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shamgar

Unrepentant Robophobe

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joined 2023 August 05 09:48:22 UTC 

				
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shamgar


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				
Unrepentant Robophobe

				
				
				

				

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					joined 2023 August 05 09:48:22 UTC
				


				
					

					
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				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 6, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Yeah I was thinking mostly of trans stuff when I said that. I agree with you that our culture is very hypocritical and incoherent when it comes to this, which is the very tension I was trying to point out. Which is why the very sentence after the one you quote says:




Ironically the same people who make such accusation often have little issue with telling bodybuilders on gear or transhumanists that they are insane and should accept their natural body (which is correct in my opinion, I'd just like them to extend this to gender related transhumanism as well).




I'm happy to add ugly men to that list (or ugly women when they can't frame their vanity as transgressive feminism trying to dismantle the patriarchy trying to control their sexuality or something like that). I have no clue what your personal struggles were of course, but I will say fixing some sort of obvious deformity or a scar or something to me is qualitatively very different than trying to look like another gender, trying to look half your age or trying to have cartoon action figure musculature or unnatural gigantic boobs or something. Depending on the specifics I might well still come down on the "make peace with the body you were given" side, but I have much more sympathy for somebody who feels insecure about some unattractive feature of their body and just wants to look normal, compared to people who want to look like a transhuman abomination.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 6, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
There is a strange tension in contemporary western culture. On the one hand we are bombarded with platitudes about how the good life consists of being free to be yourself, i.e. the postmodern ethic of self-actualization. On the other hand when your desires clash with who you actually are in reality and you for instance end up with body dysphoria, we are told that if you think people should be themselves, you are a horrible reactionary bigot and paradoxically get accused of not letting people be themselves. Ironically the same people who make such accusation often have little issue with telling bodybuilders on gear or transhumanists that they are insane and should accept their natural body (which is correct in my opinion, I'd just like them to extend this to gender related transhumanism as well).


I think a key to understanding this problem is that there is an unspoken assumption that your true self is primarily to be found in your desires. This is interestingly a complete inversion of the more negative view of the "passions" which most premodern Western thinkers had (both pagan and Christian). Traditionally passions are considered to be fleeting, unstable and for a good life one needs to learn how to control the passions lest the passions control you. I don't know much about eastern thought, but my superficial stereotype of Buddhism also includes a negative view of the passions. Much philosophical work has been done and is being done with regards to the question of what a self is or whether a self even exists and I will not make a judgment on that question in this comment, but at least I agree with the ancients that the passions are a particularly implausible and silly candidate for locating one's self.


This unspoken interpretation of self-actualization as maximally indulging ones passions is in my opinion the cause of much of the cultural woes of contemporary Western society. Passions being fleeting, unstable and insatiable, it is no coincidence that our culture is reaching ever sillier ways of actualizing ones true self. "The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing". Once we get people telling us that amputating perfectly healthy parts of their body is the only way they will ever be able to really be themselves or pursuing literal vampirism to extend oneself throughout time, we should maybe pause and think what on earth went wrong in our culture. I believe to recover from this madness we need to regain a sense of some sort of human nature and when our passions point at things that are at odds with human nature, one's true self is to be found in human nature and not in said passions. Things only get their beauty and meaning and identity from their place as a part of a meaningful whole. In other words, we need to recover the value of limits, moderation and propriety, but limits are anathema to a Left that seeks to emancipate us from all hierarchy and a Techno-Right that wants to move fast and break things.


From the Centuries of Meditations by Thomas Traherne:


"His Power bounded, greater is in might,

Than if let loose, ‘twere wholly infinite.

He could have made an endless sea by this,

But then it had not been a sea of bliss.

Did waters from the centre to the skies

Ascend, ’twould drown whatever else we prize.

The ocean bounded in a finite shore,

Is better far because it is no more.

No use nor glory would in that be seen,

His power made it endless in esteem.

Had not the Sun been bounded in its sphere,

Did all the world in one fair flame appear,

And were that flame a real Infinite

’Twould yield no profit, splendor, nor delight.

