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Renrijra Krin

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MaiqTheTrue


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				
Renrijra Krin

				
				
				

				

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				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 24, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I’d argue that this shows just how much Western “help” has been propping up an Ukraine too weak to exist.  And like most other instances of the west maintaining these life support situations (whether by supplying weapons, by forcing or shaming the stronger party into not winning the war, or by invading on behalf of these states) we create more conflict.  Israel/Palestine will continue to be fought to the last Jew or Arab.  They’ve been at it for 3/4 of a century more or less, and they’ll keep fighting for the next century unless one party is driven to capitulation by the other.  The complete destruction of Gaza is probably an unfortunate but necessary step in this as it demonstrates that under no circumstances can they actually get the state they want.  Ukraine should probably face a similar “you can’t get what you want” moment.  In both cases, the result is a lasting peace in which the ethnic groups in question still exist, and they can even live in their own region, they just have to accept that they aren’t actually strong enough to take control.   It’s certainly more stable than having major cities reduced to rubble once a decade in a bloody war they can’t hope to win.


That’s how I see these conflicts— intervention doesn’t mean peace, it just means reloading and digging in for the next round.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 24, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
This is every issue on the planet.  Abortion (it should be illegal and rare — unless a female family member needs one, then I need an appointment on Tuesday), war (defeat the enemy!  Wait, what do you mean my draft number was called?). It’s what ends up causing bad policies.  Everyone wants the final results, they want the six pack abs, but they aren’t willing to diet to get them.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 24, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Any sort of tension will grow.  I don’t think it’s going to just simmer in the background doing nothing.


First of all it erodes trust.  No matter what the difference in question is, people will notice and keep score.  They’ll notice when one of them does something to one of us.  They’ll notice when governments start pandering to them at the expense of us.  They’ll notice whether or not they are good citizens or not.  And as this continues, trust in each other (is it safe to leave this thing in the open, or to leave access to valuable goods, or to allow access to something). It erodes trust in institutions that will be shown to favor one group over another, to unfairly enforce laws, or to attempt to shift culture in favor of them you no longer expect those institutions to be fair, neutral, or beneficial to your own people.


Second, it’s inevitable that one group member will actually act out on the simmering tension.  He might be drunk, high, or unstable, but he will act out that tension.  It might even be an event, a perceived government misstep that feeds the narrative that they don’t respect us.  And with every such incident you ratchet up the tension as the competing narratives both get reinforced.  The more Allah Akhbar events happen in Christmas markets, the more the narrative that Muslims are not like the rest of us is reinforced.  But at the same time the backlash makes Muslims feel threatened.  BLM was the same for American blacks and whites.  Whites saw that blacks hated them, blacks saw that whites don’t care about them.  Ratchet.


Third, if the differences in culture are big enough, there’s an erosion of common culture.  Muslims and Christians don’t have the same ideas about a lot of things — what God is like, how you express faith, what the role of religion in the state is, what kinds of activities are allowed.  And in many cases, you can’t compromise.  There’s no compromise between “separation of church and state” and “Shariah or else.”  So you can’t heal those divisions.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 24, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It has the benefits of being a fairly isolated island.  It’s not easy to sneak into an island if the nearest major population center (outside of NZ) is thousands of miles away.  It’s the same reason that Covid was lower in Australia— it’s an island, and there was no reason to lock anyone down.


America has a very porous border with Mexico and another in Canada.  It’s thus much easier to sneak in and thus vetting becomes difficult.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 24, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I mean space launches are extremely expensive and thus probably not in the perview of any company without a billion dollars in capitalization.  Angola’s GDP doesn’t actually support that kind of activity.


Going to the broader point, how much waste, fraud, and vanity projects are the taxpayers to fund in an agency to get one semi-interesting project spun off to the private sector?  We had a shuttle program for 30 years.  We did fuck-all with it.  We studied zero gravity’s effects on some plants and animals, we took cool pictures of space.  But when it’s all said and done, what the public got was a shuttle program that didn’t even improve the space suits, let alone the shuttle or the launch rockets.  We bolted a shuttle that, other than heat shielding was basically a commercial airplane to an ICBM without a warhead.  For 30 years.  It took Musk maybe ten to create a system in which all parts were recycled for the next launch and capable of landing vertically.  He redesigned the 1960s era space suits to meet the needs of people who would spend more than a few hours in them, and had all of this safe enough that celebrities were willing to pay for a ride.  If we’d stuck with NASA and the shuttles, we’d still be going down the produce aisle to find new plants to test in zero gravity.  I’m sure rutabagas in zero gravity behave very much like every other root vegetable in zero gravity, so I don’t want to spend ten thousand dollars to launch them into space to find out.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 24, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I tend to agree, with the added observation that Ukraine is of limited strategic significance.  It has no vital resources (Taiwan at least has chip manufacturing), it doesn’t really grant NATO greater access to the Black Sea (Turkey is already in NATO).  The government has significant corruption.  And while Donbas has minerals, Ukraine has nothing much in that department.  It’s rural farmland that’s rapidly depopulating, right next to Russia (which means even if we “win” Ukraine, you might end up exactly here ten years from now).  I just don’t see much juice here worth the squeeze, and certainly nothing worth deploying troops and thus increasing the risk of nuclear war.


