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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 22, 2026

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This does not feel like a good faith interaction. You asked me a question, I gave a detailed answer. If you can't watch videos you think are AI, then I don't care. I don't need to qualify anything to you at all and you can remain ignorant on whatever topic you want for whatever sake you choose. But honestly, I don't believe what you are saying right now since the videos don't sound like AI to me. It just sounds like you're erecting an arbitrary hurdle to shield yourself from earnest engagement. I don't know why and it feels like a shame. The videos are well made and cover an interesting topic.

But I'm not sure why this is especially relevant to the point you were originally making.

I was not sure if the person I was responding to was a serious or just a troll. So it felt right to include video material to figure out what level of engagement I was actually getting from them. People generally have opinions on film more readily available than opinions on 18th century anthropology and studies on racism in jury trials.

It's also very relevant to the prescriptive position that person was taking about how media should serve a role in shielding whites from information that would otherwise allegedly cause them to lash out in racist furor. The sentiment reminded me of the monkey tied down in front of TV's in 28 Days Later, as explored in the video. Showing the monkey violent imagery of mob justice and riots made the monkey crazy with rage. Very similar to what that person believed would happen to whites.

But honestly, I don't believe what you are saying right now since the videos don't sound like AI to me. It just sounds like you're erecting an arbitrary hurdle to shield yourself from earnest engagement. I don't know why and it feels like a shame.

No, I'm not lying; that is my true objection. Leaving aside that I've never lied on theMotte (though I've occasionally accidentally said false things, and I've often refrained from telling the whole truth), what motive would I have to lie here? Like, I mentioned this in my first post of our interaction; if I didn't want to engage with you, I simply wouldn't have engaged with you.

If you look around some of my other posts, you'll see that I'm a full-blown Yudkowskian Jihadi, and my objection is the AI-box one, which indeed I've explicitly mentioned on here over a year ago.

I don't doubt you have sincerely held positions about a variety of things and I don't think you're lying in a malicious way to me, more that you are lying to yourself. The voice sounding like AI is an excuse you are giving yourself to not engage with a subject matter.

I've had this experience before when broaching uncomfortable topics. As an example, a Swedish friend of mine and I got to arguing about immigration during the height of the refugee crisis. At the time there were not a lot of resources with data on the matter, and the subject was not mainstream at all. But there was one website called something along the lines of muslimrapestatistics.blogspot.com. I linked it without thinking much of it, but to my friend the name of the blog was too much. Despite being relatively well presented and including a host of Swedish government sources, he took a stand that it was impossible for anything on such a webpage to be true and bailed on the discussion, as I had shown myself to be disreputable for linking it.

Now, maybe I am mistaking your principled stance towards AI voiceovers for what I've just described. Hell, maybe my Swedish friend had a principled stance on believing what's being said on internet blogs. But I can only ask you to appreciate that it's impossible for me to tell the difference, and the end result is the same.

I just listened to this video. It's 17 minutes and I think it's one of the best videos he's made. If you can't stomach 17 minutes of genuine and thought provoking material locked behind a high quality AI voiceover, but can stomach the ocean of garbage that is the internet, well, we'll just have to agree to disagree on what counts for hygiene.