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magic9mushroom

If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me

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joined 2022 September 10 11:26:14 UTC
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magic9mushroom


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me

				
				
				

				

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				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 16, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
As a separate point:




Finally, you accuse him of being a propagandist. On what basis?




We know Bret Devereaux is a propagandist because he publically boasts about his skill at it. I haven't read his whole blog, so he may have mentioned it elsewhere as well, but the two obvious admissions I've read are The Practical Case on Why We Need the Humanities and especially On Public Scholarship.


Relevant excerpts from the former:




The other thing we ask students to do, beyond merely encountering these things is to use them to practice argumentation, to reason soundly, to write well, to argue persuasively about them.






What is being taught here is thus a detached, careful form of analysis and decision-making and then a set of communication skills to present that information. Phrased another way: a student is being trained – whatever branch of specialist knowledge they may develop in the future – on how to serve as an advisor (who analyzes information and presents recommendations) or as a leader (who makes and then explains decisions to others).


And it should come thus as little surprise that these skills – a sense of empathy, of epistemic humility, sound reasoning and effective communication – are the skills we generally look for in effective leaders. Because, fundamentally, the purpose of formal education in the humanities, since the classical period, was as training in leadership.




And the latter:




The first is a question of presentation style: good public engagement should feel more like a (good) lecture than a conference paper. That can be tricky when writing for traditional media publications because you have a point you are trying to make and a sharp word limit in which to make it, but the idea remains the same: you are mostly aiming to build a base of knowledge for a reader with little grounding in your topic and then – in a persuasive or argumentative piece – perch an argument on top of that basis of knowledge. Looking at my own public-facing writing outside of ACOUP, I have a fairly standard structure that I start with: in the first couple of paragraphs I introduce a current issue and a historical analog which can help us think about it. Then I spent the middle of the piece (generally the largest chunk), explaining what the historical analog is, because of course most readers don’t know what the auxilia were, or who Peisistratos was or any of that. I am building the basis of historical knowledge in my reader, introducing the facts I need them to know in order for my conclusion (which is about the current issue, not the historical analog) to make sense.






Next, do not pretend that activism is public engagement. This is, I know, a hard pill for a lot of academics to swallow, but the medicine is necessary. Public engagement is how you build support for the field; activism is how you spend support for the field. Yet the two are often conflated; spending is not saving. Now do not misunderstand me: activism that comes from a place of scholarly expertise is valuable and important but it will not save the humanities because it spends down public support. If we want our activism to have any real meaning or impact, we have to put in the time to build the public support for our expertise first. Part of the problem I think we find ourselves in is that many academic fields have frankly spent a lot of time making activism withdrawals from the bank of public support but almost no time making engagement deposits and now the accumulated savings of centuries are spent.






There’s a sense in which all of the other content on this site – the ironworking, logistics, Lord of the Rings stuff and so on – is building up my ledger so that when I do want to make a point about the field or about contemporary events, I have that basis of expertise and frankly the forbearance of my audience to do it.






Finally, there is tone. Effective public engagement, like any kind of public communication, requires constructing a public-facing persona that is going to be part your authentic self and part strategic communication. I know for some academics the need to do that emotional labor (in its original meaning) is going to be distasteful, but it is an unavoidable part of actually successfully reaching the public outside of one’s own echo chamber. And frankly, this is hardly the only job that demands that sort of emotional labor (or the only part of an academic job that does!) and I do not think that the fancy letters next to my name make me any better than the Starbucks barista who has to smile to random customers even when they aren’t feeling it.6 Likewise, acting in ways you do not feel is just about the foundational skill of leadership: a good leader looks confident, even when concerned, corrects carefully in private even when angry, praises openly even when envious. Some emotional labor is not beneath me.


In terms of the tone that works, I suggest aiming for a mix of enthusiastic, sincere, cheerful and charitable, an almost Ned Flanders-esque good-natured gee-golly-gosh level of sincerity. It helps communicate enthusiasm for the material – your audience will never be more excited about your material than you seem to be – and avoids the trap of ironic detachment (if you don’t really care or only like this stuff ironically, why should they care or like it sincerely?).


