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VoxelVexillologist

Multidimensional Radical Centrist

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joined 2022 September 04 18:24:54 UTC 

				
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VoxelVexillologist


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				
Multidimensional Radical Centrist

				
				
				

				

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					joined 2022 September 04 18:24:54 UTC
				


				
					

					
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				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 12, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
IIRC humans can get theobromine poisoning, but the required dosages are such that it's a non-issue outside of small children and the elderly binging on chocolate.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 12, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Temperance




If you mean "temperance" as in "Women's Christian Temperance Union", I recall reading that Biden and Trump are both teetotalers, and that W. Bush stopped drinking before he ran for president.


Sadly, your conclusion about the other virtues seems well-founded.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 12, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I feel like one of the pitfalls of eugenics (then and now) is an assumption about what good genes even means (beyond Sydney Sweeney, apparently).  There seems to be a lot more agreement about bad genes:  see general consent on the borderline-eugenics of genetic counseling for various diseases, or the general acceptance of anti-incest rules.


You're probably right that Nazis lost out by dismissing a bunch of human capital and (over?)valuing blond hair and blue eyes, but I can't avoid thinking that statement is smuggling in some value judgements about what we should consider the ideal human form.  Sure, intelligence is generally valued, but I see a rather open-ended question about the relative merit of maximizing paperclips chess scores, baseball ability, or height that I'd personally prefer to defer answering.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 12, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I sometimes feel like we over-medicalize things in modern society: we want to defer "hard" ethical decisions to "experts", and doctors are some of our favorite experts.


I noticed this acutely when I was called for jury duty a while back (I was not selected), and voir dire included some questions about considering about applying a legal label ("sexually violent predator") that does have a very loosely defined medical component, and I could tell a tangible number of potential jurors really wanted to hide behind "what does a/the doctor think?" in terms of something the legislature, in it's great wisdom, deserved a jury trial rather than a medical panel.  Frankly, given the weight of the decision, I see why: there are plenty of horror stories of doctors involuntary committing people, and a jury seems a potentially-preferable way to evaluate such status.


There were also quite a few jurors that questioned their own fairness on the topic of heinous crimes.  I didn't get selected (the defense busted the panel, as it turned out), but am I weird in thinking that sometimes "fair" is, after carefully weighing the evidence of guilt, "throw the book at them"?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 12, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The Rwandan genocide managed a comparable body count with mostly machetes.  It seems more a matter of whether the regime's forces (who I'm sure have enough small arms) are choosing to use lethal force, either as a top-down policy or more local spontaneous decisionmaking.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 11, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I read this one recently: I liked it overall.  Without spoilers, I thought it interesting that the plot twist, to the extent there is one, struck me as very "of it's time" in how it reflects on the human condition, but in a way that I don't think could be written today because waves at culture war, nor would the conclusion be deemed quite as satisfactory in that light.  At the time, it was pretty well received by critics, too: an interesting display of shifting political winds.


I'd be curious to hear others' thoughts, though.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 11, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


is weak evidence towards that possibility,




My intuition is that "intelligence" actually has theoretical bounds we just haven't derived yet.  We haven't, IMO, defined what it is well enough to state this easily, but information theory broadly defines some adjacent bounds.  Also that real humans require orders of magnitude less training data --- how many books did Shakespeare read, and compare to your favorite LLM corpus --- which seems to mean something.


Also that at the scale of economics, "singularity" and "exponential growth" both look darn similar in the near-term, but almost all practical examples end up being the latter, not the former.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Whining about it strikes me as pathetic LARPing to some extent.




I'll give you to some extent, but non/semi-violent resistance as a strategy only works because the repression looks much worse in the public eye than the original resistance (see why American riot police don't use water cannons unlike plenty of other Western countries).  I'm not sure I fault political actors for trying to bring attention to such, but often it does feel like things are magnified hugely out of proportion ("Help, I'm being repressed!").  In this case someone died, and I'm not really inclined to call that "out of proportion" specifically, but I will point to the incentives here in that tangible repression was certainly being sought by at least some parties involved (the protest movement as a whole, for example).


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I assume leftists would be okay with protests against far-right (or far-right aligned) regimes.  But there aren't too many of those left: Pinochet and Franco are both long gone.  The closest you could get would be El Salvador or Argentina (not seeing huge protests recently, but not nothing), or Russia (not seeing huge protests, also historically complicated).  I would put Iran in that bucket too, but leftist sentiments on Islamic regimes are complicated (among other things: the right is happy about it, so they can't be). Some Israeli protests get leftist sympathies (anti-Bibi ones).


Some of this is just that they were so successful at the end of the last century that they have comparatively few nation-state enemies.  Frankly, the right doesn't have that many either.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


If Trump really wants it he can make a deal




My intuition here is that poor negotiating has soured his counterparties on the idea of deal making, and they weren't in a position to be looking for one anyway.  Denmark seems happy enough with the status quo, plus Trump is at least coming across as more than a bit of a jerk here: why should they be open to any offers at this point?


I felt the same way about the "merge with Canada" thing: maybe a good idea long term for all involved, but approached in a disrespectful manner that soured voices that needed to agree.  Hardly the work of a "master negotiator" unless you think that selling used cars is the pinnacle of such.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


North American indigenous people




Fun fact! The Norse settlement of Greenland predates the modern Inuit population, although the Norse population seems to have died out on its own (and there is evidence of a separate, even earlier culture unrelated to the other two).  I assume this is the basis of Denmark's original claim, but it's at least interesting in (technically) differing from the general "European power took land from natives" narrative.