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PaperclipPerfector  11hr ago (text post)   1707 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 28, 2026

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Yesterday in the UK a farmer noticed something odd - three white vans blocking a road and "a large group of hooded and masked men" who hid when they saw her near RAF Fairford. She called the police and five men were arrested. International story, were these men agents of Russia? Iran? Homegrown terrorists?

85 homes were evacuated while the bomb squad investigated the vehicles. Trump stated that intelligence agencies had their eyes on these guys, while other people noted that this contradicted the official story of a chance random encounter leading to the arrests. Other news articles indicated the air force base had been under heightened security leading up to the event, while paradoxically other news articles indicated nobody was guarding the place.

What everyone did agree on was that these people were dangerous and definitely up to something not good. Which is obviously the reason they were released a day later on the most "stringent bail conditions."

...What?

Ok, I'm supposed to come up with a better conversation starter than just disbelief so... why did this happen? Are the suspects brown and they just cannot conceive of holding brown people without bail? Are they actually not all that dangerous? Is it a foiled false flag? An interrupted training exercise?

People (especially journalists) jump to conclusions. I suspect these guys looked very suspicious, maybe the UK was surveilling them, but ultimately are petty criminals who are now being treated like unsuspicious petty criminals.

Whoever they are, I am annoyed that many news articles are calling them terrorists.

To me, terrorism means attacking civilian targets because of political motives. Attacking a military base is just an attack, not terrorism. It has more in common with using a fighter jet to blow up a tank than it has in common with, say, deliberately blowing up a music concert.

The word "terrorism" has been politicized to mean something like "an asymmetric attack done by the bad people". Maybe even worse, maybe it's been politicized to mean something like "an attack done by the bad people".

I'd love to see them called "unlawful combatants" instead of terrorists, but I imagine if the press adopted such a practice generally it would lead to some awkwardness in their reporting on things like Gaza.

I think "terrorist" grew to mean something like violent, possibly organized, non-State actor. Because "violent, possibly organized, non-State actor" is a mouthful to type.

VNSA is already a term, but it also covers organized crime groups, pirates, rebels, and other non-terrorist/not-necessarily-terrorist organizations.

True. Or more precisely, "violent, possibly organized, non-State actor that is not on the speaker's side". Because people almost never call their own allies terrorists.

I too found it bizarre that they were released on bail. Unless the plan is to surveil them closely and hope they'll 'phone home'. Aren't terrorism laws supposed to make it easy to hold suspected terrorists?

I like the theory that they were diesel thieves that bit off more than they can chew.

My bet is some pro-Palestinian direct-action activists with cans of petrol (and empty bottles, and rags) in the vans or something similar that was not an indisputable weapon or explosive device.

Do we know anything about them or what happened? I saw something about it being a drone attack but otherwise it's been beaten down hard.

An old staple of the culture war has resurfaced: District attorney reopens case of alleged Cornell University 'gang rape'. The core allegation is that the girl went to a frat house, got pressured to snort ketamine, passed out, and was raped by multiple people while unconscious.

I first heard about this case from someone at Cornell a bit after it happened. She was adamant that the frat boys were guilty and that there was conclusive proof (though she didn't personally know what the proof was), but the administration went easy* on them because of misogyny. Obviously, this set off alarm bells in my head because it pattern-matched well with Duke Lacrosse, Mattress Girl, etc. I said that it sounded like there wasn't enough evidence to tell, while in the back of my mind thinking that the accusation was probably false.

I was somewhat surprised when I read today that this conclusive proof does sort of exist, in the form of a Snapchat screenshot wherein someone in the fraternity's group chat posted that there was "free pussy upstairs". It's not quite conclusive proof, but it's much better proof than I expected. At this point my assessment is that the accusation is probably basically real.

This got me to thinking about whether it was time to update my model of the world, and whether the discourse around campus rape has changed over the past 10+ years. In a media environment where Jezebel is dead and Rolling Stone irrelevant, should we still expect the mainstream media to be biased to the point of uselessness? What about the power dynamics? Who is Cornell more afraid of, feminists or Republican OCRs?

There're also the evergreen questions, like what the responsibility of a university should be in cases like this, or what the police department or justice system should do. Seasoned culture warriors will point out that wanting to be hard on this kind of crime correlates with wanting to be soft on other kinds of crime.

Another thing that came to mind was the question of how grievous a crime we should consider rape to be. In my lifetime, rape has generally been considered equivalent to murder in severity ("rape and murder" usually being used to indicate the category of "super serious crime"), and the question of whether that's a good thing has been debated to death. However, Zoomers are famously more prudish than Millennials. Does it follow that Zoomers also regard rape as a greater crime, relatively speaking, than Millennials do?

*I see people claiming on Reddit and other places that the alleged rapists' only punishment was that they had to write apologetic essays, but this is not true -- at least two members of the fraternity were expelled. Whether this is a light punishment is up for debate.

I was somewhat surprised when I read today that this conclusive proof does sort of exist, in the form of a Snapchat screenshot wherein someone in the fraternity's group chat posted that there was "free pussy upstairs". It's not quite conclusive proof, but it's much better proof than I expected. At this point my assessment is that the accusation is probably basically real.

Does this screenshot actually exist? The articles I saw referencing it were so vague and carefully phrased and caveated that I can say with certainty is that someone claims that such a screenshot exists, and implies that it is in reference to this woman.

I'll also note that those articles said that her initial interview with police described everything as consensual, including the sex and drug use, and specifically included language that her request to stop was respected.

I'm still leaning towards "girl had quite the party, then weeks later after conference with her friends/suspicion from her boyfriend decided it was rape."

Does it follow that Zoomers also regard rape as a greater crime [than murder], relatively speaking, than Millennials do?

Anecdotally, the answer is yes. A while back, a Zoomer coworker told me about how one of his acquaintances had SA allegations bubble up and that trying to respond to the allegations destabilized his friend group. Verbatim, the coworker said: "I think if he killed someone in a bar fight, I'd feel less upset than I do right now," and remarked how others felt similarly. There you have it.

These sorts of cases where there is ambiguity really paint a nice picture of where the societal incentives lie: she can either lean toward admitting that she partied too hard, wanted to be a slut in the moment, and that she regretted it later, or she lean toward being the victim and a bunch of feminists and liberals will run their default settings and try to ruin the lives of every male involved. There is no incentive for her to lean into the former. None. Zero. Why would she? Why would anyone in her position take responsibility for their actions?

Whether there was a rape or not, there is actually substantial incentive for her to lean into the former. Legal cases are unpleasant. Victory is uncertain. Becoming a nationally known culture war figure who is alternately valorized and defamed by people online is something that many people would want to avoid. Being famous for having been raped is something that many people would want to avoid.

Was she raped? I have no idea. I'd have to look at the details and even then possibly there is no way to come to a convincing conclusion. But I don't think the incentives are as one-sided as you believe.

You comment as if she has the experience of having played the victim with no agency before and it turned out horribly for her. I doubt that.

It's the default setting because that's where the incentives lie for women. The choice between taking responsibility vs. hiring a team that will make someone else take responsibility and absolve you of facing the shame of what you did is a no brainer. She's already been branded as a slut and, if you did have sex, there's really only one way out of that label: accuse the other party of rape. Even if it is found that there is not enough evidence to charge the males involved, she can still play victim and people online and in the media will believe her.

Based on what I've seen, it's hard to say whether she was raped or not. I don't know what she was wearing or how she was behaving either. I assume she was dressed like most other college-aged girls dress during a night of drinking when they are seeking out the allure and possible risk of sexual shenanigans. It says she had been drinking.

