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ArjinFerman

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joined 2022 September 05 16:31:45 UTC
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ArjinFerman


								
								
									
								
								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				
Tinfoil Gigachad

				
				
				

				

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					joined 2022 September 05 16:31:45 UTC
				


				
					

					
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				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 9, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					




they lack the intelligence and positive vision for the future necessary to attract "elite human capital".




Elites don’t demand either of those things




You're mixing up terminology here. The elites are people with actual power. "Elite human capital" are a bunch of influencers with status anxiety, a Joffrey Baratheon complex, and a hate boner for populism.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 9, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Moreover, there's an opposing force: depending on who's in charge of the government, it can violate federal law to not act, with a bunch of fun questions when those regulations change after the action or inaction happens




The problem with that idea is that by forcing the doctors to provide treatment, politicians will be taking ownership of the entire scandal. Which can be fine if the treatment is actually good for people, and the odd malcontent is just a result of occasional incompetence or weird allergies. If, on the other hand, it's bad, politicians will have tied their own rope.


The idea reminds me of some Reddit post I saw, where transgenders were gloating that their doctor got around some red state ban by using the ICD code for an endocrine disorder, instead of gender dysphoria. Good for them, I guess. I totally can't imagine how this could come back and bite the doctor in the ass.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 9, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Yes, they are being forced to. We know this because the only reason the law even came about is became they double backed on their own promises to release the files to begin with.




That's not exactly the own you think it is. It's hard act outraged about Trump only releasing them when he was forced to by his own promise, when the other party was in a position to release them for years, but didn't, and didn't even promise to.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 9, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Now I am curious. Denizens of the Motte: How many of you see children between the ages of 8-12 out and about without a parent in your day-to-day life?




Europe is kinda split on the issue. There are countries that are extremely paranoid about it and people will literally call the cops on you, and countries where it's perfectly normal, and roving gangs of schoolkids are a common sight to see. I lived in both kinds.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 9, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Every single question asked by a political opponent has this goal, and yet only this question produces a segfault crash. Also, the opponents are getting a lot of play out of the refusal to answer as well, so it's not a it's not even working to avoid the issue. And also, if this was the case, there should be someone, somewhere who came up with a good answer, and I haven't seen one yet, even in contexts where soundbites aren't a threat (like, say, this forum).


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 9, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Because the anti-transgender faction, in response to the distinction as initially drawn by the pro-trans faction, was to take social matters of 'gender' and re-cast them as matters of 'sex', thus attempting to undo the exact goal of the pro-trans side, namely that biological sex ought not determine anything in social situations.




They haven't re-cast them as sex, they just disagreed with the goal of the pro-trans faction. Seeing that they can't make a persuasive argument directly, the pro-trans side started playing language games, hoping they can hide the ball long enough to push their goals through.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 9, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Ok, what about that memo and the settlements? If he's right, it's a bit more than just Giuffre?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 9, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
You have to speak a little more clearly. Is the question itself supposed to be a trap? How? The only way I see it as one is that any answer exposes some contradiction in the ideology, at which point you're admitting the person setting the trap is correct.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 9, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


And we don't give the general public access to trucks, partly for exactly that reason. Even in the hoplophobic UK, it is harder to get a cat D endorsement on your driving licence (needed to drive a vehicle over 7.5T) than a rifle permit.




Isn't it weird then that I met a lot more truck drivers than gun owners?




Lahouaiej-Bouhlel had taken a job as a trucker about a year before the incident - it isn't obvious if this was a long-term evil scheme like Atta's flying lessons, or if it was a career decision that created an opportunity down the line.




The point is that if someone wanted to use a truck in an evil scheme, it's trivial to do so. Money is some concern but there are literal subsidies for people who want to get a truck license, and the criteria to get one aren't particularly high. It's the quintessential working class job.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 9, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


but the non-murderous trans people you're interested in being nice to understandably perceive misgendering any trans person as an insult to them as a group.




This assumes the Queer Theory worldview to be axiomatically correct, where it's not a disorder, but a valid identity that each individual can put on and off at will, and a refusal to acknowledge could be construed as an attack on the validity of the entire identity.


