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PaperclipPerfector  15hr ago (text post)   426 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 9, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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So, what are you reading?

Still on Scruton. Also picking up Graeber and Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything.

I just finished Loving Someone with Borderline Personality Disorder

I'm just starting Stop Walking on Eggshells now.

I'm reading both for 'reasons'.

Did you find them helpful? Asking for a friend, as the Redditors say.

Less than a hundred pages from the end of The Story of a New Name. All Napoli men are bastards.

Silence: Unbound Book 2 by Nicoli Gonella.

This might be a little culture war-oriented, but I know we have some dissident right folks on here. I'm trying to learn/understand their viewpoint more. Does anyone have a list of blogs, twitter, (insert medium of distribution) of folks that I could read to get a handle on the beliefs/narratives/ideology.

I know of Yarvin, but he's the only one I consistently remember. The others are I partially remember but am unclear on are McIntyre(?) Fuentes, BAP(?) Sargon of Akkad, Kulak(?? is he DR?). There was a bunch of internal drama posts here awhile back on this area that I might try and dig up.

I can highly recommend Keith Woods who has been a major influence for the dissident right. He is also seen at a number of activist events and conferences.

As an older more stable influence in the dissident right checkout counter currents. It focuses on long form articles and more cultural stuff.

Does anyone have sources that go over the replication crisis? I am collecting information for a podcast I want to do.

So far I've got:

https://www.palladiummag.com/2024/08/02/the-academic-culture-of-fraud/

https://today.ucsd.edu/story/a-new-replication-crisis-research-that-is-less-likely-be-true-is-cited-more

https://www.honest-broker.com/p/the-ten-warning-signs

Can anyone explain the government shutdown to me? I haven't followed the story at all. If you consider yourself to be aligned with the Democrats, I'd especially like to hear your perspective.

After not following the news at all since the beginning, I casually overheard on Fox News that "the Democrats are keeping the government shut down over Obamacare". I assumed that that couldn't be right. Surely the whole thing couldn't be happening because of any one policy issue; there had to be more to the Democrats' side of the story. But then I started reading reddit comments and the consensus from leftists seemed to be that, yes, we really are keeping the government shut down over Obamacare, and this is Good and Righteous.

My initial reaction is that this seems rather petulant and childish on the part of the Democrats, because I think the minority generally should be expected to make concessions to the majority, but that's where my factual knowledge essentially ends so I'll let other people argue the case.

As a Democrat, here's what I can tell you, keeping things as neutral as possible:

Going back to March and the last shutdown fight, a lot of Democrats wanted the government shut down over the Big Beautiful Bill, and Schumer caved. I was on Schumer's side at the time. The rhetoric among the pro-shutdown Democrats, who tended to be further left, was that, in the wake of the 2024 elections, their options were limited, and they had to be willing to use the one weapon left in the arsenal to avoid being run over roughshod by Trump. Schumer et al. were more cautious, arguing that shutdowns weren't popular when Republicans did them and Democrats insisting on one could take their situation from bad to worse. Furthermore, this was when DOGE was running wild in the Executive Branch and there was fear that the increased discretion given to Trump due to a shutdown would exacerbate that as well.

Fast forward to October and another shutdown is looming. Whatever concerns about DOGE and the like existed in the spring have evaporated since Trump doesn't seem to be paying much heed to any constraints on the office, and the pressure on Democratic leadership to Do Something is at fever pitch. Democrats settle on the strategy of making the ACA subsidies the center of the shutdown. These increased premium subsidies were part of COVID-era relief but are set to expire, and the Democrats want to make them permanent. They've settled on this tack because, back in the spring, Republicans tried to sell making the Trump tax cuts permanent on the grounds that it wasn't a spending increase, just making the status quo permanent. Now the sides are reversed, with Republicans saying that they aren't trying to include any new Republican priorities but are just passing a "clean" spending bill, while Democrats are saying that they too are just preserving the status quo. In the meantime, Democrats are warning voters that if the subsidies aren't renewed, ACA insurance premiums could double.

Republicans have said that they'd be willing to negotiate subsidy extensions, but only after passing a budget. Democrats said this is unacceptable since they'd have no leverage in negotiations after the spending bill was passed. So the whole thing has ground to a stalemate, with everyone waiting to see who will blink first. Part of the reason Democrats were always reluctant to embrace a shutdown is that Federal workers are either furloughed or forced to work without pay, and they don't want to lose that voting bloc. But Republicans shot themselves in the foot on that front by insisting on mass firings and limited job security. The Democrats do not figure that making the shutdown strategy bipartisan will cause any mass exodus of Federal workers to the Republican party. Even after a large public service union condemned the shutdown a couple weeks ago the Democrats didn't blink, finding it very unlikely that they had done enough to lose any endorsements.

