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TheAntipopulist

Voltaire's Viceroy

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TheAntipopulist


								
								
									
								
								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				
Voltaire's Viceroy

				
				
				

				

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					joined 2022 September 05 02:32:36 UTC
				


				
					

					
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User ID: 373


					
					
					
				

			


					

						
					



		

	

 











			
			

			
			

			




	


		

			
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				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Right, but personal criticism is.




Attack the argument, not the speaker! I think personal criticism should be avoided as much as possible as it never tends to be on the positive side of the light:heat ratio. So no, I don't think "it's personal criticism" is a great defense.




Replacing [thing that can be good or bad, depending on how you do it] with [thing that's always bad no matter how you do it] completely changes the discussed scenario.




Again, I really disagree with the notion that calling someone a "bad faith borderline troll" would ever be a "good" thing for a conversation. It's not quite as terrible as "lying shitbag", but it's quite clearly still "bad" in my eyes.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


precisely because "bad faith borderline troll" is fine, actually,




Name calling like this isn't fine. If his argument was that it was fine, he could have just said that instead of claiming the issue was that I quoted out of context.


If his argument was that it was fine because he had some "justification" in the rest of his post... well that would indeed be different to the argument I thought he was making and which I responded to, but it would be even sillier. You could justify practically anything in that case, including "lying shitbag".


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The principle exists outside the specific words used. I presume he would think "bad faith borderline troll" is bad, but I couldn't be sure. I wanted to demonstrate the principle clearly without having to worry about whether he'd come back with "bad faith borderline troll" is fine, actually.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I was not changing the principle of "selective editing", nor of "relaying what other people think".


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Again, I was demonstrating the principle.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
His whole point was that it was a "selective edit".


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I want to make the principle clear. I think accusing someone of being a "bad faith borderline troll" is bad enough that it should be sufficient, but a lot of people on this site seem to think that's perfectly fine as far as debate etiquette goes. I don't think anyone would defend "lying shitbag" though. Hopefully I'm not wrong.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I guess a lot of it comes down to what exactly you're building too. I doubt I'd get as much pleasure from the end product if I was designing something like medical device firmware that hardly anyone would ever interact with, and they mainly only get upset if it stops working. In my job I'm designing data reporting tools which let me see a big difference compared to the old version, and I have end-users telling me "oh wow, this is a lot better than what we had before". In my free time I design little video games and ad hoc apps that let me automate things I had previously done manually, both of which have intrinsic appeal.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
This isn't the gotcha you think it is. For what it's worth I'll include the "a lot of people think" part to the front of it for fuller context going forward, but it's still quite bad even with that included. Claiming you're just relaying what other people think shouldn't be a shield that lets you just write whatever inflammatory stuff you want.


E.g. if I wrote something like this, I ought to get moderated:




You know Amadan, a lot of people think you're just a total lying shitbag. For a long time I urged people to give you the benefit of the doubt, but goddamn I really get what they were saying now.




I do not think it would be a great defense if I said: Oh hey, technically I wasn't saying that about you, it's just what other people have said about you that I'm informing you of ;)


(If it's not clear, this was for illustrative purposes only. I would never describe you as a "lying shitbag" or "bad faith borderline troll" no matter what our differences of opinion were.)


Also you're saying I didn't include enough context, and then you turn around and clip out the context of the next sentence in that post of yours:




I guess this is the point where I say "Goddamn, I get it now," because frankly, you are either being astoundingly clueless or just flat out disingenuous.




The important bit is the "I get it now", which I'd say isn't a far leap from saying you agree with them, at least somewhat.


"Very bad form", as they say.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'm glad you enjoyed reading it! And yes, it's mildly frustrating in a lot of ways to have a CTO that doesn't know much about tech. I wish ours had a handler that knew what they were talking about.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Heh, I'd certainly like to think so. I wish my current job had infrastructure that was as elegant and well-functioning as my train-based city blocks.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I do not believe that LLMs can adequately program, but ultimately it won't matter what I think. What will matter is what the industry at large thinks, and there's a decent chance that they will believe (rightly or wrongly) that everyone needs to use LLMs to be an effective engineer




If you really don't see LLMs adding any value, then you can just lie about using them quite easily. I think they're very useful, but can still see they've become a huge management fad, and I doubt they'll stay like that for more than a year or 2. You can just say you're using AI if they don't check, or send it off on goose chases with filler prompts that you don't actually use the results of if they do.