The stuff I've read has a lot of "she was pressured" type claims attached, meaning that she had no agency. That's how these cases go. You can drink like a fish, dress like you're DTF, go to a house with a bunch of young 20s males who all want to have sex, and then if the sex doesn't turn out the way you had hoped and things got a little messy you can pull the "I was raped." rip cord.

It's stories like these that remind me how completely out of touch I am. Every aspect feels equally implausible.

Setting aside the drugs (where do people even get drugs, anyway?), and the violent crime... How does a man on a modern university campus, who is presumably smart enough to attend that university, receive a text message saying "free pussy upstairs" and not instantly nope out of that situation? That is so obviously and transparently a trap! Getting arrested for rape is the best-case scenario, because at least then you'll get to be processed by an actual legal system with a presumption of innocence.

I suppose these kids could have been just the right age for Depp v. Heard to be their formative experience of feminism, and early-2020s Internet censorship might have stopped them from learning about how society works, but that feels like a stretch.

It's cool that frat parties are real, though.

Ketamine can literally just be ordered from a tele-health provider (just AI it but assumed was true). Even many of the “illegal” drugs have websites that you just click on to order and they send you in the mail or if local it’s like uber eats.

receive a text message saying

While sus it's not incompatible with consent and active engagement from the lady, some people in college (especially when high or drunk) just go for that kind of stuff, both as the deliverer and receiver.

Think about girls gone wild and old school campus porn videos. Some people are into this even if it sounds alien.

where do people even get drugs, anyway?

From drug dealers.

This is why I would prefer to live in a Christian monoculture nation where getting gangbanged in a frat house is such a taboo that you could reasonably assume no girl would do that and therefore they are guilty.

Her behavior would also highly correlate with an effective altruist who rationally experiments with drugs and sexual pleasure.

Who knows? There was an investigation at the time and reports are she’s significantly changed her story. Two frat bros being expelled doesn’t really tell you much because schools were really harsh on those accused for a while.

There’s another story going around of a girl who did the same thing in college and got gangbanged at a frat house. She’s upset they took video and put it on snapchat not that she was gangbanged. So girls do happily get gangbanged today.

She’s suing for millions so maybe she’s just concerned about AI and trying to get her bag in time.

I’d prefer strong social norms against gangbangs but feminists won.

I think you're probably underestimating how much non-feminists are responsible for culture in which consensual gangbangs are permissible, and overestimating how much feminists are responsible for it.

I am technically a feminist, by some definitions, because I think women should have equal legal rights to men. But that's probably not what you mean by "feminist". I am guessing that I am not a feminist in your sense of the word.

I am nearly 100% in favor of culture being permissive of consensual gangbangs.

Why? For selfish reasons: I like wild sex. And for philosophical reasons: I like liberty.

The sexual revolution was caused by many factors of which feminism is only one. Certainly there were many men who supported it out of selfish or philosophical motives, and were not really part of the feminist movement in any substantial way.

No, you sound like a feminist. Not all feminists are pro-sexually liberalized society, and not all sex libertines are aesthetically interested in girl power narrative, but both are part of the same fundamental school of thought:

Women (and men) should be understood as atomic individuals first, and social or cultural expecations that restrict liberal expression in favor of traditional, Christian-based, role-based hegemonic ideas are to be rejected as oppressive.

The snapchat message is not indicative of anything. Plugging ["free pussy" until:2026-05-28] into x search, having picked a random date, I see that there are three usages of the phrase which convey consensual intercourse on May 27th alone. Two examples:

• “Free Pussy scare me, u don't want ya nails done or nothing ?” — a user indicating that he is afraid of women who offer intercourse without asking for something in return, like funding for a nail salon appointment

• “Men stay to get free pussy. Convert a serious girlfriend to friends with benefit. Why throw away the pussy when you can demote it.”

There are two more references on the 26th and two more on the 25th. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were no online usage of this term to refer to non-consensual intercourse. Or perhaps it refers to non-consensual activity a small percentage of the time. But yeah, “free pussy” is how AAVE-influenced young White American refers to promiscuous women.

My two cents remains that catching rape charges for participating in an impromptu gangbang sounds like (literally)fucking around and finding out, and that universities are not the people to handle this.

Viral story, sûre, but not actually much to see here.

Viral story, sûre, but not actually much to see here.

It does tell us that there's only so long the media can resist before sticking its hand in the "lurid story about college men that may or may not be true" jar.

The UVA rape case was...twelve years ago? Mattress Girl was 11. So about a decade at max stretch.

that universities are not the people to handle this.

What baffles me about all these situations is that in any sort of sane world (ie. how things work at least outside the US) the university should have zero say in anything that happens between students. Rape allegations would be investigated by actual police and the university's role would be reduced to the same role as eg. a regular apartment building's (ie. providing possible security cam footage etc to the investigators).

The administration literally couldn't go "easy" on a perpetrator because they would be nearly completely outside the process.

Don't think this is possible under Title IX (which is what I believed Obama used to get them to get more involved in these cases). Universities need administrators to manage compliance like any other business and the government will react to lobbying for more interference in captive institutions.

In this case the police were involved. They even did a grand jury and grand juries are sometimes used to show that there is not credible evidence for a charge. A grand jury standard of evidence appears to be the same as a civil lawsuit - 50.01%.

A grand jury has to find probable cause that a crime has been committed, which is a lesser standard than preponderance.

I was somewhat surprised when I read today that this conclusive proof does sort of exist, in the form of a Snapchat screenshot wherein someone in the fraternity's group chat posted that there was "free pussy upstairs". It's not quite conclusive proof, but it's much better proof than I expected. At this point my assessment is that the accusation is probably basically real. One guy says "there's free pussy," therefore seven men must have raped her.

A picture someone posted online that has no provenance except a viral twitter mob is actually really bad proof. This is really, really flimsy proof. The worst part about it is that everyone believes it must be real because they've seen the picture, and seeing is believing. The story would actually be more believable if there were no picture at all, because then it would rest on the simple usual he-said-she-said and not the stochastic Rorschach test of things that are half-known.

Even if the picture is real and not taken out of context at all it's entirely possible to construct a benign interpretation. (One guy saying to his friends that there is "free pussy" upstairs is really, really far away from proving anybody actually raped her.)

This got me to thinking about whether it was time to update my model of the world, and whether the discourse around campus rape has changed over the past 10+ years. In a media environment where Jezebel is dead and Rolling Stone irrelevant, should we still expect the mainstream media to be biased to the point of uselessness? What about the power dynamics? Who is Cornell more afraid of, feminists or Republican OCRs?

It has less to do with media dynamics and more to do with teenage anxiety about sex combined with bureaucratic neuroticism. We take teenagers away from home and put them in high-pressure career-study stress then ply them with booze and free condoms and tell them not to worry, college is a great time! Let's give them matches and dynamite while we're at it. Out of this mix you get a wide variety of responses, which includes lots of normal excess that people regret for lots of reasons. From the outside it's impossible to really tell what's going on, it's impossible for me to say when a girl is having fun she regrets or if a guy is actually a creep or what. I hear all sorts of stories from my girlfriends, and half the time they are clearly BS, and half the time the men really are pigs, and you can't ask too carefully at all or you're part of the problem. So, from the inside, the colleges invent this insane bureaucratic machine that puts men through impossible burdens of proof that assume they are basically guilty by default.

Let's not forget the Lois Lerner "Dear Colleagues" letter and everything that came down on college campuses during the Obama years.

