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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   33066 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026

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Minneapolis isn’t an obvious megathread. It’s not dominating my twitter algo. It’s something weird here that is causing a massive amount of posts. This lady dying is one of like 5-10 news items currently and from what I can tell barely mattering nationally.

A good board now would be 60% Venezuela (it matters), 20% Iran, 10% Minneapolis, 10% random. Venezuela has interesting discussions on whether we bribed people or we have some really cool new tech. Iran what I could tell from Israeli actions something like 90% of their administration are on Mossad payrolls. This should be geopolitics week.

Agreed that Venezuela is by far the most important thing going on right now. Iran is potentially more important, but based on the (very limited) available information the way to bet is nothing happens (in this case that the regime successfully cracks down).

I think "The President of the United States launches a criminal investigation against the Fed Chair" is a bigger deal than "10% random" implies, although I don't know if there is much to say about it.

I think "The President of the United States launches a criminal investigation against the Fed Chair" is a bigger deal than "10% random" implies, although I don't know if there is much to say about it.

He claims he wasn't personally involved, though in phrasing that generally means very little from him ("I don't know anything about it"), so there's a chance this ends up a nothingburger. (perhaps a trial balloon that didn't make it)

Tbh the shills are out in force on 4chan, spamming the board with this woman, the youtube algos are also relentless in trying to shove this shit down my throat.

There’s frustratingly little information available about what’s going on in Venezuela or Iran right now which dampens in depth discussion outside of speculation. There’s a lot of information about Ukraine but that’s been going for four years so everyone other than me is bored with it.

There is a cool story on this:

https://www.zerohedge.com/military/white-house-amplified-shocking-claims-us-super-soldiers-deployed-maduro-raid

Big if true. If not it’s good propaganda. Scares China on our capabilities.

If not it’s good propaganda

It definitely sounds somewhere between "it's not that we're incompetent, they were just too advanced" defensiveness and "this'll make a great story to sell to the media" opportunism, but yeah: why would the US government try to correct stories about "their troops were super-humanly accurate and their equipment was space-age advanced"? 😁 You really expect the DoD to come out with a correction "No, that's not the case at all! Our guys are just regular, some of 'em barely competent, and our kit is standard average like every other country's military!"

Venezuela may be incompetent. But I still expect country with 30 million people and some legacy wealth has a bunker or secure facility for their President to sleep in. And that he sleeps in said place when the USA is threatening to kidnap him. The men with guns protecting him have good places to shoot from versus guys landing in helicopters.

I am thinking about my condo building I sleep in. It’s a large building with 2 stairwells and 2 elevator shafts. It does have a 40th floor balcony. In order to get to me you either need to:

  1. Go up 40 flights of stairs. My armed men with guns can drop grenades on you and shoot you coming up.
  2. Take an elevator. My men with guns can light up the elevator even before the door opens.
  3. Come in thru the balcony. Which sounds like a very exposed entrance for a helicopter. My men with guns can shoot the helicopter from a few hundred balconies or the roof.

Of course you could fairly easily kill me. Just drop a bomb on my condo building. But we didn’t do that.

It does appear to me the US either bribed a lot of people or we have some technology that knocked guys out guarding choke points.

I think people overrate the testimony of that guy.

Venezuela can't even maintain their own oil industry, the core basis of their national wealth, why would they be any good at fighting? They probably didn't know how to use their equipment and certainly couldn't maintain it. The Russians quit giving Venezuela loans to buy military equipment a few years ago, I think that even they had written Venezuela off.

Security Guard: Without a doubt. I'm sending a warning to anyone who thinks they can fight the United States. They have no idea what they're capable of. After what I saw, I never want to be on the other side of that again. They're not to be messed with.

I think this indicates he was paid to say this as part of the propaganda campaign. He was probably paid much more than he was making as a soldier. The real superpower is just having a certain level of organization and discipline.