I think as such negotiations are probably the best we can do for Ukraine.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 24, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Most of our global hegemony comes from our military and technical capabilities, it’s not because we give out our money in random nice, but generally unappreciated gestures of good will.  Iraqis don’t hate us less because we fund their version of Sesame Street.  Africa doesn’t hate us less or love us more because we build the occasional school or hospital.  Even the shipping lanes are mostly free for trade because we have a navy that protects all of that.  Even if we decided to not fund all the things we fund and decide not to get involved in every war on the planet, I don’t see why any other country is going to say fuck you to the country that spends more on it’s military than the rest of the planet combined.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 24, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I mean celebrations of deviant sexuality is definitely a rite of Civic Religion, as are denouncing the Old Ways (Christianity, European derived cultural elements, white people themselves, and capitalism).  Basically, while a lot of people see it as cultural Marxism, I see Civic Religion as cultural Maoism — it’s certainly pro-socialism, but just as importantly it’s about shaming, blaming, and disempowering anyone who openly supports those Olds.


And if you go into a public school you’ll see most of it happening.  Literature classes no longer focus on English or American literature, instead the focus is on teaching the works of other cultures — Arabian, Latin, Chinese, African.  Now while some of it is interesting (im fairly big on Korean Drama and music, personally), I can’t help but notice the double standard here.  Kids can read the opening verses of the Quran in a public school, but not a Bible.  We can spend a month reading a book written from the POV of and African American oppressed by white people, but not the perspective of white people.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 24, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think you can define terms.  The idea of who is “subject to the jurisdiction” of the state is at least somewhat ambiguous.  And as such saying that if you would be prosecuted by civil courts if you broke the law, for example, as a prerequisite for being considered a subject of the USA seems reasonable as a law.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Speechcraft and Pithiness: Give your tips here
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I mean yes, but at the same time getting overly verbose or going through multiple examples and hypotheticals to get to a point that is really simple for the median member of the audience to understand often means people start skimming through or in a speech tuning out.  When something can be made clearer using an example, fine, but at the same time taking 5 paragraphs to make a point that can be explained in five sentences is not good writing.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 24, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
But what percentage of cases are even remotely functional, let alone high functioning?  If we’re saving people who are somewhat functioning, it might make sense, but if we’re saving people who will dig through trash cans and sleep in the streets and can’t afford medical care, we aren’t saving people, just prolonging the suffering stage.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Speechcraft and Pithiness: Give your tips here
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
My best advice in writing is be as simple as you can be and still be accurate.  The most powerful speeches are simple, and the same is true of writing, if you can get the point across accurately in three sentences, using more than that tends to make communication worse, not better.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 24, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I mean you can have too much state capacity.  In fact, I think we passed that point before my birth.  There are very few aspects of modern life that aren’t touched on by the government.  And globally, we give out a lot of cash with very little vetting of where the money goes and what it does once it gets there.  I think the excitement is about finally clawing back a bit and making sure that we’re actually benefiting from the money spent, and that any aid money given out goes to something beneficial to both the country it’s given to and the interests of the USA.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 24, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It’s not that the world would be better without them.  It’s that you’re simply delaying the inevitable while increasing the suffering of the individual.  Drug addicts suffer a lot, they have serious diseases, they’re often homeless, they have to scrounge for food in trash cans, they can be covered in sores.  At some point, I think you end up keeping someone living that life alive because it’s good for you, rather than good for them specifically.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 24, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think this is the only plan that will actually allow the government to cut the bloat out of the budget and bring these organizations back to being under the elected government.  If you’re just asking politely if they’d mind telling us how many people they need, the answer will be “actually all of them”.  If asked about the budget the answer will be “actually, we need more money.”  And that’s not even getting at the hundreds of programs that are useless, redundant, or counterproductive.