Remember that the goal is to reach an audience and bring them around, at least a little bit, to seeing your subject the way you do (in particular with the excitement you do, more than with the perspective you do). No audience was ever really persuaded by condescension, which is a real risk in relentlessly negative communication. A degree of critique is fun, but if all you ever do is ‘debunk’ on increasingly more pedantic points (or use your platform for academic score-settling on technical points), it is going to be hard to keep an audience – especially because that kind of approach can easily become condescending and condescension is poison. Likewise, if you spend your time making it clear to your audience that you kind of hate them and what they believe, you aren’t going to reach them. Especially in an online context where the audience is likely to be international, there are going to be a lot of different value systems and worldviews in your audience: if you can only communicate respectfully with people who share all of your beliefs, you will struggle to engage the public which does not live in your echo chamber.




This guy is proud of his skill with the Dark Arts. He thinks they're valuable and awesome. Whether his writing makes heavy use of them is settled in the affirmative. It is true that ad hominem is a fallacy, and that points Devereaux raises may in fact be correct. But to call him a propagandist is no accusation; it's just stating a fact.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 16, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


If hard times make strong men inevitable, then the places experiencing the hardest times should be the places producing the strongest men, and by the meme’s own implication, the most formidable military actors.




There are other factors in play beyond the cycle. The ironman of this argument isn't really talking about barbarians from bumfuckistan being supermen who conquer everything. There's a weakman that does, but the ironman is Secular Cycles; approximately every 300 years (maybe less more recently), regional hegemons have periods of weakness due to internal conflict*, which may or may not utterly destroy them. Rome had roughly four cycles (the Kingdom, Republic, Principate and Dominate) and it pulled through the first three crises (including the civil wars of the Triumvirates at the end of the Republic, and the Crisis of the Third Century at the end of the Principate) bruised but intact.


The prediction of this ironman is not that Afghanistan will conquer the USA; it's that the USA is going to suffer internal unrest - most centrally, a civil war - which will knock it out of hegemon status and greatly reduce the power it can exert internationally (and mean very-bad times for its citizens). To some extent (though far from fully), this has already happened; I'm not confident the full civil war will actually happen, but one of the main ways I can see that it wouldn't is if the lower-level stumbling is enough to trigger WWIII (with approximately-equally-devastating consequences for those living in the USA).


Do note also that the strength of a great power is not maximised in the "Hard Times, Strong Men" phase. It's maximised in the (much longer) "Strong Men, Good Times" phase - the obvious current example being the PRC, which did have hard times in the first half of the twentieth century.


*As I said in a previous post:




I think perhaps instead of weak men, it would be more correct to say bad men, as you seem to run with later in your post. I think a more central way to look at it is the one Zvi identified in his Immoral Mazes Sequence; good times allow and to some degree require intermediation of reality by social systems, enabling negative-sum extractive enterprises exploiting the mismatch between what's legible and what's true, which (may) eventually consume more than all of the societal surplus leading to collapse (which then resets the maze level, as mazes are not viable in unintermediated reality).




To put it another way, lack of external threats eventually leads people to start competing internally rather than presenting a united front; notably, this takes longer than a human lifetime because virtuous traditions can be passed on for some time, but eventually you wind up with extractive elements (current Western examples would include social media platforms, the related advertising industry and to some extent the finance industry) and internal political division (the Blue Tribe and Red Tribe hate each other more than they hate external threats like the PRC and Russia) - the latter exacerbated by the former. Eventually everything falls through, reality reasserts itself, the extractive elements either starve or get executed, the political divisions end one way or another, and the cycle starts over.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 16, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


the moon rotates around the Earth rather than being pulled in toward the sun,




It's... complicated. The solar gravity on Luna is actually greater than the terran gravity, so that Luna's orbit around Sol is convex (it does not curve away from Sol when it's between Sol and Terra at a new moon, the way that the Jovian or Martian moons do).




