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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 13, 2023

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Politics is extremely serious, it is a matter of megadeaths. Some 20-30% of GDP is government spending in most countries. Nuclear powers like the US, UK or Russia have a special responsibility to avoid crises which risk the destruction of Western civilization. Political decisions determine who lives and who dies, whether masses of wealth are created or destroyed.

Consider the sabotage campaign against nuclear energy, the gain-of-function problem, Tiktok being markedly more predatory in the West than in China, our idiotic wars in the Middle East, pervasive regulatory issues that cripple the production of energy, goods, housing, healthcare and education. These are very important issues.

CNN must report all things that are relevant without partisan slant.

When is this ever going to happen? Who decides what relevant or partisan means? This is an insoluble problem.

Citizens should be obliged not merely to read newspapers or watch TV shows with various slants but to develop their own world-models. They unironically need to think critically about what they read and watch. Most people think critically in the sense that they solely analyze why their political opponents are lying to them. People need to think about the information they're being told by various sources, what they observe in their actual lives, how various predictions and so on stack up in reality.

Of course there's little incentive to do this, we don't live in the world of prediction markets or electronic direct democracy.