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MadMonzer

Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite

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joined 2022 September 06 23:45:01 UTC 

				
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MadMonzer


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite

				
				
				

				

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					joined 2022 September 06 23:45:01 UTC
				


				
					

					
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				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 4, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I don't think the government with the silly mustache guy and the Hindu good luck symbol cared if they accidentally rounded up a small number of non-Eskimos as collateral damage - particularly because they were mostly rounding up and deporting citizens of defeated enemy countries. A single citizen deported by mistake is enough to sink a mass-deportation programme in a Western democracy (and probably should be).


This happened in the UK with the Windrush Scandal. The problem is particularly bad in the UK because the mess created by changing citizenship laws as the British Empire as dismantled - the scandal concerned people who immigrated from the Caribbean before their birth countries became independent (and were therefore born and remained British and never crossed a border) or between independence and 1973 (in which case they lost British citizenship when their home countries became independent, but were not subject to British immigration control and therefore would have arrived without paperwork). But I'm sure the INS has had paperwork screwups similar to the UK decision to destroy the old disembarkation records in 2010 which left us unable to work out which long-resident undocumented Caribbean immigrants were citizens, which ones were legal permanent residents, and which ones were deportable.


Historically, the US has not tried to maintain a central register of everyone in the country legally such that it would be easy to only deport the right people - and the people who favour mass deportations generally think that keeping such a register would be tyrannical overreach.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 23, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It doesn't help that Musk has actually got stupider as he got more famous. Everyone who worked with him at early-stage Tesla or SpaceX said he was scary because he understood the technical aspects of your job better than you did. But since he was normie-famous he has mostly been signal-boosting right-coded midwit conventional wisdom.


You can tell this by looking at what experts in his fields think of him. The car and rocket people all had the initial reaction of "This is a longshot, but it could work, and I want it to work." People who know anything about civil engineering's reaction to Hyperloop and The Boring Company was "Musk doesn't even understand why the last N people who tried this failed, so he is going to repeat those mistakes." And people who know about AI tend to think that Tesla is well behind Waymo and Cruze in autonomous driving.


My guess is that the underlying cause is some combination of drug abuse, long-term effects of lack of sleep, and no longer feeling the need to do his homework before running his mouth.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 24, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
And you need to put at least three people's heads on the block to make this scheme work - your own, someone to sign receipts on behalf of the charity (you only get to deduct the appraised value if the charity uses the donated object as part of its charitable activities, so someone needs to confirm this), and the appraiser.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 22, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


It’s not the same people protesting every time.




I'm not directly familiar with US protest culture, but in the UK it so is. Sometimes they forget to change the protest signs and people march against student funding cuts behind a "Free Palestine" banner. We have a single-digit number of activist groups experienced in organising this kind of noisy, disruptive protest, and until the SWP collapsed due to sex scandals most of them were SWP front organisations.


Even if you look at people rather than orgs, we are talking about a subculture (strictly two subcultures because the socialist-anarchist split hasn't gone anywhere) involving a few thousand people split between a small number of big cities (mostly London and Bristol in the UK) which is cohesive to have its own values. The tribal values of the subculture that is socialist protest includes a hierarchy of issues, and Palestine is number 2 on the list after opposing US foreign policy.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 18, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


“God created men, Richard Stallman made them equal” —new motto of the Free Software Foundation, probably




And Eric Raymond merges the Coltian and Stallmanian concepts of equality. Which is more dangerous to the irresponsible user is left as an exercise to the reader.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 11, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Besides, Saruman wasn't planning for "what happens after Sauron is defeated", his entire rationale for throwing in with Sauron was that he was convinced he was going to come out the winner, and Saruman wanted to be on the winning side. He had lost all his wisdom, and wasn't capable of foreseeing that the Hobbits would survive and come out the victors and he would therefore need to be three moves ahead in destroying their homeland. He didn't see this because he didn't want to see this, he wanted the position as trusted viceroy after the victory of Sauron.




This isn't my reading. By the time the Fellowship reach Rohan, Saruman has already attempted to double-cross Sauron (by attacking the Fellowship at Rauros with the intention of stealing the Ring and taking it to Isengard). See this Brett Devereaux post for why Saruman's plan was very unlikely to work. My understanding is that the Unfinished Tales confirm this reading, and that Saruman had been actively concealing the likely location of the Ring (which he had guessed based on Gandalf's excessive interest in the Shire) from Sauron several years before the events of LOTR - with the implication that the offer made to Gandalf before imprisoning him (to join in a Saruman-led scheme to use the Ring to defeat Sauron and seize power for themselves) was sincere.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Kevin Dolan - 2023 Natal Conference: "In our lifetime, every government, every culture, every belief system, and every family on Earth will pass through a bottleneck -- a bottleneck tighter than the Black Death, predicated on one question: will your children have children of their own?"
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The theory that feminism and fertility are strongly inversely correlated (at least within the relevant range as of the mid-20th century - as of the early 21st we are on the flat part of the feminism-fertility curve), and that the baby boom was caused by feminist gains being rolled back in the 1950's, is the kind of theory that is frighteningly plausible but can't be discussed in most spaces because neither side of the culture war likes the implications.