However, even then, even putting aside the bad-faith bureaucracy and taking the worst for granted... -- the events described at Cornell University are a six sigma event. They are extraordinarily unlikely. Seven teenagers drugging and gang-raping a random girl unknown to them? I actually find it more believable that Jussie Smollet was innocently walking around Chicago when two thugs assaulted him and shouted "This is MAGA Country". Do you know how hard it is to organize the alleged events? Teenagers do not think like this. There is not a single man on this forum who would participate in something like this, and probably not a single man anybody here knows who would participate in something like this, perhaps even to a 2nd or 3rd degree. I've known men to do some pretty heinous things to woman but gang rape is really a step above in improbability. How many people here would commit a life-ruining crime with their roommates or even strangers? You can throw infinite alcohol and drugs into this mix and it still remains extremely improbable because unlike an episode of Plato most people do not lose their moral sense when you grant them total anonymity and repercussions from consequences.

Basically, I call BS, UVA Lacrosse, "A Rape on Campus," Jussie Smollet, etc etc etc.

at least two members of the fraternity were expelled. Whether this is a light punishment is up for debate.

What else is the college supposed to do? The cops looked into it in 2024 and concluded there was no criminal case, expulsion is then actually the maximum possible punishment. This is actually evidence of hysteria because you can be expelled for things which the legal system concluded had no merit.

Do you know how hard it is to organize the alleged events? Teenagers do not think like this. There is not a single man on this forum who would participate in something like this

Not knowingly, not with full consciousness of the heinousness of what they're doing. But many rapists lie to themselves to maintain plausible deniability within their own minds - they tell themselves soothing stories. This is what she wanted, this is what she came here to do, slipping her a little something to loosen her up is just insurance to make sure she follows through on what she implicitly promised already. In an environment where casual sex and casual drug use are already normalized group mentality could easily reinforce that sort of self-deception rather than unravel it.

Indeed, in a scenario like this, some participants might well be earnestly unaware that the encounter is non-consensual - that when the group-chat guy told them "I've got a girl up on the bed, naked and high as a kite" they might have honestly assumed the implication was that the girl had gotten high on purpose, and preemptively consented to sex before the drugs kicked in. That sort of thing probably happens fairly often in its own right. And the relative reasonableness of that assumption feeds back into the self-deception/plausible deniability: even if the non-consensual-roofie hypothesis has occurred to them as a more-or-less-distant possibility, horny boys will feel a strong incentive to continue to operate on the assumption of consent rather than double-check and find themselves unable to proceed without guilt. Schrödinger's Pussy?

This is what she wanted, this is what she came here to do, slipping her a little something to loosen her up

The allegation is that they made her snort ketamine off their dicks. I've heard some people saying they put ketamine on their dicks before they fucked her. This is not normal stuff. This is up there with knives in the Halloween candy and Satanists in the pre-schools.

But to your broader point -- no, I don't think this is common, I don't think this isn't something people rationalize. I don't think rape is a casual slippery slope down a simple rationalization.

that when the group-chat guy told them "I've got a girl up on the bed, naked and high as a kite" they might have honestly assumed the implication was that the girl had gotten high on purpose,

Most men want nothing to do with group sex cumdump porno fantasies, media narratives about male barbarians and ancient primal caveman urges aside. We can actually judge by comparison three cases where we do observe this behavior: Pakistani rape gangs, Aella sex parties, and gay orgies. In none of these cases are the men involved psychologically normal. It takes a huge degree of filtering to get men to exhibit anything close to the behavior alleged at Cornell. You could probably give out free booze and ketamine to college frats across America and you would not reproduce the behavior alleged here. It would be more likely that if you gave everyone in America a billion dollars a few of them would build SpaceX.

Yes, I should have looked deeper before giving my personal opinion on the likelihood of guilt.

What else is the college supposed to do? The cops looked into it in 2024 and concluded there was no criminal case, expulsion is then actually the maximum possible punishment. This is actually evidence of hysteria because you can be expelled for things which the legal system concluded had no merit.

When the type of punishment is already maxed out, the next variable is the number of people being punished. They can't expel the expelled students any harder, but if they wanted to project a stronger anti-rape message, they could expel more of them (in this case, other frat members for their alleged involvement).

there was "free pussy upstairs". It's not quite conclusive proof, but it's much better proof than I expected. At this point my assessment is that the accusation is probably basically real.

Proof of what exactly? It proves that there was train happening upstairs - which no one has disputed I think. Whether it was rape depends on whether she was capable of consent and if she gave it. That exact quote doesn't swing in any direction.

Points against that being rape is that during the woke era in a woke institution administered and ruled by woke people trough and trough - that this was covered up is strange.

For is that she did drugs.

I hadn't been paying close attention to the details of the story and I was under the impression that her being unconscious (and therefore incapable of consent) was an agreed-upon fact. Upon closer reading it does seem like the unconscious part is under contention, with the DA saying that when the incident was originally reported, she did not report being unconscious, which seems like the classic story-changing pattern.

Maybe I was too quick to update.

Starship Flight 14 is in orbit; it's just finished deploying satellites as I type. Looks like @TheDag won his bet with @ArjinFerman, with about 3 months to go. Recent discussion of this and other bets.

IMHO I'm still on track to lose my bet with Arjin, though there's three years left for things to get more interesting there. Things got a little more interesting in the wrong direction this morning, with SpaceX making a last-minute call to do the final (only 19 seconds long! Their suborbital trajectories really are really close to orbital!) orbital insertion burn after an ascent in which one of the six upper stage engines shut down early.

An early engine shutdown or two (they had one on the booster too) isn't the end of the world for the ascent - they carry extra fuel reserves for that contingency, and just keep the other engines lit a little longer if it happens - but it does mean a higher chance that the most exciting potential failure here is still to come. Starship did go to orbit, but we have yet to learn for certain whether Starship should have gone to orbit. They're hoping to do about 8 more hours of orbital coasting, then relight an upper stage engine for a deorbit burn. They also get to a "checkpoint" every hour or two where they can do an early deorbit burn and an early controlled reentry over ocean if they anticipate any issues with the full-length mission. But, if there's anything wrong with the upper stage that prevents the relight, then instead of another nice reentry and splashdown, we'll have the largest individual vehicle to make orbit (at least 25% heavier than the Shuttle orbiter, and something like a quarter the mass of the entire International Space Station after all its individual parts were assembled) stuck in orbit, eventually reentering out-of-control. This would be the largest event ever of that nature (Skylab was maybe 75% the mass of the Starship orbiter) and would be by far the largest recent event (the series of irresponsibly-littered Long March 5B upper stages were something like 20% the mass of Starship).

Beat me to my concession speech! @TheDag, if you're still here, send me a charity of your choice, or if you prefer to get the goods directly, some privacy-preserving way of transferring the money (happy to buy you a game on Steam, or something).

Things got a little more interesting in the wrong direction this morning, with SpaceX making a last-minute call to do the final (only 19 seconds long! Their suborbital trajectories really are really close to orbital!) orbital insertion burn after an ascent in which one of the six upper stage engines shut down early.

This one was a real nail-biter, originally they actually called off the orbital burn, only to change their mind again and go ahead with it.

I'll go ahead an concede a few more things. Over the years my opinion on Elon / SpaceX improved. Originally I was sure that Starlink was a gimmick, but between the Ukraine war, and every competitor trying to get their own version of it running, it seems pretty obvious like it's here to stay, and so no matter what happens in the coming years, I have to give him credit for implementing an idea that, frankly, seemed deranged just a few years ago.

Wooo lovely! I will DM you my friend. I am still here but have mostly moved to another account. Thanks for being a good sport, I was definitely sweating with how close things came. It's wild that if they didn't get it this time I probably would've lost.

