@4bpp's banner p

4bpp

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

4 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

				
				
				

				

					4 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 November 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I'm not a deontologist. I'm closer to a Platonist, if you couldn't tell from me quoting the Plato books.




Could you please explain what that entails here, beyond, again, the "textbook"/folk understanding that you believe that everything in the real world is an imperfect reflection of some "perfect" (whatever that means - is it just a matter of having a simple definition?) abstract entity or concept?




(...) One is a dog, the other is a rat. Prior to anything else, you decide the dog is legitimate (as your pet) and the rat is illegitimate. (...)




Do I? I don't think I need to blegg the rat or the dog. I will give any animals that happen to be in my house whatever degree of care, engagement and quarter I decide in the moment is appropriate to optimise for my preferences. If I feed the dog, it's not because I have decided that it is "legitimate (as my pet)", but because I thought I want the dog to stay in my house and not starve as it doing so brings me joy. I could do the same thing for the rat.




This sounds like it assumes democratism?




Huh? To be clear, I'm only talking about shared values between the speaker and the listener, that is, you and me.


If you tell me something like "one should ensure that raw metal is always processed into wires of 2mm diameter", because you are actually a paperclip maximiser and have concluded that preparing metal in such a way makes it easier to proceed to make paperclips, then this statement is completely meaningless to me, because I am not a paperclip maximiser.




Well I think you are wrong here, although I'm not exactly a virtue ethicist either -- to me your textbook is itself flawed and you ought to read the classics directly. I'd prefer not to have this conversation filtered through such a glass, darkly, and I'm mildly perturbed that this sort of exposition is needed




Unfortunately, you can't convince me to read hundreds of pages of ancient texts (that I, based on my limited interaction with written philosophy of any degree of antiquity, strongly suspect to be incoherent and intellectually unsatisfactory) before I engage with your post. Such a requirement is so heavyweight that it should be taken to go against that "Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion" rule we have.




Is it really that you and the others have not understood what I wrote in the slightest, that the concept of judging a state is completely confusing to you all?




I would like to think I'm not so naive, nor do I intend to pretend to be, that I don't have any idea about how you engage in "judging a state". It's just that the bases of our moral systems are fundamentally sufficiently distinct that I don't think there's a productive discussion to be had. I mean, what sort of thing do you actually want to see? Someone coming at you and proclaiming their own notion of state legitimacy, backed by nothing than emotional assertions and well-written words? Would you adjust your own understanding, if their paean to legitimacy based on the height of the tallest building the state managed to construct (for example) were sufficiently beautiful?




And not just that the word Israel is a mind killer




I don't think I showed any signs of being mind-killed to you mentioning Israel. It seems wholly orthogonal to the question at hand; we may just as well be talking about the legitimacy of the Federal Republic of Germany contra the Reichsbürger movement that asserts that the German Empire was never properly dissolved, or the legitimacy of Sealand, or of the Cherokee Nation.




the last paragraph




I'm not sure I understand what you are saying here. I'm not religious, and if I against all odds wound up being captured by a deity who at smite-point forces me to to guess His definition of some concept, I would hope that at least some contextual hints will be available to me regarding the nature and preferences of Them.


We can, of course, play this sort of game as a hypothetical scenario - if you do in fact sketch out which deity you are imagining running this trial, I can speculate about a wrath-minimising answer. Perhaps a Mesoamerican deity would want me to say that a state can establish legitimacy by creating and maintaining a pipeline of human sacrifice, with the proper attendant rites. If we want to package this notion as something that is parseable in the Western philosophical tradition, we could even say something like of course the highest symbol of the state's authority over men is its power over life and death, and the very circumstance that the exercise of this authority is recognised as ritual rather than banditry and thereby accepted by the subject population without complaint proves that it is legitimate.


Taking a step back, is it so hard for you to write out what it is that you specifically want this notion of "legitimacy" for? If you just were willing to unpack it - say, by saying something like "I hold that it is morally imperative (1) for any legitimate state to not invade the territory held by another legitimate state and (2) for people who are subject of a legitimate state to accept violence upon themselves that is sanctioned by the legitimate state" - then we could have a productive discussion about different notions even without having the same ethical language. Or, perhaps, as a related question: if the Son of Man, or the Platonic ideal of Plato himself, descended on an exquisitely shapely cloud and told you that in fact no country past, present or future on this planet is legitimate, what would you do differently going forward?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


rather it implicitly denies that there is any question to be had at all




Let me explicitly deny, if not that there is any question to be had at all, then at least that you have properly asked any valid question. You sound like a textbook deontologist: for you, the wording "what type of state should there be?" is self-explaining and self-justifying, because should is an atomic element in your conception of the world. A large number of your interlocutors, including me, are not deontologists†. For us, the assertion that something should be in some way is on its own a pointer into nothing, an error of language that makes an actually meaningless phrase sound meaningful in the vein of the trope of the "sound of one hand clapping".


