@MathWizard's banner p

MathWizard

Good things are good

0 followers   follows 0 users  
joined 2022 September 04 21:33:01 UTC 

				
User ID: 164


				
				
				

			

		

	














	


		


			



	

		

			

			

				

					

						

							
						

						

							
							

								
MathWizard


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				
Good things are good

				
				
				

				

					0 followers  

					follows 0 users  

					joined 2022 September 04 21:33:01 UTC
				


				
					

					
No bio...

				

				

				

				

				

					

					

					
					
					

					
User ID: 164


					
					
					
				

			


					

						
					



		

	

 











			
			

			
			

			




	


		

			
‎

			

				
				

					Hour
					Day
					Week
					Month
					
					All
				

			


			
‎

			

	
	

	 Hot Bump Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
	



		

	






	

		
		

		
		
	

	

  







		

			
			
				My Willing Complicity in "Human Rights Abuse"
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
This is a bad counterexample, because the problem in the Roman case is not the quantity of the exchange but in the kind. That is, the exchange of political tutelege for sexual gratification is fundamentally illegitimate. It should be possible to gain political tutelage without resorting to sexual favors, and anyone who refused to give sexual favors would be blocked out of the system. This is exploitative because it forces people to perform actions they shouldn't be forced to perform. If the ratio were 10x more favorable to the boys (they get 10x as much tutelege per sexual act) it would still be fundamentally exploitative. Sex work is demeaning and degrading and nobody should be forced to do it. Good faith political tutors should offer their services for non-sexual compensation.


Meanwhile, the exchange of labor for money is inherent to... reality. You can't create things without labor. Someone somewhere is going to have to labor. The labor in combination with the capital creates the wealth. Capitalists cannot offer money for not doing labor, they would immediately go bankrupt. You can make a quantitative argument (working for $5/hr is exploitative but working for $500/hr is not) but this is fundamentally different from saying exchanging labor for money is inherently exploitative. Unless the argument is that labor itself is inherently demeaning and degrading, in which case Marx just has an irreconcilable problem with reality itself, because if nobody labors then everyone just starves to death.


Exploitation comes from the monopolistic seizing of something that by all rights ought to be a public good and holding it hostage at distorted prices that wouldn't persist if it weren't being monopolized. Some Marxists would argue this is true of capitalists monopolizing capital, but this is a really stupid take and doesn't hold up to any scrutiny. Capital didn't spawn on the Earth, it was made by people. A good rule of thumb is "if this person had never been born, would everyone be better off, or worse off." In this case of political people forming networks and functionally ostracizing people who didn't go through their tutelege, the world where they didn't exist is one where young boys could grow up and not get molested and control politics themselves. They are better being exploited compared to being ostracized in a complicated system designed to force people to need tutors, but they're worse off than if this system didn't exist.


In the case of capital, if the capitalists didn't exist then neither would their capital. It's not like the world had this factory sitting there and the capitalist came along and snatched it up and prevented the workers from owning it themselves*. It wasn't there before the capitalist paid to have it built! If you want a world where the capitalists don't exist, literally pretend that they don't and go physically build your own factory, and then you'll own it. The fact that most people don't do this (or can't afford to do this) suggests that the capitalists are providing real value.


*In cases where this is untrue, like natural resources that people did snatch up and exclude others from, I agree this is exploitative and bad, which is why I am tentatively in favor of Georgism and think they should have to pay Land Value Taxes. Marxism is just an inferior proto-version of Georgism that fails to comprehend the distinction between land and capital.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				My Willing Complicity in "Human Rights Abuse"
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
But it's inherent to the redefinition in the first place. Marx could have picked a different word to begin with. If Marx did not want to smuggle in all of the connotations of the word "exploitation" he would have used a different word for his technical definition. You can't just appropriate words that everyone already uses and means for something and then redefine them and then get annoyed when people keep using them for their original meaning.