I'm very glad your opinion has changed! I have become less focused on Elon / SpaceX over time, but I do still deeply admire the work they're doing.

It's wild that if they didn't get it this time I probably would've lost.

Depends on why. If they'd just decided to be extra paranoid and stay suborbital, they'd have gone to orbit in October instead. If some wild disaster had blown things up on the pad, Starship would be shut down for investigations for at least the rest of the year for sure.

This one was a real nail-biter

As a bet, maybe. As a live-stream, not by their standards.

They set the nail-biter bar way too high in the last 10 minutes of their first controlled reentry, Flight 4, starting at around T+57:11, when you can see the back side of a forward flap start to glow. The live-stream stops swapping between 3 other cameras and now focuses solely on The Flap as it's torn completely through by the plasma intrusion.

Fifteen seconds later I'm seeing whole thermal protection tiles ripped off into the slipstream ... but it's still going. At T+58 I'm warning my kids that that plasma temperature is thousands of degrees and the video is probably about to stop abruptly when the whole ship explodes, but so far it's still going. At T+59 I'm squinting because the lens cover is partially obscured by spatters of what must have been molten steel, but it's still going. Just before T+1:00 the video does stop abruptly, and I'm sure the thing is dead ... and 5 seconds later it's back, still going. 2 minutes later we lose video again, for 40 seconds this time, but just as I'm wondering if we're merely seeing telemetry from a falling black box amidst wreckage, ship video comes back; it's still going. Soon it looks like it's nose down, surely too far to be a maneuver, probably out of aerodynamic control ... until, though the cracked and splattered camera cover, you see a near-skeleton of a flap actuate again, and the ship levels off, 15km up, still going. At T+1:04:07 the host literally says "This is a nail-biter!" Ship's slowing to subsonic, but still plummeting into the Indian Ocean night, video pure black, telemetry hitting 1km altitude and surely about to end with a dead belly-flop into the water ... but then the black is lit up by engine light, the flap is clearly visible (minus what looks like half its heat shield and a quarter of its structure), the ship flips sharply and stabilizes at vertical, and water spray fills the view for a moment as the ship comes to a stop.

At T+1:06:06, the ship tips into the water post-splashdown, and the decimated-but-still-working flap appears to tear loose, job complete and permission to die finally granted.

Aaaand ... they're going to bring it down early. Aiming at the Northern Pacific contingency zone for splashdown, after a deorbit burn, about an hour from now, for a total time in orbit of only 3 hours instead of 8.5. Not sure whether this means they actually are seeing sensor readings that suggest the relight will be riskier than they'd expected, or whether they're just having the same "if this goes wrong it'll be literally the biggest failure of its kind ever" thoughts I outlined above and decided not to push their luck after an imperfect launch.

and decided not to push their luck after an imperfect launch.

Seems like it. A youtuber I follow for the space news predicted / guessed that this is what they'd go with as the situation was unfolding. The logic being that between the multiple engine failures, and this amount of time causing everything to go ice cold, would indeed be pushing their luck.

Damn, I meant to buy more SPCX before the launch went off. Maybe it's still early.

For some reason the price actually fell today. Never could make much sense of stonks.

They got satellites into orbit right? Seems badly misjudged to me. Give it a few more months (maybe when they finally catch Starship on return).

In every rational market the reaction of prices to news doesn't hinge on "is this news good" versus "is this news bad", but rather on "is this news better than expected" versus "is this news worse than expected". This was their best v3 launch so far, even aside from it being their first operational launch, but I'm not surprised if it's not the best by as far as the market was expecting. Flight 12 had 2 engine shutdowns on ascent, but massive (dozens of) relight failures on the boostback and landing burns, Flight 13 had an aborted ascent but then had a fine ascent on their second try and had slightly-less-massive (boostback shutdown when only 80% done, fewer but still too many landing burn engine failures) failures on the relights. Flight 14 had only recoverable failures (2 engines shutdown on ascent, 4 relights aborted on boostback and landing), but it still had enough failures that they didn't risk completing the full planned testing phase of the mission, and I wouldn't be surprised if investors had been hoping for a little better than that. There's now a good chance that SpaceX won't even try for another catch on Flight 15, of ship or of booster much less both.

Getting satellites into orbit is huge, though. They're still not getting the payload margins they want (they launched 26 Starlink v3s from a ship that's supposed to be able to do 60 eventually), but what they did get to orbit is roughly 3 times the mass and 10 times the additional bandwidth capacity of a Falcon 9 Starlink launch, which is a pretty nice start.

IMHO the biggest question right now is cadence. They've been doing v3 Starship launches every 2 months since Flight 12, but before this flight they were talking about NET October 19 for Flight 15 and (in a "super provisional" schedule) October 30 for Flight 16, the first Starship launch from Florida. I'm sure those will be delayed, but I'm hoping it'll be delays of weeks rather than months.

The hype of a mostly-successful launch is at war with the broader market anxiety about data centers and the cost of debt right now.

Remember that per their S-1, SpaceX is an AI company with rocket side business, not the other way around.

And companies would never lie on their S-1s...

As an aside, that form was the best piece of fiction I've read in a long time. Swap the numbers between AI and space valuations and it might approximately resemble the truth.

I don't know about "misjudged", SpaceX is mixed up with a bunch of things, including insane levels of AI spending, but yeah, I can't find any logic to it. On previous launch the stocks fell because they scrubbed the flight - a pretty normal occurrence for any launch provider. I imagined that if the market is this sensitive, prices would soar upon reaching a new milestone, but apparently not.

Down 4% this week, up 3% this month. It's about at the IPO.

For some reason no 8 hours, they will deorbit early, so only another 30 minutes from now to coast in space.

You beat me to it; thanks! I'm trying to actually get work done and not just get nerd-sniped by the livestream, so I missed the deorbit burn too. Looks like it went fine, thankfully; they're nearly down to 100km now and probably 5 or 10 minutes away from hitting atmosphere.

I’m somewhat familiar with the work of the reactionary blogger Jim and one thing I definitely never expected him to do was to use the Japanese light novel series KonoSuba and its anime adaptation as a talking point. But now it’s here:

In the anime Konosuba, Kazuma and Megumin frequently find themselves alone together and have a lot of physical contact. Kazuma, who is the main male character, is identified in the storyline as seventeen years old and is drawn as slightly younger; Megumin, who is the primary romantic interest, his waifu, his best girl, is drawn inappropriately young, and is identified in the storyline as inappropriately young even for a seventeen-year-old boy, but all the fanservice women, for example Aqua, are drawn as about Sydney Sweeney’s age. They are all drawn as obviously older than Kazuma, and most of them are identified in the storyline as inappropriately mature for a seventeen-year-old boy. All the other girls perform fanservice, and Megumin does not, but only Megumin gets time alone and extensive platonic physical contact with Kazuma. The storyline could be interpreted as the young main male character preparing her for a future marriage, while at the same time being distracted by all those attractive, far older eye-candy women, particularly Aqua.

One aspect he left out is that Aqua basically exists a comic relief character and not as a potential romantic interest (also the notion that she is ‘drawn as about Sydney Sweeney’s age’ is questionable at best) and that the other main female character who can be called a fanservice woman (Darkness) is basically a delusional pervert which rules her out as a love interest as well.