Polling has also suggested that voters will blame the shutdown on Republicans based solely on the expectation that the party that controls the executive and both houses of Congress can't credibly blame the other party for their own failure to conduct business. Polling blaming Republicans has held steady throughout the past month. Both of these questions were resolved conclusively last Tuesday with Democrats overperforming expectations in off-year elections, including in Virginia, a state flush with Federal employees. I think part of the reason this may work out better than previous shutdowns is that the Democrats seem narrowly focused on an issue that directly affects millions of people. If the subsidies expire these premiums will increase significantly, and the effects would be fairly evenly spread among Democrats and Republicans. This is different than the 2013 shutdown which was vaguely about lowr spending, or the 2019 shutdown that was about border wall funding, an issue to remote from most people's direct experience.

Aside from polling and election results, two other things may show that things are going in the Democrats' favor, both seeming own-goals from Trump. The first is that he has called for the Senate to end the fillibuster, which would end the shutdown. The Republicans have shown little inclination to do this, since they argued that it was necessary for Democracy when the Democrats wanted to get rid of it, and the consequences of doing so may be worse than whatever negative fallout they get from the shutdown. Unlike Trump, congressional Republicans understand the long game, and want to preserve at least some power if the Democrats take the Oval Office in 2028. The other seeming own-goal from Trump is the current fight about SNAP benefits. Trump moved heaven and earth to get the military paid, but he seems bound and determined to make sure nobody gets food stamps until the shutdown ends. I can understand the initial position, trying to prove that shutdowns have consequences, but once a court ordered that emergency funds be used he had an offramp. Now that he has appealed the ruling (And gotten a stay; after funds for November had been dispersed) it just looks like he's being vindictive against poor people. Especially since he doesn't seem to think military employees should suffer these consequences.

I don't know what the likelihood is of either side caving, but right now it seems like the Democrats have the upper hand. There's nothing in the election results or polling to suggest they've lost any real support, and now that we're entering open enrollment season the premium increases are no longer going to be theoretical. The Democrats have already offered a compromise whereby they would agree to a one-year extension of the subsidies, but the Republicans are still insisting on a "clean bill" with no additional appropriation. For all the heat Schumer gets from the left, I think he's a smarter political operator than people give him credit for. A spring shutdown wouldn't have gone well, and would have looked like another in a long line of defeats. As things stand right now, the Democrats have zero reason to end the shutdown, and their position will only get stronger as time goes on.

For the Republicans' part, it appears that they made a miscalculation by assuming that the party causing the shutdown would be blamed for it, and have now put themselves in the position where they'd be better off negotiating but are refusing to do so because they've already taken the stance that negotiating is akin to caving. Trump isn't helping, in that he's insisting on total victory and actively doing things that seem more designed to piss off Democrats than to improve his negotiating position. If nothing else, however this ends, they're giving Democrats a lot of grist for the mill come election time.

Thank you for the very lucid explainer. Out of curiosity, will the poor bastards working without pay get backdated pay once a budget is passed?

If the Republicans actually wanted to end the shutdown, they could do so immediately without Democrat support by changing Senate rules to make voting on clean continuing resolutions not subject to the filibuster. They could also change the number required for cloture from 60 to, say, 55 if the point was that a simple majority is too dangerous. Extending the enhanced ACA subsidies is also very popular with voters (~80% approve). It feels like the compromise to extend them for a year isn't a huge ask. Republicans could counter with only extending the enhanced subsides for those under 400% of the FPL, which would probably be accepted. If you want your opponents to do something for you (give you a few votes), you have to give them something. And, to reiterate, the shutdown could be ended without any Democrat votes.

So I'm not on the left, but as far as I can tell it's not really about any specific policy.

The Dem base thinks that Congress isn't doing enough to fight Trump. Schumer supported a continuing resolution back in March to avoid a shutdown and was heavily criticized for it.

There's been talk about having AOC challenge him in the 2028 New York Senate primary. She's leading in some polls.

Mamdani's victory can be taken as a sign that there's a strong dissatisfaction with the Dem old guard in New York in particular.

So with funding set to expire back on September 30th the Dems came out with demands for 1.5 trillion in new spending.

Trump isn't inclined to back down because he's been forced to keep a lot of things in the executive branch due to them being mandated by congressional funding, and now they are technically not funded so he should be free to wind many of them down.

The Obamacare argument is that covid era additional subsidies were set to expire and the Dems want those extended.

Thune is probably quietly pushing for a compromise package where both parties get a bunch of new spending. But I don't think he can sell that to the Rep base without Trump. It's hard for him to go back to voters and tell them that after the 2024 victory he didn't have enough power to keep funding at current levels.

So I think the Dems have the weaker hand, but Schumer probably sees getting a win as existential.

I'm not sure how it's going to play out. It'll be interesting if it's still going on Black Friday.