This is some basic rationalist A Humans Guide to Words stuff. Socrates fell afoul of this thousands of years ago and get roasted by Diogenes for it. They should know better by now. They do know better. I don't for an instant believe that Marx did this by mistake. He wanted to expand the definition of exploitation in order to include people who normally wouldn't be included and thus smear them with the same brush. Any textual Marxist who is autistic enough to genuinely think that the new definition is what this word is supposed to mean is a victim of Marx himself, not the kids using it the way he intended.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				My Willing Complicity in "Human Rights Abuse"
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
This is a feature, not a bug, and one of my main gripes with leftist ideologies. I have no sympathy, because the entire point is the deceive people but get away with it under the guise of "not technically lying". It's a step beyond the media version where you use words which are literally true but heavily imply something false. Here they use words which are literally false but with made-up definitions that would be technically true if that's what those words actually meant. And they spend however many years or decades publishing articles that nobody reads establishing those definitions so they have something to point to when called out on their deception. But the deception is the point.


Fundamentally it's the same as calling your political opponents "child molesters" and then when called out you say that you've redefined the term "child molester" to mean whatever political point they hold. It's a difference in magnitude, being less egregious and much more carefully laundered in order to get away with it, but it's the same kind of rhetorical trickery, and deserves the same level of respect.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				My Willing Complicity in "Human Rights Abuse"
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Maybe this is just a quibble about language then, but language carries with it smuggled implications and connotations that can be quite important. So quibble I will.


It's not exploitation if both people are profiting and fully informed and mutually consenting and no shenanigans are going on. Exploitation is when the Company Town charges 10x market value for food and services because it's a monopoly and there's literally nowhere else to buy your stuff and then takes it out of your wages until you have negative money and wish you'd never started the job. Exploitation is when an employer threatens (implicitly or explicitly) to turn their illegal immigrant workers over to the authorities if they complain, or when a Pimp threatens to beat the crap out of his prostitutes if they don't earn enough, or when children are forced to work in Diamond mines at literal gunpoint.


Exploitation is when someone wants to leave but can't, and the inability to leave allows their employer/captor to pay them less than market wage. Exploitation is things like indentured servitude and slavery. This is bad. People don't like this, people don't want this, and it makes the world a worse place.


Exploitation is not "the market has lots of labor but not a lot of capital, so people with capital can capture most of the profits from their joint ventures". If both parties are profiting and are glad for the presence of the other party, then neither is being exploited. If you call this exploitation then you in turn have to come to counterintuitive conclusions like "exploitation is sometimes good for the exploited people and we should encourage more of it". Instead, you should use a different word for it, that doesn't carry all the negative connotations and connections to actual bad exploitation.


Of course it's not as good as some hypothetical utopian ideal that we haven't yet discovered which distributes resources equitably while simultaneously being at least as productive as capitalism. But it's better than anything we've found so far, and it's better than literal exploitation. It deserves a better name.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				My Willing Complicity in "Human Rights Abuse"
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


This completely ignores the economic principle of revealed preferences: the idea that you can tell what a person actually values by observing what they choose to do under constraint. Western pundits sit in climate-controlled pods and declare that nobody should ever have to work in forty-degree heat for $300 a month. But for someone whose alternative is working in forty-degree heat in Bihar for $30 a month with no social safety net, banning Qatari labor practices doesn't save them. It just destroys their highest expected-value option.






You cannot legislate away grinding poverty and resource constraints.






But love would not put food on the table. Love would not put his son into a decent school and ensure that he picked up the educational qualifications that would break the cycle. Love would not ensure his elderly and increasingly frail parents would get beyond-basic medical care and not have to till marginal soil at the tiny plot of land they farmed.




Marx would let them starve on their tiny plot of land and declare victory, because nobody had gotten rich from their labor. Having no food is inherent in the system of reality, it's only by creating things that people can eat and have stuff and not be poor. Everyone is born as a poor, defenseless, property-less infant. Every moment you live is a battle against your body trying to eat things that don't want to be eaten, or eating itself if you can't put things in your stomach. It's only via economics that we advance beyond that, and it's only via the massive massive massive godlike success of capitalism that we've build so many privileges we've forgotten not only what poverty is like, but that it's the default state of humanity.


Who cares if someone else gets rich in the process of enriching you? Is jealousy and spite worth more than not being poor?




What I will say is that "exploitation" is a word with a definition, and that definition requires something more than "a transaction that takes place under conditions of inequality." If we define exploitation as taking unfair advantage of vulnerability, we need a story about how the worker is made worse off relative to the alternative - and the workers I spoke with, consistently and across months, told me the opposite story.