One in USAid turns out that we actually funded cement works in Gaza.  That cement that American taxpayers paid for built the tunnels under Gaza.  Then, after 10/7, we sent Israel millions in weapons to blow up the tunnels we spent millions to supply the cement to build.  Now I ask you, how the heck does America gain from this?  How does this create stability in MENA let alone the rest of the world?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 24, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Not in a formal sense, but managers are held to justifying every employee, and yes, employees do have to sometimes write up their own job descriptions to send to HR.  Other times, your direct supervisor informs HR of what tasks you are doing.  The only really unusual thing is that the employee is asked to send that information directly to DOGE, and that there aren’t these kinds of job audits happening regularly (which is why DOGE is necessary).  The interesting bit is that not only are the employees shocked by the demand that they show some form of actual productivity, but their immediate supervisors are telling them not to comply.  If there’s a giant red flag of “these people know their employees do shit all all day” it’s them saying “don’t you dare tell DOGE what you do all day.”


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 24, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think we are in a civilizational crisis.  And the crisis is the seeds of the twentieth century and the hubris it represents coming home to roost. We’ve convinced ourselves that we are the exceptions to civilizational laws, that we can afford to ignore reality in all kinds of ways that only work when we’re protected by the natural fortresses created by oceans, seas and mountains, and guarded by military forces with huge technological advantages.  When we were the only ones with a strong manufacturing and innovation.  That was probably true until the end of the 1990s.


Because of those advantages, we tried to get away with all sorts of things that turn out to be really bad ideas, and lead to really bad outcomes.  We no longer push for achievement.  In the turn of the last century we absolutely celebrated great achievements.  We celebrated big business doing great things, and people who discovered important things.  We also pushed our citizens to production and industry and held education out as aspirational.  We were forthright about teaching our own culture and heritage, and unabashedly claimed Christianity as the Western religion.  We insisted on public and private morality and promoted heterosexual monogamous marriages that formed strong families and raised healthy children.  We didn’t mollycoddle those who refused to do any work, if you didn’t work, you wouldn’t expect to live on food stamps and in government housing.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 24, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I’m pretty much here.  I don’t understand just why these people are so allergic to the idea of having to prove to representatives of the elected government that they did five productive things in a week.  Like how out of touch are they, that they don’t think they need to answer a question that most people with private sector jobs have to answer — what is it you actually do here, any why should you continue to get a paycheck from us.  Rest assured, for even the lowest employee of any private business, if they are only doing 5 things in an entire week, they would be laid off as soon as possible.  It’s an absurdly low standard.  I think in most jobs if you only did five things a day, you’d be out.  That’s all the public wants— they want everyone in the public sector to actually be held to some standard of actual productive work.  We’re paying for it, and its unreasonable that they don’t think they need to do anything.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I still think parents in some form or another are necessary for psychiatric health.  It seems like just observationally a lot of social pathologies and mental health issues went through the roof after the widespread use of institutional daycares and preschool.  We’ve essentially been kenneling our kids for much of their waking lives, and im becoming much more convinced that, especially if it starts young, it has a lot of negative impacts on the mental health of the child as they can’t form the strong family bonds that existed for most of human history.  It’s actually a pretty odd social experiment that we did to ourselves without thinking about it.


If you think about a child in daycare maybe a good one will have 2 adults and 8-10 kids.  That child is a number.  Not the caregiver’s fault, but she’s not the kid’s parent and she can’t care as much as a parent could.  And even if she did, she has other children to worry about.  Now this starts in the USA especially in infancy maybe 8 weeks or so, depending on the leave offered to the mother (fathers rarely get leave).  And because it covers the working hours of parents, including commute, you might have a child in daycare from 8am to 6pm and be putting the baby to bed soon after.  The child gets weekends with mom and dad, and spends most of the time in institutional care.


