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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 2025

Personally, I'd only wish success to someone banning Disney, rap etc.

To react to your bailey, @The_Nybbler haven't many in this community opposed this government and arana imperii, ascribing modernity's ills to it?

See, I knew this was coming. There is a consistent bait-and-switch deployed by defenders of the proposition that rogue/irredentist regimes such as Iran are actually secretly friendly to Western culture/interests. The initial claim is always “No, they’re not actually trying to ban Western culture or actively harm Western governments.” And then when someone brings up examples of those regimes explicitly opposing Western cultural imports or waging covert/proxy war against Western countries (particularly America), the claim switches to, “Okay yes, they are opposed to the West, but that’s good, actually, because the West is degenerate and its cultural imports deserve to be banned.”

Yes, I have issues with much of the lyrical/philosophical content of hip-hop music and the culture around it. I agree that much of Disney’s recent output is of questionable artistic quality, and that some of its messaging is insidious. However, if there is such a thing as “the West” (and I’ve expressed my skepticism that such a construct refers to something real and consistent) then surely one of its defining factors, at least in the 20th and 21st centuries, is that it is extremely reticent to ban entire categories of art. As an American, I can effortlessly find the intellectual and artistic output of countries and cultures which are openly hostile to my own; I can follow Russian nationalists and Iranian mullahs on Twitter, and I can watch ISIS videos online without needing a VPN lest I risk imprisonment. Only a very insecure and consciously-insular regime would ban the output of its critics, either domestic or foreign. That the Iranian regime does so is a sign that it is not friendly to the spirit of Western-aligned cultures. (It is also, of course, openly very hostile to the political, economic, and military interests of Western-aligned nations.)

I agree with you that the Persian people have no inherently adversarial relationship with me and mine. They are one of the great historical cultures of human history, and I long to see them returned to their former glory. This would not be possible under an Islamic hard-liner regime with revolutionary and anti-Western sentiments baked into its DNA. A proud and high-IQ people deserve better than these incompetent, blustering, grubby mullahs. My problems lie almost entirely with the people on top in Iran, and not with the people who have to live under their boot.

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 2025

If you read Tribe's comments in context it's clear that he's referring to her having a certain arrogance where she thinks she'll be able to persuade conservatives where she's more likely to put them off.

This does not seem clear to me at all.

In any event, Tribe later said that he was proven wrong.

He's a partisan. I trust his unguarded opinion about someone whose status was in the moment unimportant to his tribe, above anything he said later in public when he was likely to be speaking more to save face or engage in "yay ingroup." I'm applying something like a Bayesian version of the "statements against interest" rule, I guess.

As for Jackson, she didn't ask that question,

Sorry--looks like I dropped a word ("was") from that sentence, mea culpa. You are correct; she was asked "what is a woman" and her answer was "I'm not a biologist," which is a stupid answer even assuming she is a hardened partisan. Someone who believes "woman" means what trans advocates want it to mean ("a person who identifies as a woman"), should have answered in a way that would not imply that the answer was grounded in biology at all. Her answer wasn't just a pointless dodge, it was a bad dodge. If you think it would be more charitable to characterize her answer as a lie than as stupidity, like... okay? But that's not actually clear to me. (I also disagree that the question was a "gotcha." It's not a "gotcha" to ask someone a question that requires them to either admit to the force of biological reality, or speak lies and prevarications in service of one's ideological paymasters. But that is a different discussion I think.)

Yeah, she gave an idiotic answer, but it was an idiotic question.

Two people can be idiots at the same time!

it comes across as below the standards of this board to imply that someone who has risen to the rank of Supreme Court Justice acts the way they do because of low intellectual capacity

I am opposed (and increasingly opposed every passing year) to the deference shown the judiciary by lawyers, journalists, and the public. Specifically, you are probably familiar with attorneys being disciplined and sanctioned for impugning judicial integrity in court proceedings; I regard that as a blatant violation of the First Amendment. My experience with law practice and legal academia is that there is a prevalent attitude of deference to the judiciary, not only to its supposed impartiality, but to its competence. I think that is both mistaken and a little bit disgusting, especially as the judiciary has become increasingly professionalized. One does not "rise" to the rank of Supreme Court Justice, because these people are not above anyone. Especially when they are explicitly affirmative action selections. Even the brightest SCOTUS justices are approximately comparable to your typical tenured professor in an R1 university (except that university professors do more real, actual work than appellate justices, but again--different discussion). SCOTUS justices just are not that special--and even then, Jackson would not be a SCOTUS justice if she were a white man. Probably she would not even have been admitted to Harvard Law, though we don't know for sure because apparently it's "racist" to ask about her LSAT scores--even though legislatures often demand such information from judicial appointees. (Seriously, have you ever listened to a state legislator who graduated from Fly By Night Law with a 2.1 GPA harangue an appointee over going to State Law with a 160 LSAT? The chutzpah of elected officials really is something else!)

