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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25161 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 13, 2026

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Anthropic is Now Running Television Ads Threatening Humanity

I saw this ad play on my tv while watching the England vs Argentina postgame. I could not believe what I was watching. I had vaguely heard of a tone-deaf video from Anthropic communications, but I hadn't actually watched it until it popped up on my screen against my will. I am stunned that this is how Anthropic chose to portray themselves to the general public. Maybe this sort of messaging works on a tiny subset of niche technological policy nerds, but they played this during the World Cup.

The ad opens with scenes of destruction: a house ablaze, civil unrest in the streets, hundreds of graves at Arlington National Cemetary. A concerned voiceover asks the questions that many of us ask of the AI industry every day. "Can AI be trusted?" "Who's gonna hit the brakes if we need to?" "How do we really ensure that what we're aiming to acheive really does benefit the majority of people?" All good questions that the rest of the ad is utterly unconcerned with answering.

It feels like a threat. It doesn't feel like they're saying, "oh please God somebody stop us". It feels like they're saying, "just try and stop us, MUAHAHAHAHA!" I suppose it's good that they acknowledge the gravity of what they are undertaking, but that doesn't really matter if they keep doing it anyway.

Also, sort-of-unrelated-but-not-really: Is "Total Clanker Genocide" an acceptable sign for an anti-AI protest?

Apropos of England vs Argentina, I absolutely called it: https://www.themotte.org/post/3822/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/458055?context=8#context

Wouldn't be England if they didn't first give us hope only to lose in the worst possible way and to the worst possible team to lose to.

Also Argentina's one strategy the entire tournament, other than paying for rigged reffing (except during the England game., too expensive or obvious at that point maybe), has been to tire the opponent out for 75 minutes and then kick it into gear. I'm suspecting they do it on purpose to make betting market dips. Who knows, at least it was easy to capitalize on.

Half remembering a stat from the radio this morning: around 70% of their goals occur after the 75th minute of a game.

I am British living in England, and support England, so I feel the pain, although I can acknowledge that we deserved to lose this one. (So did Argentina in the first half).

But I can at least be aware that England were in a World Cup semi-final. For the second time in eight years. And that is a stunning achievement. In 1990 everyone knew this - even after going out on penalties to West Germany, the team that made the semi-final were hailed as heroes. But English fans are more susceptible to entitlement that any other country except Brazil, and now we have far too many people thinking we deserve to win the World Cup and anything less is a disappointment that the manager should be blamed for.

I'm still dreaming, but I think the 60 years of hurt are basically over now. If England had played their best and the opposition had not, we would have won the World Cup. But the opposite was what happened in the second half of yesterday's game.

We were lucky it wasn't 4-1, and we only have the courage and bravery of the goalposts to thank for that.

I don't think we deserved to win, getting to the quarterfinals is the standard benchmark for England and anything more is a bonus. The problem people have isn't with losing per se, it's the way that we lose. Even the way that we win. Let's say that somehow we'd held off Argentina for 40 minutes (!). Would you be proud of the result and confident going into the final, or feeling an unpleasant mixture of relief and trepidation? You can excuse keeping your back against the wall in a match where you're a man down, but in any other scenario it's an admission of a shameful lack of ambition. Too much of England's success has come from lucky breaks against weak opponents and a failure to capitalise on our advantages.

Relevant comedy sketch

Third place playoffs, eh?

OTOH in countries like Finland (where we have never participated in the World Cup and only once in the Euros) there's a long tradition of many people supporting England on the basis of old "honest lads who play hard, don't go for diving" narratives, and this World Cup, at least, has been a nail in the coffin of that myth.

Sadly that's the way the game has developed. I think the refereeing of this tournament has done a good job of limiting the worst of these tendencies and hopefully there's more that can be done. The new rules about time wasting have been a welcome change too.

To be fair, the ratio of fouls Argentina:England was literally 2:1. And the yellow cards were worse. England played a comparatively clean game.

England players don’t do the grandiose ‘let me hear your joy, pour champagne on me now’ routine when they score either.

Playing less dirty than argentina is nothing to brag about.

I'll be honest, I only tuned in for the semi-finals. I assumed that lots of fouling was just how the game was played these days, and that Argentina was overdoing it.

There have been a lot of fouls in this world cup but Argentina has had, just like previous world cups, a lot of them.

Was referring more to the Norway game here.

Ah, didn’t see it :)

and to the worst possible team to lose to.

Explain please - what is the hate towards Argentina? I have seen it all around the social media, but no justification.

They play dirty, but the clincher is they're proud of it.

VARgentina have done enough to fill a mid sized book for why they and their team should be disliked and shunned by all right thinking people.

A good starting point is to take a look at Maradonna's cheating "hand of God" goal where he deliberately lied to the referee about what had happened; this is just not cricket.

The England-Argentina soccer rivalry is one of the bitterest in the game.

How is it a rivalry when they only play every 25 years?

England is still bitter over the 1986 game where Maradona scored a goal off a handball and the ref let it stand, Argentina hates England because of nonsensical posturing over the Malvinas.

It's white people acting like Balkaners all around.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falklands_War

"We" are the reigning world champs and we talk a lot of shit. Last world cup we also came up with this gem, so there's also a racism component to it. It's all banter, but in a fully interconnected world of people without context, people get mad.

All the "rigging" allegations are ex post justification of the hate, if you started to dissect every call in other games with the same level of scrutiny you could build a similar narrative, soccer refereeing is contentious by nature and VAR hasn't helped. I know because back when we weren't winning anything, people were also coming up with stupid conspiracies as well.

No, that Egypt game was rigged. Without that corrupt ref they would have gone to extra time at least. And that doesn't take into account the way teams feel like they can't properly defend against Messi because if they breath on him they get fouled because he is FIFA boy. Messi is a top 5 striker surely but is he really number 1? How can we know? Well, they want to make him look like number one by giving him two world cups in a row. But after some of the reffing it doesn't look legitimate to me. It's a team sport too, just because his team keeps winning doesn't make him any better than eg Ronaldo at the same age. The cult of personality around him is too insane.

Messi is 39, Ronaldo is 41- not exactly a gigantic difference there. He's also legitimately the best player in the world, even if it's exaggerated somewhat by celebrity, and had that reputation even before he became FIFA's flagship player to try to sell the beautiful game to the world's few holdouts against it.

See here, this puts Ronaldo at 2 and Messi at 5. Also an entire continent and global power center is not a small holdout.

From an England perspective, it goes back to the Falklands war and the 1986 World Cup quarter-final where Maradonna punched the ball into the net and the referee missed the blatant handball and allowed the goal.

From a neutral perspective, there have been a lot of complaints that the refs are protecting Messi in an unfair way, which link into the usual allegations of FIFA corruption and greed. Since the Balogun affair it is also possible to link it to rumours of Trumpy interference - the idea that Trump has leant on Infantino to help his ally Milei win re-election is too good to check.

Never heard the Trump angle, but it doesn't sound like Trump. Maybe something that someone whispered to him and he then did, but if FIFA could totally change their refereeing in response to Trump they would've done it for the Belgium-USA game. With the amount of money they're making having the US as a host- and the amount of money they stand to make from the USA going to quarters- they'd have already done it if they could.

They did bloody well, though. I though they were going to get pasted but they held on till the 80 minute mark.

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