Anyway, that’s not the main reason I’m linking to it here and I also know this subject matter has been done to death here. The reason instead is the reference therein to mainstream accusations about the ‘Peter Pan syndrome’ among single men. I think it’s a fascinating culture war phenomenon and I also think Jim misses the point about it here. It’s not that it’s a pretext for aging and frumpy hags to whine, it’s that it’s based on the assumption that women are innately mature enough for marriage. I’ll quote a 2011 blog post from an Australian Catholic social conservative author who is also critical of the Manosphere:

On the other hand, what alpha Christian male wants to be sloppy sixth's to the modern shrew? The problem for this type of guy is the lack of quality women out there. He wants to get married but the pickings are so slim. Hymowitz thinks that today's average girl is "quality" product, however I think that there is a fair amount of legitimate disagreement as what constitutes quality No matter what her career achievements, a woman who has ridden the carousel and perhaps made a few trips to the abortuary is not quality material from a Christian point of view. A mature and responsible christian male would think such a woman is high risk material for infidelity and divorce and by-pass her. If there were an en masse movement to alpha up, the following would happen. The hedonists would pump and dump while the Christians would become more choosy; the pool of marriageable suitors for women would shrink.

Where Hymowitz errs, is in the assertion that today's woman is in some way more "mature" than the pre-adolescent male upon which she rightly heaps her scorn. She labours under the illusion that the modern woman is some sort of prize that men will aspire to. Hymowitz has framed her argument in such a way that would be laughable to the good men of the past.

Men and women of the past would both agree that men today leave a lot to be desired, but the fall in quality has been most marked amongst women. From the vantage point of the past, the modern woman today is vapid, slutty, superficial, unfeminine and hence extremely poor quality material.

What marks the transition from adolescence to adulthood is the gradual assumption of responsibility, maturity and independence. What separates the child, the adolescent and the adult is the increasing influence of reason over emotion. The mature adult takes his emotions into account but is not ruled by them. Enter the concept of the Rationalisation Hamster. The concept needs to be understood as the cognitive mechanism by which thought is subordinated and aligned to emotion. The function of this "hamster" is to provide a superficially plausible (if not logically consistent) series of thoughts to align and justify whatever action is required by the emotional state. It is effectively the thought process of an immature adolescent.

The "triumph" of modern Feminism has been to culturally and legislatively legitimise this rationalisation hamster. Marriage is no longer seen as a reciprocal relationship amongst two people, but rather a flexible arrangement of convenience based on the emotive state of the parties. The logic of abortion as a woman's rights issue (ignoring the rights of the father) is another example. The furthering of women into fields that they are totally unsuited to, such as the military, police and firefighting services yet another. Feminism has also been able to reframe feminine identity; what previous generations would have thought trampy and flighty, modern feminism has been able to portray as mature.

When Hymnowitz points to the Star Wards nerds, all I can think of is the "mature" female SATC equivalents. I admit that men sitting in mom's basement jerking off to online porn are pretty shallow, but so are the women who spend their lives shopping for bags, clothes whilst riding the carosel waiting for the enabling supplicant whom will provide them with lifestyle to which they are accustomed. People from a less enlightened age would consider a person who endlessly obsesses about their looks, the latest pair of Jimmy Choo's and who Brad is dating now, pretty superficial. It's the pot calling the kettle black.

Aqua basically exists a comic relief character and not as a potential romantic interest

I think it's interesting to try to figure out how this works. Kazuma is totally a pervert, yet he doesn't have any romantic or even sexual interest in the apparently attractive and well endowed fanservice characters. And us as the viewers empathize with him, agreeing with him on that aspect. Why is this?

I saw the preface of reactionary and thought I'd be reading some Yarvin-slop, but this guy is reactionary-reactionary. Certainly it's the case that when you hold up the state of the world to the light in just the right way, a few reactionary glimmers appear. Speaking this strongly, though, seems irresponsible to me and there are so many disagreeable assumptions made that undergird this article that it's hardly possible for me to respond to it in a meaningful way. If there was one claim in particular that you wanted to highlight, what would it be?

Could you please make the point you're trying to make more explicit?

The Culture War Singularity is already here

I was once very interested in the culture war, and in many aspects of the culture war. I am a staunch atheist so I cut my teeth in online debates arguing about evolution and the existence of god in the early 2000's. That felt like a side topic to all the important policy debates at the time. The war in Iraq and Afghanistan. The national debt. Censorship of free speech by the religious right. How to deal with islamic terrorism. George Bush and Dick Cheney. The military industrial complex.

Many of these overlapped, but they also generally felt like separate and distinct things. I ended up stumbling across libertarianism because I ran into someone complaining about government spending, and anti-war. I felt like they kicked my but in a debate simply because they didn't allow for my easy auto win argument at the time "oh you care about government spending, then why don't you care about the massively expensive war in the middle east?"

Nowadays it feels like the culture war is collapsing. Not like a structure collapsing into the ground, but a star collapsing into a black hole. Everything is funneling into fewer and fewer topics. The main two that have come out of it all are Donald Trump and AI. You can collapse most people's views into what they think about Donald Trump. If you know that you basically know all the rest of what they think about political topics. For the few where this is not true, the dividing line is instead AI.

I find myself ambivalent/uncertain on both topics. But my ambivalence is not a path out of the stereotyping. It just leads to a different set of assumptions about me, and most of them are probably pretty accurate.

Both topics feel like they will either come to a conclusion by 2028 or implode in such an epic catastrophe that they will continue mattering for the next century at a minimum.

Or is this all just me becoming jaded and bored with the culture war? Ignoring topics like Transgender, feminism, race relations, metoo, and global conflict to shoehorn my pet theory into the world.

Or is this all just me becoming jaded and bored with the culture war?

Probably, yes. You can ignore much of it. I know I do.

What you describe are (at least) two different things. I understand your suggestion as the topical discourse which has condensed into a few topics and because of that the Culture War is receding. On the first point, I believe you are wrong. Discourse is narrative, the stories we choose to tell and feed and build and listen to. Sustaining a discourse is cheap these days, but an individual can only be interested in and sustain so many extra important things in their head. Three, maybe four big narratives at a time can be managed-- of those, a couple are short-term and tend to flame out, while longer lasting or more impactful ideas can stoke the flame of commentary for years.

Whose discourse do you share? Discourse was democratized and decentralized. You choose AI and Trump, but now there is curated discourse each for Anorexia TikTok, Turkish nationalists on X, and lynching-in-21st-century-America enjoyers on Threads. You might argue they are all moot against AI and I'd probably agree, although for any individual Important Things have multiplied.

The Culture War is how the average American perceives conflict in the world and their position according to the tribes therein. America exported the Culture War so now many other hundreds of millions share certain aspects of it in their own cultural contexts. Perhaps in a village in Slovakia cultural conflict is experienced differently, but over here in the center of the universe even the sections of society with strong cultural cohesion and homogeneity are not immune. In our culture, it has been proven the absence of conflict is an invitation to the Culture War. Something must be wrong if my ideas or my people are not represented in an area of our democratic society. There can be no escape from the ideas monster or the values monster.

The result is the most well documented history of human cultural conflict ever created. We can view it granularly, down to every nook and cranny. We understand cultural conflict as something much more grand, possibly due to exposure to discourse, and thus we find the Culture War in knitting clubs, lesbian bars, workplaces, and church.

The Culture War had its Cambrian explosion. I don't think there's anything to derail it except the kind of catastrophic hardship that radically reshapes the world. Gay Space UBI Millionaire Communism might just help better resourced, funny looking creatures grow legs to where they can bicker on land instead of underwater. If the robots put 100 million well armed people out of work and it goes poorly... a radical change in the Culture War understanding or an alignment of values for a time seems plausible.

I am a staunch atheist so I cut my teeth in online debates arguing about evolution and the existence of god in the early 2000's. That felt like a side topic to all the important policy debates at the time. The war in Iraq and Afghanistan. The national debt. Censorship of free speech by the religious right. How to deal with islamic terrorism. George Bush and Dick Cheney.

