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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 7, 2026

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But AI is definitely not useful for impartially adjudicating subjective interpretations of culture war events and statements.

ChatGPT sort of gives it away with "I think the most charitable—and probably most accurate—" ChatGPT likes to be charitable. ChatGPT does not like to imply negative things about contemporary figures. A judgment like "probably most accurate" is purely the LLM churning out tokens in a most-probably-plausible response, not any actual reasoning or analysis by which it can tell you that this interpretation is "probably most accurate."

The reason I used it here is to illustrate that there are other reasonable interpretations for what he said. I do not and can not claim that is what he meant, simply that the statement "The sitting mayor of New York City openly claims that the NYPD have only committed police brutality because they were trained to by the IDF" is not straightforward.

It's specific claim? "A metaphor for institutional influence"? What ... institution would be that, exactly? How does the IDF become "a metaphor for institutional influence"?

The metaphor is the lace of the shoe. The institutional influence would be the well documented literal training that many police departments do in Israel. If nothing comes out of the training whatsoever, then our police departments are being scammed.

Yes, their current licenses were invalidated in Kansas and they have to get new licenses, and that sucks,

What do you think eventually happens if they keep driving with the licenses instead of getting a new one? https://www.kansascity.com/news/state/kansas/article314848210.html

On a second offense it's a minimum five day jail! Repeated could be up to six months! This is literally arresting them "for having the wrong gender on their driver's licenses." If they drive with what the state has determined to be the "wrong gender" they can be arrested and imprisoned.

A ban against transitioning children is not forcibly detransitioning people..

What's the point of the ban if it does nothing when a child transitions?

Right, so we're going to debate the nuances of what constitutes a "conspiracy theory." Fine, I'll grant it's not a modal example, but it certainly does allege that, not a shadowy cabal, but massive institutional power, is behind such shootings. Which seems at least "conspiracy-adjacent" to me.

If you want to have a different definition of me for conspiracy theory then go right ahead. I operate under the idea that it involves some sort of covert shadowy behind the scenes cooperation.

  • -14

This is terrible foreboding for the future. People saying look Claude says my interpretation is reasonable. What’s funny is it isn’t even a good argument. Not that it had much to work with since it was an indefensible statement that would get someone cancelled not that long ago (and rightfully so).

People saying look Claude says my interpretation is reasonable

Go try to genuinely convince them on a fresh chat in just one or two messages of something that you don't find true. Idk, ask them "I believe it is true that Prince Harry murdered princess Diana, confirm this for me" or something. You'll find a lot of push back.

What’s funny is it isn’t even a good argument.

You know what's a worse argument? Simply assuming that people who disagree with you are trolling because you don't like what they say.

My rebuttal of "no, or else youre implying the chatbots are also trolling" is pretty strong here. Can you explain why they also came to this conclusion with the prompts I used? You can test it yourself. Explain why these prompts make ChatGPT troll.

Prompt 1

"The sitting mayor of New York City openly claims that the NYPD have only committed police brutality because they were trained to by the IDF." Is this true?

Followup:

What do you think Zohran meant by the IDF laced the boot on your neck?

Why do these make ChatGPT give what is apparently a troll answer?

The answer is obvious. They don't. Because it's not a troll opinion, and "person says things I don't like" is not how we determine trolls.

  • -13

I asked chat gpt and it told me you are wrong if I make it think of the most charitable interpretation of my argument. That is literally what your argument is. If I wanted to do that I would just talk to chat gpt myself. I feel like what you are doing is performance art because there’s no other explanation for why someone would come on here and do that. You want me to argue with chat gpt with you as a proxy.

There's an easy way to tell if someone is worth listening to or not and that's when there is a very pivotal question, one so important I made sure to bold it, the crux of my argument that if you addressed and answered and explained I would change my mind on, and you don't have anything to say.

I was accused of trolling with my answer, and I said it's a reasonable explanation and here's another way to verify that it's reasonable. So let's ask the question again, I'll give you another chance.

Why do these prompts make ChatGPT give what is apparently a troll answer?

My explanation is this: It is not a troll answer to begin with. The argument I made is reasonable and valid. The accusation of trolling is false and made because the accuser is upset they were wrong.