I reject that view. Like I said, the view I would be endorsing is trans-medicalism. Asking that I pretend a man is a woman is already a tall order, but like I said, if that makes their life somehow more bearable, it's something I can indulge, if the person is otherwise reasonable.


Asking that I pretend that all men, that declare themselves to be women, are women, no matter how they conduct themselves, is deranged behavior, and a request they have no right to make.




Similarly, you may not care about a black murderer's feelings, but you shouldn't call him the N-word in a newspaper article, because it would be hurtful to your non-murderous black readers.




"Nigger" is an unambiguous insult. It's seen this way by people who hear it and are insulted by it, as well as by people who say it. Even when black people use it affectionately between themselves, the core meaning is still an insult, they are just adding sarcasm on top of it, to invert the meaning into something positive.


"Man" is a neutral factual term. It's not being used to insult trans people when relating a story about a trans murderer. It's being used the exact same way  it would be, if the murderer was a non-trans male.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 9, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Somehow I doubt there was a "last time" anyone implied that




Well, I'll happily admit I'm prone to reading into things when they rub me the wrong way. Still, that's the impression I was left with.




but can we at least agree that we should first try sifting the ore from the slag before declaring we've struck gold?




Yes, absolutely. I didn't mean to attack reasonable skepticism.




We’d expect repeated third party victim accounts converging on the same powerful clients.




Agreed.




We’d expect at least one cooperating witness able to describe the system mechanics in detail.




Agreed.




We’d expect financial structures that clearly map to services rendered beyond “social hosting.” We’d expect leverage events, like documented attempts at coercion, extortion demands, hush money escalations that can be tied to specific encounters.




I don't know about that.


You're assuming this is transactional, rather than a honeypot meant to accumulate influence and/or enable intelligence gathering. There wouldn't be any hush money demands, if the demand is for getting your people to "penetrate ze cabinets" as it were. I don't know how you expect to tie them to specific encounters either, if they take place face to face.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 9, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


it would imply a very weird outlook where ability to change one's social gender is some sort of… revocable privilege?




What's weird about that? I'm skeptical of the science behind Trans, but if it convinced me my view would be Trans-Med: there are people with a disorder called "gender dysphoria" and going along with their preferences alleviates their suffering a bit. As long as someone is a functional member of society and in good standing, I can go along with that. It's not that they're allowed to change their pronouns, it's that they're being indulged, the same way I'd indulge an autistic weirdo like Richard Stallman, or Linus Torvalds. Why should I indulge a murderer, though?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 9, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The Nice truck attack had a bigger body count than most mass shootings.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 9, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The correct analogy would be if people were stumped about the "what is a sandwich" question. Once you have a definition for a category, you can have a debate about whether a specific instance belongs to one category or another. If it the category really is fuzzy, you'll have actual arguments for why that is, and why a specific instance falls somewhere in the middle, making it difficult to classify.


We've head these sorts of conversations countless times: what is a race, or a species? Does an animal belong to one or the other? What is a planet? Is Pluto one?


What you don't normally get is the Blue Screen of Death when you ask someone to define their terms.




I am once again asking you to Read the Sequences.




I'm yet to hear a good argument for doing so.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 9, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Epstein appears to have been a sexual predator who, in at least one period of his life, did engage in conduct meeting trafficking definitions involving minors (to himself).




Well,we're getting somewhere. Last we had this conversation here, I almost had the impression he's just a poor boy that dindu nothing.




But there's nothing to substantiate a baroque, centrally managed blackmail syndicate spanning half the planet. Wealthy and powerful people likely did participate in morally compromising environments,




The problem with that argument is that barring Epstein et all acting like complete idiots, and exchanging emails like "Oi, can you send little Suzy over to Steve's place, he's really dtf some 12-year-olds" without even a figleaf of plausible deniability, there's no reason to expect substantiation. Or am I missing something, and there is some form of evidence you'd reasonably expect to appear in this scenario, that we are just not seeing?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 9, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I was surprised and apparently what this really means is 'they used chamber pots' not 'people were relieving themselves in the halls openly'.




Not being able to argue for the status, the powers that be set out to slander our past. Almost every widely held negative belief that I heard about it, turned out to be inaccurate in the way you described.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 9, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


It feels like this chapter of the culture war is largely closed, albeit without a total victory on either side.