Whenever I see someone people tying themselves in knots trying to explain and/or justify Trump's latest Outrage of the Week, I'm tempted to respond by simply saying that Trump is obviously too stupid to engage in anything approaching coherence and that his supporters, almost without exception, are too stupid to notice that he's incoherent, and that if you want to bemoan the decline of conservatives in academia then maybe it's time to consider that it isn't so much persecution as it is proof that conservative ideas are simply unappealing to anyone with half a brain.

I think it's important to be able to discuss people's intelligence, not just in absolute terms but relative to the intelligence of others. I am not a blank slatist. Apparently you're not the one making them, but I know I have seen posts here discussing Trump's intelligence and mental functioning, and in the past those conversations were also had about Biden. "Trump seems to be showing himself less intelligent than past U.S. Presidents, and here is why..." is an argument I would identify as within bounds, provided the rest of the post were sufficiently backstopped, not needlessly inflammatory, etc.

Now--very importantly--generalizing that to the intellect of "his supporters, almost without exception" or to "conservatives" generally, would be out of bounds. Why? Because of the rule about focusing on specific individuals or groups rather than general ones. Arguing that a person is stupid, and providing evidence for why that is the best explanation of what they said or did (in particular, explaining how you are not using "stupid" as a stand-in for mere disagreement), is a very different thing than characterizing an entire group (especially, an ideological group) as stupid.

despite the fact that I can point to all kinds of evidence supporting the idea that Trump and Trump supporters are generally all morons

I also am of the view that Trump is not very smart (though he does sometimes seem to possess remarkable cunning). You're welcome to say it, when it seems relevant, and I doubt you'll get many reports for doing so (though I couldn't say for sure). Frankly, if you brought real evidence that "Trump supporters are generally all morons" that might be an interesting post! But it would require you to actually bring such evidence, and it would have to be pretty strong to counterbalance the "bring evidence in proportion" rule, and frankly "Trump supporters" are a sufficiently diverse group that you would be on very thin ice. But hey, we've had Jew-obsessed posters manage to get away with quite a lot of bullshit by adhering to the letter of the law; if you wanted to become a raving anti-Semite but with MAGA instead of Jews, that could be novel and interesting. (With apologies to my fellow mods for even suggesting such a thing.) Just notice that most of the raving anti-Semites here do eventually get themselves banned over it. Very few manage to keep the touch sufficiently light.

So when I see it coming from a mod it's disappointing, and when I see it trying to be justified on the grounds that Larry Tribe once said this and "Did you hear what she said to the Senate Judiciary Committee?" it makes me wonder if I should just say "Fuck It" and see what I can get away with.

Those aren't the only grounds, those were just the easiest and most obvious grounds. Other posters have fleshed out other relevant concerns.

Now, having laid all of that out--I could have written that post better. Your concern is valid, and I will try to adjust accordingly. For whatever it is worth, I regarded my mention of the low-IQ wing as a bit of throwaway flavor text expressing my respect for Kagan (despite disagreeing with her). I really do have no respect at all for the intellects of Sotomayor or Jackson, based on many hours of reading and listening to their words, and I think that they are excellent examples of how the "affirmative action" approach to political appointments genuinely harms real institutions. But as that was not the point of my post, I probably should not have included it as a throwaway line, at minimum because it apparently created significant distraction from the actual substance of my post.

you can count on me referring to Alito and Thomas as the "low IW wing" in the future

I... think that's a typo? Maybe? If not, you'll have to tell me what IW is. Assuming you mean IQ--I have seen many people on the Left criticize Thomas as an affirmative action appointment, and maybe that is true; partly I have a less firm opinion of him because he stayed quiet in oral arguments for so many years. But Alito is quite sharp, this just would not be a plausible criticism of him. If you wanted to plausibly identify a "low-IQ wing" on the right it would need to be, like, Kavanaugh and Thomas, and off the top of my head I can't think of any cases where they went in together against the rest of the conservatives.

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 2025

Everyone knows the real agenda here is that you don't want anyone getting abortion pills period.

Avoid consensus-building phrases like "everyone knows," as well as presuming you know the other person's motives. You are probably correct that @hydroacetylene does not want anyone getting abortion pills, but you need to actually engage with him ("Are you saying...?" or "I think your actual agenda is...") rather than simply asserting it in this antagonistic fashion. This is a pattern you're unfortunately engaging in a lot. I hate to see it, because here you are a leftie on a mostly anti-left forum (you aren't wrong about that, though you are wrong about "far right"), and you are of course being heavily downvoted and reported for having unpopular opinions. The usual failure mode from here is you get more and more frustrated and antagonized by everyone telling you off, and eventually the warnings accumulate and you get banned. I realize this is a hard pattern to break out of, and maybe it's not entirely fair, but I will tell you that rightie posters that start taking the same attitude you do to all comers who argue with them also wind up getting banned because they just can't stay calm and gracious enough while arguing with people whose opinions they clearly do not respect.