And the answer is, they are being pulled in, but inertia, momentum, and other forces are more powerful at the moment and thus obscuring the particular model.




Inertia and momentum aren't forces. The mistake is related to inertia, though, and specifically due to the fact that human intuition expects attractive forces to result in collisions due to the nonconservative forces of air resistance and friction which prevent stable orbits; those forces (mostly) don't exist in space, so gravity attracting things doesn't usually result in a collision.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 16, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I can take credit for the phrase, but not the idea; as noted, the idea is from Zvi (that sentence is essentially a summary of this post in that sequence).


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 16, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


This formulation not only seems obviously consonant with my understanding of history, but the reasons why it should be so likewise seem obvious: Good times impose reduced consequences on weak men for their weakness, and greatly reduce the amount of free energy by which strong men might exercise their strength.




I think perhaps instead of weak men, it would be more correct to say bad men, as you seem to run with later in your post. I think a more central way to look at it is the one Zvi identified in his Immoral Mazes Sequence; good times allow and to some degree require intermediation of reality by social systems, enabling negative-sum extractive enterprises exploiting the mismatch between what's legible and what's true, which (may) eventually consume more than all of the societal surplus leading to collapse (which then resets the maze level, as mazes are not viable in unintermediated reality).


Agree with your characterisaion of Devereaux, though.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 9, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Varies; varies; women, presumably.


I'm not sure exactly when I started strongly wanting babies, but it would have been late twenties at the latest.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for February 13, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
We have an epidemic of open-source software smart enough to use social engineering techniques and almost certainly hostile to humanity, and that's funny?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 9, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Nobody really believes a twenty-two year old man wants to settle down and pump out babies every year with his fifteen year old wife




I don't understand. Lots of men want babies.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for February 13, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Why did you post this in the fun thread?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for February 13, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
That's my understanding. I know some cyanide-bearing seeds get through mostly unabsorbed unless damaged (e.g. from putting them in a blender, or chewing them), but I don't know whether apple seeds are one of them and eating any amount of cyanide isn't a great idea.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Transnational Thursday for February 12, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Oh hey, here's a fun one.


So yeah, these laws are terrible and judges do convict on them. However, it should be noted that police forces don't generally come after you for them. I'm not 100% sure what got this lady punished - seems to have been public pressure on the police from operating commercially and getting noticed - but fanfic authors/readers and VN pirates are generally pretty safe (I wouldn't try to bring VN packages through customs, though).


Citation: four years ago I full-doxxed myself and publically confessed to possessing like 12 illegal VNs and having written an erotic Madoka Magica fanfic, and I wasn't even questioned let alone charged.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for February 13, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
You can eat the arctic and antarctic zones from the side as well, though it might depend somewhat on the type of apple (Red Delicious would make this difficult due to the thick skin and mushy flesh, but there are plenty of firmer, thinner-skinned varieties).


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 9, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I'm not actually sure if there's anyone in the world who does the latter, it would imply a very weird outlook where ability to change one's social gender is some sort of… revocable privilege? By and large, "anyone can change their pronouns" vs "no one can change their pronouns" is a binary debate, nuance vs zealotry is a question of what else someone in the former camp believes falls under the umbrella of inalienable trans rights.




I don't really do it based on morality, but I've generally been a lot more hesitant to swap pronouns (among the legitimate three; I utterly refuse to use singular-they or neopronouns) if someone's obviously acting erratic and crazy (given the likelihood that said person is not, in fact, stably trans).


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Note that in most of the USA, the age of consent actually is 16 or 17. The meme that it's 18 is from a combination of 1) California has 18, and makes most US media, 2) a bunch of other crimes do kick in at 18, just not statutory rape itself.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Mate attractiveness is mostly a relative good. Giving everyone a relative good doesn't have absolute effects.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Blackmail material is frequently of negative utility to the one with it, insofar as it gives a murder motive to the subject of the material.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


You claim it's not because of such attraction on your part, but pure devotion to scientific fact?




