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MadMonzer

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MadMonzer


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				
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				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


First, torture including torture as part of military intelligence gathering as well as counterinsurgency was used for thousands of years probably in every war humans fought.




And here is the rub. The argument the anti-torture crowd are making is not "Torture is useless for all purposes." It is "Statements made under torture are unusually unreliable, and therefore interrogation under torture does not produce actionable intelligence." The premise has been a principle of English evidence law since time immemorial (the first explicit documentation that torture evidence is never admissible in English courts is as late as the 1460's, but Fortescue implies that the rule was old in his day), and the conclusion follows from it as night follows day.


The famous medieval civil and ecclesiastical torturers did not use torture to extract intelligence - they used it to extract confessions (usually true ones, as is the case with all corrupt policing, but frequently false ones) - because this worked in Roman-law inspired systems including Canon Law everywhere and Civil Law in most of Continental Europe.


In wartime, we don't have as much visibility because military law isn't a thing until modern bureaucratic states. We do know that medieval knights liked to "get medieval" on defeated peasants and townsfolk, but this doesn't look like torture for intelligence gathering - based on my knowledge it is a combination of sadistic revenge and torture as a terror-weapon to deter future rebellions. "Getting medieval" on knightly POWs was prohibited by the rules of Chivalry (which doesn't mean that it didn't happen, of course, but it does mean that it was not seen as a usual incident of warfare).


When military law does become a thing, the first written prohibition of torturing POWs appears to be included in the 1863 Lieber Code (issued by Abraham Lincoln to govern Union troops in the Civil War - again the Lieber code states that it is formalising a rule that has existed for a long time. The Lieber Code formed the basis of the 1907 Hague Convention which was the first international treaty prohibiting torture in wartime. The Hague Convention was agreed by military leaders who all agreed that aggressive war was legal and sometimes ethical, and from the records of the debates leading up to the Convention we know that they would not have banned torture if they thought it had military utility.


The reason for this is obvious. Telling someone in a position to inflict  pain on you truth they don't want to hear is a bad idea (just like speaking truth to power in any other context), and we all know this viscerally. The only way to make the torture stop is to work out what the torturer wants to hear, and tell them that. So the only truth you can extract under torture is the truth you already know. In theory you could develop a technique of interrogation under torture where you "calibrated" the victim's response by asking questions you did know the answer to and punishing incorrect answers before switching to the information you actually wanted. In practice, nobody has done this, and the people who have the expertise required to do it are unanimous that you would be better off offering a hot meal and a cigarette in exchange for sincere co-operation.


The most famous example of systematic use of torture for intelligence gathering in a counterinsurgency was the French in Algeria. They lost that one. The most recent example was the waterboarding of KSM and a small number of other high-value Al-Quaeda captives at CIA black sites. Eventually KSM realised that what he needed to say to stop the torture was that Saddam Hussein was helping him. Obviously, that was believed stat by the Bush administration. They lost that one too.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


You may be underestimating just how much people enjoy cruelty.




I can absolutely imagine torturing certain people just for fun. The list of names is long, and not suitable for discussion on this forum.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


But energy policies - the bulwark of prosperity, are absolute shambles. Shale gas is not exploited at all. Nuclear is barely supported.




This isn't a statement that things don't work in the EU. It is a not-yet-fulfilled prediction that they will cease to work in the future - to be precise a prediction that they will cease to work in the future in wartime, due to enemy action. As of October 2022, heat and electricity are still available at the push of a button in the EU, and are marginally more reliable than in the US.


Seriously, the key marker of a first world country is that a lot of things essential to civilised life just work in much that same way that MacOS just worked at a time when Windoze didn't. The EU absolutely passes this test - that is what Borrell is talking about. As you point out, basic public safety just works in Europe to a greater extent than the US (or at least is perceived to by both Americans and Europeans - I am aware that US crime is lower than most people think it is). So does access to healthcare. So does urban transport. On the flip side, the only thing I can think of that just works in America but not Europe is clothes driers (and I lived and worked in America for three months - I have some experience). All these things also work in rich Asian countries, but Borrell is almost certainly forgetting they exist, as most European and American pundits do when engaging in civilisational blowhardery.