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 2025

You yourself got +15 upvotes saying things that I thought were quite uncool, and very right coded. I was with you for the first half, but "The more pain and terror inflicted in the process" and "I want the fascistcore club music as a squad of red-visored faceless commandos mow down the rioters waving Mexican flags." are things I think should get you disqualified from being taken seriously on the topic. I don't mean that as a personal attack (I'm sure you're a kind person to your friends and loved ones, etc) but holy shit dude, what the fuck? The fact that anyone (let alone a voting majority) agreed with you is a pretty clear demonstration of ideological lean here. If you posted this on reddit (obviously quite left leaning) you'd be at -100 and probably banned to boot.

No offense taken, much like how you'll not be offended by the obvious retort coming up: your disapproval genuinely means nothing to me. You're right that Reddit would not allow this, as Reddit only supports violent fantasizing when it's directed toward the right. Replace "criminals and illegals" with "law-abiding Republican voters", and they'll foam at the mouth in support.

And yes, I got fifteen upvotes. I expressed myself plainly, took a hard stance, and stood by it. You can do similar! You'll find great success if you use the right tone and style. These sorts of posts, where you passively complain and snip at people, will almost always encourage a pile-on. Nobody likes snivelers.

Lastly, I'd strongly encourage you to not mistake "lack of progressives" with "abundance of right-wing". Almost everyone here hates progressives and progressivism. That's why they're disaffected liberals.

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 2025

Hey man, I'm not complaining, just observing. I didn't realize this was a common trope here, although that makes sense, /r/stupidpol has been hyperventilating about a right-wing takeover for nearly a decade which has never happened.

My only thought is that I feel like my takes garner more disagreement than agreement (which is why I am here), and none of the disagreement is because my takes aren't progressive enough.

I've actually been trying to expose myself to more right wing thinking. Partially because the left has been pushing me away, partially because I am so bored of echo chambers that agree with me, and finally because it forces me to challenge my ideas, which is good for my brain.

I haven't been around long enough to see any group surveys. My observation is purely vibes.

But you inspired me, so I did a really quick """analysis""" of all (18 at the time of writing) the first-level replies to the ICE question, and this is what I found:

Pro ICE comments: 44% (8/18) comments, with 47% (128/271) of the net upvotes

Middle/I couldn't confidently tell their stance on ICE's current actions comments: 39% (7), with 44% of the net upvotes

Anti ICE comments: 16% (3), with 9% of the net upvotes.

This tracks with my vibes, although is obviously not very comprehensive or rigorous. I note that my impression hanging out here is right-leaning comments do much better than left-leaning ones on average, and it feels independent of comment quality.

Edit, this was weak: You yourself got +15 upvotes saying things that I thought were quite uncool, and very right coded. I was with you for the first half, but "The more pain and terror inflicted in the process" and "I want the fascistcore club music as a squad of red-visored faceless commandos mow down the rioters waving Mexican flags." are things I think should get you disqualified from being taken seriously on the topic. I don't mean that as a personal attack (I'm sure you're a kind person to your friends and loved ones, etc) but holy shit dude, what the fuck? The fact that anyone (let alone a voting majority) agreed with you is a pretty clear demonstration of ideological lean here. If you posted this on reddit (obviously quite left leaning) you'd be at -100 and probably banned to boot.

I should also add, I do understand your anger and frustration, the recent mass-migration into Canada has been deeply upsetting and black-pilling for me. I am not here to debate your opinion on ICE or immigration, I don't care if our beliefs differ.

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 2025

This is a perfect explanation for the semi-rhetorical question later posed by @hydroacetylene here- as a response to you, in fact- the reason "liburals" (I prefer "progressives" for this group- progressives are not classical liberals so I don't call them that) don't take traditionalists seriously about decreasing baby murder is that decreasing baby murder is obviously not a terminal value for them and it's just a fight over aesthetics (because if it was, traditionalist organizations would be handing out as many free IUDs and Nexplanon as humanly possible; since they oppose this, they're obviously not serious about solving the problem as long as it's not their way).

You're also wrong about age of consent laws. Before 1900 most states set the age of consent at 10-12. Higher age of consent laws are a modern invention.

No, you're proving my point. Gynosupremacy/feminism pushed for high age of consent laws coincident with their emergence as a viable political force, which itself follows socioeconomic effects (gender equality following the decoupling of physical strength from production of goods) in industrial societies; I'm explaining why they did that. I can't link to the original post(s) here more fully explaining this because the person who made them has their account set to private (and they're banned, or at least their alt is).

In the Greco-Roman world infanticide was allowed.

Yes, obviously. Children are property of those who make them, and it is their right to dispose of them as they wish coincident with the child's ability to resist it as dictated by market conditions (usually a society's age of majority, though less than that due to the fact an age of majority results in market distortions so it's usually higher than it actually is).

What, you weren't told "I brought you into this world, and I can take you out of it" as a child? That was a Cosby show thing, I believe.

You strike me as a secular right-winger who's grasping for straws to justify why the church lady anti-abortion crusade is actually rational and BASED, anything other than accept that maybe the hated liburals are right about a single subject.

You really haven't read enough of me.

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 2025

Are the blackbagging tactics of ICE a necessary evil, a dangerous overstep, or some nuanced in-between?