Its corps confined, and beams extended be

Effects of Wisdom in the Deity.

One star made infinite would all exclude,

An earth made infinite could ne’er be viewed:

But one being fashioned for the other’s sake,

He, bounding all, did all most useful make

And which is best, in profit and delight

Tho’ not in bulk, they all are infinite."


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 6, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Yeah and also there is a surprising amount of overlap between the people who think AI is going to plausibly kill us all and the people actually involved in building cutting edge AI.


"Hey guys ASI is an existential risk. Btw have checked out this new model we've made, it's so awesome we're going to get ASI any day now."


Hmmm all the normies think we're either insane or evil or both. Wherever could they have gotten that idea?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 6, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I used to be firmly on the side of Brave New World being the relevant dystopia novel for our world rather than 1984. I've recently reread the space trilogy and I am forced to come to the conclusion that if half of what the techno-capitalists dreamed up turns out to be more than a power fantasy by a bunch of delusional nerds, the Space trilogy might turn out to be the best literary description of the evil facing us presently.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 22, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Do you think Christians should completely abstain from politics? In the end somebody has to run the country and I cannot imagine a version of Christianity that doesn't at least espouse some values that will inform how Christians think a country ought to be run. If you think Christians should completely abstain from politics, what do you think Constantine or Clovis should have done after converting to Christianity? How should a country be governed when almost all of its citizens profess Christianity, like most Western countries up until quite recently?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 22, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I can never understand the trad Christian love for the Russian state as some enabler of Christian virtue - it's really really not the case.




My experience as a European member of a conservative church is that this is mostly an online and political phenomenon and doesn't represent people who actually go to Church. It might be different in the USA, I don't have any info on the ground from over there, but over here in the Netherlands right wing populist politicians will exhibit sometimes the trad love for Russia and they will make some vague remarks about our country being Christian or whatever, but none of those politicians actually go to Church and if you push them all of them will admit they are cultural Christians and don't actually believe any traditional Christian dogmas. Just like you can get more liberal politicians to sometimes dress up progressive politics with vaguely Christian language about love or whatever, the right wing populists will dress up their anti Muslim sentiment with some vague rhetoric about us being a traditionally Christian nation or whatever. In both cases it is just superficial rhetoric trying to appeal to some cultural memes and doesn't really mean anything. In practice, people who vote for those parties mostly don't actually attend Church regularly and people who do attend Church regularly almost never vote for those parties. Maybe in other countries actual trads are more tempted to vote for the right wing populist parties as the lesser evil, but in the Netherlands having no electoral threshold and proportional representation in our parliament, we are spoiled with not just one, but two actual traditional Christian political parties and almost everybody who regularly attends a theologically conservative Church votes for them and both of these parties are not pro Russia.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 1, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I agree the NRx (or whatever label you want to slap on it) and Christianity are very much opposed and its a weird quirk of American politics that anybody would think otherwise.


Your framing of the issue is rather bizarre however. The way you talk about it, one would almost think that empathy and helping the poor and the vulnerable is some sort of leftist and progressive invention. In reality of course, Christianity has promoted these things since its inception more than 1500 years before anything that can be meaningfully called 'leftism' or 'progressivism' ever enters the scene. It would be more accurate in my opinion to state something like leftism took a Christian virtue and isolated it from the rest of the Christian worldview and rather predictably ended up in a rather unbalanced and silly place. Recognizing this silliness in the leftist project, the alt-right/NRx/whatever simply completed the process of the secularist revolution and threw out the last remaining bit of the moral order of Christendom.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 1, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think pro-life people are typically opposed to IVF exactly because of the reason you point out.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 25, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
"AI is an existential risk and that's a good thing actually" sure is one hell of a take. Although to be fair, I think this type of misanthropic techno-millenarianism is in the end nothing but the inherent telos of transhumanism or even just of the techno-capitalist "technology is going to solve all our problems" vibe. While I despise your ideology, I can at least applaud your honesty. Rather than the Straussian world-salad of somebody like Thiel or sugar coated scifi dreams of a lot of techbros, you at least have the clarity of mind to see where your ideas lead and the guts to say the quiet part out loud.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Weekly Finance Thread
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Can the wordcells of the Motte come up with an alliteration for the title of a weekly finance thread on Saturday, to make it fit in with the other weekly threads? Maybe Solvency Saturday?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Converting to Catholicism
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Hmm I confess that while I've heard about Suarez being an important thinker at the time, I'm not super familiar with him. I wasn't aware he had significant influence in the Reformed world. I know for instance Gisbertus Voetius, who is one of the most influential theologians in the 17th century in the Netherlands, explicitly defended Aristotelian philosophy against Cartesian philosophy, including also specifically on metaphysics arguing against the extreme nominalism of Cartesian philosophy. But yeah maybe I need to moderate my claim then to saying that the majority of orthodox reformed theologians were realists instead of calling it "pretty much universal". Thanks for providing a counter example to my claim!


