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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 28, 2025

As far as I can tell from the outside, the EDKH theory is largely circumstantial - here are a bunch of odd things that happened around Epstein's death, it is implausible that these were all just coincidences, here are some other plausible explanations. There doesn't seem to be any truly solid evidence of foul play; just a lot of things that seem suggestive. Is that much correct?

Well yeah, it is mostly a mix of that and the blatant lying happening in explanation. Like why say it's raw footage when it doesn't appear to be? Why say the files existed only for them to not exist later? Why is Trump now saying everyone is past Epstein and no one cares after his admin promised to release the information before the election?

Maybe they're all just so addicted to lying and coverups that they'd do the opposite of OJ (the joke where they framed a guilty man) and tried to coverup an innocent situation, but come on it's so weird. And like I gave examples for, there's lots of things in life that we don't have 100% proof for but we can still reasonably say "yeah that most likely happened"

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 28, 2025

I'm all for an explanation like this, but this is not the explanation they have been giving. If it was true and a reasonable excuse, I would expect them to have given it instead of blatantly lying about "raw footage" and showing signs of edits in the metadata.

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 28, 2025

I've muddled around with LLMs enough to see the outlines of how someone could fall for one, but I always find that after half an hour or so, their fundamental shallowness kicks in and I either get bored, or I feel a kind of self-disgust or self-loathing for having even gone this far with them. I find it hard to imagine any genuine 'oneshotting' - they're just too tawdry.

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 28, 2025

a typical anthro major at a top-tier school like Harvard will be reading >20 300 page books/semester

Do they actually do the reading? I went to a fairly well regarded uni and humanities students Would Not Read. A professor came from outside and was perplexed at how people would basically openly admit to not reading. He'd assume we'd be reading a book in a week or so, that was the standard expectation for him on starting the course. I would at least pretend to read the book (finding some relevant question to ask based on skimming through source material) but that was going above and beyond by the standards of my peers. I saw no need to go further than that, ordinal grading and all.

I think people who's last experience with a university system was 20 years ago or more should recalibrate, it's not what it used to be. There are all these articles talking about how Gen Z are basically illiterate retards and they're not wholly unfounded. My experience was pre-AI boom, so it's probably gotten way worse since then.

Wellness Wednesday for July 30, 2025

Kind of you to say, thanks.

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 28, 2025

HxA is a very much failed project. They've achieved nothing, really. What they do is classically liberal tone policing, and have utterly failed to do anything about the domination of academia by progressive ideologues.

Incrementalism and appealing to progressives entrenched in universities isn't going to bring balance - progressives know they're right and they know what they want. Only putting the fear of unemployment a-la Rufo can possibly succeed.

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 28, 2025

If the price of bombing is higher, then the amount of bombing will fall as bombing is replaced with substitutes?

Seems pretty straightforward to me.

Israeli military supremacy is a mirage. They can't stop Iranian missile barrages without a gigantic US defence effort and even then a fair few get through. They can't even persist with their bombing of Gaza without US munitions, the munitions just aren't there.

The 'lets just exterminate them all' policy you seem to be proposing would probably shorten the lifespan of the state of Israel rather than lengthening it. Very courageous for a small country dependent upon global supply chains for its high-tech economy to beg for sanctions while performing a follow-up to the Warsaw ghetto liquidation (such an operation will be costly!) At the end of the day, Arab oil > whatever Israel brings to the table.

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 28, 2025

Even the most obnoxious hair-dyed queer tranny activist, if they were literally starving to death, I'd say "help them" and not "hur-dur, they should have picked the right side in the political fight".

You are kinder than many people here.

Both things can be true. Hamas apologists can be lying about the extent of hunger currently and the actual risk of famine, and the IDF can be fudging the truth and the Israeli government might be foot-dragging food aid in hopes that hunger will put more pressure on Hamas and weaken resistance.

I'm skeptical that Israel's plan is literally to have hundreds of thousands of dead bodies littering Gaza as they die of starvation.

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 28, 2025

..sometimes, I wonder how more normal people's mind works.

To me, any photo I know to be artificial, any text communications or prose I know to be an output of a LLM seems..unreal. It's obviously not real, obviously as fake as most compliments and small talk.

Getting 'oneshotted' by a mirage I asked for seems as real as falling in love with a prostitute you hired. I can't rule out liking a whore - a few I've noticed are quite charming, but not in the context of an obvious business transaction. Then there are the uncanny ones - like Aella or Bonnie Blue, who by rights should not appear outside of Cronenberg films.

