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4bpp

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

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joined 2022 September 05 01:50:31 UTC

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4bpp


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


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

				
				
				

				

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					follows 2 users  

					joined 2022 September 05 01:50:31 UTC
				


				
					

					
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				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 3, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Do you assume women's prisons are meaningfully less violent than men's prisons? After having seen an assortment bodycam videos of female criminals getting arrested, I would find that doubtful. Were you aware of headlines such as this?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 3, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
How does prison rape happen? Presumably if you can forcefully penetrate your fellow inmates and get away with it, you can also do all sorts of other violence to them. Anecdotally, this happens a lot, including in single-sex prisons. Is that part of the "fitting" punishment? What about male-on-male prison rape? I have never heard anyone on the right take up a crusade to reduce those things, and surely, in the age of robotics, tasers and $50 HD CCTV we could easily shut down all physical forms of prisoner-on-prisoner violence in no time if a critical mass of people didn't think it's all part of the punishment.


It's a bit too convenient if of all unscheduled tribulations of prison, the only one that you think urgently needs to be addressed happens to be one where the indicated solution would be to grant you a symbolic victory on a culture war topic that otherwise has nothing to do with prisons.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 3, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
In what context did you encounter those Ukrainians? Those who have made it all the way to America don't really count, since they have already safely made it to the West and probably are more subject to American memes (which would have you proudly wear the culture of distant ancestors like an Aztec warrior wears a jaguar skin).


(I don't deeply know any Western Ukrainians, but have talked to some of the refugees who are all over Europe now and overheard the conversations of many more. Of course having fled does bias the sample, too.)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 3, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


My argument is that it's incoherent to claim to oppose violence against women and yet support policies that put women at greater risk of physical harm for the benefit of men.




I don't see it as particularly more incoherent than when right-wingers, who are generally hardly known for wanting to improve the lot of imprisoned criminals, develop a strange and very isolated compassion towards women prisoners who are forced to share their prison tracts with men.


It would be easier to make sense of the sentiment if it were presented as outrage at the MtF criminals getting off lightly/getting to enjoy a fox-in-the-chicken-coop scenario, rather than the appropriation of care foundation language we are getting. (Something about using the master's tools on the master's house?)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 3, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I don't think Ukrainians, outside of the max. 3% or so actual nazis (effective as they may be as a fighting force), care for "surviving as a people".
The only thing they are fighting, and willingly taking a 50% chance to die, for is the hope of "becoming part of the West", either by uplift like Poland or Estonia, or by emigration once the borders open. Generally, it may be hard for a Westerner who spends all day every day seething about the state of their country to understand just to what extent post-Soviet people, especially relatively poor ones, idolize life in the West. (Maybe take in this prophetic music video for vibes.)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 3, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The internet is quite saturated with Israel/Palestine arguments that selectively ignore everything bad that one side has been doing, graphically describes everything bad the other side has been doing, and then presents it as some sort of novel insight into the bottomless hypocrisy and evil of the former side like nobody has considered it from that angle before. I would hope we can do better here.


That being said, maybe the set of pro-Palestinians I am exposed to is non-representative, but my sense is that unlike the pro-Israelis they at least don't generally outright gaslight away half of what is happening. Instead, they treat Oct 7 rather like the public treats the violence against the civilian population of the losing nations of WWII - "not strictly good, but they honestly had it coming". (Red Army on German civilians is getting reevaluated due to modern political shifts, but from what I understand the fate of the Japanese settlers and their descendants on Chinese territory still is squarely in that category.)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 27, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Uh, you might or might not win that round of banter, but you would for sure win an immediate meeting with HR, "RoyGBivensAction was joking about shooting me/my whole family/half of our office" and what-not.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 27, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Then we get to the Reno shootout. Woman decides to intervene in some quarrel between a man and a woman. Man starts yelling at woman. Husband of woman intervenes. Man goes back to truck, gets gun, shoots husband. No, this wasn't what was deemed justified -- things continue. Woman pulls out her gun, shoots man. Man shoots woman (and some bystander) too. Then another bystander fatally shoots the man, thinking he's going to kill the woman. The dead man turned out to boozed up, coked up, and high on pot too. If the WSJ writer had his way, presumably the bystander who killed him would be imprisoned for it. Or not shot him and maybe the woman dies instead. How would that improve things?




I assume that if the WSJ writer had his way, nobody here, including the first guy, would have had a gun. Unfortunately, there is no policy that would have realistically disarmed the first shooter without people screeching that it aims to disarm the second one.
Any efforts towards a general crackdown on lethal self-defence should also be understood through the lens of this environment - encumbering any reasonable use of guns is just a means to the end that only unreasonable uses remain, which would make a total ban politically more attainable.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 27, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
But on the other hand, some forms of protecting people from the damage they can do to themselves and others in a fit of passion seem to be very popular. We have laws against drugs and gambling, contra any "it is good that druggies slowly poison themselves/compulsive gamblers surrender their money to someone who is more responsible with it" arguments; the state mandates that you were a seatbelt while driving; most people ban assisted suicide, do not recognise consent to major amputations and maimings to the chagrin of cannibals and trans-disabled everywhere; and, indeed, all have largely banned legal duels.


