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vorpa-glavo


				

				

				

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vorpa-glavo


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				

				
				
				

				

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					joined 2022 September 05 18:36:07 UTC
				


				
					

					
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				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 1, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I struggle to see how these individuals may square this perspective that sex work is valid, despite fitting the bill of objectification. Perhaps there is something I'm missing?




There are sex negative feminists who largely agree with you here. They tend to be anti-porn and anti-sex work.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 1, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Why do you think it would not work?


The guy who actually leaked Trump's taxes got fired and sentenced to 5 years in federal prison. It's not like Trump never gets fair court proceedings.


Heck, he's won a fair few cases in the Supreme Court during this presidency. I actually believe that if Trump had held the case in abeyance, he would have gotten a just outcome from genuinely adversarial proceedings, whatever that might have looked like.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 1, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Luckily, we live in a constitutional republic, so occasionally there are checks and balances on abuses of power by one of the three branches of government.


Doesn't mean that Trump isn't in charge of the executive branch. Just means that he doesn't get act like he's an absolute monarch who can do whatever he wants.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 1, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Is that wrong? Are there solid charities out there which are either apolitical or lean conservative which provide foreign aid, but were neglected by USAID in favor of some kind of nepotism?




The obvious place to look would be religious charities, wouldn't it?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 1, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Obama and Biden did the same thing dozens of times, for totals far higher than the current fund, for more spurious reasons.




The main difference for Obama and Biden era sue and settle, was that that the people footing the bill for the slush funds were private companies, or where there were large payouts from the taxpayers, congress voted and approved it.


The Trump situation is the current president suing the government he now controls in his capacity as a private citizen for a wrong done to him while he was previously president, by people who he was theoretically in charge of. The money is coming from the taxpayers, and the slush fund is being administered by the federal government. There's lots of ways this could have the whiff of corruption on a different order than the Obama and Biden era precedents.


There's lots of things Trump could have done differently:


    

  1. He could have held the case in abeyance until after his presidency was over.
    2. 

  2. He could have done the settlement, but have himself administer the fund as a private citizen, instead of having the government administer it. Since he's the wronged party, under a fair settlement this would be perfectly fine. Once money is yours, you can spend it however you want.
    3. 

  3. Since he was the executive then, and he is the executive now, he could exercise the powers he has to achieve a resolution (firings, audits, etc.)
    4. 



				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 1, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


What exactly is supposed to happen if Party B does not realize they have been intentionally wronged until they control the government?


If they sue the government its just Party B suing the government they control. Of course they win. That is what happened in this case.




The problem with this statement of the case, is that Trump was president when the IRS leak of his tax documents happened. And he's president now.


What Trump could have done is ask the case to be held in abeyance, which would freeze the clock on the case and wait for the case to be resolved until after his presidency finished up. That would have been the usual "avoiding corruption, or the appearance of corruption" version of Trump bringing the complaint that created the massive settlement fund.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 25, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
This proposal is silly, since you're already taking people who have been selected for a particular trait and putting them in a particular place. Let me put it to you, do you think there would be much white flight if you instead selected for blacks with relatively high SAT/ACT scores or who had Bachelor's degrees?


Even if that group is a smaller one, I think you must understand on some level that there are good eggs and bad eggs, even in a highly crime-prone group like that.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 25, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


We also know race blind liberalism is possible, since the United States lives under it (and to some extent Europe). Do you like the system?




I mean, isn't the complaint that it isn't actually race-blind? Either because we're too lenient on black defendants, or because of affirmative action and DEI?


My preference as a heterodox libertarian would be for a race blind system that actually punished people where appropriate. If that means a higher percentage of black people end up in prison, so be it. So yes, I like the theoretical idea of race-blind liberalism, more or less.




We can't have this discussion properly when you aren't actually willing to grant the basic race facts. You don't just grant for the sake of the argument here; you must grant for the sake of reality. Then we can talk about policy. The way it works, though, is that when we try to establish the facts, we get shouted down. So there is no point and there can be no discussion. The facts remain the facts, and the fact remains that the facts remain denied.