I like doing my job. I get a great deal of joy from programming. It's an exhilarating exercise in solving interesting problems and watching them take shape. But using an LLM isn't that. It is basically delegating tasks to another person and then reviewing the work to make sure it's acceptable.




I just don't understand this mindset at all. There's a certain elegance in the craft for sure, but the value of the end-product is what's always been truly impressive to me. It's like for an architect/builder: Seeing them swing the hammer can be cool, but it's the house that they build that's worth admiration in my eyes. LLMs have thus been a thing of beauty for me since they can get there so much faster, and more robustly. It feels like I have a cheat code to just snap my fingers and pop buildings into existence.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
There's certainly a lot of nonsensical pressure to use AI from executives, which all seem to drink at the same information trough that has decreed "AI is the hip new thing". I've written about my experiences with that here. That's a fad and will probably go away within a year or two.


I'd still recommend playing around with AI and finding where it can add value. I'm doing roughly 30-40% less work in my software engineering role because of it, with the savings being redirected into building more robust systems, as well as many hours into Factorio.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
As I said, it's not about total popularity. Popularity within the movement is sufficient. If the NYT was ignored by every centrist but still did the same quality of work and was widely read by leftists, that would qualify since it would be generally truth-seeking news with enough pull to be a major part of the conversation. You could sort of see the outlines of this with stuff like the National Review back in the 90s and 2000s, but it was ostracized by conservatives themselves. Now, nothing even remotely looks close in the age of MAGA.




The rest of us do deserve to be here because we just don't admit our biases, lies, and open support for genocidal tyrants.




Not sure what this is in reference to.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
If you consider your behavior in posts like these to be fine, then I would not consider you to have a very good definition of what constitutes an ad hominem




Sometimes I think you just read posts, decide who's expressing the "conservative" (bad) position, and reflexively argue the opposite.






you are and always have been a bad faith borderline troll






you are either being astoundingly clueless or just flat out disingenuous.






You have actually spouted a ton of bullshit






Transparent straw man. Stop this kind of disingenuous whining.




				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


This is because the centrist democrat wing is woke, so they pick woke staffers.




They're not. You can look at the evolution of someone like Noah Smith to see an example. He went from pretty woke in his Bloomberg days to heavily criticizing wokeness while still being left-leaning today. Back in 2021 some Dems still didn't have antibodies to the woke mindvirus which is part of why Biden picked some of them. That, and "staffers" are kind of their own unique breed that have been radicalized by the internet on both sides. The Right has an increasing problem with its own staffers being groypers these days.




There is no woke burnout.




There very clearly is. The woke faction still exists certainly, but it's much less powerful than in its heyday.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Sure, I understand why they did it, I just wish they didn't.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Blocking people certainly isn't petty if they consistently resort to ad hominems. Attacking the speaker rather than their arguments ought to result in a mod action unless there are exceptional circumstances IMO since it almost always degenerates to heat > light, but that's not really enforced here. I wish there was something like Twitter's mute functionality as that's what I'd prefer over full blocking, but if blocking is the only thing I have then that's what I'll use.


But you're right, I should probably have just ignored this. Fruit from a rotten tree.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


we literally had exactly that




We never had this. The conservative ecosystem has never had something that was as consistently high-quality and as consistently central to the conversation (even only among conservatives) as the NYT.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Eh. This is like claiming people who enjoyed traveling and being perceived as "worldly" would have been devastated by the internet allowing anyone to chat with strangers from 1000 miles away with minimal friction. Was that a thing? Plausibly maybe, but I don't recall much to that effect.


As someone who bases his identity a decent chunk around being intelligent, I'm not too worried. It turns out that a lot of it was implicitly graded "relative to other humans". I'm not to worried that calculators can do mental math better than me for instance. And smart people will be able to leverage AI much more effectively than dumb ones. We can already see that in stuff like education: AI is easily one of the best tools for learning that has ever been invented, but it's also one of the best tools to avoid learning as well. Naturally curious people will gravitate to the former on important topics, while less curious people will gravitate to the latter and suffer long-term costs from it.


It's highly unlikely that the value from human intelligence is going to 0 any time soon. If anything, AI could plausibly increase it rather than decrease it.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Why Has Enforcement of Foundational Civic Rules Become Politically Costly?
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think there's some signal here, but there's several parts I find less convincing.


First, this is clearly AI written. I'm personally fine with that, but the blatantness could be offputting to some.