Have you reflected on this era? I have. My basic thesis is that New Atheism happened because of Bush. If Gore wins in 2000, online Atheism is completely absent. This frame helps make sense of the dissolution of the movement during Obama's first term. Without an outwardly religious president, the movement quickly lost steam.

This provides an interesting frame for interpreting the popular reaction to Trump. Since Trump's popularity with his voters isn't based on him being a good Christian, there isn't an obvious target besides Trump himself, and this has turned out to be a problem for the commentary class. They can only attack him directly, so their attacks are more nakedly political. This is unappealing for people who aren't already on your side. I think what was so successful about New Atheism was that it felt completely apolitical in the moment. Sure, the current president was a Christian, but that was incidental to their arguments. It felt like we were all online debating the real merits of Biblical historicity, etc., not just engaging in democratic political influence campaigns... but maybe a little bit the latter, in retrospect?

I'm not saying it was an organized operation; things can just happen naturally. And I'm not saying we actually weren't all internally dealing with our religion in a sincere way. But these last 10 years with Trump have really made me reinterpret my time online as a youth.

Online atheism would not be absent just because New Atheism was absent. Online atheism long predated New Atheism. Online atheism was always going to be a thing because the people who formed the core of the early Internet -- people who tended to be socially liberal, distrustful of government, and interested in questioning what they saw as dogmas -- had a high proportion of atheists.

This post of Scott's about New Atheism is required reading, if you haven't read it already.

New Atheism was a failed hamartiology.

"Hamartiology" is a subfield of theology dealing with the study of sin, in particular, how sin enters the universe. Orthodox Christian hamartiology says we all have original sin because Adam and Eve ate the apple. Gnostic hamartiologies say we sin because we are ignorant of our true nature as celestial beings. Some heretical hamartiologies say that all of this is irrelevant, and we sin because we choose to.

We watched the US population elect George W Bush and act like this was a remotely reasonable thing to do. We saw people destroying the environment, leaving the poor to starve, and denying gay people their right to live as normal members of society. We saw people endorsing weird ideas and conspiracy theories, from homeopathy and creationism to the Clintons murdering their enemies. We were always vaguely aware from reading the newspapers that some of these people existed. But now we were seeing and conversing with them every day.

And so we asked ourselves: what the hell is wrong with these people?

And New Atheism had an answer: religion.

That was it. It was beautiful, it was simple, it was perfect. We were the “reality-based community”. They were ignoring Reason and basing all of their opinions on three thousand year old fairy-tales because people told them they would burn in Hell forever if they didn’t. There was nothing confusing or unsettling at all about the situation, and we did not need to question any of our own beliefs. It was just that some people had been brainwashed by their church/mosque/synagogue to believe transparently wrong things, so they did. Sin began with the apple tree in Eden; conservatism began with the Bible in Jerusalem. Language separates us from the apes; not being blinded by religion separates us from the Republicans.

Do you think there just may be something like generational cycles at play here, in the background?

I distinctly remember there being a pretty widespread sense, around 2000, from a lot of people I knew that the neoliberal Democrats, and the compassionate conversative Republicans, were actually pretty similar when you got down to brass tacks. Like the Florida recount was a big deal, and of course people are still activated by partisanship during election cycles, but in the background, the two establishment flavors still seemed to have a lot in common. Regardless of political stance or opinions, the amount of time most people I knew actually devoted to following politics was rather limited in terms of actual minutes per day, compared to everything else they cared about.

The Bush years coincided with 1) the Cheney crew in the background being much more radical than, I suspect, the weak figure of George W Bush actually would have been had Cheney and crew not been so skillful at using the levers of executive powers (and how W behaved after 2006 as that group got sidelined), 2) the rise of the mass popular internet and the blogosphere making a new, non-corporate space for people to rehabilitate the idea of politics as being the site where mass societal change happens (so essentially dismantling the Reagan grill-pill consensus from the 80's on), 3) a generation of younger Millennials coming of age with a background of the collapsed cold war, American's unipolar new world order, mass affluence and college for a huge chunk of them, a Reagan-Clinton mini-baby-boom, and no memory at all of the 70s and the previous round of sour radical politicization ruining everything, and 4) the Iraq War and then especially the trauma of the 2008 financial crisis really discrediting the old 80s Reagan consensus that "public politics is the problem, private ownership and finance are the solution".

So the deck war cleared, so to speak, for another round of the same politics-uber-alles that had swept through from the late 60s through the 70s. And Barack Obama was there to act as a quasi-religious spiritual leader for, especially, those younger Millenials (but also scores of older progressives who had effectively been disenfranchised and marginalized during the Reagan consensus). And the internet really came into full flower as social media and the rise of pervasive smart phones meant people could be politically agitated 24/7, and as political organizations in the background became really adept at pulling those levers. And because all of this is systemic, in a sense, even if you weren't any more persuaded about infinite politics being the solution to all problems, the new media environment, and generational change, meant there was a sense you flatly couldn't opt out even if you wanted to. Everyone around you was going to be raving like a recently converted cultist about whatever their political fixations were, and whatever the outrage du jour was, and there was no way to stay socially connected to humans, and hold a normal job, without keeping an eye on all of this. Once everything becomes public, aggressively, performatively political, you don't really have an option to opt out, which of course was much of the point of those tactics. You need to be seen putting the black square on your profile or whatever to show your stance on these public, unavoidable, binary political issues (non-binary is for gender, not for political stances, apparently).

And so the culture war mattered and ran hot, not because of the issues, but because of the meta-issue that you weren't allowed to not care, and you weren't allowed to opt out, and you weren't allowed to shrug and say "I don't understand those issues, and I don't trust any of the propogandists pushing these agendas". And so you were made to care about the meta-issue of the culture war, even if you had long been exhausted by, or made up your nuanced opinions about, actual culture war issues, including the opinion that you had the right not to have an opinion.

But this whole process of infinite invasive politicization is, in some fundamental sense, exhausting and inhuman. It starts with a bunch of assertions about humans as infinitely political animals that are really at odds with reality. It eats its seed corn rapidly - there are a lot of con games at play, essentially, or emperors-new-clothes games, because it requires certain people to speak in ways that suggest that they have authority and are speaking for a much larger body of people. And that becomes self-defeating after a while, as more and more people finally pull back the curtain and understand that its a con. So it rests on a latent trust for certain kinds of authority by a much bigger mass of people that is drawn down as that authority loses respect. And it's also a machine for producing enemies exponentially - the purity spirals are real. Eventually that mass of enemies is a fatal weakness.

And the emperors new cloth element means that enough public indifference becomes a fatal weakness to the power being wielded. If activists shout JUMP! (RACISM!) and a critical mass of people don't argue or resist or fight but instead very publicly shrug, and then see a critical mass of other people shrugging, then those activists are relegated to where they had been back in 2000 - annoying gnats that everyone sort of ignores.

And then that public knowledge filters out to sympathetic but more politically minded liberals, and to amoral corporations, and they all get and transmit the signal that we're done with this cycle again (just as happened by around 1980), and so the actual muscle behind the "you're either with us or against us" energy is removed.

And then with that muscle gone, people who never cared about the culture war but cared intensely about the meta-culture war of being made to care finally get to take a deep breath, take a step back, shrug, and going back to caring about what they cared about and take the grill pill.