My thoughts? I think think they're not "a necessary evil" only because they're insufficient. I think Neema Parvini has a point when he asks:

Tell me why the mayor of L.A. and Gavin Newsom aren’t arrested for aiding and abetting an insurrection against America? Why aren’t they arrested for treason, under the Insurrection Act?

and calls for the Democratic Party to be banned, and replaced with a left-wing party that isn't "mental":

And like I said, we're getting to the point where they just need to be banned. It's like, at what level of corruption, and at what level of stupidity, do you just say, look, this is not a viable party anymore. We need to just, like, ban it, and replace it with, you know— okay, it can still be leftist, but you at least have to be… you at least have to agree to basic things.

Like, one, America is an actual nation. Number two, the concept of having a passport and citizenship mean something. Being an American means something. Therefore, number three, different laws apply to foreigners, illegal immigrants, than to the native population. Number four, if people who are not native to America start burning things down, then you not only have to take action, you have to deport those people immediately. Number five, if foreign politicians like the President of Mexico starts cheering on, you know, effectively a kind of invasion into your country, you don't side with them, you side against them.

These are just basic, basic, basic kind of… I know there's no such thing as the social contract, right? But there's a tacit agreement between the rulers and the ruled in all societies that would agree to all of those things that I just said.

If you do not agree to that, you should not be allowed to be part of public life. You shouldn't be allowed to be an official if you don't agree to all those things I just said. These dickheads are meant to take an oath on the Bible. That they're meant to take an oath, you know, on the Constitution when they take office. This is treason. It shouldn't be allowed.

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 2025

Sun Tzu said to be subtle to the point of formlessness. I feel like the current developments in terms of drones are simply taking that old advice seriously. Instead of having a small number of very expensive assets concentrated in one geographic position for ease of communication and handling and to leverage overlapping areas of influence (phalanx, encamped Roman legion, turtle ships, line formation, star fort, grand battery, battleship, tank brigade, transport convoy, carrier group, bomber wing), we're taking another step towards uniquitous, distributed, affordable and flexibly deployed assets (skirmishers in general, zealot sicarii, flying columns, organic artillery, guerilla tactics, a rifle behind each blade of grass, minefields, man-portable anti-tank and anti-air weapons, nuclear triad). The means of destruction are to be omnipresent, always available, always replaceable, and as unpredictable as possible. The entire theater of war is to be flooded with them to the point where you're no longer able to seek out and destroy a discrete enemy at all, or able to hold and lay claim to a specific place, because the enemy is not obliged to present any vulnerabilities in order to attack and all places are equally undesirable to occupy.

Historically the limit on such technologies has been that you need one at least one human to actually be the weapon, wield the weapon, or direct the weapon. The weapon would not be able to go places where humans cannot go (at least not without using vehicles, which makes the weapon a lot larger, more detectable, less flexible and less affordable), cannot be deployed in numbers greater than the number of available and qualified humans, and will never be cheaper than the price of one qualified human + the technology involved, and will be at least as detectable as the human wielding it.

With sufficiently advanced drones, those constraints go out of the window. All of a sudden your weapon can be arbitrarily small, arbitrarily cheap, arbitrarily numerous and arbitrarily dispersed. We're sill at the early stages of what will one day be swarms of millions of miniscule drones mapping out the contested space, being eyes and ears for hundreds of thousands of anti-personnel drones, backed up with tens of thousands of anti-armor drones. They will fly close to the ground if not crawl outright, utilize cover and concealement, infest all your nooks and crannies, be so cheap as to be freely replaceable, operate completely autonomously, and if they find you they'll shoot you with an embarassingly small zip-gun right in the dick.

At least that's the way things are headed right now. As so often, attack precedes defense. Maybe there are low-hanging fruits for countermeasures - some kind of electromagnetic weapon that prevents drones from functioning in a large area but that doesn't affect humans. And then, since we've already tasted the forbidden fruit, you can bet someone will develop organic circuitry. Maybe human soldiers will huddle in fortified bases surrounded by miles of completely denuded flat country, protected by some kind of automated RADAR and LASER system that zaps anything that moves their way. But honestly, it's wishful thinking either way.

More realistically, the countermeasure to infinite omnipresent autonomous drone swarms will be infinite omnipresent autonomous drone swarms of our own. It's practically guaranteed. I'd be willing to take bets on this if I had money to spare. I don't feel like there's any more to explain here because it seems so very obvious. With autonomous drones, we will have uncoupled warfare from the human frame and mind. The current human-controlled drone phase is just a clumsy first step towards honest-to-god man-made horrors beyond all possibility of comprehension. From that point on it will barely matter whether the drones kill us with jury-rigged mortar shells or by dropping polonium in our coffee cups or by buzzing near our ears until we go insane or by shooting a tiny laser from the horizon that neatly severs our neck arteries. It will not matter much wether they're built in a dozen factories, in a million living rooms, or self-replicating right here and now. Either way, us humans will be obsolete as combatants.

