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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 3, 2025

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Given that you had a month to read it, I'm amazed that you didn't address most of the things I said in that post.

The obvious case here is A Few Good Men[...]

This case is clearly distinguishable from A Few Good Men in that the real incident was public record and would have been well known to many people, part of any background check that the Marines went through later in life, and ultimately "googleable" though this wasn't a relevant concept at the time Sorkin was writing. The Cat Person connection was too obscure to be identifiable to more than a handful of people, up until Nowicki chose to put it all out there for attention. There was no way to google some combination of "30 something guy some time in the late oughts or early teens who dated a college freshman in Ann Arbor and worked at a movie theater and was super lame" that would deliver that guy's name. To repeat myself:

There are 34,000 undergrads at UMich Ann Arbor at any given time, you're telling me she's the only freshman to ever fuck a 30-something? The precise details may have been bang on, sure, [and] call me antisocial but there are like five people I would recognize at the level of detail we're talking about here. Her best friend may have recognized her, maybe a dozen close friends, but not everyone in Ann Arbor or something like that. There just wasn't sufficient detail to connect the fictional story to a real person based on past events!

The general rule of thumb is that a reasonable reader would recognize the plaintiff, not just a small handful of people who can recognize him from obscure knowledge but an identifiable community of people. This identification clearly fails on those grounds: only a small handful of people could possibly recognize these characters.

All the examples you give except the novel are not in this limbo; truthful memoirs/bitching/tweetstorms are #1 and are definitely fine, while false ones (because they're outright lies, having been stated to be real) are #3 and are very much not fine.

It's adorable that you assume that Kulak and Scott Aaronson are telling the truth when they rant about the awful Normies they have to interact with; let alone telling the truth as the Normies would recollect it. We'd have a real Rashomon on our hands if we ever got a hold of the people who have to interact with Scott Aaronson and they gave their side of the story as to what they think really happened there. The idea that there is an objective "truth" to get at whether someone is bad in bed or said a bad word once or was rude or didn't care that Scott Aaronson was lost is as good as a heckler's veto on fiction.

In research for another recent thread, I discovered that the writer of Sandlot was sued by Squints because he had made him look like kind of a dork at twelve years old; this despite Squints marrying the school hottie and having nine kids at the end of the film! He gave Squints the opposite of the Small Penis Rule treatment, and Squints still fucking sued!