Read the post you're responding to before writing a response.  /u/self_made_human debunked your point before you even made it, arguing that this is a good thing compared to the alternative, and all you did was make the original Marxist point and say "but it's a bad thing". We already know you think that. We also think you're wrong.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for March 13, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
If a discovery is finding something that you, or the people around you, didn't know about at then telling them about it, then an invention is finding a way to make something or do something, while a non-invention discovery is finding something that already existed. You discover a new plant or a ruin, you invent a lightbulb or a martial art or a programming language. The theoretical concept of how to do these things can be imagined to have existed somewhere in imagination land, but if no human being actually has this knowledge then the knowledge itself literally did not exist until you caused it to exist by putting into people's minds. And in the case of physical inventions like a lightbulb the actual thing itself also did not exist until you created one. If you had chosen to change the methods of your creation, the features of it would change. In some sense this is inventing a different thing rather than the original thing, but in many cases it's minor tweaks that don't fundamentally change its nature but are superficial (you might add a different number of coils to your lightbulb design, or you might put the steps in your mathematical proof in a slightly different order).


Meanwhile, before you discover a new plant that plant is still on the Earth doing its thing. You unambiguously did not invent the plant, it was already there before you arrived. You can't tweak the plant's discovery in minor ways to alter what it looks like (or at least, any tweaking is something you do afterwards and is not a part of the discovery process). It was already there, and you did not cause it to manifest in the real world in the way you do with an invention.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for March 13, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I would say invented, because any arguments about them being "discovered" or "already out there waiting to be found", while mostly true, apply equally to literal inventions. Was the telephone discovered or invented? Well, kind of both. The laws of physics always allowed sound waves to convert into electric signals and travel across wires to be converted back into sound waves. Someone just had to figure that out.


You can make a strong argument that invention is a subset of discovery. You can make a strong argument that mathematical theorems are a form of discovery. You can't really make arguments that they aren't inventions except by sneaking in a hidden assumption that these are mutually exclusive, when actually they're not.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think it's the outgroup fargroup distinction. They don't actually like the Democrats, they just hate the Republicans for not being far right enough and want to spite them. In the same way that progressives and LGBT people don't really like radical Muslims (and probably don't know any in real life), but advocate for them to spite the right.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


They're not any better (or worse), over there. They're just different people.




And, importantly, there's a distinction in how you get there and what the side effects are. In a capitalist system, the way to become a billionaire is to create or invest early in a billion dollar company. In a capitalist system with no holes or exploits, this means you generate multiple billions of wealth in the economy and extract a fraction of that as profit for yourself. In a capitalist system with holes and exploits that usually involves a combination of wealth creation, rent-seeking, and market capture. But it's still almost always positive sum. The world is so much better because Amazon exists than it was before it did.


Government bureaucrats mostly don't create wealth, they suckle on the teat of the wealth creators and enrich themselves off someone else's work. Theoretically there could be exceptions, if one has an especially important job and creates especially efficient legislation or regulations that smooth things over for everyone else as individuals they can do more good. But there aren't capitalist feedback loops, so there's nothing causing the better ones to be richer than the worse ones. Giving them more money and power might incentivize more people to want to be them, but that doesn't create more wealth the way incentivizing more people to want to be tech founders does. It just creates more competition to suck wealth that other people created.


Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos shouldn't be billionaires because they're good people. They should be billionaires because they reached into the void and pulled out billions of dollars of wealth and shared some of it with us, and kept some of it for themselves. They did that, who are you to confiscate it from them? And if you do, who else is going to risk reaching into the void when they could just become a confiscator instead and do the safer job of reaching into wallets?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 1, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'd say invest it. Then later once you've got a better idea of where your life is going and if you need the money or not you can either spend it towards whatever end or donate it (and the interest) to charity then.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 23, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The problem is not that Anthropic is right and the DOW is wrong. The problem is that the DOW agreed to their terms, then changed its mind, then threw a hissy fit and abused the law to punish them when they didn't agree to a retroactive changing of the terms.