I don't think I've ever shouted anyone down for anything here on the Motte.


Don't get me wrong. I've been working my way through books recommended here and elsewhere. But it is slow going, and I'm not yet fully on board with HBD in its most common form here.


My biggest hang up has always remained that I just don't think that establishing the facts of HBD should have much effect on public policy besides immigration. We have the people inside of the country that we have. We can do some amount of voluntary eugenics under a libertarian/liberal regime, but even changing my view to agree with the common HBD consensus wouldn't really change anything about how I think society should be organized. I had already priced in that some people are naturally going to be more violent, or stupid, and I still think we should treat them as individuals and let them rise or fall on the basis of their own merits.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 25, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Also, on the HBD race debate specifically, the controversy is much older than the Motte, and the same thing happens elsewhere with it. I'm convinced it was all sorted out by 1995 or earlier.




Look, I'm fully open to the idea that I'm totally wrong-headed on these topics, and I always try to keep the idea that I might be biased and believing what I want to believe in view as a possibility. But I genuinely think there are a lot of questions that a lot of HBD people I've interacted with seem ill-equipped to deal with.


For example, if I grant for the sake of argument that the average 85 IQ of African Americans is mostly genetic, and even the part that is environmental is mostly infeasible to change with ordinary interventions, I still have not heard a convincing argument in favor of segregation, which I have seen more than one HBDer advocate for.


Like, I'm fully aware of the "13% of the population commits 50% of the murders" argument, but surely if we were just genuinely tough on crime and caught the bad eggs, there would be no reason for segregation, since the vast majority of African Americans are not murderers? Like, if you just look at averages and standard deviations, then the smartest non-outlier African American in the United States has an IQ of 145. I don't understand why we need a system that segregates that IQ 145 person away from everyone else, just because 1% of his same race cohort are murderers or whatever.


I kind of just don't see why the Steven Pinker-style of HBD-aware liberalism isn't still possible, even if HBD turns out to be 100% true? Do you really assert that we've known since 1995 that such a system was and is impossible with any realistic social arrangement?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 25, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


There’s a reason citizens have “equality before the law.” You surely don’t find the principle alive in science or the animal kingdom.




I feel like you have a bit of a category error here. I don't take "equality before the law" to have to do with the facts about people one way or the other. It is more of a commitment that the legal system tries to make to be fair and impartial to the extent that it can.


Of course, because humans made this system we will fail to live up to that commitment again and again. But when we say that, say, a bicycle thief and a tech CEO are equal before the law when charged with the same crime, we're not saying that they have equal intelligence or abilities, or even equal likelihood to have actually committed the crime. We're saying that we're committed to giving them approximately the same chance to prove their innocence, in approximately the same legal proceedings.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 25, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


What do you want him to do, post FBI crime statistics for the millionth time? Then enter the heritability debate with the gaslighters again? It's boring.




One of the things I always respected about the Motte was the effortposters who were willing to research and put in the work on controversial questions. I find responses like yours extremely disappointing and out of place for what this community used to be.


At the very least, you could link to a past discussion on the Motte or somewhere else that you think did a good job rigorously interrogating the evidence and policy choices, while arriving in the neighborhood of /u/sleepyegg's assertions, so that those of us who are interested in high effort discussions and a free search for truth can have something to sink our teeth into.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


The final recalcitrant juror is induced to change his mind not by the others successfully convincing him, but by the others socially ostracising and refusing to talk to him.




You are misremembering.


The racist juror is turned by social ostracism, but is not the last to be convinced. (Although I think you could make the case that he realized how ridiculous and unreasonable he was being as the evidence for the defendant's innocence was building up, and his strong priors for guilt based on the defendant's race prevented him from proper Bayesian updates until the ostracism.)


The final juror is convinced when he realizes he emotionally needed the defendant to be guilty, because he reminded him too much of his son or something.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I mean, generally speaking a child is an 18 year commitment (and socially this is not usually passed on to fathers)




We could do a Spartan-style thing, and only have women "drafted" for the duration of their pregnancy with the ability to give up the child for adoption, with the children being raised communally.