There are values, simple numeric assignments or at least ordinal comparisons that say that one hypothetical world is better than another, and a general preference that those values should be reducible to a simple set of generating principles if possible (less death, more freedom, more variety, more beauty). If one of us non-deontologists says that something should be, this is to mean that we expect that it being so will lead to a world that is better according to that notion, and it also implies that the improvement is along a generating principle we think we share with the listener. We understand nothing else. So if you want to ask whether Israel "should be" considered legitimate, or what the notion of legitimacy should be, you need to not only unpack what you want being "considered legitimate" to entail (add its flag to the drop-down when programming Javascript slop with country selectors? Buy products made there? Refuse to aid concrete efforts aimed at the entity's dissolution?), but also what shared values you think we may want to further by setting up and applying that notion.


† I'm not going to work with the textbook taxonomy that considers e.g. "virtue ethics" its own thing; to me those are just deontologists with a particular class of rules. To begin with, all ethical systems are interdefinable anyway, so I'll just define deontologists as those who use "should" as the most basic predicate of their ethical vocabulary and define everything else in terms of it.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Midterms Megathread
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The cycle has been ongoing for as long as I have been able to read enough English to follow US politics, certainly at least around 9/11. I remember the crass flash animations with Sarah Palin squeezing out babies onto a conveyor belt to be sent as soldiers into Iraq, and the absolute derangement Obama's existence induced in the protestant demographic ("Obongo", FEMA concentration camps, Kenya, "death panels", something about him being a secret child of Malcolm X who was raised in a secret communist facility and programmed to take over America). ODS came first and was a perfect template for TDS.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Midterms Megathread
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Really shows that "freedom of navigation" is just some made up word that actually just means the US running the seas.




Once again, pro-Americans act surprised when the "rules" being nothing more than a LARP of their own making finally comes around to affect their own interests negatively. Where was "freedom of navigation" for Venezuela or Russia these past years?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Divorce is pretty standard in Islam, with sole parenting rights passing to the father by default.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I can understand the mod twitchiness here, if nothing else because we live in a Lovecraftian universe and the bulging-eyed stranger suddenly bursting into your town square and screaming "Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn!" is a different trope from the loony old Miskatonic professor who compulsively injects non-Euclidean geometries into every discussion. We don't know what exactly the boundary is after which all webhosts and banks mysteriously start refusing to do business with you giving a variety of vague excuses, but it's too late after we find out; and this particular stranger behaved as if he was aiming for that boundary and knew more than we do, or at least was quite determined to learn.


That being said, I do find these sorts of edgy hypotheticals much more fun to discuss than the nth iteration of "I am tired of having to pretend that our Lord Jesus Christ is okay with trannies", and wish we could have more of them instead.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
(1) Well, but there's little else that is so universally despised in public and sought after by powerful men in private that it could serve as a one-size-fits-all blackmail operation. If all the less risky ways have been ruled out but you absolutely need to do something, you wind up doing it the risky way.


(2) I've been saying for a long time that if I ever am in charge of a conspiracy, I will make sure that we light some candles and chant a prayer to Satan before every meeting. That way, anyone planning to leak the proceedings will make themselves sound like one of those people, and be immediately bingo-boarded into oblivion. This schema is in fact very general: any conspiracy that has a conspicuous (im)moral component tends to become its own antimeme, unless it is established beyond all reasonable doubts very quickly after it is first revealed, because lingering in ambiguity for any amount of time attracts boosters who are more concerned about the immorality than about the conspiracy, until the movement becomes indistinguishable from a generic moral panic.


Hence, I don't think seemingly risky/overly brazen/morally dubious intelligence operations are actually anywhere near as risky as they naively appear to be. (They might still be implausible for other reasons, such as difficulty, low cost/reward ratio or the existence of easier ways to achieve the same goals.)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
This may or may not be the case; I just wanted to amend the parent poster's depiction of the progressive view, not relitigate its correctness (as has already been done on this website too many times).


