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MadMonzer

Temporarily embarassed liberal elite

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joined 2022 September 06 23:45:01 UTC 

				
User ID: 896


				
				
				

			

		

	














	


		


			



	

		

			

			

				

					

						

							
						

						

							
							

								
MadMonzer


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite

				
				
				

				

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					joined 2022 September 06 23:45:01 UTC
				


				
					

					
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				Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 26, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


nothing stopping you from job-hunting a bit again especially towards the end of the internship




And as an intern without an offer, you can openly jobhunt while employed, and even get help from with your jobhunt from your co-workers. You can't do that in a normal job.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 20, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Patel is so useless that he does more damage to the administration alive than dead? But if you thought that, you would probably think the same thing about Trump.


If Trump were to die of natural causes tomorrow my heart would want to rejoice, but my head knows that Vance is probably more dangerous.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 20, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Every midterm election has been bad for the President's party since 2006. (Both 1998 and 2002 saw the President's party gain seats, 1994 was the Gingrich wave election, and before that there were enough Dixiecrats that the system worked differently).


But there are bigger and smaller midterm defeats. The 2026 Senate map was supposed to be unwinnable for Democrats, and now it isn't.


Historically, the biggest midterm shellackings have happened when the incumbent Congressional leadership beclowns themselves, like the House Banking scandal (1994) or the numerous scandals of the Hastert-Delay paedoCongress (2006). This may be the first time a President destroys his Congressional colleagues without their help.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 20, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Nike is much better at marketing than Adidas, that's pretty much it. Also I think most people don't actually care about the nitpicky rules and so the barrier was already broken, does breaking it a second time "but actually" really say anything new?




Breaking it in an actual race gets you recognition from e.g. the Guiness Book of Records, which is what the man in the street takes as official. You can argue about how much the difference between an exhibition race run under competition rules (like the "race" Roger Bannister ran his four-minute mile in) and an event with a team of 41 pacers running in a formation designed to protect the record breaker from air resistance, but from the point of view of achieving the thing we set out to achieve and


Also, the 2026 London Marathon was a real race with big money on the line. It wasn't the pacer in from of him that pulled Sawe over the line, it was the risk of being overtaken by Kejelcha that pushed him.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 20, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Barkley is deliberately non-commercial though. If there was money in ultra running, Gary Cantrell/Lazarus Lake wouldn't take it, and the infrastructure to get east Africans entered into his events would never come into being.


The (relatively small by first-world professional sports standards, but large by Sub-Saharan African middle-class income standards) money in marathon running is needed to maintain the infrastructure that finds fast runners in what is still darkest Africa. Part of how we got the 2-hour marathon is by sending a talent scout into the kind of remote village in the Kenyan highlands where nobody even dreams of being able to afford $500 trainers in order to find boys like Sabastian Sawe.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 20, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Are you saying that the people who stormed the Capitol were insane, given that they did interpret Trump's speech that way, or are you making the true but irrelevant point that one particular sentence of the speech, taken out of context, is a rejection of violence? I am not going to waste my time pulling out the other sentences from different parts of the speech which, taken out of context, are calls for violence.


FWIW, I think Trump intended a riotous mob to assemble outside the Capitol and threaten violence for the purpose of intimidating Mike Pence (and Congressional Republicans) into going along with the plan outlined in the Eastman memo. Given Trump's character and the ambiguous nature of the Ellipse speech when considered as a whole, it is more likely than not that he hadn't thought about whether he wanted the mob to enter the building if Pence ignored the threat.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 20, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
People in the distance running community are comparing it to the full-body swimsuits that eventually got banned.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 20, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
That appears to be Eliezer's view. He thinks it is morally justified to use effective violence to stop probably-unaligned AI development, and that in Western democracies firebombing data centres is ineffective violence and lobbying governments to pass laws is, as libertarians would agree, effective violence.


On the relative effectiveness of randos blowing shit up vs passing laws, which is an is question, not an ought one, he is obviously correct.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 20, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Hell, Trump has even called for the death penalty against those Dem lawmakers like half a year ago which is one of the closest things you can get of support for violence while still not quite crossing the boundary.




I'd say a government official with the power to set in motion the process of executing somebody calling for them to be executed clearly does cross the boundary - it is, in non-clown cases, an order to start that process. When Trump does it he arguably isn't calling for violence because when Trump speaks in public it is presumed to be (especially by his supporters) a mindless bloviation intended to express emotions, not an attempt to communicate.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 20, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


That sounds like more of an argument of practicality then.




The morality of violence depends on the practical consequences. In consequentialist moral frameworks (including Yud's) this is trivial. In most deontological moral frameworks violence is wrong unless certain conditions are satisfied, some of which relate to practical consequences - for example in Catholic just war theory a just war must be fought with a reasonable probability of success. And in virtue ethics engaging in violence without a plan to achieve anything by it is a vice.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 20, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The more important difference between J6 and the typical political assassination attempt is that Jan 6th was organised by the institutional GOP and various other organised right-wing groups*, whereas the shooters (of all political persuasions) have been lone wolves radicalised by internet memes.