That said, I really don't think any of that is necessary one way or the other.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I think realistically though, we are probably gonna have take a hard examination at the female end of the social contract at some-point, when birth rates and their implications become more severe and un-ignorable.




Will the implications ever become unignorable?


I'm actually a bit confused by a lot of the right wing concern about birth rates. The people who choose to have kids in the current environment have some combination of genes (personality traits, etc.) and memes that lead to them being more successful at reproducing.


If we do absolutely nothing, the whole problem will sort itself out, because each generation will have a higher share of the reproduction-in-industrialized-information-age genes and memes, and the less fit people with inferior genes and memes that don't lead to reproduction will die out. Why would we even want to dysgenically keep around genes that aren't well suited to reproduction in the current environment?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


You Are Still Crying Wolf.




I am not "still" crying wolf. I didn't really start being truly, deeply worried about Trump until April 2025.


Before that, I had convinced myself that Trump 1 hadn't been that bad, that despite the weekly outrage articles from the mainstream media, he had mostly governed as any Republican would have. But I really do think Trump 2 has been different.




Where are the criticisms for Biden? Honestly, where are they? Where are the people denouncing the pardons? Calling for them to be overturned, or for the pardoned people to be strung up on things they haven't been pardoned for? Where, in other words, is the action? Where is the demonstration of these values applied to anyone other than Trump? Because I no longer trust anyone who applies standards to Trump due to repeated lessons teaching me otherwise.




I mean, I commented this a year ago.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Biden wasn't really the center of a political movement though, and I think Democrats were a lot more willing to call him out for things like the Hunter pardon. At most, I saw people quietly understanding of Biden breaking with principle to protect family, though I still got the sense there was general disapproval for the pardoning on the Left.


As a third party voter, I have been disgusted by both parties, but I really do think the dynamic is that Obama and Biden did X, and Trump is doing X^2, as /u/lollol put it. It creates a weird dynamic, because I'm happy to condemn them all and say that Trump is still worse in most cases (even if his actions aren't totally unprecedented), but it feels like a lot on the Right are in the position where they both need Trump and are happy that he's punishing the people that they hate, and so they're unwilling to engage in more than light critique with hedging like, "the only difference is that Trump is doing what everyone always did out in the open."


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 11, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Which obviously an absurd hypothetical but how is AI not just another tool?




It absolutely is a tool, but I think that the amount of microdecisions made per artistic subunit matters to a lot of people.


In a human made novel, there are hundreds of microdecisions per page. Choices to use one word and not another.


With AI stories, the nature of prompting is that there end up being far fewer human microdecisions per page. I would guess 10:1 is a good conservative estimate of the typical case in both instances.


Some people want to know that a human being might have consciously or unconsciously used this word in this sentence, which works as foreshadowing for this section later in the book. With an AI assisted story, most such cases are going to be complete serendipity with no greater intention or meaning added by the human author of the piece.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 11, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Or if you want another example, recall how kids collected Pokémon cards back in the day. If I told you I had a foil Charizard card that’d be quite impressive. If the guy next to me had a foil, “1st edition” stamp on a Charizard card, the “limited edition” factor makes it much more valuable because of its scarcity.




I actually think most trading cards aren't far off from Bored Ape NFTs at the end of the day. Companies love to put gambling in everything these days from mobile apps, to the random toy boxes that take up an entire aisle at my local Walmart. I think gambling was the first supernormal stimulus that humans discovered -  randomness that our brains desperately want to find patterns in.


But like other supernormal stimuli, I think they are best avoided. Play LCGs instead of TCGs, or proxy your TCG cards (or buy singles and play cheaper formats like pauper if you really must buy in to the ecosystem.) They should be game pieces, not another supernormal stimulus like all the phone apps or porn sites try to be these days.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 11, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Humans just don’t like seeing replicas and care about authenticity, and it has nothing to do with the aesthetic value of the piece - that’s a red herring.




I think this is culturally contingent.