That, or a dude had a panic attack from the bombs and lack of comms and the physical intensity of the situation. Then he shit himself, and wondered what the fuck happened.

If the dude even existed.

Zerohedge is best characterized as a one-mind kiwifarms operation with less discipline. Its great fun, but the world it presents is a bit too lizard-pilled for my liking. This particular 'sonic weapon' thing sounds like Havana syndrome again, a malattribution to genericized discomforts that acutely present in stressful circumstances. LRAD is mitigated really easily because it suffers the standard problem of any beam weapon: it gets blocked by everything including atmospheric pressure, and just falling out of the cone makes the effect stop immediately. We aren't getting Atreides sonic tanks anytime soon guys, life just isnt that cool.

I’ve often pondered whether zerohedge might have the highest IQ readership on any newsite. It basically grew out trading desks communities which have a floor of about 120 IQ. I’m not sure how widely read they are outside of those communities. Traders also read news differently than other people.

Zerohedge posts conspiracy slop on the free page to attract the crazies and keeps the good shit hidden behind the paywall. Analyst reports out of Seekingalpha or Morningstar were obligate maximizers of whatever slop pushed by the funds, so there was too much noise within the signal. Zerohedge econs stuff is still crazy doomer but itll reveal good underlying points. Stuff like "the lizard globohomo are unwinding all their longs! watch for the metal inflection!"

Trading desks speak a different language than the rest of society. I guess every industry has their own language. You are always asking yourself why your wrong. Or a cottage industry has grown analyzing a CEOs body language and tone versus what he’s directly saying. Which I guess develops a natural bit of conspiracy thinking. It doesn’t apply to the automated shops which is basically more engineering.

I think trading desks develop an instinct for aggressive first mover advantage, and they get almost immediate feedback. Makes their radars very sensitive, and they get very good at filtering for what is bullshit, but they also pick up bullshit really easily. The bullshit doesn't really matter because it doesn't need to be acted upon, but it still gets thrown into the wild in case some smartdick senses gold inside. Its not like WSB where its retards pretending they know whats up.

Quite possibly. That or HackerNews, I'm not on there but even the stupidity that gets crossposted seems fairly erudite. I know a bunch of extraordinarily successful guys who read ZeroHedge, generally with a "this is silly but some of it might just be true" vibe.

HackerNews was the other one that I thought of that on average probably has a reader 1 standard deviation above the NYT average.

Scott’s readership is high IQ, but he writes in a smart person way.

RW Twitter has been having fun comparing this to how the Central Americans might have felt when Spaniards showed up with ships, steel, horses and guns.

I’ve seen that. I wouldn’t be surprised, I heard a lot of stuff about sonic weapons and pain rays 10-15 years ago and then it suddenly went quiet which means they are probably actually deployable now.

The Good shooting came in the middle of the Minnesota news. What we had was:

(1) Fraud allegations from that Youtuber (2) Walz dropping out of re-election (3) More fraud all the time, apparently (4) The ICE protests and shooting

It just happened to all be in Minnesota, which is probably the most excitement they've had in a long while. Living in interesting times, indeed.

(3) More fraud all the time, apparently

Huh?

Not just the childcare which was the most recent; the original fraud was the scamming of funds for meals for children during Covid, and there seems to have been a few other areas of 'creative accounting' as well. All of which started getting wider publicity after the daycare videos.

It's not weird. This is the Culture War thread. It's not the Geopolitics thread. Geopolitics are discussed here, but the Minnesota shooting is the most Culture War-y topic in the news cycle right now.

I agree that it doesn't need a megathread, but Minneapolis is incredibly important. The left has their mojo back. This is the moment the pendulem swings back and we end up with an immigration policy based on, "14 heartbreaking photos that will make you say fuck having borders and law and shit."

The left has their mojo back.

I kinda see what you mean, but I'd be careful with these sort of statements. It's not 2016 anymore, when all this was new, so I doubt following the same script will yield the same effect.