The Jim-tier version of this take is worth reading. I think he is serious. I am too - I think that the sexism was a load-bearing part of the 1950's social model (in a way that the racism wasn't), that 2nd wave feminism destroyed the good bits of the model as well as the bad bits, and that this is a big part of the answer to "WTF happened in 1971"


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 15, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


no, this couldn't be more wrong; Trump wins because he motivates non and low likely voters to show up when they otherwise wouldn't




This presupposes that Trump wins. He lost the popular vote to Dolores Umbridge in 2016 and lost the popular and electoral votes to an empty suit in 2020.


Trump appeals differently to swing voters compared to the Goldman-Aramco Republicans, but it isn't obvious that he appeals more to them. What is clear is that the Republican base prefer Trump to the Goldman-Aramco Republicans that run against him in primaries.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 11, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


    

  1. the second amendment and 2) an active movement of conservatives who continually fight for their gun rights.
    2. 





Wrong order. When there wasn't a large active movement of citizens fighting for gun rights, the 2nd amendment was treated like an inkblot.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 20, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Biden has a disqualifying senior moment, Dems are unable to replace him with a non-senile candidate, Trump landslide with coattails picking up multiple senate seats seems to me to be within the bounds of plausibility. But even with a landslide, I don't see how the Rs get to 60, which is de facto what you need for a large majority.


The reverse scenario where Trump has a disqualifying senior moment and Biden wins in a landslide probably still isn't enough for the Dems to hold the senate given how bad the map is for them.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 30, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Lee was regarded as a true Southern gentleman




And Rommel was regarded as a true German gentleman. But if a statue of Rommel stood in a place of honour in central Stuttgart as part of the pantheon of military heroes of Baden-Wurttemberg, and it was melted down at the request of the local synagogue, we wouldn't be complaining about "teabagging the outgroup". In fact, part of the "Reconstruction" process in post-WW2 Germany was the removal of Nazi monuments.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 2, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It's more that the OG Bill of Rights was only enforceable against the Federal government, not the States.


It is more likely than not that the Reconstruction Congress intended the privileges and immunities clause of the 14th amendment to make the Bill of Rights enforceable against the States ("No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States") but the corrupt pro-South Supreme Court ruled otherwise in the Slaughterhouse Cases. Rather than doing the sensible thing and just overruling Slaughterhouse alongside Plessey as bad Jim Crow law, the Civil Rights era SCOTUS used substantive due process to enforce these rights - as late as 2010 SCOTUS rejected the argument that the 2nd amendment was directly enforceable against the states under the privileges and immunities clause. So there is a whole line of silly doctrine that takes the 14th seriously while claiming not to.


In my view, there is a good originalist argument against incorporating the 2nd amendment against the States. The corresponding argument against incorporating the Establishment clause of the 1st amendment has been endorsed by Clarence Thomas in some of his dissents and concurrences. Based on the text, the original purpose of the 2nd amendment was to protect the State militias against Federal interference. (This is perfectly compatible with the idea that the 2nd amendment created an individual right enforceable against the Federal government - State militias were not required to and often did not keep membership rolls at the time, so many militia members were "just private gun owners" on paper). Incorporating the amendment against the States takes away the States' right to regulate their own militias, so it changes the nature of the right protected, whereas incorporating a right like trial by jury only changes the scope of the remedy available. Similarly, the Establishment clause was intended to protect State-level established religions (like Massachusetts puritanism) from Federal interference, not ban them.


Obviously nobody is going to make that argument, because it gores both sides' oxen.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 7, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Protestant Irishmen and Catholic Irishmen get along just fine in the Republic, and have done ever since independence. They got along just fine in 1798, when the United Irishmen were cross-confessional.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 12, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


racially insensitive (including towards other Eastern Europeans, e.g. gypsies and Albanians)




That's nothing. In Europe, everyone hates gypsies (and pikeys, if they are British or Irish and educated enough to know the difference). Our so-called-liberal-elite just know to shut up about it in public. /r/historymemes is down, but there are some epic memes on this point.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 15, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The argument being made here doesn't require progressive Jews to take their own religion seriously. It requires progressive Jews to think that pro-Israel evangelical Christians take their religion seriously.


To the extent that they take their own religion seriously, pro-Israel evangelical Christians are aligned with the Third Temple fringe of the Israeli religious right. Secular jews (particularly in Israel, but also in the US) hate the Israeli religious right with the same intensity and for the same reasons that secular Yankees hate the SBC.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Transnational Thursday for January 11, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think the meaning of a genuine tough on crime policy is very different in Ecuador or El Salvador where the crime problem is organised crime where sane people have chosen to persue criminal careers because they are more attractive than legal careers, versus a place like the US where most of the crime we are worried about is committed by drunks, druggies and mentally ill people.