Devotion to liberty.


I don't believe I've ever said that there aren't 12-year-old girls that I find sexually attractive. I haven't said that because it'd be untrue; while I'm not a paedophile in the proper sense, there are some very-early bloomers out there and, indeed, postpubescence is all that's really needed for the normal male gaze to approve. However, I have no intention of pursuing them in that fashion, and this is not related to my opposition to the current Anglospheric ages of consent.


Do you realise that you've set up epistemic closure, here? If someone says that he wants to lower the AoC because he wants to fuck kids, you count him as part of your "every time". If someone says the opposite, you count him as a liar and still as part of "every time". That's not an algorithm that depends on what the truth actually is; regardless of the evidence, you'll simply become more sure of yourself.


I actually suggest you take a look through my post history. See if I'm really the sort to lie about myself.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Every. God. Damn. Time.




Either you've got a lousy memory, or you're calling me a liar.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
You can cover that with child labour laws.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Making a vaccine or a cure would work. That's what removed syphilis, gonorrhea, and hepatitis as problem STDs.


(Technically, there already is a cure for HIV - bone marrow transplant from someone with CCR5-Δ32 - but that cure is useless because either you take such doses of immunosuppressants that you effectively have AIDS anyway, or you get graft vs. host disease and die even quicker. I mean a useful cure.)


EDIT: I've seen some reports that getting a bone marrow transplant from someone without the mutation, and getting graft vs. host disease, might also work. Still not a useful cure.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


As such, there's almost no political appetite for increasing the age of consent.




I think you mean "decreasing".


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
IMO you do need an AoC, although the argument that sways me is contingent on the AIDS pandemic. Specifically, consent without knowing about HIV isn't fully informed, which means you need sex ed, which means you can't have 5-year-olds consenting to sex because lol good luck getting them to comprehend sex ed.


16-18 is way too high, though. If teens are lying about their ages to get sex, your AoC is too high. Sex ed for preteens and AoC at 13-14 is what I support. And if you get rid of AIDS I'd be willing to abolish it - it's the only one left that is a big deal (the rest are either curable, vaccinable, or so minor nobody really cares).


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Maybe some hacker stole Epstein's Fortnite account after he died? Seems like a really-bad idea, but still more plausible than him being alive. I would still tend toward the "coincidence" explanation, myself.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I find it hard to believe you don't "get" this.




Guy's not posted here much, and SJ doesn't always advertise the full strategy. I can believe he hadn't quite worked it out.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


genuine misogynists who think women have the intellectual fortitude of children




I think that's an exaggeration. I see... four?... major positions here that could be called sexist, although only two of them even somewhat merit the term "misogynist".


    

  1. 

    "Women tend to prefer and/or be good at languages, soft science and pink-collar fields including homemaking; men tend to prefer and/or be good at STEM. So if STEM jobs slew heavily male and the others heavily female, that's not evidence of heinous discrimination, just biology." (I wouldn't call this misogynist.)
    

    2. 

  2. 

    "We need birth rate to replenish our species, and it is not very good for birth rate for women to normally not settle down until their late twenties or thirties, due to the unforgiving timetable of menopause." (I wouldn't call this misogynist; proposed solutions to the bad norm vary wildly in objectionability, though.)
    

    3. 

  3. 

    "Women's intuitive preferences for how to resolve problems and conflict are different than men's, and it so happens that the male pattern works better as large-scale policy."
    

    4. 

  4. 

    "Due to women being better at emotional manipulation than men - including but not limited to the 'woman's tasp' - formal equality and a state monopoly on force tend to produce actual inequality in women's favour."
    

    5. 



None of these rely on "women hav[ing] the intellectual fortitude of children". Not saying I'm 100% sold on any of them, and particularly not saying I'm sold on the usually-proposed policy solutions, but AFAICT you're beating up a strawman.