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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 28, 2025

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I think I agree with 2/5, think 1/5 is the ideal but tricky to actually implement, and actually disagree with 2/5 (though not fully in either case).

The one that's tricky is inquisitors; the problem is setting up a highly-trustworthy and highly-politically-neutral oversight body to make sure that inquisitors don't, y'know, get captured by the party in power and lock up the opposition. The difficulty of this is the motivation for jury trials, although this purpose has been largely vitiated by various schemes on the part of the government and legal apparatus (there's a whole battery of ways that judges and lawyers cut down on nullification, ranging from strikes to barring mentions to jury instructions).

The ones I disagree with are guns (I think it's wired into the male brain to like weapons; I think US gun culture is maybe a step too far, and I think handguns are a worse value proposition than all other small arms and even a lot of higher-end stuff, but I do generally support the ability of random interested people to be able to hunt game or shoot targets for its own sake) and the executions (I'm mostly on board with the Galactic Milieu policy where, upon sufficiently demonstrating that you're irredeemable, you get a choice of life without parole/["death of personality" if available]/execution, as I'm generally on team "prevention and deterrence" rather than "punishment and deterrence"; definitely prefer bullet to the head over lethal injection as method, though).