But that's future music, of course. For the more immediate future, near-term developments will depend on what the lowest-hanging technological fruits are and who's picking what. Just making drones cheaper, making them smarter, and making them more easily controllable in large numbers (i.e., giving them limited autonomy) will significantly increase the numbers deployable en masse. Short of that, we may see more drones integrated organically into existing human and vehicle formations, like the Americans are already known to be experimenting, where they will probably work much like they already do in Ukraine, mostly for reconaissance and as loitering munitions, only everywhere and used by everyone and employed even more liberally.

This goes hand-in-hand with the development and proliferation of weapons that defeat existing defence systems for large, concentrated and valuable assets that have the unfortunate attribute of being in one place. Famously, hypersonic missiles. These and similar traditional weapons make life very hard for humans and large vehicles, but are largely uneffective or wasteful against drones. Drones drones drones. It's all drones from here on out.

The big cracking point will be drone autonomy. One might think that this is not going to happen, that it'll be unethical and banned by some convention or treaty, but I posit that it's entirely inevitable. Unlike with NBC weapons that are either useful mostly against unprepared civilians (BC) or have incredibly high requirements of the situation before their use becomes at all practical (N), autonomous drones will be universally useful and practical due to their scalability and flexibility, from high-level strategy down to tactical nitty-gritty. No military force will be able to afford not employing autonomous drones. The killbots may not be right around the corner, but they are coming for sure. Anyone refusing to use them will be militarily irrelevant.

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 2025

Dunno, trying to farm some quotes you could lob at DNS registries to try to get this place banned? Seems excessive for that, who would care that much?

It is odd behavior.

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 9, 2025

Two caveats. Firstly, my thesis was not "the US should strike NOW", but that Israel succeeding here is undoubtedly very very good for us, and if they needed help to succeed, I'd want to do so. I say that as someone with skin in the game.

It seems to me that obviously either nations with nuclear warheads can be threatened, in which case they can be deterred. Or they can't be, in which case the United States (and Israel) has nothing to worry about. But you seem to be trying to have it both ways!

Secondly, allow me to rephrase: Nuclear weapons make you functionally immune to a conventional invasion and will make anyone think twice about even striking within your borders. At any point during a real conventional invasion you can consider (or declare) your existence threatened and use them to great effect, either wiping out entire armies or the invaders' home front. They do not make you immune to internal rot, discord, economic decline, or anything else, as the USSR will gladly tell you. That this is your opening argument is disheartening, because I find it quite intellectually dishonest to feign ignorance of that distinction.

As such, I don't worry about someone invading the United States. If decades of discord and hostile messaging (bolstered by adversaries who are quite happy to watch us tear ourselves apart without firing a single shot) leads to the United States to cease to exist as a political entity, then we would be quite susceptible to invasion, be it by a hostile force or something more covert. A "North American" continent with dozens of individual nation states that are likely at each others' throats would present a foreign actor many potential inroads into allying with, occupying, subverting, or otherwise controlling part of the landmass. As I live on that landmass, I'd like the huge boon that "two massive oceans and only two continental neighbors" to stay that way. We already have Chinese and other agents coming through our weak border to the south. Imagine that ten or a hundred fold. That is why we can be both a nuclear power and vulnerable.

Nuclear powers can also be defeated abroad, as in within other people's borders, without really having the right (in international eyes) to use the nuclear option. We have failed to achieve many military objectives, as has Russia, and neither have deployed nuclear weapons. But it also means no one can ever go to the source. As for Iran, yes, they have weapons that can reach us, but they are not yet nuclear capable. Once they are, you essentially waive all your chances to military deterrence. And from there stems the problem. A nuclear Iran can proxy war to their hearts' content. A nuclear Iran can threaten to retaliate to conventional Israeli strikes with nuclear weapons (whereas now only Israel can), leading both to consider a nuclear first strike necessary to preserve their existence/secure their victory, depending on perspective. A nuclear Iran can lock up within its borders when its armaments are exhausted and refill its stockpiles and have a credible threat against anyone trying to stop them. They go from being a regional power to a fact of life unless some sort of unconventional method deters them or causes their regime to collapse. Once again, see America. I am reasonably hopeful that we won't collapse in the near future, and I am also reasonably sure that a nuclear Iran would also last quite a while. Even if they didn't, those nukes would have to go somewhere once they collapse, and that's a huge security risk. All you need is one powerful higher up or base deciding they wanted to get massively rich, or being insanely anti-Israeli/American/whatever to sell or use them.

These were all real arguments up to the end of the Cold War, and they ring true now. Every single nation that develops its own nuclear weapons increases the risk of some sort of horrible outcome, be it an entrenched regime, accident, or sale to/use by crazies within or without the government. I don't want it to happen.

FIRST, the United States does not have infinite capacity to do things. If we actually want to fight China, which we've said we want to be able to do publicly, that means very specifically that we cannot write blank checks where ballistic missile interceptors, smart munitions, etc. are involved. We are already arguably under-equipped to deal with the very real Chinese threat, which will likely be a more serious threat to American hegemony than anything that Iran can do. And part of the reason we are under-equipped to fight China is because we canceled procurement and research programs throughout the Global War on Terror to fund the Global War on Terror – effectively eating our own seed corn.