The reason why Trump hasn't been prosecuting "them" for "their" repeated attempts to kill him is that there is no "them".


* Even if the organisers didn't intend for the mob to storm the Capitol, the people who did storm the Capitol did so based on their non-insane interpretation of Trump's speech, and in any case "they" were a group of people who were sufficiently affiliated with organised conservatism that they got the message to come to DC.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 20, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Today I had the opportunity to watch history being made


[I live near the start of the London Marathon, though the bit we actually went to watch was the mass start with the charity runners in fancy dress, not the elite start]


or


Competition between near-peers is the best thing to drive us to the highest levels of achievement


or perhaps just


Humanity, Fuck Yeah


First, as a piece of dull but boring throat-clearing, congratulations to Yomif Kejelcha of Ethiopia who finished today's London Marathon in what would, under normal circumstances, be a world record time of one hour and (drowned out by cheering). The actual official time was 1:59:41. But his achievement is going to be forgotten because the winner of today's London Marathon was Sabastian Sawe of Kenya with an officially-recognised world record time of 1:59:30.


The two hour marathon has been the biggest round-number goal in athletics since Roger Bannister ran a four-minute mile. But the interesting thing is the rapid improvement it took to get there. My preferred way to think about it to look at Sawe's splits. He ran the first half of the marathon in 1:00:29, and the second half in 59:01. Looking at the half-marathon world record progression, in 1986 Sawe's performance would be two half-marathons, back-to-back, both in world record time. As late as 2005, Sawe's performance would be running a half-marathon at championship pace, and then running the second one in world record time.


What is going on? Well it starts with HBD - only east Africans can be elite long-distance runners, just as only west Africans (and their US/Caribbean descendants) can be elite sprinters. So the first part of what is going on is that east Africa, or at least the functional bits of it, has got rich enough that their best runners can be talent-scouted and fed into the international elite athletics machine. There is also the slow optimisation of training techniques, diet etc. over time that allows athletes to reach peak performance. And finally, there have been some spectacular recent improvements in running shoes. Modern elite marathon shoes use carbon fibre plates and advanced springy foam (originally developed for insulating airliners) to give a similar power boost to having actual springs in the shoe (something that has always been illegal in competition as mechanical assistance). World Athletics intervened in 2021 to set limits on the thickness of foam allowed and to ban shoes with multiple rigid plates. Shoemakers have, of course, aggressively optimised within the rules.


Conditions matter. London is a fast course, but until today it was not considered one of the world's fastest (that would be Berlin and Chicago). The weather was good for distance running. (Cool and dry with light winds). But ultimately, two elite athletes pushed each other to the limit, and although there only was and only ever could be one winner, they both turned in world-historical performances.


And something similar (but without the big round number) happened half an hour earlier in the woman's race. Ethiopia's Tigst Assefa won in a world record time of 2:15:41. (Note that this is the record for women-only races - women run faster in co-ed marathons with a world record of 2:09:56, although the world record holder was later busted for doping so the record is tainted). The second and third-place times were 2:15:53 and 2:15:55.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 20, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
What I was trying to say is that he is the sort of person who, if white, would have ended up at a university below his IQ, but didn't because of affirmative action.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 20, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Correct - but the "American Street" or at least the minority of it which cares about foreign affairs interpreted it as a threat. "It is a historical inevitability that your civilisation will collapse" is technically a prediction and not a threat, but in the mouth of someone with the technical ability to collapse your civilisation it is (and was intended to be) menacing.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 20, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Interesting to compare him to the standard psycho political shooter profile of the last few years: smart, weird in an autistic-coded way (whether or not diagnosed), goes to a university of a tier well below his IQ level and doesn't do well there, fails to launch into a PMC career, no female girlfriend.


If he is mixed-race, he is politically Black and eligible for affirmative action on that basis, so the information to date is consistent with "this is a Thomas Crooks type smart autistic loser, except he was affirmative actioned into Caltech so he failed out of life later than Crooks did." His CV looks like a series of short stints at the kind of jobs that Caltech would love to affirmative action a black kid into, consistent with him failing out repeatedly and being given too many second chances.


Anyone want to make odds on him turning out to have a female girlfriend?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 20, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Yeah - Trump is obviously the target. The interesting question is how crazy the killer is, and whether there is a plausible political motive (either left-wing or idiosyncratic) or whether it is pure whackjobbery like Hinckley or Crooks.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 20, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
As an example, Israeli politics has moved far enough to the right since 1995 that "Rabin was a traitor for signing the Oslo accords" probably polls around 50%, but the movement to commute Yigal Amir's sentence to time served (now more than 30 years) is pretty fringe. It polls at 20-25% (noting that Lizardman's constant plus trolls who always give the most outrageously partisan response to poll questions gets you to 15% even if zero people actually support something), and nobody with a public platform apart from one washed-up singer is willing to publicly support it.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 20, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'd say notorious criminals like John Wayne Gacy and Timothy McVeigh were more hated than Trump within the US - you wouldn't be able to screen Trump's execution on public jumbotrons without the red tribe rioting over it.  The most recent example is Jeffrey Epstein - based on which political messages work, I think normie blues hate Epstein more than they hate Trump and normie reds hate Epstein more than they love Trump. Jeffery Epstein hanged on live TV would have been a widely popular unifying moment, with only Richard "nothing wrong with a little ephebophilia" Hanania and a few soft-on-crime lefties as party poopers.