I haven't observed that. The only places I'm hearing about Minneapolis are here and DSL. I think I saw one thing on Youtube, but didn't click and it went away. There was a Facebook and Instagram storm in 2020.

What "you" are you thinking of here. The people who have strong feelings probably already wanted soft borders and lots of refugees.

Go to youtube and scroll down the front page until you get to the section that suggests news clips even though you never watch the news on youtube. For me, 3/4 are MN shooting (the other one is Trump talking about Cuba). Looking at the general news tab, the MN shooting is at least a plurality if not a majority of suggested videos.

OTOH, apparently the NYT has decided that this story is bad for their interests and begun memory-holing it.

OTOH, apparently the NYT has decided that this story is bad for their interests and begun memory-holing it.

There's a David French opinion column today. Predictably dishonest:

An eyewitness, however, said that she heard conflicting instructions — one agent telling Good to get out of the car, while another agent told her to drive away.

French probably knows this isn't actually the case, that's why he is careful to attribute it to an unidentified eyewitness. There's a shitload of video and audio, and not one indication that an agent told her to drive away. (Her wife yelled "Drive, Drive", however)

The Minnesota videos show that it was never necessary for the officer to open fire. If a first shot is taken only after an officer is out of the path of the vehicle, that shot is not necessary to save his life.

The first shot went through the front windshield. Seems unlikely it was taken once he was out of the vehicle's path.

That means a frame-by-frame analysis of a shooting doesn’t come close to resolving its legality.

Translation: "Well, shit, the evidence is against me, so don't look at it"

The first shot went through the front windshield.

I admit to not keeping up with this as much as most mottizens. Would you link me a timestamp or screenshot of when this?

There aren't any good videos from that perspective, but this shows him firing and being hit almost simultaneously at 7 seconds (in the slowed-down video)

How do you perceive that W.R.T. NYT? I just went to their homepage and the top 4 stories were in order:

  1. Noem Says 'Hundreds More' Agents Will Be Sent to Minnesota Over 'Corruption'
  2. Somalis Fled Civil War and Built a Community. Now They Are a Target.
  3. After Minnesota Shooting, ICE Again Limits Congressional Visits
  4. Who Was Renee Good, the Woman Killed by an ICE Agent?

The "front page" looks different, but I did actually overlook one.

Why are we obligated to follow some imagined proportionality of objective importance? You forget, this forum exists for entertainment, no different or more significant than Fortnite. We’re all just shooting the shit for fun and sometimes discussing gender relations in the latest season of Love Island is just plain more fun than some dry geopolitical developments that only nerds care about.

It’s mattering a lot nationally, people I don’t often see as intensely political have become emotionally affected by it, on both sides. It’s also being pushed by the media pretty hard, I can’t scroll through YouTube or try to read the news without a “special breaking news event!!!” banner about some new detail of the event being presented.

I don’t think it needs to be that important and I’m bewildered it’s become such a big deal, but it’s activated strong feelings on both sides and people have very different intuitions about it.

It’s like 10% of my media consumption. I guess I hope some of you are just in blue bubble worlds trying to make it a thing because it’s not finding its way into my bubble outside of the motte.

I’ve seen one girl mention it on instagram and it was praising ICE. So hopefully some of you are just in the blue bubbles because it doesn’t seem like it’s breaking out.

It’s something weird here that is causing a massive amount of posts.

It's not weird, or at least nothing new for this forum. It's just the n'th iteration of George Floyd, Kavanaugh, Nick Sandman, Jussie Smollet, Kyle Rittenhouse, Richard Stallman, James d'Amore, etc., etc., etc. One side decides to ride or die on a particular issue, so the discussion continues more or less indefinitely, because no argument works, and autists keep banging their head against the wall in frustration.

Unlike Iran and Venezuela, there's a lot of actual information available for Minneapolis.

But you can add Cuba now, Trump's at least talking about it.

I have to keep reminding myself that this is only the start of the second year of his second term because Good God it's all kicking off.

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