If the gangs are credibly threatening the State's monopoly on violence (and busting a gang leader out of jail counts), then fighting them is more like war than policing.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 11, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Speaking as an atheist in a country where Christianity is the official state religion, I do not think that actually-existing American Christians would be willing to make the compromises that Anglicanism made in order to survive as a state religion in England, let alone the greater compromises needed in a country which is deeply committed to the idea that all Christian denominations are equally valid. Nor do I think that "mere Christianity" would work - the differences between Christian traditions matter. I wouldn't want to deal with the fallout when someone prays the Hail Mary over the tannoy before a Notre Dame vs BYU game.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 11, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The Bolsheviks were not Lizardman-tier popular. They got 23% of the vote in the Constituent Assembly elections which were the closest approximation to a free election in post-Tsarist Russia (they happened after the October revolution but before the Bolsheviks consolidated power outside Petrograd) including majorities among the voters they were targetting (the urban working class in Petrograd and Moscow, and the enlisted men in the armed forces), and had already demonstrated enough support in the military to defeat the Kornilov coup. It may not have mattered what Vasya Pupkin thought, but given how things played out it sure-as-hell mattered what Private Ivan Ivanovich thought.


e/acc and the Tech Right do not have the level of elite or popular support they need to take over through anything that looks like politics - at the point Hanania wrote the linked essay the people he was lauding as the future of right-wing politics were backing deSantis. In so far as Balaji Srinivasan had a political project it was based on crypto-enabled exit, and it has already failed - it is now very obvious that the world is a sufficiently dangerous place that you want to be under the protection of a US or Chinese client regime if you own anything worth stealing - particularly if you own anything the Feds or Chicoms would want to steal themselves. The Dominic Cummings project (given the people involved, probably supported in the background by Peter Thiel and Robert Mercer) to replace Trump with someone the Tech Right see as competent and biddable ended up not happening, and if it had happened it would need "orbital mind control lasers complete" persuasion tech in order to beat Trump in a Republican primary.


The only way an e/acc is becoming a technoking is if they build a superintelligent AI and use it to pwn their opponents. And then our technoking will be the man (or possibly transwoman, but definitely someone with a Y chromosome and penis) who is de facto goal-donor to the AI (who is probably a first-tier tech lead who can ignore the de jure top management of his organisation until the AI is turned on, and pwn them afterwards). The only gold-owners who are sufficiently close to top technical AI teams to be de facto goal-donors are Sam Altman and Demis Hassabis. If the AI-enabled technoking isn't one of those two then it is some wunderkind we haven't met yet.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 10, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


The Omicron variant of covid was intentionally developed (by serial passaging through lab mice) as a much more contagious, much less deadly variant that could quickly provide cross immunity against the more deadly variants.




I find "Omicron was a lab leak" to be >10%. But given that it emerged in South Africa, the idea that it was developed intentionally by people who knew what they were doing gives the South Africans credit for more competence than they possess.




Unelected leaders of some US agencies sometimes lie under oath to Congess.




I don't consider bears shitting in the woods to be a conspiracy theory.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 4, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
A quick check of the right wing alt-media site you link to shows that even they are not claiming that there were 150,000 test ballots improperly included in the count. 150,000 was the total number of postal votes in Fulton County - we can reasonably assume that most of these were legitimate, particularly given that the overall percentage of postal votes in Fulton was close to the statewide average. Nor does the article say that the ballots were lost - it says that Fulton County explicitly says they are not lost, but that one specific right-wing citizen-journalist doesn't believe them.


The actual lawsuit filed by Favorito, a conservative activist and 9-11 conspiracy theorist (the lawsuit filed by the Trump campaign didn't run on this point) is based on an affidavit by Susan Voyles, who saw one batch of 107 "pristine" postal ballots in a box of 8 batches. If you assume that Voyles only looked at one box of ballots to find this batch and therefore that roughly 1/8 of the postal ballots were dodgy, then you get the "possibly 10-20,000 fraudulent votes" alleged by Favorito. And the specific box of votes identified by Voyles was reviewed, and there were no irregularities. So the premise of the Favorito lawsuit is that Voyles misremembered the box number, and that a bunch of randos should be able to go through 150,000 votes to find the needle in the haystack. FWIW, the reason why it has come up again is that the standing issue has finally been adjudicated in favour of Favorito after two trips up and down the appeals hierarchy.