At the very least, this is a long-winded description of my own personal experience, and why I'm entirely checked out from culture war stuff by this point. I read a ton of books along the way, I did a lot of thinking, I learned a lot... but ultimately, I engaged because I felt the tremendous, overwhelming force that I was being made to engage. Younger progressives that I knew, especially, behaved like they had tremendous wind at their back. And now my sense (fingers crossed, god willing, and if I'm wrong the future probably involves a lot more political violence) is that regardless of what happens next, it won't and can't look like the 2010s and the life cycle of woke - all that seed corn has been largely drawn down, and that we're in the burned out phase of this cycle. I simply can't be made to care or be even slightly respectful of something like this again - I'm now convinced the costs of going along with this stuff are way, way, way higher than I thought back in, say, 2012, and I think I'm far from alone in that, too.

I think it is quite the opposite. The Culture War is more alive than ever. There still are woke progressives although they want to rebrand to Woke 2.0 silently distancing themselves from some of the more stupid stuff, but it is still there only bubbling beneath the surface. You have revival of Christianity either in form of true conversion but also silently in form of "cultural Christianity". You have other stuff especially in Europe with regards to rising popularity of Mumdani style socialism, you have literal Islamists popping up more often as Muslims especially in Europe get more power.

In terms of policies you have age old stuff like immigration or wars. But there are various interesting issues rising up, like for instance the gender wars stemming from huge divergence of voting patterns between men and women which are driven by completely different worldviews as attested by Lindsay Clancy trial. You have Palestine vs Israel conflict creating strange bedfellows between progressives, Islamists and alt-right agreeing on who is the source of all evil in the West.

To me it seems not at all clear which ethos and ideology or culture will rein in let's say 20 years. Will it be the same GloboHomo technocratic coalition trying to hold the post war liberal consensus as outlined in official UN documents such as 17 Sustainable Development Goals? Will it be some sort of right wing conservative nationalist coalition? Will it be rationalist technobros developing AI overlord who will rule with iron hand of utilitarianism where everybody is hooked on some sort of UBI and robot hookers? Will it be some sort of South African style of failed country split in tribal conflict over diminishing resources in the middle of failed AI dystopia and demographic crisis?

This is a result of one group of people getting to decide what's right and moral. The only thing that matters is whether you agree with them. They have Decided that Trump is wrong, Israel is wrong, Palestine is right, AI must be controlled, the rich are evil, immigration is good, etc. It's hard to overstate their power -- Trump won the popular vote and yet at no point has it been acceptable to admit in polite company that you voted for him.

Maybe in the New Jersey liberal bubble. But lots of people support trump in polite company.

You forgot Israel/Palestine as the other big axis. Personally I hope for massive im or explosion. I am sure that the main issues of Europe can't be solved democratically so we need some proper chaos to even have a chance of solving them.

Not so much on The Motte since it's a, uh, motley crew around here, but the real life correlation between "Free Palestine" and the rest of the lib-left omni-cause is remarkable. Like when I see people in real life with that bumper sticker or slogan somewhere, I have a very solid guess where they stand on the 2nd amendment, trans stuff, DEI, Elon Musk, immigration enforcement, and datacenters. I'm even confident they were in favor of mandatory masking, vaccine mandates, government suppression of "misinformation," and believing the lab leak hypothesis to be a racist conspiracy theory. As you say, Palestine is now a major axis that all topics revolve around.

The other day I saw an old white guy (either elder Boomer or last Silent) driving in a Prius and he had a "Free Palestine" sticker, a rainbow flag sticker, and a sticker that was an impenetrable wall of text (I couldn't even make out what it said--it was the meme about leftist memes to a T). I can't track him down to prove it (well, it's a rural area, it's possible I could see him again and ask), but I have a good guess at the rest of his beliefs.

I couldn't have imagined Israel/Palestine becoming huge in the US back in the 2000s. That was very much a European lefty thing to care about. One of those ways in which European politics influenced the US, not the other way around (BLM in Germany, etc.) You could say shifting views on free speech by the left in the US is another way.

Apart from politics, US music being so electronic-sounding now is another Euro>US trend. European radio in the 90s was far more dancey than American radio, which was full of rap and rock.

Israel/Palestine conflict was an American lefty thing to worry about too. In the MetaFilter heyday around 2010 it was (along with declawing cats and male circumcision) recognized as one of the "third rail" topics that could be expected to start heated fights on that (American-centric, though leftist enough to feel ashamed of that) forum.

You can collapse most people's views into what they think about Donald Trump.

Donald Trump's personal approval ratings poll at minus a gazillion, but the GOP is still going to get well over 40% of the vote in the midterms. There are a lot of double haters out there, many of whom voted for Trump in 2024 and some of whom will vote for their local Republican in 2026, and an even larger number of grillpilled normies.

In real politics, there is no shortage of centrist Democrats who either signed the Harper's letter condemning wokestupid or secretly wanted to, and the only reason why there are so few NeverTrump Republicans and conservatives is that MAGA successfully purged them from the movement.

Something about the current online environment (probably the algorithmically mediated impact of what midwit political junkies click on) tends to turn online political spaces either 100% wokestupid or 100% MAGAtarded. The Motte isn't immune, although we are holding out better than 99% of the competition.

I don’t think it’s possible to get approval above 40% in America anymore. Also one reason I don’t think everything collapses into your opinion of Donald Trump.

You can’t sustain >40% for long because the death of American monoculture has occurred. There are two cultures. Add in some splinter groups that hate both. Then a small bit of disapproval from your side and you approval quickly falls below 40%. Multicultural tribal politics will severely limit the amount of time any POTUS is above 40%.

Trump does not poll at minus gazillion, nor are his polls an outlier among recent second term Presidents.

https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/approval/trump-obama-bush-second-term

I suspect part of the issue is that things seem to be moving too quickly. If you were cutting your teeth in the early 2000s you likely remember at least the tail end of the Cold War, where the big over-arching question was "will capitalism or communism prevail" and "when, if ever, will the nukes fall?" These were not issues that would be resolved over the short term. If you read some Cold War science fiction, you find the Soviet Union there, just because the authors sort of assumed it wouldn't knuckle under in the span of a few short decades.

The transition in politics and culture war over the past decade has been extremely fast and unpredictable and the crisis of the times seems to loom much closer temporally (COVID, Ukraine, Iran, AI, all things that seem as if they should resolve short-term). Because of this, having takes becomes more fraught because the speed at which you will be proven right or wrong is much faster and in many ways it becomes easier to just sit back and see what happens.

(Also we're getting older and I think this also becomes easier as you age.)

I don’t think this is true. I think it’s much more common in vibes based semi autocracies like Turkey and Russia. In America there seem to be plenty of Trump supporters who disagree with him on AI, or the Iran War, for example.

Most Trump supporters disagree with him about the Iran war and about half of them do about AI.

It could be that we are less into the Culture War, perhaps? I also find that culture war topics seem to come and go far more frequently. It's like the speed with which things fade into irrelevance has dramatically increased.

Or from another direction perhaps our collective attention span has gotten shorter. I do think people have their own hobby horses but yeah, the political coalitions are all in a total upheaval which puts things up for grabs.

Perhaps this is a bit of a biased take, but if the political parties that actually matter can be counted on the toe thumbs of one person, the "singularity of political debate" is either already in place, or is more likely to occur.

Americans already only have the choice at the ballot box between only two parties. (I admit that in Europe political parties that differ only marginally inflate how many truly distinct parties there are, but in the ideal such a singularity is less incentivised.) In a two party system, you can oppose exactly one of transexuality and Palestine, but when the X needs to placed, you have to make a choice. And once the choice is made, mind works to justify it, make you think it was the right one.

And so alignment between ones opinions and the opinions of the political party increases.