The US is an extremely successful society, but how that manifests is that the middle class have moar - bigger houses, bigger cars, larger portion sizes etc. It isn't that the US delivers a first world experience that other medium-high income countries can't.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Taiwan ... benefits from virtual monopoly on the most valuable industry near the top of the global supply dependency graph.




ASML (which is Dutch) is upstream of TSMC on the dependency graph, and has a stronger monopoly. Right now nobody else is even trying to compete in EUV, and ASML have about an 80% market share in new wet DUV installations (the previous generation of photolithography tech).


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'm not saying Bush's use of torture was stupid - it was a logical plan to achieve his goals. He wanted to start a (second) land war in Asia, and in order to sell it to the normally-isolationist Republican base he needed false intelligence that Iraq was helping Al-Quaeda. Torturing KSM was a good way of getting it. (The bad info on WMD had a different target audience, including people like me, and was in any case probably an honest mistake). Nobody is questioning that torture is useful when what you want is a false confession, or even a true one.


I am saying that the intelligence gained by torturing KSM was net-negative for the US, because the most consequential thing we got out of him was false.


I am also saying that John Fortescue writing in the 1460's, Abraham Lincoln issuing executive orders in 1863, and the negotiators of the 1907 Hague Conventions were not motivated by their attitude to the foreign policy of George W Bush.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
You provide a link to an example of an American PoW who was tortured into doing propaganda broadcasts for the North Vietnamese (John McCain was another). This is a minor variation on torturing someone to give a false confession. You do not provide examples of American PoWs tortured into giving up actionable intelligence, because there is no evidence that it happened. This is unsurprising - NATO doctrine on intelligence investigations is that a sufficiently large percentage of PoWs will give up the goods for a hot meal and a cigarette that you have to assume anything a PoW knows is compromised and plan accordingly, so we would not expect to see evidence either way.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


This idea that white people invented the concept of racism and racial supremacy and that they did so relatively recently is an idea that's absolutely ridiculous. I find it very difficult to believe that tribalism based on appearance is something that just became entrenched in the 18th century and that one race is responsible for - race is a fairly strong visual indicator of cultural similarity and in-group status, and would've been an even more useful heuristic in the past when international travel was more difficult and people couldn't so freely move from one place to another.




I don't know whether phenotype-based tribalism was a thing before 18th-century Western racism (I suspect it was in China, at least), but it wasn't the main thing. Our very word for a tribal membership test (shibboleth) is a reminder that the OT Jews (who were a tribe defined by common genetic descent) nevertheless used diction and not appearance as the practical sorting algorithm. There is an ongoing argument about how many "Aethiopians" (actual Sub-Saharan Black Africans, as opposed to "Africans" who were whitish North Africans) there were in the Roman Empire, but the number was a lot greater than zero, and they were seen as just as Roman as anyone else who ate garum and aspired to own and wear a toga.


In the Middle Ages in Europe, religion-based tribalism trumped phenotype-based tribalism. When the Crusaders established contact with Christian Ethiopia, they didn't think "Black and heretic - must be outgroup". They thought they had found the lost kingdom of Prester John and immediately sought an alliance.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Thanks. Someone who has been tortured to the point where




Buckley was close to a gibbering wretch. His words were often incoherent; he slobbered and drooled and, most unnerving of all, he would suddenly scream in terror, his eyes rolling helplessly and his body shaking.




is obviously limited in the value of the intel they can provide, but getting them to name names worked for Hezbollah. I genuinely don't know how Hezbollah avoided the problem of continuing to get useless names after the victim has run out of useful ones - this was a major problem for the US in Afghanistan, to the point where the CIA torturing Al Qaeda captives to name names appears to have ended up being a net negative.




In any case, in both cases whether actionable information was obtained, is probably classified.




