourselves(...)...?). Moreover, it's just listed as one among many objectives. The "We the People" bit, as much as people like turning it into a shibboleth for their favoured political package, does not seem to be doing anything apart from identifying the party in whose name the following document is issued.


It seems like a rather unreasonable leap to go from something that amounts to "In order to strive towards objectives A, B, C, D, E and F, we proclaim the following set of rules to constrain the behaviour of $entity" to "The first duty of $entity is some mixture of C and D but only for the beneficiaries stated in F". It would even be unreasonable if you just said that {A,B,C,D,E,F} together is "the first duty" of the US government: the whole point of having a constitution is to not leave it up to the government, or any future individuals, to determine how to best implement these six things, but to establish a priori a common agreement on how it is to be done, so that these instructions (hopefully less ambiguous than the original goals) can henceforth be used as a terminal goal. You would not need a constitution otherwise, but could just have a one-paragraph blob saying "the government shall form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, (...)".


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 23, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think you are kind of dodging my point here. To say it a bit differently: what do you think gives you more of an authority to speculate about the motivations of the modal woman than the person you were responding to? If you are just going to say that it's your own presumable female biology, the "take it to Bluesky" charge seems fair enough. "I'm a woman, and I don't feel anything resembling that instinct" would have been a fair response; the implicit "I'm a woman, so I can authoritatively assert that women don't feel that instinct" is just progressive tokenism.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for February 20, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Thanks for the recommendations! I'll make sure to check out the museums (and the food was ranking high on the todo list anyway, open to concrete (anti-)recommendations there too). Do you know if there's anything interesting to do with the more recent history of the city, specifically including the Japanese occupation?


As I said in my parallel response to problem_redditor, the two-week period is not entirely under my control, but I can probably fit in a short detour to Malaysia somewhere.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for February 20, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Thanks for the recommendations! These all look interesting, and quite in line with what I'm looking for. I would add a more specific question for whether there are parts of town that are particularly interesting on the street level, in the sense of having local colour rather than being all globalised slop. (I'm quite open to shantytowns and the like too.) Also, anything touching on the military history of the place? The British colonial era, prisons/bunkers/batteries that changed hands during WWII or were otherwise connected to it being overrun, etc.?


The reason for the ~two weeks is that it's a technically-for-work trip (but with a low expectation for the actual density of work that will be done). A one- or two-day excursion to Malaysia is probably conceivable; how is the transport situation to go to Malacca or beyond? Are there good trains, or is it sensible to rent a car and drive?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 23, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Someone sufficiently snarky may be tempted to describe your combination of rejecting progressivism and still expecting progressive-style deference towards your lived experience as a "leopards eating my face" moment.


More seriously, what is your working principle here? Your interlocutor, it seems, is not allowed to engage in evopsych speculation about women on account of not being a woman. Does this restriction only apply to the human male/female categorisation, or are there more? (Can Americans speculate about what motivates Europeans? Zoologists about animals? Christians about Atheists?)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 23, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It occurs to me that the "power differential" argument could actually be analysed as almost entirely upside down. Isn't it the case that the 20 year old woman is the one with good BATNA/options, and hence greater negotiating power, compared to the 50 year old one who would be left with whatever the market looks like for 50 year old divorcees? In fact, as long as there are in fact 20 year old women who date 50 year old men, the 50 year old woman's equal-age-bracket husband is even less incentivised to stay in his marriage rather than chase that possibility; so perhaps the age-gap relationship is indeed bad for someone's power differential, but not the one of the people involved in it.


I'm not convinced that this is outweighed by whatever impact the difference in "life experience" has. Outside of romance novels, most 50 year old men do not actually seem like they have acquired a mastery of guile and manipulation that no 25 year old could hope to compete with, but are basically what you'd expect a boomer to be - that is, financially a bit more settled, perhaps a bit less anxious, mentally quite a bit less sharp and more rigid, and slowly falling out of touch with modernity. I don't see this conveying a degree of power over young women that must be regulated, unless you hold that they are constitutionally incapable of resisting someone who can stay calm (in a slightly loopy way) and buy them dinner.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 22, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'm not convinced it's America. A lot of countries seem to have working mass English education, with some notable exceptions being Japan, to a lesser extent China, and historically (though not anymore) France. At the same time, a lot of European countries force kids to learn a third language at school too, and at least in Germany I have not observed that going any better than second-language instruction in anglophone countries.


