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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 19, 2026

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There's something very David French about this, but I suppose that's just being Christian, and what makes them such frustrating fellow travelers. I think it's the sense that they would rather lose as long as they satisfy their own personal feelings of being a good person first and foremost. It's like a desire for martyrdom or something, they active want to lose while feeling righteous about their own goodness. Because if your goal is "live in a neighborhood without violent drug addicts", handing out free things to violent drug addicts directly undermines that. With allies like these, who needs enemies? Like, one could very easily donate to some kind of cause that aids the homeless without actively undermining one's own neighborhood. If there were actively violent drug addicts congregating outside my house and I found out my neighbor was giving them free shit I would be just about ready to kill my neighbor.

Because if your goal is "live in a neighborhood without violent drug addicts", handing out free things to violent drug addicts directly undermines that. With allies like these, who needs enemies?

I think you will find that this is not in fact the goal of the poster you are replying to or any of the other related posters.

Your stated goal is easy to "paperclip optimize" away by, for example, killing all of your neighbors. After the massacre, you would clearly "live in a neighborhood without violent drug attics", but you would also be living in a much worse neighborhood.

To use proper RAT/utilitarian/machine learning terminology, I view Christian morals as a form of regularization on goals like the one you state. You already are applying a regularizer that prevents you from considering murdering all humans as the correct solution to your optimization. The Christian is applying a stronger regularization where the ultimate goal of "living in a neighborhood without violent drug addicts" is just as much about wanting to benefit the drug addicts as it is about wanting to benefit yourself.

I think it's the sense that they would rather lose as long as they satisfy their own personal feelings of being a good person first and foremost.

The one thing Christianity isn't about is your own personal feelings. If the God of the Bible is real, and his only-begotten son Jesus Christ died on the Cross for our sins, then this matters. Different strains of Christianity differ over the precise relationship between "being a good person" and faithful acceptance of the gift of Jesus' sacrifice, but the end goal is mutual love between God and Man, and "If you love me, you will keep my commandments". (John 14:15). There is a lot of moral and social teaching in the Bible (although very little about secular politics), and if you find that 100% of it agrees with opinions your allies have adopted for secular reasons, you are engaging in motivated reasoning.

It's like a desire for martyrdom or something

Many people who are sincerely religious desire martyrdom. Read the lives of the Saints, or the sermons at your local Salafi mosque. The reward they seek is not of this world, and trying to point out the worldly unwisdom of what they are doing invites and deserves ridicule.