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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   23196 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 14, 2026

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Begrudging congratulations to @self_made_human for producing a book review entry that's good enough to make it as a finalist of Scott's Book Review Contest, yet AI-sloppy enough to make the comments section focus almost exclusively on the (un)acceptability of undisclosed use of AI.

This reminds me of a video I stumbled on the other day. It's a 12-minute "documentary-style" video essay telling the story of a rescue dog that gets dropped off at a shelter without any documentation. It's a cute, healthy dog that should be eminently adoptable except for his utter refusal to engage with anyone. Five months in, the dog's time at the shelter is up, and he is scheduled for transfer to doggy prison (or whatever, the point is that it's the end of trying to get him adopted). But a woman brings in her small, shy six-year-old deaf girl, and amazingly the dog responds to the child alone, and knows all the hand-sign commands. Turns out the dog was raised by a deaf old man, who then had a stroke. That's the gist, though the video packs a whole lot more dramatic beats, twists, and turns.

It's a real tear-jerker... if it describes a true story. Unless it's made up. Which, come to think of it (I say to myself as I review my reaction to the video), it probably is. Because how can there possibly be a dog smart enough to learn sign commands, yet so dumb that it couldn't possibly figure out any other forms of human-dog communication. Yeah, I smell bullshit.

But OK, maybe it's like a video short fiction, it's not supposed to be real, no more than any other kind of fiction. Then I can judge the video on this fictional-short-film kind of merit, and not worry about thinking critically on the veracity of facts. Damn it, they really should have specified that this is fiction. Then I can enjoy it as such. It has good plot beats. The actors are cute and relatable. Especially the dog.

Unless it's AI-generated. Posted March 2026. Possible. Fuck.

When I read something that, presumably, is the human author's thoughts, only for it to turn out to be LLM's output, I feel a similar betrayal of trust as when I read something purportedly factual that turns out to be fictional, even if not actively meant to deceive. This is definitely true if the entire output is LLM-produced, and remains partially true if LLM is used for editing that inserts LLM-created phrases. Like this zinger from the review:

He holds the buck in his hand, hot as coal, and tries to douse it in hotter tears. He orders his thumping heart to be still. He fails on both counts.

I hope this forum preserves the norm of humans writing for humans by humans, even as I know that the overall tide is flowing the other way.

I'm just going to pretend the book review was posted as the OP instead.

For Americans and others only accustomed to for-profit care encountering this for the first time, the experience can feel vertiginous, like you’ve stepped into a film about the Soviet Union, except the doctors speak English and the building has running water. I do suspect there’s less phage therapy and more tea involved.

I've had this experience. It reminded me of being in public school. Everyone working there looks tired, the guy with almost debilitating tourettes is a security guard, the whole building is the color of oxidized beige computer hardware and maybe you can smell mold that experts have decided was totally nothing to worry about.

Was the Soviet Union like this?

Was the Soviet Union like this?

ahem:

Those who ran the Soviet Union had believed that they could plan and manage a new kind of socialist society. But they had discovered that it was impossible to control and predict everything, and the plan had run out of control.

Rather than reveal this, the technocrats began to pretend that everything was still going according to plan. And what emerged instead was a fake version of the society. The Soviet Union became a society where everyone knew that what their leaders said was not real — because they could see with their own eyes that the economy was falling apart.

But everybody had to play along and pretend that it WAS real because no-one could imagine any alternative. [Alexei Yurchak] called it "hypernormalisation". You were so much a part of the system that it was impossible to see beyond it. The fakeness was hypernormal.

Adam Curtis, HyperNormalization, 2016

But everybody had to play along and pretend that it WAS real because no-one could imagine any alternative.

Curtis is such a twat sometimes. No, genius, people were perfectly capable of imagining alternatives, they could sometimes even see them directly, as the Iron Curtain wasn't airtight. Everybody played along because otherwise they'd face punishment ranging from what we call "cancellation" today, to prison, various degrees of torture, or disappearing in mysterious circumstances.

Everybody played along because otherwise they'd face punishment ranging from what we call "cancellation" today, to prison, various degrees of torture, or disappearing in mysterious circumstances.

You are wrong. The great divergence really picked up speed in the late 70s. By that time no one really bothered with oppression seriously. Except probably Ceausescu and Erich Honecker. The whole 80s were spent waiting for the regimes to just die.

I think Gorbachev was doing more than waiting for his regime to die, at least in the 1985-9 period. (After the rest of the Soviet bloc collapses, he does seem to be sitting waiting for the USSR itself to die). I don't know how high his chances of success were ex ante, but he was trying.

And of course Deng in China was trying and succeeding.

You are wrong. The great divergence really picked up speed in the late 70s. By that time no one really bothered with oppression seriously

It wasn't literal stalinist reign of terror, and there's some argument to be made for "oppressive regimes fall apart when they become more permissive", but the way you phrased it is, uh, slightly rosy.

You'd absolutely get booted out of any prestigious position if you said anything commie-skeptical, which is what kept most people in check, but beyond that every Eastern Block country had it's Stasi equivalent that would surveil and imprison political opposition. You didn't even have to do much to cross them, I had a friend who's earliest childhood memory is the secret police bursting through the door to haul of her mother to prison for handing out pamphlets. You'd even see the odd political assasination happening well into the 80's.

He has this very specific thesis and bends the material to it quite a bit (even sometimes using fiction clips without telling you they are). So it's to be taken with a grain of salt as "the BBC man's view on things". But I do think he has a point insomuch as the whole system came crashing down the second that Soviet elites had a preference cascade where they realized most of the people in charge wanted to "liberalize" to a certain degree.

The repression can't be the only force operating because otherwise the Yanayev coup would have succeeded.

He has this very specific thesis and bends the material to it quite a bit (even sometimes using fiction clips without telling you they are). So it's to be taken with a grain of salt as "the BBC man's view on things".

Yeah, that pretty much zeroes in on what drives me up the wall about the guy. Still, you're right, he does regularly come up with interesting ideas, so I can't write him off completely.

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