I have personally cultivated an aesthetic appreciation for imitation and replicas, because I want to feel beauty in my life, and if you cultivate the joy of copies you can always cheaply and non-rivalrously enjoy art. What you lose in the ability to be a snob, you gain in the ability to be content with enough and what you have at hand.


Why not have a print of a beautiful piece of art that you love? Why not get a cheap but beautiful study of a famous piece done by an art student?




If you’re in a museum looking at, let’s say, Palaeolithic stone axes, you might feel certain emotions or a sense of connection to humanity’s distant past. Then if you learned the collection was made by a boomer in the 90s in the Palaeolithic style, you’d be disappointed, regardless of whether the axes looked “good” or not, since they’re literally just crude chipped stones with hardly any aesthetic values on their own.




If you cultivate an appreciation that leads to the causal chain of a replica, then you can get almost the same "big" feelings from a copy of something. I went to the Nashville Parthenon, and I was blown away by it. It may be a copy, but with the right attitude it can be just as mind blowing and interesting as the real Parthenon, since it is causally downstream of the builders of the original Parthenon. It just happens to not share any of the matter of the original Parthenon, but who cares about a silly little detail like that?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 11, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
We can at least be sure that they were proximally caused by people, even if people didn't actually make the comments.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 11, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


If you take two pixel-by-pixel identical artworks, one made by a human and one made by an AI (or at least, the kinds of AI we have today, using the methods that today's AI systems use -- this isn't a simple chauvinism in favor of carbon over silicon as an underlying substrate), the AI image is simply worse, because (very briefly and roughly) human effort has intrinsic value, connecting with other humans has intrinsic value, the total historical and social context of an artwork has intrinsic value, etc.




I am a hobbyist writer (100% human-made), and I have also dabbled in adding AI art to my stories. I can tell you that trying to add art almost doubled the time it took me to craft a story, and if anything I got less engagement on the stories I added carefully curated AI art to. Frankly, I don't think people can "see" the human effort that goes into something, even AI art.


I'm honestly sad that most of the large D&D subreddits have banned anything with a whiff of AI, because I think it would be nice if there was a space for non-slop AI-assisted products for D&D. Instead we have r/dndai which is 50% sexy elf girls, and 100% slop.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 11, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The sapience/agency thing is a lot of what I was trying to gesture at with "personal." Obviously, God could be personal and non-interventionist, like the God of the deists, or the gods of the Epicureans.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 11, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


but it's unproven any of them exist and as such the epistemic status of these multiverse explanations is actually not quite too far from asserting the existence of a creator God.




The main difference in my mind is whether God is personal or not.


An infinite, impersonal multiverse is about as complex as God, but it is still not a person you can pray to, or who will intervene in your life.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 11, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I do remember feeling jealous in my younger years of the characters in the Bible who got to test their God against the other gods in a battle of miracles.




Oh, it's much worse than that. I've always been jealous of the angels.


Supposedly, they get to make an informed decision about whether to serve God or not. Even if you say humans have it better because they can be forgiven and reconciled to God while angels never can, I prefer to make a single informed choice for all eternity over the fuzzy uninformed choice most Christian churches implicitly claim I must make.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 11, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


no one, as far as I'm concerned, has a convincing materialist theory of consciousness, or even a sketch of the beginnings of one.




I am partial to Global Workspace Theory as a materialist explanation, but you may find that either unconvincing or too light on details.




Even gods or ghosts seem more amenable to materialist understanding: if real, they would require a distinct, radical change in what laws govern the material world to something far more complex than what seems to, but they could still be made a part of the material.




I mean, you could have a naturalistic explanation that isn't materialist.


You could just hypothesize that there are motes of mindstuff that come together and produce consciousness, but which are governed by natural laws like everything else in the universe.


I just think this is on the level of the old theories of elan vital (the special "stuff" that supposedly makes life possible.) We got rid of theories of elan vital after we discovered the mechanics of biochemistry.


My intuition is that just as science rendered the superlunary sphere and life into ordinary matter, we will someday do the same to consciousness.