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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 14, 2026

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Both

AI Luddites, reactionaries, job protectionists and woke ethics grifters who demand pause/stop/red tape/sinecures (bottom left) plus messianic Utopian EAs who wish for a moral singleton God, and state/intelligence actors making use of them (top left) vs. libertarian social-darwinist and posthumanist e/accs often aligned with American corporations and the MIC (top right?) and minarchist/communalist transhumanist d/accs who try to walk the tightrope of human empowerment (bottom right?)

(Why are state/intelligence actors top left, and the MIC top right? Just being foreign should not make them change the quadrant?)

and especially

AI accelerationism vs anti-AI/AI safety movement

feels like it is lumping a lot of different groups together which have very little in common.

I can of course define arbitrary groups, like "people who sometimes kill young mammals", and then lump in various groups like doctors who perform abortions, butchers, school shooters, pharmacy labs, some psychotic mothers, the US military, drivers accidentally running over hedgehogs at night, ratcatchers, sport hunters, indigenous hunters, cannibals, owners of oil drilling rigs, MAID activists, evil cults doing child sacrifice, measles activists, people practicing infanticide for population control, carnivorous animals.

The problem is that young-mammal-killing is just a surface-level similarity between all of these, not some deeper moral belief. MAID activists are not especially pro school shootings, nor are butchers especially likely to be pro measles, or cannibals pro animal testing.

Sometimes necessity makes strange bedfellows, and you get broad coalitions like the WW2 Allies. And it is always tempting to lump all of your enemies together for propaganda reasons. The communist Jewish Yankee pacifist union ethno-nationalist gay gypsy democratic enemies of the Reich.

So far, I see very little evidence that the AI x-risk crowd and the people who are against AI-generated art or Grok undressing kids or AI causing job loss will converge on a common strategy (like Butlerian) jihad any more than that the killers of young mammals will converge on a particular mode of mammal-killing.