Your line of argument particularly reminds me of ones about gambling. As it happens, I play a lot of gacha video games (F2P games with a significant "lootbox" component, where you can spend in-game currency that can be either very slowly gained from playing or straight up bought with real money on a probability to obtain a character or item). I have never had issues with self-control, and probably spent a grand total of $50 on all such games in my lifetime, only buying small top-ups to signal to the developers that I especially liked what they did in a particular patch now and then; so for me, these are just ridiculously high-production-value live-service games I get to play for free (but where sometimes I can not get access to some content). However, in these games, if you must get an item and RNGesus is not on your side, it is not uncommon to have to blow $2k or more on gacha rolls. A friend, who likewise plays a lot (of the same games, and then some more), has spent more to the tune of $20k, and continues spending heavily.


A while ago, we both entered an argument about whether gacha should be banned, instigated by a third friend (who does not play it, but is very European). I took what is essentially the pro-gun position: the lack of impulse control of some should not be a reason to stop consenting adults from engaging in business transactions, even if there is a probabilistic component, and rejecting even the polite fiction that adult members of society can be trusted with making decisions for themselves and shouldering any consequences leads you down a path whose endpoint can not really be described as liberal democracy anymore, etc. The addict friend, who continues indulging in his addiction and happily spamming me every day about what haul his most recent $500 of paid pulls got him, took the "ban it all" position. At the end of the argument, the two of them expressed what seemed like genuine, if slightly brainrotten, concern that I am out of sheer contrarianness drifting towards becoming a "libertarian trumptard" (their words!).


(On the other side of the divide, drugs? I would wager that "adults who can use drugs responsibly should not have to take restrictions due to irresponsible addicts" is a much more Blue position.)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for October 24, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'm surprised that "abnormality" is a prerequisite for getting worker's compensation.  Accepting for the sake of argument that PTSD is real, this is a real instance of PTSD, and it really prevents him from continuing in the same line of work, should "all firefighters experience this, and usually it does not result in them quitting with PTSD" be a sufficient argument to deny compensation? Does that mean that in cases like those radioactive watch face painters, where everyone in a line of work was exposed to a perhaps underappreciated probabilistic risk by convention, those who did get struck by it (the people who got cancer) have no claim to compensation?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 20, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I doubt that, if the safety of Israel's population were seriously threatened, some countries in Europe would not open their gates to them no questions asked. (Not without irony, the main way I'd expect this to fail is that in some countries the Muslim population that washed up in no small part thanks to Israel's misadventures, and other things (such as, uh, Algeria) that rhyme with them, has become a significant enough voting block to provide a contrary incentive to politicians!)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 20, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'd be curious what the argument was for logical arguments beating "pissing them off", as opposed to the latter just being a dominant strategy...


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Considering the figures on the Wikipedia page, with the sub-replacement values for "Christians" and "others", I'm inclined to believe that whatever they are doing at least does not work as a society-wide intervention. "Jewish non-Haredi" is already given as only 2.4, and I assume that there is a large number of sufficiently aberrant lifestyle people (like settlers) in that group pulling up the average without resembling "affluent liberal modernity".


I mean, sure, with a sufficiently compelling religion you will find some people willing to live on a farm and multiply for your ethnoreligious group's manifest destiny; the fraction of people willing to do that might however not be that large, and Israel already has an easier time there because their baseline Jewish population is preselected for propensity to go for such a thing from a much larger global Jewish population. I'm however not convinced that that group could sustain itself even at its current level of lifestyle without a much larger and lower-TFR group subsidising them. I'm in fact not even convinced that Israel as a state could sustain itself at its current level of lifestyle without the much larger and lower-TFR group that is the USA subsidising them. Israel's TFR is also secured by weapons and money built by/earned by Americans burning their fertile years in the rat race at Raytheon.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I don't know enough about Utah, but I would assume Israeli fertility is nontrivially carried by subgroups that are not living in affluent liberal modernity. Maybe, assuming that the subgroups are not actually genetically distinct from the general population and have a steady rate of evaporation (as in children who leave the group and join modernity), such a strategy could be viable - maintain a self-sequestering pronatalist cult, and keep the rest of society running on a steady trickle of apostates from their circles - but it hardly seems stable, especially since I assume evaporative cooling will cause the cult to drift genetically towards who knows what over time.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Was pre-1960s America/Europe "Muslim/Amish with a different paint job"?




No, but we can't go back to anything like it, because not having invented smartphones and Uber Eats looks very different from upholding a ban on smartphones and Uber Eats and we have neither the coordination nor the technology to just forget a capability.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I dispute that it's such a good metric, because GitHub submissions always have an element of flexing and self-actualisation (the "become the best stamp collector in Sheffield" type of male hierarchy climbing pursuit). The best female programmers I know disproportionately do not put their hobby projects on Github, and are often unenthused by the idea even if urged to (it draws attention,  might attract the bad kind of attention, looks like cringy showing off which they just axiomatically don't like, etc.).