The medical scandal part of it is yet to play out fully. Like I mentioned in another post, the first detransitioner just won a lawsuit, the FTC is going after WPATH, AAP, and the Endocrine Society. In the UK, they commissioned a massive clinical trial of puberty blockers to get around a ban that was imposed in the wake of the Cass Review. If it goes well for them, we might end up with some sort of "alright, let's call it a draw" resolution, if not it might be the nail in the coffin.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 9, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Peter Molyneux




Did the Fable guy had some venture into the culture war I'm not aware of, or are you guys talking about Stefan?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 9, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


but I would like to see how far we could go with a moonshot to make it not so.




From Minnesota to Somalia, and back again. The problem isn't resources, a daycare is not a complicated service to provide, the problem is the kind of people who'd want to be in charge of the program, how much they'd wan't to skim off the top, and what they'd want to do with other people's children.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Tinker Tuesday for February 10, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Alright, the little buggers are moving!


Next step is getting bullets to do something to them. Collision detection and setting some internal state flag should be easy enough, but I want to do some post-death processing which might get tricky. As this is all done on the GPU, and GPU's don't like cores branching off in their logic I was trying to figure out a neat way to sort all the dead entities, so they can be handled in bulk. There currently is a system in place that divides the space into a grid, and sorts the critters by the cell they're occupying. The current plan is to use that by adding an virtual grid space, that corresponds to the alive/dead state rather than current coordinates, so the already existing sorting mechanism can group them together and they can be processed in bulk. Let's see if it pans out.


How have you been doing @Southkraut?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Sure, here's one.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Woke leftists usually get away with quite a bit more than a median poster here. Even you get the kid glove treatment, but don't see it.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 9, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


No but economics is and is a far better tool than your gut when dealing with large markets and the mass decisions of human behavior.




I don't have a particularly high opinion on economics either. It managed to distill a few laws of "never go full-retard" but not much beyond that. I'm also not sure how you reconcile economics fan-boyism with your criticism of technocracy.




What else do you call someone who attempts to solve human problems like its an experiment to be managed or its factorio/paradox/rimworld esque. I think this impulse is exactly the technocratic one.




I don't want to do that though. Factorio / Rimworld / Paradox are deterministic systems that autists can optimize with statistics and excel sheets. I just want to bonk people on the head.




Obviously not, but plenty on the right object to being forced into compliance as though they were playthings of the technocratic mind.




Well, I'm also fine with admitting I'm not exactly like the median rightwinger. I think a lot of the people complaining about being "forced into compliance" are naive and/or haven't thought their position through very much. Every society forces people into compliance one way or the other, and most of the debates are actually about  what should we be forcing people to comply with, and in what manner. We're also expanding a lot of effort into pretending this isn't what the debate is about, but the only people I ever met who don't want to force compliance are literal ancaps, so unless you're one of them, you have no ground for criticism here.


Technocracy is a separate issue where you assume there's some sort of domain of expertise that will grant you legitimacy and enable you to make optimal decisions. I think that's folly, and it's prone to spawning a lot of pathologies in society.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


No, personal criticism of the person you're debating with almost never goes well. It breeds defensiveness, vitriol, and one-upsmanship.






OK, they're free to do that, but I do not think this is within the realm of "reasonable people could disagree". I'd say most people would think these types of statements cross a line. At the very least they don't add productively to the conversation, and it would be better without them.




You're entitled to your opinion, but I disagree with you. I think most people think it's fine, including you. Otherwise you wouldn't be doing the "chopping a piece out of a sentence to imply he said something quite different than what he did" bit again.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 9, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


But apparently less effective.




Not necessarily. Going full Big Brother could trigger a rebellion, causing the effectiveness to go to zero.




I feel like a percussive maintenance approach to fixing a defect-defect is similar to a pray and spray approach to shooting




All of politics is. Contrary to it's pretense, sociology is not a science, so there's a lot of going with your gut when you're governing.




I always find it funny, ironic, and depressing how people on the right are not opposed to technocratic solutions, they just don't want to be a on the receiving end of them. Everyone wants to wear the boot.




Where's the humor / irony / gloom? Not everyone on the right is a libertarian. In fact, it's only a small minority that is. Though I object to being called a technocrat.