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
This is a correct statement, but also I think that by invoking "punching up"/"punching down" you are making the average right-wing reader cross out an entry on their bingo cards, shut down their thinking and dismiss your argument.


Instead, perhaps, a more visceral depiction of the progressive view of the situation: imagine, if you will, a school class in which one kid is viciously bullied. The teachers and classmates look away and do nothing about it, and even if someone reports it they just dismiss it as "kids will be kids" or "they are just playing". Maybe they half-heartedly break it up if some of it happens right before their eyes, or interferes with class. One day, the bullied kid, while being beaten up again, lands a lucky hook and gives one of the bullies a blue eye. Immediately, the bullies run to the teacher, and all the kids who were sitting around and doing nothing happily testify that the bullied kid indeed threw the punch. The bullied kid's parents are summoned, it is dragged before the principal, permanent mark on the record, the works. Any objections it or its parents raise are met with a firm "we understand the kid is struggling socially, but you have to understand that violence is never acceptable". The others started the fight? "That's not what we are talking about right now. Your kid gave Brad a blue eye and he had to get it checked out at the doctor." "That does not give you the right to use violence yourself. Be the bigger person and walk away." "You keep complaining about this. Don't you think it's hypocritical that [bullied kid] is also violent but you never have a problem with that? All parents think their own kid is innocent."


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Midterms Megathread
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It's also relevant that the bougie senator lady more likely than not never once had to adjust her own diet to adapt to economic circumstances. Compare to the ancient "learn to code" narrative, which was particularly loathsome because it was spread by journalists and professional twitterati much more than by working programmers.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The mistake, as usual, is to confuse "left" for "the powerful interests backing them". There is nothing obviously left-coded about Germany and others deciding to send male military-age Ukrainian refugees back going forward, but the ECHR will not interfere with that. Indeed, if it did, this would piss off people far from the usual progressive coalition.


The tragedy of right-wingers is that they like selective enforcement; the picture of a gravitas-laden authority producing triumphant wordslop that puts ineloquent, unwashed, treacherous rubes who thought the letter of the law would protect them in their place warms the authoritatian's heart. They like it so much that even when they have lost all power and gravitas and the same mechanism is only used against them 90% of the time, they can't get themselves to denounce it in the remaining 10% where they still agree.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The Econ 101 argument is that you can't have deflation, because even the possibility of it incentivises entities that have cash to sit on it and wait for it to become worth more rather than spending it, thereby tanking spending and investment. You could try to cheat with mechanisms like negative interest, but this will just incentivise people to look for more ways to stash their cash where your negative interest mechanism can't get at it.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Huh, I have to say you are not among the top posters I expected to go into a doomer meltdown after the election. What gives? Did you expect a significantly different outcome? Is it El Sayed specifically?


On the object level-




Even lightly chipping away at one of the sandbox’s walls requires the legislative energy of an entire term, and all the while they can accomplish nothing else, must contend with moderates in their own faction




The lede, which is that actual conservative restoration does not have a majority, is buried pretty deep here. Really, there's a very short summary of the situation you are describing: progressive policies are implemented unless a majority opposes them, while conservative policies are only implemented if a majority endorses them. The bias is entirely implemented using the slack given by the indifferent, so the result is not per se undemocratic.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Midterms Megathread
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
In what direction do you expect such a policy to shift the election outcome, and why?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Midterms Megathread
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The difference is that Gerald Ford was fairly milquetoast presidential material, while JD Vance does not fit the mold at all in appearance and demeanor, and appears to be instinctively loathed by normies to the point that I seriously think Trump may have picked him as a threat to discourage his own removal.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Midterms Megathread
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
We have maybe about 5 people with unconditional pro-Trump values and about 3 for Israel (in the sense that "convince people of the righteousness of (Trump/Israel)" is a significant part of their motivation to post at all). They always show up for these topics, and the active user base is small enough that this is enough to make their views seem dominant.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Midterms Megathread
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'd bet that at least one of the next three distinct US presidents (including the tail of the Trump administration, mostly to cover the nontrivial possibility that it will collapse in favour of something more pro-Western in the next two years after all) will order physical military action on Iranian territory at pretty steep odds.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Midterms Megathread
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It's obviously your in-group biases showing, because a larger gap than white men's 55-43 red is right there in your numbers (women's 58-40 blue) but you presumably felt no concern that women would "continue to feel disenfranchised and start checking out of the increasingly masculinized society" when the red team was ahead.