I would add Saddam Hussein around the time of GW1 to the list of foreign enemies who got the 2 minutes hate treatment before Bin Laden.


Fred Phelps of the Westboro Baptist Church was the most universally hated person in America, and I think he was pretty intensively hated as well - it just didn't make as much noise because nobody was willing to defend him. Rats are also near-universally and broadly hated, but it isn't a political issue worth discussing on the Motte. I think whether he was more hated than Trump ends up being a question about how you count.


If you ask the question globally, rather than locally, then the answer would be Trump. This is unsurprising - a huge part of Trump's rhetoric (whether or not he means it) is that it is time for the civilised world's long nightmare of peace and prosperity to come to an end as the US throws its hard power into negative sum games chasing (at best) marginal gains for red tribers.  The last time a world leader who was powerful enough to be dangerous ranted about destroying the system that underwrites the security and prosperity of Westerners was Khrushchev and "we will bury you" and the last time someone did it while also acting like a crass vulgarian was the guy with the silly mustache.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 20, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Multiple British sources now saying the shooter is in custody. (example)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 20, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


For bonus points, consider the French guy who found some of the temperature sensors used for city weather predictions markets and started betting on them before applying localized heat. Is that "insider trading"? It seems at least adjacent.




That is closer to "cheating at cards" than "insider trading". Traditionally not a crime in the UK, because the powers that be didn't want the police wasting their time policing cardsharps. A very serious crime in Nevada or New Jersey, if done by or against a licensed casino.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 20, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


yeah aside from the 9/11 highjackers and the Unabomber I can't remmber a single smart terrorist. Even the unabomber wasn't the smartest at actually carrying anything out.




The IRA and the old-school PLO had a lot of smart terrorists.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 20, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think this is applying conflict theory where mistake theory would be more appropriate.


Handguns are, in practice, orders of magnitude more dangerous than long guns, looking at (murder, suicide and negligent) death tolls. The difference between America and other broadly pro-gun countries like Switzerland and Canada is that America has ubiquitous legal private handgun ownership, and lots of people shooting themselves or each other with said handguns. The pro-gun movement in America largely consists of people who routinely carry a handgun for personal self defence (or would like to if it was legal in their jurisdiction). And they (you?) are winning politically.


And yet the anti-gun movement's best argument is to point at spree killings and call for bans on scary-looking and/or high-powered rifles, because blue tribe normies who are susceptible to anti-gun messaging are not actually worried about the chav-on-chav shootings going on in the rough parts of their own cities, they are worried about the spree shootings they see on TV.


If the anti-gun left were serious, committed gun-grabbers at both the elite and mass levels, I don't think they would be so stupid about guns. I think normie fear of spree killings is very real, is largely driven by media amplification (which in turn is driven by if-it-bleeds-it-leads incentives, not partisan bias), and is grossly disproportionate to any real threat. But the pro-gun right don't have a very persuasive response to it - the real argument they believe is "one classroom of dead kids in a every 4-5 years in a country of 300 million is a good tradeoff for the advantages of widespread rifle ownership for shooting sports, hunting, rural home defence, and tyranny prevention." And that is a non-starter in the public debate because most people are innumerate. [FWIW, I think the tyranny prevention argument is mostly bullshit and I still think the tradeoff points in favour of broadly legal long guns. But if I got my sense of how common spree killings actually are from the MSM, I wouldn't]


tl;dr - the reason why the debate about long guns isn't as one-sidedly pro-gun in the US as it is in Switzerland is because normies overstate the risk of spree killings, not because of a conspiracy of evil gun-grabbers.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 20, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


As far as I know, marking the enemy in red and your own side in blue on maps has also been a tradition of armies.




I always thought it was a tradition of NATO and NATO-trained armies, based on the assumption that the enemy would be Red because it was the USSR. (Both the Nazis and the USSR marked themselves in red on military maps, consistent with the dominant colour on their flag). Googling suggests that the origins of the practice are older - during the long period of Anglo-French conflict everyone agreed that Britain was red and France was blue (mostly based on uniform colours, also consistent wiht the predominant colours on the medieval English and French royal flags), and there are various reasons why the capital-A Allies adopted the French colour scheme as early as WW1. If true this suggests that Germany chose to put themselves in red because they saw France as the permanent enemy.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 20, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Azathoth is blinder but Trump is more idiotic, so it's swings and roundabouts.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 20, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The Maduro indictment is unusual in that all the counts are extra-territorial, so jurisdiction only ends up in SDNY because that is where they landed him after arresting him overseas. Normally this kind of complex international drug smuggling case ends up in SDNY because the money was laundered through NYC-based banks, making SDNY the easiest jurisdiction to throw in money laundering charges.


But they could have indicted Maduro anywhere - I guess they went with the SDNY because that is where the career AUSAs and judges with the relevant experience are.