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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   7340 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 17, 2026

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it's in everyone's best interests for rules to be written in an ideologically neutral fashion

Not everybody's. What about 'I win and you lose' as a ruleset? That's what they actually want. When it's Farage or someone they don't like, the media is holding them to account. At no point are these rules intended to be applied fairly, it's like how Lockheed Martin doesn't give Iran missiles to shoot back.

See if you shoot missiles at them you get into a conflict! This is why you shouldn't shoot missiles! I told you so!

But I want to get into a conflict, that's why I'm shooting missiles. I want to win and secure control and reap spoils of war!

I think some don't understand the culture war, it's a kind of war after all. Wars have certain levels of escalation management and there can be negotiated peace deals but fundamentally they're about using force to achieve goals. Sometimes I saw people saying about war 'why not just do arbitration instead or go to the UN or do an elaborate computer simulation to see who would win' but the violence is the point, that's the proof of work that no judge or agreement can override and sometimes it just feels good to hurt people.

Not everybody's. What about 'I win and you lose' as a ruleset? That's what they actually want. When it's Farage or someone they don't like, the media is holding them to account. At no point are these rules intended to be applied fairly, it's like how Lockheed Martin doesn't give Iran missiles to shoot back.

That ruleset is fantastic only if it is truly the case that God or the moral arc of history is on your side, since you can guarantee that that ruleset will win out. Otherwise, that can invite alternate rulesets that are even harsher for oneself than it would have been towards others, and it can make that alternate ruleset both more likely and just in a way that the original ruleset wasn't. Thus one can genuinely believe that it's fantastic for oneself/one's party/one's ideology/etc. if one has unwavering faith that they are on the side of God right side of history, even if it is, in fact, not the case that it's fantastic for oneself. This, of course, is an obvious risk that immediately presents itself the moment you start dealing with faith, which is something that anyone who's had even a semester of higher education should find intuitive; that any college-educated people would fall for this is a tremendous condemnation of the higher education system as it exists today and certainly within the last few decades.

That ruleset is fantastic only if it is truly the case that God or the moral arc of history is on your side, since you can guarantee that that ruleset will win out.

It's also fantastic if you don't believe rulesets exist in any meaningful way. That is, "ruleset" implies and assumes that good outcomes can arrive by some mechanistic process outside one's own direct control, that one can meaningfully win not only through enforcing one's own will, but by "the rules" declaring one a winner, and that this will be respected by all parties involved.

"I win and you lose" is the default of the ingroup fighting the outgroup, always has been and always will be, because that's how human minds work. If you have sufficient cohesion that I (or we) covers a supermajority of the population, then you can prop a dinky NASCAR-commemorative-china ruleset on top and pretend it's running the show. Then the level of cohesion drops and the china set totters off and hits the concrete floor and shatters into a million irreparable pieces.

None of this is about rules. Rules are not going to solve any of these problems.

Or if you vest thé ruleset in partial institutions, of course.

I don't think you have to believe you're on the side of good, just that enough of your enemies are sufficiently unscrupulous that they would always evoke maximally harsh rulesets against you if they won (so don't let them win at any cost).

I don't think you have to believe you're on the side of good, just that enough of your enemies are sufficiently unscrupulous that they would always evoke maximally harsh rulesets against you if they won (so don't let them win at any cost).

"Good" isn't a perfectly easily-definable term, but I'd say that anyone who truly believes that their enemies are sufficiently unscrupulous in that way is someone who can accurately be said to believe that they are on the side that is "good" in some meaningful way that their enemies aren't.

But also, believing that the "I win and you lose" ruleset is a particularly good way to guarantee forever that "I win and you lose" happens (which is very important, because if I lose and you win, then you will be particularly unscrupulous towards me) seems naive to the point of (self-)malice. A ruleset like that is just going to encourage people to circumvent the ruleset and also eventually subvert it, in a way that a ruleset that isn't just purely and obviously who/whom doesn't. And the only way to believe that such attempts to circumvent/subvert will never succeed is if one believes in some supernatural force willing it so, whether that's God or a god or the moral arc of history or whatever.

Sometimes I saw people saying about war 'why not just do arbitration instead or go to the UN or do an elaborate computer simulation to see who would win' but the violence is the point, that's the proof of work that no judge or agreement can override and sometimes it just feels good to hurt people.

So what I'm hearing is that the objectively best solution is to replace warfare with giant robots in a civilized fighting tournament.

Almost. Lose the giant robots, use maids.

Nanomachines might be a point of failure.

Inventing nanomachines is still easier than making thousands of kg of steel move like ballerinas...

I have observed in the past that warfare has gotten, for lack of a better term, more abstract in the last century or two. Time was, you fight because the enemy would sack your cities, take your lands, put you and yours to the sword, or similar. But those things are unseemly by modern Western standards (not saying they don't happen, though). Modern states fight for principles or alliances or things like that, and we'd likely prefer to force surrender (or at least negotiations) rather than aim for maximum destruction. See the current Iran conflict: we certainly could strike bridges and power plants, but that's not abstract like we'd like it (not judging, merely observing).

It seems the logical conclusion is that we'll move to warfare between entirely-robotic forces, with any human casualties seen as "gross, icky, war-crime material". On the other hand, the abstraction only works when all parties accept the implication: the Taliban didn't have the good sense to give up in the face of overwhelming force that wasn't accompanied by wanton destruction. Neither does Iran, it seems.

On the other hand, the abstraction only works when all parties accept the implication: the Taliban didn't have the good sense to give up in the face of overwhelming force that wasn't accompanied by wanton destruction. Neither does Iran, it seems.

Yes, unfortunately, it gives any defector in the system too much power, so long as public opinion will be on their side as poor victims. If public opinion of Iran's behavior was similar to that of General Sherman talking about the South, things would be far, far different, I feel.

A people who will persevere in war beyond a certain limit ought to know the consequences. Many, many peoples with less pertinacity have been wiped out of national existence.

I meant "in everyone's best interest" in the Rawlsian veil of ignorance sense. In a realpolitik sense, obviously it's best if you can design the rules so that they always benefit your ingroup and hurt your outgroup. Most progressives at least pretend to believe that justice is (or should be) blind.

Oh I missed that... I think though we overcare about Rawls though. The veil of ignorance is something that cannot exist.

No one thinks the veil of ignorance can actually exist. It's a thought experiment meant to guide our intuitions, basically a more sophisticated version of the golden rule.

At least as regards speech restrictions, the historical evidence is that even rules that are intended to be used exclusively by ingroup against outgroup end up mostly being used to settle personal beefs within the ingroup.

Also groupthink. All ideologies are flawed, and if you can't point out flaws without greater risk to yourself, you get Stalin, woke, LinkedIn (iykyk), etc.

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