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 28, 2025

Bonus points: there's already a class of VRchat user called mirror-dwellers, etymology unrelated. The future's already here; it's just not evenly distributed.

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 28, 2025

I think it was... Nate Silver who posted that it doesn't seem it's hurting him at the polls. Vox Day and such are very special people who aren't that interesting.

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 28, 2025

The joke here is that Business students had to take Math 440 (Math 110, four times). I can't see them getting any use out of the fact that the derivative of sin(x) is cos(x), but the derivative of cos(x) is -sin(x).

That being said, they have to know how rates of change can affect the amount of something, how to add a simple and predictable series of something into a total, and so on. That is calculus, in its simplest form.

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 28, 2025

Critical theory is a creation of the Blue Tribe, it didn't create the Blue Tribe

It was a fringe idea from outside the Blue Tribe's overton window, that took over the Blue Tribe

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 28, 2025

Tumblr was already citing academia, and the only reason they were taken seriously, was they were long-marching through the institutions and gaining political power. Without at that, Tmblrinas would be the equivalent of 4chan incels, so it strictly points to a top-down direction.

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 28, 2025

That stupid idea proved a failure with Pakistan and Burma

I think you mean Pakistan and Bangladesh here.

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 28, 2025

Little of both.

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 28, 2025

Does it? I can assure you in very Blue Tribe places that is not so.

And why should I put any weight on your assurances? Because you're blue tribe and I'm not? It hasn't crossed your mind that I could have been blue tribe myself at the time?

I was there when these ideas were becoming dominant, and in the conversations I was having, their academic backing was THE argument for why they should be taken seriously. Hardly anyone could argue them with their own words, and without relying on arguments from authority. It's half cancelations became a thing.

Wellness Wednesday for July 30, 2025

Have you changed the types of books you read? Sometimes I feel reading is a sloge compared to my youth, but then I remember that I have traded Animorphs for Wuthering Heights and while there are fewer cliffhangersthat keep me reading past bedtime I do get more out of it.

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 28, 2025

Cartoonist/lay theologian/general esotericist Owen Cyclops had this to say in response to MrBeast posting such a picture:

once again we must review that normal people are now exposed to things every day that would, literally, previously have only been madness inducing items from fairy tales and ancient legends.

Yes. Don't create the Torment Nexus, etc. I wonder if you could package it to the masses by calling it a pocket-sized Mirror of Erised. But give it another 20 years and people will be able to climb inside the mirror. What then?

The wonderful dream of what might have been only becomes a cognitohazard if you wake up, I suppose.

Wellness Wednesday for July 30, 2025

What are your go-to strategies for making small talk with "normies"? I was working alone with someone high-ranking for a couple hours with lots of downtime and she asked me about my hobbies. Without thinking too much I answered truthfully (foreign languages, science/math/history). I might be overthinking it, but I think most of my hobbies being essentially studying left a weird impression.

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 28, 2025

Has there ever been an insurgency quelled by immiserating the population?

Some of Rome's "counterinsurgency campaigns" against rebellions come to mind — most immediately the Bar Kokhba revolt:

…the last and most devastating of three major Jewish rebellions against the Roman Empire. The revolt took place in the province of Judaea, where rebels led by Simon bar Kokhba succeeded in establishing an independent Jewish state that lasted several years. The revolt was ultimately crushed by the Romans, resulting in the near-depopulation of Judea through mass killings, widespread enslavement, and the displacement of much of the Jewish population.

…

The revolt's consequences were disastrous. Ancient and contemporary sources estimate that hundreds of thousands were killed, while many others were enslaved or exiled. The region of Judea was largely depopulated, and the spiritual center of Jewish life shifted to Galilee and the expanding diaspora. Messianic hopes became more abstract, and rabbinic Judaism adopted a cautious, non-revolutionary stance. The divide between Judaism and early Christianity also deepened. The Romans imposed harsh religious prohibitions, including bans on circumcision and Sabbath observance, expelled Jews from the vicinity of Jerusalem, restricted their entry to one annual visit, and repopulated the city with foreigners.

The famous ending of the Third Servile War comes to mind as well.

And then, of course, there's the sort of things the Assyrians did, like with Ashurnasirpal II.