As a private company, Anthropic is entitled to negotiate whatever contract it wants, and its customers can accept or decline. If it doesn't want to license its rightful private property to be used for certain purposes, and apply this fairly and equally to everyone (it's not picking on the DOW here, nobody is allowed to use its AI for autonomous weapons or mass surveillance), that's their right as a private company. If you don't like that then don't sign a contract with them. Nobody has a right to their AI, it's theirs. That's how the free market is supposed to work. The government can't just call people terrorists or supply chain risks in retaliation for not giving them extra favorable terms in contract negotiations. That's fascism, in a literal non-exaggerated way, that's what that term actually means.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for February 27, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Make giant pots of soup and freeze them (in individual serving sizes). If you x3, x4, x5 a normal soup recipe it takes less than that many times effort. Especially if you use one that includes a bunch of things like canned tomatoes and beans rather than fresh chopped vegetables (though most of mine take a combination of both). Eat some of it fresh, freeze the rest (we have a bunch of plastic 2-cup containers my wife brought home from work). This doesn't work for every type of soup (noodles turn to mush, for example) but for some of them it's fine. Then on demand you can unfreeze a serving of soup and it has all of the cost and nutrition value of homemade soup but the convenience of canned soup. If you regularly do this with a variety of recipes then you can have a variety of soup types so you're not stuck eating the same thing every day.


It also works with other things like pizza or calzones. My basement freezer is a big box packed with presents from past me to future me. The point being I don't want to cook every day. But I can have home cooked meals every day anyway, as long as I force multiply when I need to.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for February 27, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
If your hobbies work that way then that might work. I am a massive introvert, I like staying home and playing videogames or board games, not going out to meet people. And my wife is that way too. I was never going to find her by going out and being social, and if I had picked up a new social hobby to meet people I would have mostly met people who like whatever that hobby is that I would be pretending to like.


I found her on a dating website. And it was painful, because I had to go through hundreds and hundreds of stupid normies and people looking for quick hookups, or just the wrong kinds of nerds. Luckily by being a weird nerd myself I screened off most of the people who were a bad fit pretty quickly, Despite looking for like 4 years I only ever went on one real life date prior to finding my wife. But I eventually found her and now we stay at home not doing external social things together.


I don't know how well that scales in general. That's what worked for me. But also I knew I wanted to find someone and I knew what I was looking for (as close to a female copy of me as possible, basically), so I went through a bunch of effort, and a lot of waiting, to make it happen.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for February 27, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It was a couple weeks ago but I tried out Pathologic 3 and I am... not a fan. The Pathologic series is known for being brutal and unforgiving, trying to cure a plague and slowly losing as you have to make hard decisions with limited resources. Very much not my thing. But someone left a review of Pathologic 3 that was like "it's a time loop! The developers saw all the people saving and loading and saving and loading and trying to optimize their runs on the previous games, and decided to bake that into the mechanics."


And that sounded like fun to me. I really like time loop stories where the character is up against overwhelming odds but manages to win anyway by exploiting the ability to try over and over again and learn and cheat using future knowledge. Even if the game is super hard, I can tinker and optimize stuff and fix any of my mistakes by rewinding.


What the review failed to mention is that even though the plot revolves around a time loop, the mechanics are still based around finite resources and brutal hard mechanics. Every consumable you use to restore your statuses permanently reduces the effectiveness of future uses of that type of consumable. Every time you rewind it consumes a non-renewable resource. It's not a true time loop, because even if the plot allows you to redo decisions and change the consequences of your choices, your vital resources don't respawn and you can only do it a finite number of times. Every time you mess up in an encounter and die it forcibly rewinds to the last time you saved, which uses up the time resource. And if you do it too many times and run out of the resource the game deletes your save and you have to start the entire game over again. This is more harsh than a normal game that lets you save and load at will, not less.


This didn't even happen to me. As soon as I discovered that the time rewinding used up resources I googled to see if it was renewable, saw that it was not, and stopped playing. I do not play games that threaten me with permadeath. Not unless it's a roguelite where each character only exists for like an hour (and even then I usually only play if there's meta-progression that persists). If there's a realistic chance of me having to reset or backtrack more than 5 hours of gameplay and have to do it all over again, I'm just not going to play in the first place. It's bad game design, it's not fun. The Pathologic people are trying to be hardcore and brutal and catering to a masochistic audience that likes that sort of thing. You're allowed to have a niche. And I knew that about the first two games which is why I never played them. I'm just kind of annoyed that this one was presented differently and then wasn't.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for February 27, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
My understanding is that the vast majority of people need a life partner in order to be fulfilled and happy throughout their life. It is a deeply ingrained human instinct to want a partner, and sex, and children, because evolution means everyone historically who didn't have these died without passing on their genes.