In any case, Suarez himself was a Roman-Catholic so at least with regards to differences between Roman-Catholicism and the Reformed tradition I think it is fair to say that metaphysics is not an area of conflict between confessional Protestantism and Roman-Catholicism.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Converting to Catholicism
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


How does God work and will (1)? Does God have a an array of potential actions, any of which he can actualize? Yet this runs the risk of these potential actions being "outside" God. Does God create the potentials as he actualizes them? Thus no "possibles" exist for God, simply "actuals"? This also could be seen as a constraint on God and limit his radical freedom. Both these potential concepts of God’s will and freedom (of which I’m sure there are hundreds of alternative concepts) seem to be operating at a level above how Barron conceptualizes God’s freedom. Put crassly, Barron seems to be hinting that God could not "make a triangle a square", that is, that God is constrained by logical impossibilities. But this is such a small view of God. God creates our minds and universe. Our minds invent or discover things like logic, or define things like squares or circles. Whether spawned by our intellect or embedded in the structure of the cosmos, these concepts (including logic!) are part of Creation itself. God created the conditions under which we can model physical reality with math, structure, and logic. Logic is a model. Logos is Truth. Logic is created. Logos is the Creator.




I'm a bit late to the party, but having just gotten around to reading this post, this stood out to me. Personally I feel like saying "God cannot make a square triangle" does not diminish God's omnipotence at all, nor does it entail some sort of Logic that exists independent of God to which God is beholden. A "square triangle" is simply not a thing in any sense whatsoever, so saying "God cannot make a square triangle" does not entail saying there is a thing God cannot do. Any triangular object can be made into a square object by God, but then by definition it ceases to be triangular. If the words "triangle" and "square" refer to something real, "square triangle" cannot refer to something real. To be clear, I'm not suggesting "triangle" and "square" refer to uncreated things that exist independent of God, I'm simply suggesting that they are real things and that this necessarily suggests "square triangle" is nonsensical sequence of symbols. Saying "God cannot make a square triangle" is identical to saying "God cannot make a weiuytrni". I suppose if somebody would ask me "Can God make a square triangle?" I would reply by saying that question is incoherent rather than saying "no". But if somebody asks me "Can God make something that is logically impossible?" I will definitely answer "no", because I believe logical impossibilities are incoherent nonsense.


To the best of my understanding, my view is simply metaphysical realism and the vast majority of Roman Catholics (very much including Barron), Eastern Orthodox and confessional Protestants are all metaphysical realists and this is not an area of contention between these traditions. Some Catholic apologists have claimed Luther was a metaphysical nominalist because he was taught in university by nominalists, but Luther doesn't write a lot about philosophy and he writes very negatively about the scholasticism he knows from his own education. And besides that, once we get a more fleshed out Lutheran and Reformed tradition in the period of Protestant Orthodoxy, both Lutheran and Reformed theologians are pretty much universally metaphysical realists as far as I know.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 6, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Well, I had higher expectations of the USA than Iran personally. Makes sense to me people would find such rhetoric coming from the POTUS more notable than similar rhetoric coming from a mob in a third world country or from a notorious extremist theocracy.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 30, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
This Pew research report suggests almost everybody in Poland has a negative view of Russia.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


The hatred between the Turks and the Armenians is now so intense that we have got to finish with them. If we don't, they will plan their revenge.




