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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   19640 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 28, 2026

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I think the biggest failure states in this kind of argument will just be the failure to fully understand a body of knowledge for an ideology or religion you don't belong to

Most of the people making these sorts of comments come from Christian-majority societies and often grew up inside the church. They're familiar with Christianity and the famously wide gap between what its holy texts enjoin and what its adherents actually do.

The point is trolling (just look at the amount of seething it produces) and highlighting their hypocrisy to third parties. As I said when this was discussed earlier downthread, very few people think you're going to convince a chuddy religious conservative by quoting scripture at them or pointing out the gap between their notional commitments and what they actually do and advocate for. This is particularly stinging for them because they ground their moral legitimacy in strict adherence to Christian principles, but they're at least as guilty of picking and choose as theological liberals and they don't even try to live up to Christian principles (and the theolibs have the out of rejecting inerrancy).

The point is trolling (just look at the amount of seething it produces) and highlighting their hypocrisy to third parties.

Yes, this is why those doing 'the meme' are treated with disdain. They are like children whose goal is to annoy by deliberately misunderstanding you. The only response to this is to rebuke and then ignore.

The reason it provokes such agitation is that they've understood perfectly the character and substance of the people they are criticizing. If religious reactionaries had a real defense, they would give it. The fact that they can't is rather telling.

Just like I've understood perfectly the character and substance of atheists if I say they're hedonists who just want to do evil without consequence, or I've understood perfectly the character and substance of socialists if I say they just want free stuff, or I've understood perfectly the character and substance of MAGA Republicans if I say they're just racists in disguise, or etc. etc. It is definitionally straw man nonsense designed to attack the outgroup.

What exactly is the real defense to 'You're an idiot who believes in sky daddy?' The correct response is not a defense at all, but scorn and dismissal.

What exactly is the real defense to 'You're an idiot who believes in sky daddy?'

I couldn't possibly say, but that's not the topic at hand here. The topic at hand is that there's a certain kind of Christian who make a bunch of theological commitments and then refuses to follow them to their conclusion and instead treats Christianity as a costume, but still wants to claim credit and authority as if they are actually pious. They're not being made fun of for being religious, they're being made fun of for being sanctimonious hypocrites.

The point is trolling (just look at the amount of seething it produces) and highlighting their hypocrisy to third parties.

Part of the problem is that it doesn't highlight hypocrisy, but I think the other big problem with tweeting stuff like that out is...what third parties are going to be convinced by this? As far as I can tell, Scott painting AI safety as a "Jewish guy's apocalyptic cult" and pointing out that they "consort with prostitutes" is only going to get every other major political faction to put aside their differences and agree that AI safety, as a movement, is (shall we say) "misaligned."

Yeah, to be clear, I was responding more to the meme itself than Scott's tweet. I don't actually think Scott's tweet is a good example of the meme.

Yeah, I agree that I don't think Scott is trying to do the meme.

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