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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.

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.

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.