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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   43600 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 8, 2025

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There's some funny nutpicking, and then there's some not-so-funny nuts someone else picked.

I'm... hard-pressed to comment more, here. I'd like to 24-hour-rule this, because early reporting is so often so bad for these type of incidents, but there's almost zero chance it's some nutty right-winger who thought Kirk Didn't Stalin Hitler Enough, and at most it's a question of whether early reports that it's trans-related-stuff are right, and my gut makes it pretty hard to think they're not or that it'd even matter much if they weren't. It's a little nice to see some lefties or 'centrist' liberal saying this is bad (woo, Kelseytuoc retweeted aghamilton28), but when that's not even close to universal, and when those who don't or who find it worth other forms of comment don't get at least a shush, it's hard to take too much solace from the exceptions.

But it's soon, and maybe in a week there'll be some mirror to the culture war WMDs of the past and I'll eat crow and be very happy about it. Or maybe some manager will steamroll through MSNBC and The View. But I'm not optimistic, and I dunno if we'll even get Home Depot Lady v2, and I don't think anyone on the conservative side of aisle will or can be persuaded to care about that.

I've been trying to write a followup on the Paul Kessler thing (trial: supposedly next month, but also supposedly two months ago, maybe early next year?), a contrast on a lot of other public violence cases in the aftermath of various public protests, and on a bunch of recent gun cases, and there's some increasingly obvious answers for a lot of it. Four years ago I worried about things going hot in a crime-of-passion sense, where plausibly-reasonable decisions run into foreseeable consequences, and the ramifications spiral and reinforce each other as 'our' definitions of reasonable decisions increasingly disagree, with a standard example being where CPS and trans kids and the horrors of the foster system run face-first into each other. The answer seems, increasingly, that those crimes of passion will happen, and the people charged with enforcing the law against them will decide to bring the hammer down or not based on their current wins, and those whims have unsurprisingly kept pots from boiling over, and that's a solution of a sort, but only until you think about what comes next.

There's a lot of discussion around this topic that I just aren't willing to publish publicly, because at some point, someone that isn't a garbage person is going to take ten hours and seriously think about what the results and ramifications and incentives are, and how they can maximize their impact. And it's going to result in hundreds of deaths, if not thousand+, in the first incident, and we won't find them, and people won't even wonder why so much as who they can blame.

There's a lot of discussion around this topic that I just aren't willing to publish publicly

Is this forum too public? Are we to be denied your insights?

Yes. I dropped a PM conversation with FCfromSSC over a tangentally related matter, and there were a portion of discussion around the Baude/Paulsen stuff that I will not post here and did not write down anywhere except in a direct e-mail to Baude.

There are ideas that are dangerous. I will no sooner than write publicly how to kill large numbers of people and probably get away with it than I would inform twelve year olds about the cool cleaning technique of mixing bleach and ammonia.

Please do not use this space to workshop ways to make the world a significantly worse place.

Please do not use this space to darkly hint about ways to make the world a significantly worse place that you've totally though about, and are absolutely so dangerous you can't share them, but hoo boy, are they dangerous.

It just piques my curiosity, like saying you can't tell me about your secret. I didn't even know about your secret until you told me you had one!

It is difficult to properly phrase a cognitohazard warning. I am sorry that I am not better at it. Please consider that I mean this genuinely and in good will, and am not attempting to play some sort of complicated word game.

A lot of people here historically and currently believe that this is all business as usual, that the spiraling escalation of the culture war is more or less a sideshow to the more meaningful features of modern society. They are wrong. The increasing violence, and the increasing support for violence, is very bad, and has a high probability of making everyone's lives much worse.

You’re reacting to his comment as though he asked specifically about ideas for violence, but the way gattsuru worded his original comment I had no clue the specific things he was talking about not speaking on publicly were in that category until he clarified.

It's a one-human to another warning, not a mod warning. I also am attempting to provide clarity. It is difficult to phrase a cognitohazard warning properly.

There's some funny nutpicking

Jezebel at monday: "We Paid Some Etsy Witches to Curse Charlie Kirk"

https://www.jezebel.com/we-paid-some-etsy-witches-to-curse-charlie-kirk#

For the “POWERFUL HEX SPELL,” I had to provide Kirk’s date of birth for “accuracy.” The witch performed the hex, but her response was unsettling: “I just completed your spell, and it was successful. You will see the first results within 2–3 weeks. However, I did notice disturbances… negative energy not only from you, but projected at you. Likely from toxic family members, co-workers, or new acquaintances.”

I wonder which way that witch will jump. On the one hand, if she reveals her identity she'll probably get quite a few more customers (and/or be able to raise her rates quite a lot). On the other hand, she would also get quite a few more people looking to burn her as a witch.

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