I agree with this. I admittedly did not make this clear enough in my post, but I must say I am aware of the looming threat of China to American interests and I don't want to be bogged down in this. I really hope that Israel succeeds or Iran comes back to the negotiating table, as you said. However, there are two issues here. Firstly, Iran has been "at the negotiating table" several times, including with previous administrations, leading to billions of funds going into their pockets in return for them only pursuing civil nuclear reactors... which they then proceeded to ignore completely. Secondly, the inverse of your statement is true as well: Iran does not have infinite capacity to do things either. They have already used a huge amount of missiles in the current exchange, and their IADS seems to be in shambles. They may already be close to their limit as far as projecting power is concerned, and dealing with them now is a lot more appealing than waiting for an armistice where they are able to refill their reserves. If they actually nuclearize, or perhaps state their intent to use those weapons against the US, and we suddenly have to divert resources back to them to stop an imminent threat, it will be a lot costlier, and likely bloodier.

And the only reliable way to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon is regime change.

I don't know that this is true. There was a lot of fear about Iraq getting one, and after we utterly demolished their ability to make war in the first Gulf War, they were never a credible threat. That's why the "they're making WMDs" justification for Gulf War 2 is a persistent joke.

Second (another commenter posted in response to this but I'm going to put my reply here, as it's relevant and I've received a number of replies) I think the biggest issue with Gulf War 2 (other than doing it) was that we picked the worst middle ground imaginable. We banned every single Ba'ath party member from ever being in government, which is not even a thing we did with the Nazis or Japanese. This essentially left a fledgling government in the middle of a war zone filled with the unqualified, malcontents, and sometimes literal terrorists in power. That Iraq even exists after ISIS is kind of a miracle to me, not that they're somehow doing great. I think we should have either:

  1. Completely obliterated their military again, ousted their leaders that time, and left.
  2. Actually worked with the remaining government to allow for some kind of legitimate regime change.

Both of these things are something I would accept, at least on the home front. "Don't fuck with the US or they'll show up, kill all your leaders, and break all your stuff" is at least something we can credibly do multiple countries. We cannot get continuously bogged down in a 20 year nation building/peacekeeping quagmire.

SECONDLY

I somewhat responded to these points above, but I agree partially. I'll explain below.

If Israel conducts the war successfully, they may reduce the cost of a limited US intervention (destroying the buried nuclear facilities with bunker busters – although it's possible that some of them are buried even too deeply for oversized US ordinance!) to near-zero.

As I said above, I want this to happen. As with Ukraine, I like the idea of adversaries blunting themselves against our allies at zero cost to American lives and (relatively) low cost with materiel. As it is, if we're going to have to strike, I want to strike while the iron is hot and their munitions and defenses are depleted. If we're not going to take our hands off the steering wheel of the entire region and withdraw entirely (which I think is a bad idea outside the scope of this already long-winded discussion), then I want it done now when it's going to be the easiest for us to do.

The Iranian regime may not last forever.

I hope it doesn't. The average Iranian is not a lover of their regime, which is why we see regular protests despite the authoritarian nature of their government. While I've mentioned I prioritize American interests over others, I don't want a single life to be lost. But I have to be realistic and consider the fact that their nation will be able to do damage as long as they're in power, even more if they nuclearize.

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 9, 2025

I am qualitatively annoyed by the situation, which is independent of the frequency. However, you have the mod history, so if you'd like to provide numbers to supplement the conceptual-level discussion, that would be appreciated.

We don't have a record of "How many times someone was banned for a low effort top level post," but it's not common. Pretty much only when someone is a repeat offender after being warned, or being a deliberate jerk about it.

Moreover, I prefer a world where this distinction is overt in policy.

This is in the general category of requests we receive from time to time to, essentially, codify in minute detail the exact rubric we shall use to decide whether or not someone gets banned in every possible situation, and then consider ourselves bound to it so if someone makes a convincing enough case that "Actually, per clause 3 in paragraph 4, the offender did not meet the necessary threshold for banning" we will be forced to acquit. That's not how it works and it's not how it's ever going to work. "Low effort" is subjective, and it's always going to be subjective. Over time the mods have converged on something like a general consensus (not just on "low effort") such that most of the time, when we ask each other "Hey, do you think this post merits a ban?" there will be general agreement as to whether it does or doesn't. But it's not always unanimous, and depending who mods you, Amadan might decide on Tuesday to just give you a warning, and netstack might decide on Thursday to ban you for a week.

I understand this may be frustrating to those who have an autistic need to have the exact decision process mapped out for them, but you're just going to have to negotiate that. We're not a court of law, we respond to general community feeling, our own intuitions, and history, and trying to keep an interesting place running with maximal freedom of speech without letting people shit on the commons is more important than writing rules for autists.

(I am not calling you autistic; I have no idea whether you are or not. I'm just saying that the need to have all vagaries and subjectivity removed from human decision-making strikes me as a very autistic desire.)

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 9, 2025

The competitive advantage of the motte is not that it can report what is true faster than twitter, nor that it is better at reporting facts than the news media.

I think you have mistaken what my model was. I agree with this.