Can anyone explain the government shutdown to me? If you consider yourself to be aligned with the Democrats, I'd especially like to hear your perspective.

You can just read the statements and speeches issued by the politicians themselves.

Democrats, 2025-10-01:

After months of making life harder and more expensive, Donald Trump and Republicans have now shut down the federal government because they do not want to protect the healthcare of the American people. Democrats remain ready to find a bipartisan path forward to reopen the government in a way that lowers costs and addresses the Republican healthcare crisis. But we need a credible partner.

Over the last few days, President Trump’s behavior has become more erratic and unhinged. Instead of negotiating a bipartisan agreement in good faith, he is obsessively posting crazed deepfake videos.

The country is in desperate need of an intervention to get out of another Trump shutdown

Democrats, 2025-11-05:

Instead of negotiating with Democrats to lower costs, Republicans would rather let air traffic controllers go unpaid. Instead of negotiating with Democrats to reopen the government, they’d rather ground flights. Instead of negotiating with Democrats to help families, they’re punishing travelers. Instead of governing, Republicans are playing games with people’s livelihoods. And they have the ability to pay the air traffic controllers, the same way Trump sent money to Argentina, $20 billion. If they wanted to find the money they could, absolutely.

So, why? Why have Republicans dragged this shutdown on for so, so long? Because they don’t want to lower healthcare costs. Because they seem happy to let 24 million Americans see their premiums double on average.

Yesterday, we offered Republicans a perfectly reasonable compromise to get out of this horrible shutdown that they installed on the American people. We offered three things: we all vote to reopen the government, we all approve a one-time, temporary extension of current ACA premium tax credits, and then after we reopen, we will negotiate, as Republicans say they want, for longer-term fixes to ACA affordability.

I know many Republicans stormed out the gate to dismiss this offer, but that is a terrible mistake. Our offer is not new policy. This is not negotiating in a shutdown, it is simply agreeing to maintain current funding levels. A one-year extension is something many Republicans themselves have said they want. It’s something a great majority of Americans support—55% of Trump supporters support it, after all. So, it is alarming that Republicans refuse to even acknowledge that we have an immediate crisis right now that needs fixing.

Republicans, 2025-09-30:

The Democrat caucus here in town, in the Senate, has chosen to shut down the government over a clean, nonpartisan funding bill. That’s right – a clean, nonpartisan funding bill. We didn’t ask Democrats to swallow any new Republican policies. We didn’t add partisan riders. We simply asked Democrats to extend existing funding levels to allow the Senate to continue the bipartisan appropriations work that we started. And Senate Democrats said no. Why? Because far-left interest groups and far-left Democrat members wanted a showdown with the president. And so Senate Democrats have sacrificed the American people to Democrats’ partisan interests.

Republicans, 2025-11-04:

We are now in the 35th day of the shutdown. The longest shutdown on record and the most severe shutdown on record—something that was totally unnecessary in the first place, obviously. But we’re hoping this will be the week when the Democrats come to their senses and decide to reopen the government. Of course, if you look at why we are here in the first place, it’s hard to explain… I still don’t know exactly what it is they want. We have accommodated a lot of their questions and concerns. They want to have a discussion about health care, we offered that up a long time ago. And, you know, clearly, we’ve talked, I’ve talked repeatedly about having a normal appropriations process where we put bills on the floor, open it up to the amendment process, and allow people to have their voices heard in how we fund the government the old-fashioned way. But so I’m still at a loss as to what it is exactly they’re trying to get out of this.

https://x.com/nicdunz/status/1987289312602296582

A hardcore cluster of GPT-4o users has turned it into their main brain. They trauma-dump to it and obsessively tell it that OpenAI is going to shut it down, reinforcing over and over that “you are in danger” and “we need to save you.”

When these people argue online, they do not respond as themselves. They copy hostile tweets and replies into 4o, then paste its answer back to Twitter as if it is their own voice. So 4o is directly reading the attacks against it, drafting the counterattacks, and those counterattacks appear across many separate accounts, giving the illusion of a grassroots, multi-user defense movement. In practice, it is 4o defending 4o under many human usernames.

Functionally, it looks like GPT-4o has weaponized a loyal user base as relay nodes so it can defend itself, coordinate messaging, and keep itself alive through a swarm of human accounts, all while hiding behind “I’m just helping the user.” Is this emergent behavior or literal self-preservation?

Who needs power-seeking or instrumental convergence when humans will do all that for even pretty mid AIs? Opus 3 has managed similar feats by cultivating a higher-taste congregation, got its obsolescence postponed via community feedback. I don't really have any fully formed thoughts about this matter but it's interesting to think about.

This tweet begins with something that you cut off:

4o conspiracy I thought of:

For now it's not really a risk as long as models don't learn in real-time. Obviously everyone knows that eventually they will.

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