Unusually, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence declassified a summary of their report into the CIA torture programme, coming to the conclusion that




The CIA's use of its enhanced interrogation techniques was not an effective means of acquiring intelligence or gaining cooperation from detainees.




and providing an unclassified overview of the detailed evidence present in the full, classified report. The CIA's internal report into the torture programme (the "Panetta Review") apparently comes to the same conclusion.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Framing oneself as the underdog is not equal to being the underdog or even believing oneself to be one. Downplaying one's strength advantage is the default posture of the strong (or those imagining themselves to be strong), rarely wholeheartedly believed.




I don't think this is generally true. The late 20th/early 21st century West has the heroic archetype of "plucky underdog who defeats superior force through extreme physical and moral courage, ingenuity, and luck" which causes Western overdogs to falsely claim to be plucky underdogs in order to make themselves feel heroic. It also has a set of egalitarian instincts (one of the other consequences of which is vulnerability to wokeness) which make underdogs more sympathetic, other things being equal, therefore creating another incentive to claim to be the underdog. Everywhere else, "the nail that stands up and is pounded down" is a strong anti-heroic archetype and third parties are most likely to choose the side which is more likely to win. So the incentive is to signal strength, and people did.


Incidentally, the fact that the most broadly popular media franchise in the early 21st century West is actually the MCU suggests that normies prefer heroes who don't falsely claim underdog status and Han Solo didn't actually succeed in changing the basic rules of Story.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


We gleefully egged this entire war on.




Given that the decision to have a war was entirely Russia's, this doesn't make sense. Nobody in the West was gleefully encouraging Russia to invade Ukraine - not even in a semi-ironic "Bring. It. On." type of a way.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I trust nothing said by US intelligence by default, sorry. I did not predict a quick toppling and I don't think anyone serious did, either. Ukraine isn't some goat-herding bunch of terrorists shaking AKs... and even the goat herders didn't go down quickly.




Russia predicted a quick toppling with sufficiently high probability that soldiers packed dress uniforms for the victory parade. Scott Alexander reported that the big US-facing prediction markets all briefly traded at >50% probability of Kyiv falling by April 2022.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


But petty property crime is almost entirely motivated by drug addiction.




This is a contingent fact. In the 1980's in the UK, there were career professional burglars who saw a short jail sentence each time you got caught as a cost of doing business. (My MIL was a legal secretary who typed up a lot of the rap sheets). After sentences for repeat burglars were increased, there stopped being career professional burglars.


Longer sentences deter crime if criminals expect to get caught eventually and choosing to crime anyway because the sentence is short. They don't deter crime if criminals think they will never get caught (like most rioters), or if criminals don't think at all (like car-prowling junkies).


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Let's not forget the Axis of Evil speech...




I remember bien-pensants comparing the Axis of Evil speech to Reagan's Evil Empire speech at the time, and thinking they were even stupider than Bush. The point about the Evil Empire speech was that the Soviet Union was both evil and an empire, but there was a legitimate argument about whether the leader of the free world shouting this from the rooftops was a good idea with nukes involved. The point about the Axis of Evil speech was that Iran, Iraq and North Korea were not an axis, and thinking they were should disqualify you from national security policymaking roles. But to treat both speeches primarily as examples of provocative American jingoism is to indicate that you don't care about the truth values of statements.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I suggest you keep in mind Evil Overlord List item #4 if you ever get the chance.




I lack the grit and work ethic needed to be an effective evil overlord, but thanks for the advice. My wife is currently working on an SF novel with an evil overlord inspired by me, but who is able to make up for the work ethic with an Elon Musk level IQ and mild psychic powers.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
You don't have to be morally deformed when you torture the first prisoner. You just need to believe that this time there really is the ticking bomb in the school, and that you are being morally serious and avoiding Just World fallacy and all the other things torture apologists have said on this very thread. So you hold your nose and turn the handle.