That's a quote from Talaat Pasha, who has been called the architect of the Armenian genocide. In some sense he was not wrong. After the war Armenians systematically assassinated a bunch of Ottomon war criminals involved in the genocide, including Pasha himself. Pasha was murdered in Berlin where he lived after the war. His Armenian killer said during the trial "I do not consider myself guilty because my conscience is clear…I have killed a man. But I am not a murderer." The German court proceeded the acquit him from murder.


"Okay maybe we started an unjust war, but now we have to finish our killing otherwise they might take revenge" might well be a factually correct statement, but it isn't going to get you a lot of sympathy.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 16, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Well, I've used plenty of windows and unfortunately still have to use it for my job and I've been using Ubuntu for ~15 years now and I guess we just have very different preferences. It's not that I've never had issues with Linux that would have been solved by using Windows, but all those issues stem from people making software for Windows rather than Linux, not some inherent issue of Linux itself. I also feel like Ubuntu/Linux and just the whole suite of common opensource software around it has improved significantly in recent years. Although to be fair we were talking about Windows 7, not the current situation. Admittedly maybe my current positive experiences with Linux and negative experiences with Microsoft have biased me a little bit when looking at the past. I've always had a strong preference for basic, clean, minimalistic software, which does what I tell it to and nothing more has always made me prefer Linux over Windows. But in recent years the feature bloat and the clunky annoying UI of Microsoft - not just in the OS but in every single piece of software they make - has really been out of control. I feel zero temptation to ever switch back to Windows currently.


As for mac, I've never used it. It's probably fine, but the fact it runs on overpriced devices and tries to get you locked-in on a bunch of Apple hardware and software is enough for me to have never seriously considered using it.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 16, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
If we imagine a possible world where Linux was widely adopted so that all common software ran out of the box on both Linux and Windows, are there any advantages that remain for Windows 7 over a contemporary Linux distro with a straightforward GUI (say Ubuntu)?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 9, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
To some extent I feel like all big cultural events are getting less relevant. Modern terminally online people are increasingly isolated from a shared culture and live in their own little bubbles. Of course random online niches can have some sort of culture, but traditional national or international massive cultural events which pretty much everyone is exposed to, are increasingly a thing of the past.


That being said, that process is of course far from finished and there are plenty of big relevant cultural events left and in the Netherlands that definitely includes the winter Olympics. At least if you correct for the general trend I mentioned above, I don't feel like it has decreased in significance over here at all. A quick check of the all-time medal table for speed skating at the Olympics will reveal why it is a big event in the Netherlands. Or well, the causality presumably runs the other way with speedskating always having been a massive sport in the Netherlands. Speed skating gets prominent coverage in the Netherlands outside of the Olympics as well and successful speed skaters are massive mainstream celebrities over here.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Tolkien, Chesterton and presumably @PyotrVerkhovensky actually think Christianity is true. You seem to be talking about Christianity as if it is a means to an end. An end which you coincidentally don't state anywhere, leaving you open to accusations of nihilism. The people you are trying to convince that Christianity doesn't work to achieve their goals, have Christianity itself as their goal. I don't think your disagreement is about whether Christianity is currently 'working' or not, but about what end we should be working towards. Chesterton et al. are bemoaning the fact that what they believe to be good is getting further and further out of reach and your reply appears to be "ah, but that good is getting further and further away, therefore it can't be good!". I believe "pornography is morally evil" to be an objectively true statement, just like I believe "1+1=2" is an objectively true statement. Whether modern westerners watch porn and whether they are good at arithmetic or not, does not change anything about those beliefs.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 26, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
So far I have only seen planning ones. However the planning ones show Musk asking whether he can visit and one of them has Elon asking when the "wildest party" will be, when discussing a date for his visit. So unless I'm missing something here or these documents are fabricated, the idea that it was Epstein taking initiative and Elon always refused seems demonstrably a lie, because we have emails with Elon asking whether he can visit.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 26, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It looks like there's serious dirt on Bill Gates and Elon Musk at least. The funniest possible timeline is if Trump of all people has no credible evidence against him, but like every other elite from the USA on both sides of the political aisle does. So far I've only seen the non-credible witness stuff with regards to Trump, but I understand there are literally millions of files so who knows what will turn up in the coming days.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 26, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Elon Musk previously claimed Epstein tried to get him to go to the island but Elon refused.