But the important point here is how easy it is to create a Gish Gallop of hinkiness. We have one poll worker claiming (under oath, admittedly) to have seen 107 votes that looked a bit wrong (an argument so frivolous that Trump's lawyers wouldn't touch it), being blown up to 150,000 fraudulently counted test ballots alleged on this forum. And apart from Voyles, who (being under oath) was careful not to allege any specific irregularity, all the amplification was done by randos. There are hundreds of more or less frivolous complaints about the election being exaggerated in thousands of places, and because they get vaguer as well as bigger online, it can take hours to find out what the allegation even is, let alone to rebut it.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 4, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


This isn't actually true anymore, and hasn't been for a while. The NSA's surveillance and profiling system most likely has a flag for whether or not someone's an illegal immigrant, and if it doesn't it would be able to add one in seconds.




Winston Smith was born in 1970 in a poor rural county which never digitised its birth records. He has never had a passport. The SSA has long-since lost any copies they kept of the documents he submitted when he first applied for an SSN in 1986.


Yossarian was brought to the US by his parents as a teenager in 1983. His shitlib high school guidance councillor helped him acquire an SSN in 1986 using the US birth certificate of a baby who died shortly after being born in 1970. (Back then birth and death certificates were not positively matched, so you could use a dead person's birth certificate). His parents' visas have long since expired, and they were out of status when they died in the 1990s.


How does the NSA know which one is a US citizen and which one is an illegal?


The problem with a mass roundup-and-deport is with corner cases like these, not people who entered the country on a 4-year visa 5 years ago.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 27, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I have an interest in my neighborhood being a place I like to live, my city being a place I like to live, and my country a place I like to live. I absolutely have a right to express my preferences in these matters via the state. Keeping me expressing them via elections instead of simply forcing things to look the way I want them to is very literally the foundational role of government.




This viewpoint would be significantly less obnoxious if fewer of the people expressing it also talked about freedom, self-reliance, the value of hard work and other libertarian-adjacent ideas. "You can't have my house, you should get your own, and if you try to build one I will send men with guns to demolish it" is still antisocial, but "You can't have my house, it's my property because I worked hard for it, go get your own just like I had to, and if you try to build one I will act on my God-given freedom to send men with guns to demolish it" is despicable.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 27, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


A couple of generations ago, the median American sang frequently for fun or at least every Sunday in church. I’m guessing the anthem, sung by a crowd, didn’t used to be the big horrible embarrassed mumble it is today.




Most songs designed for mass singing have all the notes in the same octave. Looking at national anthems, God Save the King and Deutschland uber alles are all on one octave, La Marseillaise goes one note beyond the octave, and The Star-Spangled Banner goes four notes beyond a single octave. In addition, the top note of the tune is on "free", and "ee" is one of the harder vowels to sing at full volume.


To put the required vocal range into perspective, an operatic soloist is expected to to have a useful range of two octaves, and chorus singers can get by with slightly less.


A soloist singing The Star-Spangled Banner can choose the key to optimise for the middle of their vocal range (and the singer opening a sporting event will do just that - that is part of the reason the song is usually sung unaccompanied). Someone singing it in a choir can't - in order to be in tune they either have to sing at the same pitch as everyone else, or exactly one octave different.


This was never a song that was easy to sing.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 20, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
When I was active in student politics in the early noughties (As a Liberal Democrat, I was part of the "minority right-wing faction" within the students' union, according to the student newspaper) the SWSS (student group of the SWP) was by far the largest maggot extremist group on campus. They were also the most organised group on demos - as well as being the ones handing out the "Free Palestine" placards at demos against spending cuts. As far as I could see, every left group that actually did stuff was an SWP front organisation.


Although the SWP claimed to be Trotskyite, the main argument against them made by other maggot extremist groups in rooms where it was assumed that everyone was a leftie was that they were closet Stalinists. The main argument made against them by everyone else on the left was that they were entryists who took over any attempt to do organised left-of-Blair politics and turned it into something that only appealed to the usual suspects.


It was the rape allegations that did them in - all the most competent people left.


Apart from Life of Brian, the best material on the culture of sectarian maggot extremist groups in the UK is the work of John Sullivan, who was a Trot with a sense of humour. The details of individual groups are out of date (As Soon as This Pub Closes is a 1986 update of an earlier pamphlet), but the culture has not changed.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 23, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Even if people did trust the system, I don't think it would work. The Thatcher-era UK had a health service that enjoyed near-universal public confidence, police who enjoyed universal confidence among the subset of the public who were likely to be legal gun owners, and a gun culture that supported strong gun control. Even so, we couldn't keep guns out of the hands of mentally ill people who weren't supposed to have them. After two spree killings in 10 years (both using handguns, which was the norm for spree killers pre-Columbine), both by people who had gun licenses but should not have done, we  banned private handgun ownership and  banned private ownership of firearms other than shotguns designed for sporting or agricultural use.


I do not think you can have a system where any given type of gun is generally available to law-abiding citizens but does not end up in the hands of crazies.