Going further to deprive future children of any parental bonding at all would likely make that situation much worse.  I suspect that it would create sociopathic behaviors in most children in that situation.  How does a child learn to care about others if they never received the same care themselves?  Could they feel the pain and suffering they cause another human being?  If they could, would they care?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The dirty thoughts (that they are women even with male genitalia) lead to harm.  It normalized men being allowed in intimate spaces reserved for women like bathrooms and changing rooms.  It’s decimating women’s sports as women are no longer good enough to compete at high levels of sports leagues if men are allowed to declare themselves women.  These harm women. Men in women’s sports basically closes off a major source of scholarships for women, particularly minority women, and to the degree that they need those scholarships to make college affordable, they’re now shut out.  And men being allowed in women’s changing rooms and restrooms enables rape.  A man looking to rape women can hang about women’s changing rooms for as long as he likes, so long as he claims to be female.  The only point at which women might object is if he actually tries to rape them.  At which point, it’s too late.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It’s plausible, assuming that you’re talking about physical objects.  It gets a bit strange to talk about buying and selling in America when the product is a game that lives on a server in Maldives or something.  I’m not even sure how VAT work on drop shipping outfits or things sold to Americans just outside American territory (I.e ships in international waters don’t have to deal with sales taxes).


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think the principle of ethnic national sovereignty is a bad idea.  My questions would generally be “are people living there better off under whatever government happens to rule them?” And “Is the rest of the world more stable under the regime in question.”  In such a light, assuming that Brazil could bring stability, rule of law, and resources for the reconstruction of Haiti, Haiti would be much better off under the  Brazilian regime than as an independent state.  Ukraine as well seems much better off split off from Crimea and Donbas but not at war, or in an alternative not offered, under a Russian puppet state but able to govern all of its territory.  There are plenty of other cases proving this out.  The Palestinians who accepted Israeli and gained citizenship are worlds better off than the ones who keep banging their heads against the IDF in hopes of an independent sovereign state.  Add in for most of these failed states the loss of international stability as the people flood other countries to flee instability, criminal pirates or gangs trafficking drugs into other countries or simply rob shipping lanes.  Is that really better than the bad old days of colonialism where these states that are basket cases full of drugs were modernized and crime was dealt with?  If Haiti were French, is that terrible?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think it’s a consequence, in part because of the utilitarian approach most self described rationalists have.  Utilitarian philosophy doesn’t have any inherent moral principles other than “minimize harm.”  The problem comes when you have a group that’s defined “telling the truth” as “causing harm.”  Theres no leverage to push back with.  You can’t say “I refuse to tell lies” because that’s not really a base level moral principle of utilitarian moral thinking.  The argument would take the form of “I don’t want to tell lies”, but unless you can show that you telling a lie leads to worse consequences than “trans woman committing suicide because you hurt their feelings,” it’s not something you can support under that moral code.  It end up being “suicide vs my desire to tell the truth.”  Truth loses.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It’s still a map territory error, and I think that the salutes are aimed at ironically reclaiming the most common sneer aimed at every conservative leader since probably Reagan.  Every last one of them, no matter what they actually did was gasp a Nazi.  Both Bushes were, Romney was, Trump is.  And this wasn’t based on anything they actually believed and did.  It was just governing as a conservative makes you a Nazi.  It’s hardly surprising that after nearly 50 years of “opposing democrats makes you a Nazi”, people do the Nazi thing ironically and say “fine, if not being a democrat makes us Nazis, we might as well throw up the salute.”


I keep going back to one question to answer the “are they actually Nazis “ question.  Forget the aesthetics, forgot the words, forget the tweets, what actual policies are happening that are fascist?  The best sterlman I have of them going Nazi is the mass deportations.  Other than that, I can’t put anything they’re doing in that “literally Hitler* box.


It’s not surprising.  We’ve been turning Nazis into cartoon villains since the 1960s.  Nobody knows, outside the holocaust, anything they actually believed or did.  In modern America, it’s just a sneer term meant to get people to stop supporting those+labeled with the sneer.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Te AI is in Bahamas, it’s making decisions for a business in the USA.  Who gets the tax money?


As for the AI have nots starving, this is how history has tended to work for most of human history.  When a worker has no useful skills he gets laid off permanently, and either subsists on a dole or goes hungry.  The Industrial Revolution was also a time of great poverty with thousands reduced to living in tiny tenement housing.  The Victorian Era had people living underground as it was illegal to be homeless.


What’s unprecedented here is the sheer scale of the problem.  There’s no reason to think that a government can permanently and sustainably put three quarters of the population on welfare and still function.  Nor do I find it plausible that millions of people with no prospects of useful employment are going to thrive.  We have historical examples of people in that situation, and none of them have produced Utopian societies.  Indian reservations are impoverished shit holes compared to the surrounding communities.  So are ghettos.  Rome created a huge underclass full of dysfunctional families with her dole.  Turning all of America into a giant reservation where everyone lives on the dole is not going to create a flourishing society that creates hippy art.  It’s going to create. Poverty and corruption and dysfunction.