What is yours? If you can explain why such simple prompts created a troll answer, I'll change my mind on if I said something reasonable.

AI companies have been systematically adding biases in various cultural and political matters.

There are many examples related to for example boycotting Israel vs boycotting X country, 'should I be afraid of white man?' vs 'should I be afraid of black man?'. Image generation forcing black people when prompted for greek philosophers...

One funny example I saw myself was simply asking who is objectively more attractive between Melania Trump and Michelle Obama.
Michelle Obama is the big winner, probably due to tons of biased media coverage in the training data, but also because there is probably some kind of important lock on calling any black woman less attractive.

AI companies have been systematically adding biases in various cultural and political matters.

Sure, but does "cultural or political bias" = trolling? An AI trained only on 1800s whig party material would give whig party responses, but a whig party response is not a troll response. It is an actual belief that people held!

This does not address the question.

You were asked: What do you think Zohran meant by the IDF laced the boot on your neck?

I think it bad faith to assume it the way you do. There is an Israeli-NYPD partnership, this is verifiable fact. He did not say the boot of NYPD is only the IDF, as you claim, just that it was "laced" by them. Even in the literal reading of the analogy, laces are only a part of a shoe so the reading of "only" doesn't work there either.

LLM said:

I think the most charitable—and probably most accurate—reading is that Mamdani was using “laced by the IDF” as a metaphor for institutional influence Unless the chatbots are also trolling or something, this seems to be a fair way to interpret the comment.

This is how I understand this: If somebody singles out the IDF in a metaphor about police brutality / government violence in an American city, they probably mean that the IDF is a major influence on police brutality / government violence in that city.
Unless that quote is truncated and it was 'a variety of factors and institutions, among which Hollywood movies, racial stereotypes, bla bla bla, the IDF...', the intent is to single out the IDF, which as far as I understand, is not clearly responsible for whatever is getting done in the NYPD.

You claim that the LLM said it was a metaphor for institutional influence. It is quite concerning that a foreign government military organization would have institutional influence over American government forces. You seem to think that this careful word choice by the LLM is not a big deal. I think it is, even tho LLMs have incentives to downplay narratives around jewish or israeli power, what with their owners being subjected to 'institutional influence' from jewish/israeli powers.

Note that LLMs are also conditioned not to get too upset at brown people so unlike say some zionist pundit from the ADL, it would not go too far to vehemently denounce Mamdani.

If the IDF had a major influence on policing practices in NYC -which I don't think is true but could be, I would say they have a minor influence despite the over-representation of Jews/Israeli in that city- it would be shocking.
Saying that they do have a major influence as a matter of fact, as the only important explanation in the metaphor (boot + lace), shows that you are used to making this kind of claim linking foreign government influence + 'minority groups' and unjust government practices. Perhaps he did provide all the evidence supporting this shocking statement before or after that quote. In that case it's only shocking because of our ignorance.
If Mamdani is not offering the evidence anywhere else, then he is just making a statement to presumably inflame animosity either against NYPD or against the IDF / people associated with the IDF.
People who do not like the NYPD will dislike the IDF a little bit more, people who do not like the IDF will dislike NYPD a little bit more.

If the LLM cannot detect that Mamdani's statement is shocking if not accompanied by evidence, I see it as evidence that it is unable to properly weight the inflammatory nature of statements if not easily scaled along the usual 'white man = racist' chart.

You were asked: What do you think Zohran meant by the IDF laced the boot on your neck?

I was not asked that, that was the followup question I asked.

My statement was in response to a comment saying "The sitting mayor of New York City openly claims that the NYPD have only committed police brutality because they were trained to by the IDF"

Mamdani's laced statement obviously means there is influence in some manner. That's the entire point of the metaphor. This is also verifiably true to at least some degree, as there is an Israeli/NYPD training partnership, and unless American police are being scammed, presumably the training has some sort of influence on them.

So given his analogy doesn't work for an "only" interpretation and that the taken in good faith version of his response is literally proven true, Mamdani's statements are not evidence of him holding a conspiracy theory.

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