Then you hear the screams. The screams of the hated, defeated enemy. It feels good. An better still, he screamed a name. You got actionable intelligence - you did the right thing. (You don't know at that point that he gave the same name to the FBI in exchange for coffee and a hot meal three weeks ago). And you did this. You had to overcome your fear of the tofu-eating wokists of North London to do the right thing. Actually, you're kind of a hero. The sense of power is good for the ego too. Your testosterone levels go through the roof. The sex with your wife that night is special.


They bring the guy he named in. The second time is easier. You get another name. But perhaps he is holding back - he is supposed to be the higher-up after all. So you arrange another session. Nobody broke after only one round of torture in the old books, after all.


The third time is even easier. You tell him he needs to name names to make the torture stop. In between the cries, you get name after name.


They bring those people in. You start to realise that they don't talk as easily. They must be particularly hard cases - you have hard evidence that they are baddies, after all. The second guy said so under torture, and if he was lying you would have put him through another session, and he wouldn't want that. You don't consider the possibility that they aren't talking is that they weren't baddies and don't know anything. It would mean you are out of a lucrative job. So you dial up the pain.


Two days later you hear that one of the guys you left in the cold cell overnight died of hypothermia. Can't make an omlette without breaking eggs, after all. But you aren't morally deformed. You are just doing a difficult, unpleasant job that most people are too prissy to do. And you have also tortured an innocent man to death.


You have also booked a one-way ticket to the eight circle of Hell and your family is accursed down to the thirteenth generation.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Spanking (of children as punishment, not the other kind) is domestic violence.


The almost-perfect negative correlation between support for legal abortion and support for legal spanking of children strongly suggests that the "abortion is domestic violence" argument is not being made in good faith. To be fair to MedicalStory, I don't think he is suggesting making the argument in good faith - I think he is suggesting it as a way of arguing in the opponent's language in order to persuade across a cultural barrier.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Boris is intelligent. Unfortunately many British politicians studied PPE (Politics, Philosophy and Economics) at Oxford, which is notoriously an easy subject. (Why doesn't a PPEist get up in the morning? Becuase then they wouldn't have anything to do in the afternoon) Boris studied Greats, which is basically a broad-based course in Ancient Roman and Greek society based on reading the primary sources in the original languages. It is traditionally seen as the hardest course Oxford has to offer, although the mathematicians and physicists naturally disagree. His tutors said he could have got a First if he applied himself.


Boris's vices are laziness and incuriosity, not stupidity.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The trip to Barnard Castle made Dominic Cummings a national laughing stock, but that was survivable as long as he retained the support of Johnson. It was falling out with Carrie that did for Cummings in the end.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
To me, the proximate cause of the shitshow is that Boris has character flaws which made him a bad Prime Minister (and would make him unsuitable for any kind of executive leadership in any organisation) but which never became obvious to the Tory grassroots. Boris is lazy, intellectually incurious and lacks attention to detail. He lies constantly, and thinks rules don't apply to him (or his mates). He is willing to beclown himself to get an attractive woman into bed, or to get invited to the right high society parties. And according to Dominic Cummings he has difficulty saying "no" to people, which is utterly fatal in an executive. To make matters worse, he found himself entering Downing Street with a ruinously expensive divorce and a ruinously expensive trophy wife, so he needed a side hustle on top of his PM's salary.


All this was familiar to people who had worked with Boris, including Tory MPs. Much of the dishonesty and sexual immorality was public record. And it wasn't just Labourites saying this - immediately after David Cameron resigns following the 2016 referendum Michael Gove publicly refuses to back Johnson, saying that he is unsuitable to be PM (and torpedoing has campaign, getting us Theresa May). Max Hastings (probably the most distinguished right-wing journalist in the UK, and Boris's editor at the Telegraph) wrote multiple articles calling out his unsuitability (this Guardian article being the best non-paywalled example). After the fact, Dominic Cummings notoriously brings receipts re. how badly these flaws affected Johnson's administration in practice.