A decent current news top level post is basically providing a canvas for takes.

I think a pretty low-effort comment is sufficient to provide the canvas. It seems to me that you are asking for it to paint the canvas.

But all the interesting takes, like ... will only happen after the facts are in and the posters have had a day to think on them and how they tie into their world view.

If the mods believe this, then they should simply impose a moratorium. No breaking news for 24hrs. That would be clear.

I would propose a system of sliding standards. In the first 24h of a news item being reported, I would expect someone putting in a solid twenty minutes of citing multiple news sources. After 36h, if it is an important CW news item (e.g. the first Trump tariff story, not the tenth), I propose top level posters should get away with a low effort post (source+quote+two sentences).

This seems like an unstable equilibrium. An individual actor can defect by putting in only 19min of work. Then the next individual actor can defect by putting in only 18min of work. Rinse and repeat. My proposal acknowledges that it is a useful service to provide a canvas, but only for a small subset of genuine 100% topics. Moreover, it says that this service is valued in that it will not be warned/banned, but in order to maintain incentives for the equilibrium, it will come with a shower of downvotes and significant penalties if you're wrong about it being a 100% topic.

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 9, 2025

How many times has someone been banned for this? Any guesses?

I am qualitatively annoyed by the situation, which is independent of the frequency. However, you have the mod history, so if you'd like to provide numbers to supplement the conceptual-level discussion, that would be appreciated.

You do not have to write an essay, a flowery effortpost, or come up with some wildly innovative idea. You just have to not look like an attention whore on Twitter.

There is a very simple solution for a major event worthy of discussion: write something about it. If it's too low effort, we'll probably clear our throats and say "Low effort, don't do this."

Technically, even this OP wrote something about it. But yeah, I still have no idea what the actual standard is.

Normally if someone rushed to be FIRST! we'd just warn them not to do it again (as I said!) and let the thread continue.

Perhaps your numbers from the mod history will bear out that the typical response is just a warning. I still think this is a bad equilibrium. It provides insufficient distinction between typical low effort garbage that we don't want and obvious 100% topics, which we (I) do. Moreover, I prefer a world where this distinction is overt in policy.

For any other mods who might be casually interested in subscribing to my newsletter this meta topic, I would like to note that so far in the responses, I see very little engagement with my conceptual definition of the problem to be solved, the incentives involved, the current or desired equilibria, or valuation methods for what type of resulting posting dynamics we'd prefer.

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 9, 2025

I am genuinely shaking my head in amazement that you wrote such a long wall of text to defend such an absurd argument and expect it to be taken seriously.

Right now, the equilibrium is that somebody (or their alt account) is willing to take a ban to just do the thing that needs to be done.

What are you even talking about? How many times has someone been banned for this? Any guesses? You talk like this is how it usually goes down, that when a big breaking news event happens, everyone wants to talk about it and someone has "take one for the team" and post a thread-starter they will get banned for.

Of course when big events happen, there will inevitably be a thread about it. Because someone will write about it. And they will, hopefully, write at least a measly paragraph or two that is something beyond just "HEY GUYS SOMETHING BIG IS HAPPENING I WANT TO BE THE FIRST TO START A THREAD SO MY THREAD WILL THE THREAD ABOUT IT!"

Our standards are not high. They are not unreasonable. You do not have to write an essay, a flowery effortpost, or come up with some wildly innovative idea. You just have to not look like an attention whore on Twitter.

There is a very simple solution for a major event worthy of discussion: write something about it. If it's too low effort, we'll probably clear our throats and say "Low effort, don't do this." Sometimes we will create a mega thread, like for elections and other predictable events. If next week, World War III has started, we will probably create a mega thread for it (you know, if we're alive and the Internet is still up and stuff).

@ABigGuy4U ate a ban because he was so blatant, so deliberate, so "Tee hee ain't I clever guys!" about it. I explained this. Normally if someone rushed to be FIRST! we'd just warn them not to do it again (as I said!) and let the thread continue. But someone who goes out of his way to be obnoxious about it, yeah, he's going to eat a ban. Don't tell us "I'm breaking the rules on purpose because the rules are stupid and I want attention." Of course I'm going to be inclined to respond harshly to that.

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 9, 2025

Sexual nihilism is considered harmful. There's a reason why the rationalist community has a very low TFR - I wouldn't be surprised if it were as low as 0.1.

There was a rationalist adjacent group in a certain city that banned Aella from their events, and I remember her complaining about it a few years ago. But that subgroup had a TFR of closer to 2.0. They didn't want someone throwing sex parties, being an open prostitute, and debating whether-or-not pedophilia was really that bad around their kids. She felt hurt, her friends felt the need to defend her, but its an unavoidable side-effect of basic social hygiene.

Sex is an incredibly powerful psychological force. People kill for sex, people die for sex, people throw away their careers for sex, they lose a fortune for sex, the commit crimes for sex, they bully people for sex. Jeff Bezos pissed away ~$40 billion to upgrade his lay. The best we've been able to do is cage that energy and channel it for pro-social and pro-civilizational ends.