The main difference between the American and European systems is where the coalition building happens, not whether it takes place. At the end of the day, a parliamentary system will have "the government" and "the opposition" as two more-or-less coherent blocs made uo of several parties acting in a coalition. America just does its coalition building within the context of the two parties. The DSA and abundance dems (or the libertarians and the MAGA conservatives) are at least as ideologically distinct from one another as Germany's Greens are from the Left, for example. American parties tend to be substantially weaker than their European counterparts, and are almost completely powerless to force members into line, so individual American politicians also tend to act with a lot more independence. They just do it from within one of the two major parties rather than spinning off their own splinter group.

I think you are correct in your suspicion that an annoyance with FTP is biasing you. The reason that Europe has so many parties with only marginal differences is that the policy platform of parties is broadly the policy platform of the people who make up these parties. Broad cultural consensus causes these people to all think basically the same thing, and then they create new parties with some bullshit differentiator to try and get an easier climb to the top.

They actually have parties that challenge the orthodoxy, but that may make it worse. Germany's attempts to quarantine the AfD forces coalitions that cannot really be that ideologically coherent given the inherent compromise needed to neutralize the votes of a growing share of the electorate.

Germany's just created a 2-party system, the AfD and everyone else.

Seems deeply unwise compared to letting them into a coalition and having them disappoint people through governing, like the Tories did the Lib Dems, and Trump is doing now.

But, hey, I'm a naive observer of German politics. Maybe in a decade this'll prove some genius move. Maybe Germans really cannot handle their liquor and even a sip of the far-right will be a jump off the slippery slope.

The way it works is the more people vote for the AfD, the further left the ruling parties can govern, which they love. Only fails if the AfD gets an absolute majority, which isn't likely to happen (and I'm sure they have contingency plans).

Keeping them out means the entire veto vote ends up being AFD. Which yes is very risky.

I can't remember who said it, but I once saw a quote to the effect of "if you tell me one of your political opinions, and I can accurately guess every other political opinion you hold, you are not a serious thinker".

I get heavily-downvoted comments on this website frequently enough to reassure me that I haven't fully surrendered my higher brain functions to the Motte Egregore.

A lot of people seem to let themselves be slotted into a "NPC" type role where they more or less just subscribe to all the tightly and loosely associated positions that have connection to a couple of core positions in some neural network. There are a few easily identifiable types. E.g. the redditor who cares desperately about 'the Gaza genocide' (currently). This type also subscribes to feminism (and will combat any mentions of disparate societal impacts against men), covid zoonosis, pronouns, opposition to mass immigration being 'Islamophobia', respect for higher education and credentials as a basis for credibility rather than actual mental rigor, BLM and denial of race/crime stats, etc, etc.

It seems to have a term: package adoption. It's supposed to reduce cognitive load, provide cognitive closure and the comfort of motivated reasoning (going backwards from group belonging to 'make sense of' issues rather than go bottom-up from evidence), while reducing social costs and providing tribal identity. Almost like religion, I guess. And I'm guessing there's a strong influence from higher education institutions here: In order to fit in and not have your chances at romance and future employment harmed, you need to conform to the dominant politics in the student/staff body.

I can't remember who said it, but I once saw a quote to the effect of "if you tell me one of your political opinions, and I can accurately guess every other political opinion you hold, you are not a serious thinker".

It's a take Sam Harris used to hammer on about.

Not sure if he lived up to it, since his anti-Islam takes flow pretty well with his zionism and other commitments.

His take is consistent and unrelenting atheism, and he criticizes Christians and Muslims alike, which these days makes him homeless, politically. I've listened to a lot of him and there's a lot of criticism of Islam and Islamic terrorists, I don't remember anything specifically Zionist. Do you have a reference?

Do you have a position on turf cutting?

I do not.

I will down vote this comment for its failure to support people who spent five thousand years shaping the bogs and have some claim to keep warming their homes from it.

I still know a fair amount of people that I'd almost describe as "squeamish conservatives;" people who are not liberal, but who were nevertheless put off by Donald Trump's personality and style. I think they'd have been happy if history had simply stopped during George W. Bush's time as president. The same people, while ostensibly conservative, are unwilling to grapple with the consequences of modern progressivism: institutional capture, demographic change, longhousing, etc., preferring, in my experience, to put their heads in the sand on these matters.

I don't really disagree with your framing, but at the same time this population is pretty large and doesn't fit readily into the model.

Donald Trump's personality and style

Also the dishonesty, personal corruption and incompetence. I don't think NeverTrump Republicans' main objection is that Trump is uncouth. In this cycle, most non-lefties who are NeverTrump would say that "he did January 6th" is the strongest argument for opposing him that isn't about policy.

NeverTrumpers like the Bulwark guys were vehemently opposed to him long before Jan 6th. Their hostility feels much more in line with the old adage that the worst thing that can happen to a socialist is for socialists to come to power who are not his friends.

Also the dishonesty, personal corruption and incompetence.

This is an incoherent stand to take for anyone who voted for Biden and Harris. It would be like MAGA insisting they despise '28 cadidate AOC because she lacks gravitas and decorum.

Also the dishonesty, personal corruption and incompetence.

This is an incoherent stand to take for anyone who voted for Biden and Harris. It would be like MAGA insisting they despise '28 cadidate AOC because she lacks gravitas and decorum.

What are you talking about? If every single corruption allegation against Biden and Harris were true, they still would have been collecting multiple orders of magnitude fewer dollars off of their political power and been involved in orders of magnitude fewer corruption scandals. Or, well, not sure "scandal" is the appropriate word for Trump's corruption as the media has pretty much given up on highlighting it as "Trump pardoned yet another person in exchange for $X million dollars." or "Trump openly took $X00 million from some country for a trade deal." is just not front-page news anymore.

Trump seems to believe the point of being president is personal corruption and doesn't get why he would even try to hide it.

There were three clauses in that quote. I'll accept your admission for the first and last.

For the second... yes, you can make a strong argument for Trump's personal corruption, as porkpiehat said, though in Biden's case it wasn't for lack of trying. Also as PPH said, the institutional corruption Biden/Harris facilitated is unprecedented, on the level of "civilizational ruin".

Trump is certainly more corrupt than Biden in certain petty ways. In those petty ways, like his crypto scheme, he's possibly the most corrupt President ever. It's all a bit puzzling since Trump is already rich and he'll be dead before long.

Nevertheless, the scale of the corruption is quite small.

Biden's corruption was categorically different. He didn't benefit financially. But the scale of his corruption was much larger, on the scale of trillions not billions. Build Back Better was just one big grift. It's just that the beneficiaries of that corruption were Democratic party clients, not the President personally.

Trump doesn't want to loot the state like Biden (or more accurately his handlers) wanted to.

This is not a defense of Trump's corruption which is indefensible. Only to say that Biden's was even worse, but perceived as acceptable by many because the gibs were spread around to all the important members of the coalition.

and he'll be dead before long.

He has kids. One of the things I'll give him (insofar as it's a compliment: a pseudo-aristocratic clannish mindset is perhaps not ideal for a POTUS? not that Biden was better on that front) is that the guy seems to genuinely care about the wealth and welfare of his family, not just about his own.

Runs into credibility problems thanks to the sheer number of people who claim that position, and coincidentally also thought he was the worst politician ever in 2017, and have turned to oppose other Republicans who had no relationship to J6. I'm sure the genuine category exists, but the people wearing it as a mask outnumber it by large counts.

IME most of these people vote Republican in other races.

The whole Van Jones "character matters" critique of uncouthness is validated by Trump's later actions.

It's not like the man lied. He was quite adamant about refusing to even contemplate losing, or being transparent about certain things. Some people saw that as a game, while others argued that such a basic failure of character would show itself.

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