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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 3, 2025

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Unlike your radioactivity example, there's no Geiger counter for detecting the presence or absence of, say "the universal right to free speech."

The parallel in that case is the observation that:

  1. Censorship regimes tend to have bad outcomes, and
  2. This happens even when it appears that they will have good outcomes.

In the Sequences, this is referred to as an Ethical Injunction.

It's impossible for any state to be truly neutral on metaphysical commitments

...but some states are closer to it than others.

As metaphysical beliefs are not falsifiable, disagreements about them, if derived from diverging axioms, can only end in one of two ways: either the sides agree to disagree, and mutually refrain from attempting to forcibly impose their beliefs on others, or they wage war against each other until one or both is dead.

Liberalism is the 'agree to disagree' option; for the other, see 17th-century Europe.

The state is still picking sides on metaphysics, it's just picking the side that pretends not to have any.

More the side that is willing to agree to stop the bloodshed even if those people keep thinking and living in a way which, even if it 'neither picks anyone's pocket nor breaks anyone's leg' (as Jefferson put it), is nonetheless heretical/problematic/unnatural/[insert snarl word here].

I posted an argument, by toy analogy, a year ago here. The tl;dr is that "teleology can constitute a valid "joint" upon which reality may be "cleaved," particularly when it comes to law" even in an imperfect, entropic universe.

....which rests on the metaphysical assumption that 'same-gender couple' and 'infertile opposite-gender couple' have little XML tags saying that the latter is supposed to be able to bear children while the former isn't.