I buy the central story that multiculturalism became "sacralized" as you describe it. From a problem to be managed --> "this is a GOOD thing actually"
--> "this is literally who we are, how dare you criticize it, BIGOT!!!"


I'm less convinced that this is a good overall framework to evaluate institutions/empires. Your other examples are pretty weak -- you can squint and make the case that they fit, but all grand theories can do that, and yours has to squint pretty hard.


    

  • For Rome, you vastly overestimate the centrality of conquest to legitimacy. Expansion was what successful empires did up until 1945. There was some amount of normative buy-in for that during Augustan times, but legitimacy in Republican times had a decent emphasis on civic virtue, while the later empire had an emphasis on stuff like maintaining the grain supply, keeping the army paid and loyal, and charismatic authority. The Roman Empire stopped doing big conquests for the most part, yet still endured for centuries. It was even acceptable to abandon huge sections if they were hard to control (e.g. Germania, Dacia, Mesopotamia). Then of course there was the Byzantine Empire that flourished for a millenium after the West had fallen.
    • 

  • For the USSR, the problem with Communism was the fact that it was Communism. Its problems were baked in from the start, and the only reasons it lasted for decades is 1) because Russia was a rising power beforehand which meant Communism had buffer to do a lot of damage without being fatal, and 2) it abandoned big chunks of Communist principles at various points.
    • 





The framework has a distinctive property: it predicts the suppression of its own articulation.




Careful with this line of logic. Statements like this tend to degenerate into "anyone who disagrees is actually just proving my theory even more correct!"




The framework is not unfalsifiable. It can be disproven by answering a single question: Why has enforcement of foundational civic principles become politically costly, and can you explain that without referencing the dynamic identified in this framework?




This isn't really a falsification. A falsification would look like "If we observe Y under conditions C, the theory is false.". Instead, this is "If you can’t produce an explanation of X that I accept, my theory survives." That’s not falsification, it’s inference-to-best-explanation with the judge being the author.


Also, "politically costly" is doing too much work here. In liberal democracies, enforcement of almost anything is costly when it touches identity or distribution conflict. If "pushback, moralization, fear of delegitimization" counts as "political cost," then virtually any contentious enforcement automatically looks like sacralization even when ordinary coalition politics or rights-conflict explains it. The framework risks defining its core claim ("sacralization makes enforcement costly") in a way that absorbs common democratic dynamics as proof.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'd agree National Review is fairly decent. The problem is its place in the Republican ecosystem. The fact its been willing to criticize Trump has made it a persona non grata to a lot of the MAGA-dominated modern Right. By contrast the NYT remains firmly centered in the left-leaning info sphere.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I feel like we have a lot of differences in our definitions here:


    

  • Desantis was certainly not the only Republican to combat wokeness. Are you referring to him trying to build an entire alternative ecosystem here?
    • 

  • I would not call peak woke as being the "height of the centrist wing of the Democrats' power" by any means. "Power" to me means the ability to implement the change you want vs. the change someone else wants. Biden may have been President, but he had woke staffers running roughshod over a lot of policies both in theory and in practice.
    • 

  • Trump's victory accelerated the process of woke burnout that was already occurring. It was not the cause, it was the death-knell.
    • 



				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I agree with you on all points. The reason the Right can't produce a quality competitor is that it has a demand issue rather than a supply issue. The parties have increasingly sorted by educational attainment which correlates with intelligence, but it's not like everyone on the Right is a moron. You only need like a dozen or so good journalists to start an institution. But the Right lacks an ecosystem that punishes partisan slop, so you have a few genuinely good writers blogging in the wilderness (like Arctotherium, who I'm a fan of) while the Right mainstream gets clowns like Shirley and podcasting fools like Tucker, Candace, and Rogan dominating the conversation.


Capturing institutions is particularly valuable when there are large network effects like Twitter, and I agree that Musk's takeover was a huge coup for the Right. I don't think it's quite as hard to build a competitor to the NYT by comparison.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It doesn't need to be impartial enough to win over deranged leftists, just enough of the center that people like myself or Scott or Bryan Caplan or Richard Hanania or Nate Silver could look at it and see a relatively competitive alternative. The easiest niche would be on identity topics since the MSM is quite bad on those, but right-leaning news is also terrible so we're in a "pick your poison" environment on that issue. On most other topics the NYT is good enough that it can generally be trusted within terms of bounded distrust that reading it will be a lot better than the average right wing news source, which at this point isn't so much Fox News as it is Tucker, Candace, and Rogan.