Martin Van Creveld argued that there's basically two ways to successfully pursue counterinsurgency:

In an attempt to find lessons from the few cases of successful counterinsurgency, of which he lists two clear cases: the British efforts during The Troubles of Northern Ireland and the 1982 Hama massacre carried out by the Syrian government to suppress the Muslim Brotherhood, he asserts that the "core of the difficulty is neither military nor political, but moral" and outlines two distinct methods.[34]

The first method relies on superb intelligence, provided by those who know the natural and artificial environment of the conflict as well as the insurgents. Once such superior intelligence is gained, the counterinsurgents must be trained to a point of high professionalism and discipline such that they will exercise discrimination and restraint. Through such discrimination and restraint, the counterinsurgents do not alienate members of the populace besides those already fighting them, while delaying the time when the counterinsurgents become disgusted by their own actions and demoralized.

…

If the prerequisites for the first method – excellent intelligence, superbly trained and disciplined soldiers and police, and an iron will to avoid being provoked into lashing out – are lacking, van Creveld posits that counterinsurgents who still want to win must use the second method exemplified by the Hama massacre. In 1982, the regime of Syrian president Hafez al-Assad was on the point of being overwhelmed by the countrywide insurgency of the Muslim Brotherhood. Al-Assad sent a Syrian Army division under his brother Rifaat to the city of Hama, known to be the center of the resistance.[citation needed]

Following a counterattack by the Brotherhood, Rifaat used his heavy artillery to demolish the city, killing between 10-25,000 people, including many women and children. Asked by reporters what had happened, Hafez al-Assad exaggerated the damage and deaths, promoted the commanders who carried out the attacks, and razed Hama's well-known great mosque, replacing it with a parking lot. With the Muslim Brotherhood scattered, the population was so cowed that it would be years before opposition groups dared to disobey the regime again and, van Creveld argues, the massacre most likely saved the regime and prevented a bloody civil war.[citation needed]

In short, you can be slow, disciplined, and restrained; or you can be swift, ruthless, and utterly brutal; and the problem is that too many try to do something somewhere in between.

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 28, 2025

And yet there's a whole genre of social media post where a loanholder bemoans the fact that making minimum/interest only payments results in the debt increasing/never going down. or doesn't even bother to check.

(some of these might be playing dumb, but I think most are honest).

I'm genuinely uncertain which percentage of loanholders are literally too innumerate to get what interest and debt ARE. Its more than 1%. I'd bet more than 10%, honestly.

You could put the actual amortization table in front of them and it might not click.

Look at how many people who end up on Caleb Hammer's show are women. (yes, selection effects are in play).

You cannot convince me that these folks should have been entrusted with the ability to take out 5 figure loans.

See also: This recent tweet.

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 28, 2025

I think Vance is using a straw man here.

I think the rhetorical device is called a "reductio ad absurdum."

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 28, 2025

(this didn't ping me but fortunately I saw it while scrolling.)

See, here the analogy deepens further! Citizenship in certain countries has a huge material impact, but so also with families! I hit the jackpot by being born into a family where they didn't beat me, prioritized my education, didn't molest me, etc. I did not earn this. It was not my reward to be born into a good family or a good country. How can someone earn such a thing? To describe it in such terms cheapens it.

There are two reasons why I think family membership is special

I'd like you to elaborate on what you mean a family membership is special compared to. Compared to Rousseau liberalism where everyone is born as individuals with no prior obligations who only relate to each other through contracts? Special compared to something else?

There are more than a few other traits that make a family and a nation special. For one, I would die for my children and I would die for my country. This makes absolutely zero sense if you view a country as a community of like-minded individuals who can be swapped around if their opinions shift. If your country has no relation to you after you are dead, buried, and opinion-less then there is no reason to die for it. But if your country will also be the country of your nieces and nephews, second and third cousins, dearest friends and their children, then perhaps it is possible to die for it.

And countries need people to die for them lest they will be ruled by those willing to die for theirs.

That's just one thing, perhaps the biggest. But there are so many ways in which a nation is different than a free market meritocracy - common goods like roads and utilities and schools and on and on. And these items are paid for collectively, sometimes financed on the futures of generations to come. Which implies, for these goods to exist, that these generations do come and have a pre-existing duty to the land of their birth to pay for the good things that were given to them and their forefathers.

Would you like an anarchy instead? Because only in an anarchy is there any kind of liberalism to the extent that a country could be just like a "large voluntary organization."

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 28, 2025

with the cold certainty that it was a terrible idea, that I'd regret it, I fired up ChatGPT.

Out of some combination of morbid curiosity and poor judgement, I asked ChatGPT to generate images of me with a certain influencer. Even though the output was totally mundane to any other observer I seriously got totally oneshotted by it. This was by far the most degenerate thing I have ever done and I cannot describe the depths of how dangerous this is and how much this should not be allowed. DO NOT DO IT.