This does not make it universal (otherwise gay people couldn't exist). Psychology is complicated, genes are not deterministic, and once you've unpacked from a genetic code into an actual human being, you should treat your own actual self as more important than whatever evolution originally intended for you to do.


I would definitely be highly skeptical of any desires that go against it. I got married but we decided not to have kids and I am slightly paranoid that 20 years from now I'm going to regret it. But I can't imagine me right now doing a good job of it if I don't actually want it, so that's not enough to change my mind.


I also can't imagine a me who never dated or got married. Actually yes I can, I would be lonely, just like I was for the decade before I met my wife. I have always wanted to fall in love and get married, for as long as I can remember as a child. Which is to say, I can't relate to your experience. And that might speak to a fundamental difference. You might actually be happier alone. I'm skeptical, maybe you just haven't met the right person. But it seems plausible.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for February 20, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I believe the vast majority of the people who show up in that video are very small Vtubers with a couple hundred or maybe low thousands subscribers. But they reacted to previous Skybrows videos, and he's very online and has a habit of checking youtube constantly for new reactions to his content and commenting on their videos about his videos. Which is maybe a bit narcissistic, but also kind of wholesome. And then he included them in this video to represent the love that the community gives to him and how it gives him power/courage/support, and also show his appreciation for them in turn. (I know this because most of them in turn have reacted to this video and I like watching them get excited when they see themselves show up. I might be a bit too online myself).


I do hope we see a return of unironic sincerity. The handful of instances of it I've seen recently have been pleasant and refreshing. Irony, sarcasm, and cynicism have their place, but we've swung way too far in that direction recently and I'd like to see more variety like this.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 16, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I don't know if it's maximally efficient in the purely utilitarian, ruthless economic way that a lot of people here prefer, but as a hungry kid having real food in the apartment was hard to beat.




I believe in utilitarianism with a broad and robust utility function that encompasses "things we care about" in an almost tautological way. Take "things we care about", convert them into numbers, and then do math on them and trade-off against each other. In contrast to utility that only cares about legible things like GDP, real utilitarianism should recognize that real utility is happening inside people's brains, and things like GDP act only as imperfect proxies attempting to unreliably measure the thing we actually care about.


Which is to say, food which is eaten IS more efficient in the purely utilitarian, ruthless economic way than food stamps that are traded for booze. Because the food which is eaten is value actually attained, while alcoholics getting drunk is negative value. Although you have multiply it out at scale and see how often this happens in comparison to cheese rotting and getting thrown out because it went to someone who hates cheese and wanted to eat cucumber salad. Or they like cheese but they got three times as much as they needed and had nothing to eat alongside it. Inflexibly giving specific things definitely provides a lower ceiling for non-abusers than something like EBT. But it has a higher floor as well. So its average efficiency across the population depends on statistical questions like "what is the rate of abuse vs good faith" as well as how bad in magnitude are these floor and ceiling effects.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 16, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
If either party was doing things with some competency the country wouldn't be in this mess.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for February 20, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Based doesn't just mean "politically right wing" though there is a bit of connotation in that direction. Ultimately it's when you say what you believe and what's true in spite of the external and opposing narratives and political correctness. People who are trying to be based, or god forbid call themselves based unironically, are almost automatically not. It's based to be yourself in spite of opposition, to say your opinion unapologetically, and be right about it. Which Pippa isn't always. And granted I haven't watched a lot of her content, mostly the more popular clips. But she seems generally based, if a bit unhinged at times.


People should leave her alone more though, I agree.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for February 20, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The vast majority of these are indie, not corporate. That is, it's just a regular person who wants to be a streamer and using an anime avatar instead of showing their real face. Almost all of the corporations are too afraid of their image and the potential for being cancelled to let their employees express political views. With the exception of Phase Connect (which Pippa works for), which is much more hands off, though doesn't seem to actively encourage it.


But it's not like you need big corporate money to afford a Vtuber avatar, they're mostly there for handling marketing and sponsorships and stuff. All my experience with non-corporate Vtubers suggests they're the same as any other streamer. Some of them are probably grifting, some of them are not, and you can kind of get a partially accurate vibe check by watching them. It's imaginable that a woman who loves feminism would pretend to hate it just to be popular with men (though difficult, given the difficulties leftists have with understanding right-wing opinions), but it's also imaginable that a woman who hates feminism (they're rare, but they exist) would get on the internet and say so and then be popular with men. And then get signal boosted to the top. Once you start selecting for popularity, it's no longer a random sampling. And the authentic ones are much more likely have more interesting and insightful opinions and get discovered.


