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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 27, 2026

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The opening disclaimers could be rephrased, with—as far as I can verify—no loss of accuracy:

Hi Y'all. This is a test of shady thinking and not one-shotted into an LLM. But I endorse this essay and invite criticism. I worked on this.

I am not sure how much of any of this is accurate. I didn't one-shot it with an LLM, but did I two- or three-shot it? I'm not telling you. I'm also not telling you how much I worked on this, only that I did (pinky swear!). Does reading through it before endorsing it and inviting criticism count as "working on"? If so, then I guess all of you have now also worked on this essay!

My reason for posting this is to learn more about this state of affairs in the responses.

I'm throwing this up so all of you very fine people can do the actual hard work of checking which parts are true, which parts are hallucinations, and whether it was 50%, 100%, or 200% longer than it needed to be to make a coherent point.

I read this thing because I was assigned it on janitor duty, which is why the above rephrasing (also not one-shotted with an LLM!) is a bit testy. Had I encountered this in the wild, I would've read the first two lines and simply replied, "If you're not going to bother writing it, I'm not going to bother reading it," if I even bothered to reply at all.