However, Elon appears in the Epstein files asking to go to the island. Some back and forth emails to pick a date for the visit, so it looks like he did go there and again rather than refusing to go, he requested to go there himself. Multiple times actually.


Here's Elon in 2012 (reminder, that's after Epstein had been convicted for procuring an underage prostitute) asking when the wildest party would be.


Here's Elon again a year later with some back and forth planning a date for another visit.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Wellness Wednesday for January 28, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
"Modern liberalism"


Don't really understand how that one rolled out, that's certainly not how I see myself. One thing which always causes problems for me in this type of political tests is that I want both centralised government and the marketplace to have less influence than they do now in western society. What I want instead is more civil society and local communities and institutions that aren't run (directly) by a big centralised government. To be fair, the third best match which this test gave me was Distributism which is more in the ballpark of the kind of politics I want.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 19, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Interesting point. I've thought about it a little and two ideas come to mind.


First, I think the broader definition of hedonism might end up being unfalsifiable. Let's say that people value status as some sort of more sophisticated form of hedonic pleasure over things like sex and drugs, which I think is a reasonable idea. How in this scenario does anybody value anything over hedonism? Presumably whatever one values, if you achieve it, it will bring you pleasure. If every possible good one can value is accompanied by a pleasurable experience and we suggest that what people really want is the pleasurable experience rather than the good itself, how can there ever be a situation where somebody can't be assumed to be a hedonist? Given these assumptions, hedonism seems almost definitionally true.


Second, on further thought I think the experience machine thought experiment actually does manage to solve the problem of my first point. If one is motivated primarily by the experience of status, presumably the experience machine will bring about that experience as well. So if the in the thought experiment we know we would have a perfect experience of being high status without knowing that it is false, but nevertheless we reject that experience because we think it is low status, I think it still amounts to choosing actual high status over an experience of high status, thus rendering the person who makes that choice not a hedonist. If the person in question truly values the hedonic pleaure of being high status above all, why not get into the experience machine to perfectly experience the hedonic pleasure of being high status?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 19, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
If people need to be convinced that the experience machine is high status in order to enter it, does that not prove that people value status over pleasure? It seems to me you are in agreement with Nozick, only you expand on his idea by suggesting a candidate for the thing which people value over hedonism.


For a culture war take, I reckon something like the experience machine is already in play in my opinion in the ever increasing part of our lives by swallowed up by the digital. From titillating 24/7 drama in the news and on social media to gaming and porn, a lot of it is not too far removed from the experience machine, providing continual stimulation, most of which is devoid from any meaning in the real world. The main difference is that this continual meaningless hedonic stimulation seems to not actually make people all that happy in the long run. And furthermore, people will often acknowledge it's fake and makes them miserable, and yet are unable to spend less time glued to their screen. Rather than voluntarily entering Nozick's experience machine, it's more like we placed unconsenting in a Skinner box by an egregore running the techno-capitilist establishment. Misaligned AGI is a scary scenario, but I'm afraid that the current leaders of our technological advancement are already misaligned to humanity's best interest. Whether we will achieve AGI or not, as long as our technology is made by the current crop of tech CEO's, the result will be something like a Matrix style dystopia where all of us are forced to watch adds as we move from one addictive pleasure to the next in a digital experience machine, whether we like it or not.