Sure, if you pick literally any random supposedly based Vtuber with a true random sampling there's probably a non-negligible chance of them grifting. But if you pick one of the more well-known ones they're probably authentic. Obviously they want money too, which is why they have cute anime avatar with big boobs. But it's easier to do that with authentic opinions than grifted ones.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for February 20, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I am obsessed with this Anti-diss track about Pipkin Pippa. It's so good.


I suspect my weeb levels are higher than average for this place, so not sure how much people care or know about Vtubers, but I've been falling deeper into the rabbit hole of Based Vtuber reactions. People like SmugAlana, Nuxtaku, or Leaflit, who watch and make commentary on various political or culture war stuff. It's not like super deep stuff, it's just something fun to listen to in the background while playing games or something.


Which then led me to Skyebrows, who (like Leaflit) makes AI generated music videos which are pretty cool. And tends to have a generally based perspective (glazing people like Amelia, Elon Musk, or Asmongold)


One of his videos featured a cameo by (AI generated version of) Pippa, who is a rabbit Vtuber known for being based and a bit unhinged. Kind of Alex-Jones lite? She'll go on rants about how she doesn't trust the Federal Government, or how much she hates Walmart. She calls things "gay" or "retarded" as an insult, the way people used to before being afraid of cancel culture. And since she's effectively anonymous as a Vtuber, and her income is derived from her fans who know she's like this, she's basically cancel-proof.


So her chat spams her with pleas to go watch this video because she's in it and it's so cool. And she gets watches it, and is not impressed. She goes on her conspiracy rant about how this dude looks sketchy. It looks gay. It looks like a bunch of clout chasing slop designed to get people hyped, and he's probably going to pull a Candace Owens, make a crypto coin, and then rug pull it. She goes full schizo on him.


So he makes what I can only call an Anti-diss track. He takes all of her words and makes them into the lyrics, and it's about her being cool and based and beating the crap out of him. Literally, there's a scene where Pippa goes and beats him up and he doesn't fight back. And then all the other Vtubers who have watched his videos and liked them line up and shoot heart beams and he powers up with their support and there's this giant energy blob Spirit Bomb and it looks like he's going to finally counter attack and then.... he says "it's okay to be gay" and hugs her while possibly crying, and an inspiring line from her in the background plays about how you can be cool and make all sorts of drawings or other art, you just have to let go of your ego.


The message being "You might hate me, but I still love you"


I thought it was really clever. A cool way to respond to hate, while still kind of getting back at the other person (she's unlikely to actually be happy about being the focus of a video this way, even though it does make her look cool). And it helps that the song is really really catchy (in my opinion).


Anyway, just a bit of minor internet drama that happened (and involves AI) and thought some of you might find interesting.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 16, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Or make them malnourished when naturally skinny people eat even less than they were previously inclined to because they're being force-fed appetite suppressants.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 16, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Sounds like a good way to poison the 58% of Americans who aren't obese.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 16, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


There are clever ways you could make EBT structured as a tax cut instead of spending as well.




I don't think you can. If people are taking more out of the system than they're putting into it, ie have direct benefits greater than their taxes, then they cannot receive those benefits via tax cuts, because there's not enough to tax. Once your taxes reach zero (or if you have no income and they started at zero) the only way to get more is to actually be given money. Which means it has to be taken from someone else.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for February 13, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
This reminds me of a post, I think it was here on the Motte (or maybe back when we were on Reddit), about Taboos (it was in the context of incest, but applies more generally).


A taboo against incest is less about blocking the rare two siblings who fall in love from the dangers of their own decisions, and more about protecting millions of normal siblings from misinterpreting innocent signals or having to treat each other at arms length in order to avoid accidentally sending such signals. The normal barriers of intimacy between men and women can be largely ignored by platonically loving siblings who would never even consider sex because the taboo is well established and protected.


A taboo against prostitution is less about blocking the consensual trade of money for sex between people who want it, and more about protecting the millions of women who do not want to sell their bodies and do not want people to possibly interpret them as wanting that or try to change their minds about it. If the taboo (and laws upholding it) were actually still in place and enforced for thai massage parlors, this stereotype would have never developed and caused this sort of incident.