Given these handicaps, how does Boris get elected Tory leader (and therefore PM) in 2019? The vast majority of the Tory grassroots supports hard Brexit (i.e. the whole UK, including Northern Ireland, completely out of the EU Single Market and Customs Union), as do about 1/3 of the MPs, whereas Theresa May has negotiated a deal which leaves the UK in the EU Single Market for goods in order to avoid the need for a customs border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. Some of the hard Brexit MPs vote against the deal, scuppering it. At this point there is a series of catastrophic election defeats for the Conservative party - it isn't obvious whether Tory voters dislike May's deal and prefer a harder Brexit, or if they simply want any deal to get done so that Brexit is over, the UK is out of the EU, and we can get on with life. But the Tory activists are clear that their problem is that May's deal is "not real Brexit", which allows the hard Brexit faction of the MPs to win the internal party debate. Johnson is elected leader because he is by far the most charismatic hard Brexit supporter, and the Tory MPs and members think they need a charismatic leader to rebuild the Party.


At this point, a kind of epistemic closure sets in among the Tory grassroots. The pro-hard-Brexit MPs and their supporters in the media know that supporting Johnson is the only way to deliver hard Brexit, so they don't talk about his character flaws. The pro-hard-Brexit grassroots won't listen to anyone else, because they interpret attacks on Johnson's character as a Remoaner plot to scupper Brexit. And Johnson delivers by negotiating a different bad deal to May (Johnson's deal effectively leaves Northern Ireland in the EU), lying to the voters that it is a good deal, fighting and winning a general election on the basis of his deal, and then promptly trying to rat out of it. At the end of January 2020, Britain leaves the EU. Brexit is now effectively irreversible (to reenter the EU would require a formal application process taking several years, and unanimous support from the other EU member states), but hard Brexit supporters remain paranoid about Remoaner plots to reverse it, so they still are not willing to take the issue of Johnson's character seriously. There is also an "evaporative cooling" dynamic going on, where Conservative activists who are not hard Brexit supporters drift away from the party. Something similar happens with the MPs, because a lot of remained MPs are forced out of the Conservative party during the shenanigans in late 2019 (and then lose their seats in the election) and almost all the new intake are hard Brexit supporters because activists control candidate selection in UK political parties.


Sometimes people with these flaws and sufficient charisma can be effective leaders. One way of doing it is to appoint good people who don't need managing, and then not manage them. This worked well at the Spectator (talented journalists are almost impossible to manage anyway) and tolerably well as Mayor of London (everything Boris got personally involved in went to shit, but the Greater London Authority is deliberately set up to stop the Mayor getting involved in the operational details of policing or public transport, which are the main things the Mayor is responsible for). It  The other is to be a hands-off CEO who focusses on motivational speeches and appoint a trusted COO to actually run things. This worked as PM until Boris's sycophants (probably including his new wife) convinced him that he didn't need Dominic Cummings.


After Cummings is sacked in November 2020, Boris Johnson has to actually govern, and he does so poorly. In particular, we never learn what "levelling up" (the key promise to the new Conservative voters in the north of England) actually means, and there is no serious attempt to capture any benefits of Brexit. His supporters don't try to defend his record, they change the subject by saying he is uniquely able to connect with voters, and that he deserves the gratitude of the Conservative party for delivering Brexit.


Partygate breaks in December 2021, and Boris Johnson rapidly loses public support because he didn't obey his own lockdown rules. There are two disastrous by-election defeats to the Liberal Democrats. (Amersham & Chesham is an affluent commuter town outside London, North Shropshire is a rural seat). This is mostly because of Partygate, but there are also local issues, including the fact that the government has botched post-Brexit farming policy meaning that farmers (who are mostly Brexit-supporting Tories) feel betrayed. Around this time we also see football crowds chanting "Boris Johnson is a cunt" and Boris is booed by the (presumably Royalist and therefore Conservative-sympathetic) crowds outside the Queen's Platinum Jubilee service.