The best-fit model for this is something like "school does nothing, and kids will learn a language if and only if they need the pop culture of that language". The rare examples of masses failing to learn English are just the rare countries that produce enough good stuff of their own.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for February 20, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Out of your list, This Is Going To Hurt and the Golden Oecumene/Culture comparison sound like I would enjoy them the most, just going off of your blurbs. The former just carries the risk of being seen as a bit too much of a vanilla/safe/on-the-nose choice for Scott's blog.


Having read Blindsight, I also don't see what a review of it would add. The book, while being interesting in the way an academic paper is, is also dry and bloodless like one, and something something trying to squeeze juice from a brick.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for February 20, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I expect to be going on a trip (on the order of two weeks) to Singapore fairly soon. Since it will be my first time there, any recommendations for things to see or avoid?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 16, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I always had the impression that there is a real category of men that can be described as "attracted to women and femininity, but finds actual women too alien", and therefore prefers male sex/life partners who they can actually empathise with/relate to/theory-of-mind. Relatedly, futanari (so much material reading as "it would be hot if a woman did/experienced this, but it requires having a dick"). On the other side of the aisle, lesbians who are into butch/masculine or (in East Asia especially) "prince-like" handsome women also seem to be a thing, which I'd readily analyse in the same way. (Mirroring futa, perhaps, mpreg?)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 16, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
At its core, I would say, it's just political low openness, that is, the belief that for the polity, things that are new or different from what it is accustomed to are a priori bad. Low/high openness in individual humans is understood well enough, and likewise does not care for the particular provenance or authenticity of a habit: an adult could discover chicken tenders at age 30, gradually slide into eating them exclusively and decide at 40 that trying new foods over the tried and reliable tendies is just not enjoyable or worth it. It doesn't have to be this extreme: a tendiemaxxer friend of mine can be convinced to try most things, but you have to spend half a day making the case why it's a good idea, eat some of it in front of him and show that you are not experiencing any side effects you hid from him, and then he'll start with tiny bites and wait for a bit to meditate on how he feels about it (and then in the end complain that you should have just let him stick with his usual diet).


Contra this, liberalism in essence is "did you see that Chinese bull penis hangover soup on youtube shorts too? We should try that some day, aren't you curious", applied to society. A baseline attitude of "this is different, how exciting" vs. "this is different, I feel uncomfortable".


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 16, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Well, same(ish) - I have not been featured in the news (nor is it likely to happen anytime soon given that I am in unfashionable theoretical CS), but then on the other hand I count some actual historians among my relatives so I have some inside view of that sausage factory. I think the main difference to me is that the thing you describe as a nadir does not feel particularly bad to me, on its own. The educator part of the job has always felt fundamentally adversarial to me - even well-selected students will at any point in time use 95% of their galaxy brains (or, well, of whatever fraction of those they are willing to invest in your course at all) only to engage in mental gymnastics to convince themselves that they are perfect just as they are, and to convince you that they learned and applied what you wanted them to without them actually having done those things. (The sheer inventiveness I've seen in schemes to circumvent automated plagiarism detectors in programming assignments that could be done with a fraction of the effort, or to hide transparently false lemmas in the bowels of a Rube Goldberg proof of a three-liner that was covered in class!)


To teach these students - not an anonymous public, and not on a topic of any political valence, but people you know and a subset of whom you hope to elevate to colleagues some day! - requires constant subterfuge and deception to get past the ego defenses of their monkey brains. That you would do all that and more when actually just talking to normies seems absolutely par for the course for me. It's not like I'm not bothered by the politically motivated deception cases @RenOS was hinting at, but there I see the problem somewhere else. It is only really bad if, before deciding to deceive the public, these scientists have already deceived themselves, or otherwise transgressed against the mental discipline that a scientist needs for science as a whole to function in the long run. (Many cases of this don't even involve politics, cf. every case of trash stats replication crisis just-so story zingers. I blame the general culture in US academia where idealism about science qua science is seen as cringe and unbefitting of a successful working adult.) If it were as he says, and these people indeed merely advanced their agenda when talking to the general public but treated evidence fairly while engaging in the scientific process, I would perhaps find them tasteless as politicians, but not compromised as scientists.