Hell, even in my personal space, my SO has probably written 5x the volume of shell scripts to automate random chores that I have (my tolerance for annoyances being much higher), but mine are on github with a nice readme and Show HN post to introduce them and hers are not.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Well, that sucks, but all the counterproposals look an awful lot like "we should turn into patriarchal muslims/amish with a different paint job first".


Besides, in a couple centuries, I wager both Europe and the US will either be ruled by Clippy or members of whatever type of cockroach (literal or metaphorical) emerges from the rubble of WWIII, and in the latter case the TFR probem might be solved for Westerners too since erasing industrial society seems like a reliable enough way to get the opportunity costs of childrearing under control.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Now, are there societies which combine female domesticity with a functioning sewage system?




Well, what is the cause and what is the effect there, though? It's suspicious that even for well-sewered Western society, by the time proper sewer systems proliferated, female workforce participation was already most of the way to the modern value. (Quick Google says 56% for the US now, and 40% for Victorian England.)


I don't think TFR>2.1 is compatible with affluent liberal modernity without speculative innovations in the class of artificial wombs and AI childrearing with no humans in the loop, so I'd rather just enjoy its boons while they last. We'll have to destroy freedom and fun to get TFR up eventually anyway; why be in a hurry about it?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
See this paper (randomly lifted from Google) and everything that it cites. I haven't personally experienced the Japanese workplace, but I have worked with and socialised with many Japanese people (and do not have a language barrier), and the core thesis essentially rings true. The role of the senior is fundamentally ceremonial, and any significant decisions affecting the group are always based on meticulous vibe-checking. A senior or authority who fails to vibe-check and just steamrolls their personal preference will find themselves sidelined in the most Mean Girls way imaginable, unless it's literally a doddering old (wo)man with a long social track record in which case they will be superficially humoured while the actual decisions are carefully made behind their back.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
That's a lot of speculative theories and subjective experience that may really just be yours (maybe about 1/3 of research papers I have built on had women first authors, and I'm in a hard theory corner of CS). Either way, the picture you paint of the impact of women in the workplace seems nothing short of apocalyptic, so wouldn't you expect at least some examples of societies that don't allow it outperforming those that do? Instead, on top of the steamrolling dominance of egalitarian Western society, we are now seeing the ascendancy/imminent superiority of China which at least anecdotally places even more women in competitive tail jobs.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Everyone can use that suffix, and it is not exclusively agreement-seeking (a simple そうだね。 has all the vibes of an English "Right."~"I see.", and the Facebook "like" button is translated as いいね).


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
In that particular case, I never found out. It was an undergrad that I only intersected with as we both TAed the same course, and my curiosity about undergrad drama was no longer high enough to seek out information that was not volunteered.


On another occasion, there was a mixed undergrad/grad bouldering group I was in for a while, and one of the undergrad girls (who seemed to be socially fairly central to the group before) suddenly stopped coming. I asked why I hadn't seen her around and the only response I got was "X? Oh, X is cancelled." Some of the other undergrads present just turned around and did some sort of "oh yeah, there was that" raised-eyebrows nod. - me: "Huh? What happened?" - interlocutor, repeating: "She's cancelled." I didn't pry further. Figures what they have going on.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
But she understood that intuitively, which is why she didn't ask her female friends. If she did ask, the reply, however superficially encouraging, probably would have carried an undertone of "really? you are asking about that?" that she would also have caught on to. The point is that female (and oldschool Japanese) norms are not actually reducible to "Male Westerner culture, with a layer of obscuring passive-aggressive misdirection applied on top"; communication really is supposed to bottom out in getting a hint, and making sure that others get the hints that you want to drop, with no truthful explanation in words being accessible as a last resort, and yet it works if everyone cooperates on it. (Whether it is a global or merely a local optimum is another question.)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I already disowned my choice of the word "bourgeois" in a comment elsewhere in this subtree, as in hindsight it was not the right term to describe the group of people I was aiming for. I assumed you would have seen that post as well, sorry.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


It’s hard to describe exactly, but there’s a difference between presenting criticism in a way that allows people to save face, and the kind of knives-covered-in-sugar behaviour where the critic tries to pretend that no criticism is actually occurring.




Which setting, do you figure, does which?


A missing piece of the puzzle may be that (as far as I can tell) well-adjusted women in "feminised" social groups in the West also in fact do get the substance of socially-diffused deniable criticism clearly, even when it is never explicitly stated to them. Failures occur when men and incorrectly socialised (or neurodivergent) women enter those circles.


I've even seen a pattern along the lines of the following: Chinese girl to American CS student guy friend: "I feel like those people hate me and don't actually want me to join their homework group" - guy friend: "Did they actually say something to the effect? No? I'm sure they are just busy, don't worry about it too much" - [girl gets bullied out of the girls' group and winds up with only male friends, who also all want to get with her]. In this case, the girl should have followed her initial instincts; in fact probing about it more positively would have revealed that she had a pretty accurately understanding of why the others were cross with her. The system worked fine, up until the point that it had to contend with people that expected it to be something that it actually isn't.