So we now have two problems both caused by Boris Johnson's character flaws: the scandals (of which Partygate is far from the only one, but it is the one which cuts through to ordinary voters) and the policy drift. Both are hurting the Tories with the electorate. Tory MPs can see all this because they have to work with Boris, and start moving against him. In June 2022 a formal confidence ballot is triggered, and 41% of Conservative MPs vote against Johnson - normally this would cause a party leader to resign because you need supermajority support to lead effectively, but Johnson carries on. Two weeks later there are another two by-election disasters (Tiverton & Honiton is another rural seat lost to the Lib Dems, Wakefield is one of the new "red wall" seats going back to Labour), and another scandal in which it becomes clear that Boris Johnson appointed a known groper as deputy Chief Whip.


At this point Boris Johnson is forced out of office by a series of co-ordinated ministerial resignations. The Tory grassroots still don't believe that the problem is character - they know Boris is unpopular, but they see the scandals as due to media bias, remoaner plots etc. and the real problem being the policy drift which is caused by Boris not being right-wing enough. If you think this, it obviously follows that any of the resigning ministers falls under suspicion of being some kind of remoaner plotter. So to be acceptable to the membership (who get the final say on the new leader, after MPs reduce the contenders to 2), a candidate must be sufficiently right-wing (which by this point mostly means promising tax cuts) and not implicated in the removal of Johnson. Rishi Sunak fails on both counts, so we get Liz Truss.


I don't need to repeat the other posts in this thread about how Truss fails, because it is all obvious and in public. The only additional point I want to make is that epistemic closure is a huge part of how Truss and Kwarteng screwed up - Truss was selected for being willing to treat accurate criticism of Boris Johnson's character as remoaning, and she selected her cabinet for willingness to go along with this. So it isn't surprising that she deliberately and publicly ignored all the possible sources of expert advice that might have told her the mini-budget was risky.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
"Whig" and "Tory" were both originally sneers as well. "Whiggamores" were obnoxious Scottish puritans. "Toruighes" were Irish Catholic bandits.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


People can use a high IQ to better convince themselves and others of wrong positions, rather than seek correct positions.




People can also use a high IQ to play slick verbal games which cover up for a lack of knowledge. The way Oxbridge teaches humanities subjects (you have to write a weekly essay, which does not affect your grade, but which you are expected to discuss for up to an hour with an academic specialising in the subject) is noted for training this skill. So does competitive debating (which Boris also did). Boris is one of the best people in the world at this particular form of bullshit.


You can also have a high IQ and pretend to be stupider than you are in order to appear relatable to midwit voters. Boris is good at this too.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The government was a lot less of an omnishambles before Dominic Cummings sabotaged it by fighting a successful referendum campaign based on lies and impossible promises, and then fighting a successful general election campaign on the basis that the failure to deliver these impossible promises was the result of a shadowy cabal of traitors.


Dominic Cummings is 100% to blame for putting Boris Johnson in power despite knowing that he was unsuited for it - Cummings is entirely open that he did know this, that he thought it was worth the risk in order to gain power for himself, and that he was making plans to remove Boris within days of putting him in power so he had an insurance policy in case he was sacked. Words have meanings and Cummings isn't a traitor, but I frequently struggle not to call him one.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Moore's law says that hardware advances exponentially - and a lot of progress in modern AI is about adding more computing power to relatively simple algorithms.


If I needed an AI to tell me how to fight Omega in 2032, I would take 10 more years of Moore's law used to add more nodes to GPT3 over 10 more years of AI research used to implement better algos on existing hardware.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The main way a risk in the risk-free interest rate hurts REITs is by causing a fall in the price-rent ratio, and therefore in property prices. So I don't think the distinction you are trying to make here matters.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
HS2 is a project to allow more people to commute to London, not to allow people to commute to London more easily - the business case is utterly dependent on the idea that the main line between London and Birmingham is at capacity, and that the marginal cost of building the new line to high speed standards is low. If rail use continues to grow in the way it was growing pre-pandemic, then the existing main lines to Leeds and Manchester will be at capacity by the time HS2 reaches them. If it doesn't then the northern bit of HS2 probably won't get built because speeding up trains that already run at 125 mph is not a good use of anyone's money.