If being outvoted on your group's preferences amounts to disenfranchisement any time it happens, then representative democracies disenfranchise most groups most of the time. If this actually led to "checking out" every time it happened for even one legislative period, most representative democracies would long have collapsed.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Midterms Megathread
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It's a favourite pastime for people who fancy themselves "high-information" to let some artificial macroeconomic metrics override common-sense observations. Another instance of this was when people were confidently predicting the swift end (in Western favour) of the Ukraine war based on GDP comparisons back in 2022.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I mean, isn't Evangelical support for Israel premised on something to the effect of "we need Israel to be strong and pick wars with everyone, so they get pushed to the brink of destruction, which will trigger a prophesied sequence of events leading to the Second Coming of Jesus"? It's hard to fault them for not reciprocating this kind of love; even if you can decouple from the creepiness of it, on a material level it is clear that their mid-term preferences do not actually entail any sort of peace and prosperity for Israel except insofar as it needs to be lifted up to fall down better. Can you blame the goose for being ungrateful when you are fattening it up for Christmas?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Midterms Megathread
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I don't get what's going on with Responsible Statecraft's




"Nothing to see here," the American Conservative's Curt Mills snarked, pointing to a graph showing voting preference averages literally flipping from Republicans to Democrats since the war was launched in February.




If I look at the tweet linked thence, it appears to show a graph where voting preference averages flipped in March 2025, and there is barely any detectable signal of anything in Feb 2026. Am I blind, or are these people all failing at reading graphs? (...perhaps they are so discombobulated that they only read the "Jan" on the left and the "Aug" on the right and assume the graph must run from Jan to Aug of this year?)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Midterms Megathread
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I don't know. Demoralisation of the other team (or some blind hope of achieving it) has been the supreme aspiration of American politicians for a while now, and nothing would demoralise right-wingers like exploiting the burned wastes left in Trump's wake to run Kamala again and win.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 26, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I thought it very likely, in that context, that @VIM's "Support for Israel" was shorthand for the things discussed in the video - military aid, political cover and so on. This is further bolstered by him later rewording the stance in question again as "unconditional support". Your wording ("against Israel existing") suggests that you took "65% are against support for Israel" to mean "65% want Israel to stop existing". In that light, I am not convinced that you "understood the claim correctly". It seems to me that you are still trying to resist attempts to disentangle those two.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'm not a US citizen (and Germany is not about to follow suit any time soon), but if I were I think I would be about 50% satisfied if this indeed went through (which I highly doubt). The other 50% would be about the US using its political muscle to help Israel against third parties (such as sanctioning ICC judges who prosecute Israeli officials, legally punishing boycott movements, or pressuring other countries against taking actions against it).


If this stopped, again under the hypothetical where I am a US citizen, this would not make me like what they are doing, but it would demote the salience of their business back to the level of dozens of other far-flung regions stuck in a perpetual cycle of bad people making each other's lives miserable.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


There must be an uncaused cause; this can be identified with God.






However, that's a long way from being a canonical Christian.




By including "canonical", you are papering over the distance in an egregious way - as if the way from that is not quite so long to being some sort of non-canonical, perhaps quite heretical, but still recognisable Christian.


In general, I noticed decades back that US Christians arguing with atheists often seemed to expend a great amount of effort to try and persuade the audience that some/any sort of supernatural force exists, but then took for entirely granted the leap from "something outside of physics" to "our version of Christianity is true". Your "uncaused cause" argument is that taken to an extreme: unlike, say, "intelligent design" or miracles, it does not even try to insinuate any sort of attributes of the supernatural thing that would give it a special connection to humans, but instead seems to be content with postulating the bone-barest of featureless mathematical artifacts. (I won't even go into how unpersuasive the argument itself is.)


This might have worked a little bit in a setting like rural parts US of 50 years ago, where Christianity was so dominant that people may not have had the meme pool to conceive of a supernatural "cause" that did not have the essential properties of the Christian god; but nowadays, when everyone is exposed to a dozen of world religions with their own creation myths and science fiction like Clarke's entropy-reverting VAC blending into science reality like AIs running convincing simulacra of humanity in fake environments, there is an infinitude of possible "uncaused causes" you would have to rule out that stand between you convincing a reader of a supernatural "uncaused cause" and you convincing them that the "uncaused cause" will punish them if they abort, fornicate or trans their kids.