People like Aella are smart enough to reason through the second and third order consequences of their actions. They just don't. Probably because they are directly benefiting from lighting civilization on fire. Cool. The rest of us don't have to put up with it.

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 9, 2025

What consistent moral traits has the US had over the last 100 years?

The US used to be a racially segregated, eugenicist, male-dominated, highly industrialized, colonial power with a small state apparatus. Sodomy was banned, along with miscegenation and pornography. In all reasonable senses America has changed hugely.

And yet elements of the US character are preserved over the centuries due to the people that make it up, though this is changing. There's a certain level of non-conformism, religiosity, optimism, innovativeness, individualism...

It's the same with Germany. There are certain German traits that remained consistent over the century. The high status of technical research for one thing, prestige going more towards engineering and hard sciences compared to (in the UK) classics. Even that is a relatively surface-level cultural difference, compared to underlying matters like relationship between citizen and state, class v meritocracy, systematic thinking...

It's extremely reductive to view a state's character solely by the most obvious features of its government.

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 9, 2025

—Inb4 “low effort post ban” Additional facts and my thoughts will be added as the situation develops

You know, without this passive-aggressive snidery, I would have just warned you and pointed out why we don't want people to rush to post "BREAKING NEWS" just to be the first person to post about it.

But since you clearly did it knowing the rules, and really did just want to be FIRST! Banned for three days, so this discussion will be happening without you.

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 9, 2025

Guest workers as used in eg. Saudi Arabia and the UAE are non-viable because - 60 years later - everybody knows that they don’t go home. The Turks in Germany were “temporary”, they were promised to never receive citizenship, the German public were told clearly that they would work for 3 years and then go home, every single one. Even renewals were initially banned.

Of course what happened is that businesses that employed “guest workers” didn’t want them to leave at the end of the 3 year period because recruiting new guest workers was expensive and required training them. So the periods were slowly extended, then in-country renewals were allowed, so the Gastarbeiter didn’t have to go home in between stints which was disruptive (and most stopped following the rules after a while anyway).

Then, they were slowly allowed to benefit from the growing postwar welfare system, and to bring over more and more relatives. Lastly, to avoid “social unrest” as a consequence of having a huge non-citizen population that was clearly not going to leave they were granted citizenship.

In 1982 Kohl told Thatcher that he would deport at least half the Turks in Germany. But then it seemed like a lot of effort, his ‘self deportation scheme’ (paying them to leave) led only 100,000 to return, and the military coups of the 1980s doubled the Turkish German population as they brought over wives and children and brothers and cousins (who promptly declared asylum) even though Turkish guest worker recruitment ended in 1973.

In 2000, Kohl’s own son married an (upper middle class, but still) Turkish woman and the Germans slowly started amending nationality law to essentially hand out citizenship to Turkish migrants and their children in an effort to assimilate them.

The point is simple: Western countries are incapable of approaching a guest worker workforce with the necessary maturity. The only way they come and leave is if their home country is at least 60-80% as prosperous as the country they move to (which usually means they are unviable as guest workers unless you’re like Switzerland hiring German doctors).

Since 2000, the Republican majority in congress and very careful lobbying by those on the right of the congressional party has successfully killed another amnesty bill that would hand out citizenship. Eventually the dam will break and a Democratic president will pass another amnesty, though it has been a valiant effort. But it doesn’t actually matter, because as Trump’s capitulation shows, the vast majority of migrant workers will never actually be deported.

If Americans don’t want to do ag work, then the fields can rot. It’s OK. Robotics and multimodal AI are progressing at breakneck speed. In less than a decade robots will pick our strawberries (and all the people we might import still won’t leave). In the meantime we can import them from overseas (and in the event of some kind of truly catastrophic global crisis, ex-PMC Americans will pick them diligently rather than starve, I assure you).

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 9, 2025
Culture War Roundup for the week of June 9, 2025

A million reasons. Because it looks bad? Because it's anti-social? Because people aren't qualified to determine what is or is not safe.

If I run up to you and punch the air around your face did I cause you any harm? No.

Does it suck balls and do you want that behavior banned? Sure.

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 9, 2025

Bikes yield to everyone on nature paths and it has not effectively banned them at all. Instead such paths are filled with bikers.

I'd be fine with bikes only on streets in areas of less than 30mph speeds. As soon as it hits 35 though they are asking cars to generally slow down to accommodate them. At 45mph I think they are a danger to themselves and all other drivers.

I'm fine with effectively banning what I'd consider "racing cycling" this ain't the tour de France. Just like highways aren't NASCAR or formula 1. All people in shared commute spaces have to sacrifice the top speed of their vehicle for the safety of themselves and others.

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 8, 2025

How do you use discord?

I don't need, like, a literal user's guide. I mean, how do you use it in a way that's actually practical, fun, and not overwhelming?

I grew up with AIM and online chat rooms, so i'm not a stranger to this sort of thing. But discord just seems so hectic and overwhelming. It's, well, discord in a literal sense.

Every channel I join, starts with this huge list of rules that I have to agree before I can even see anything. Then there's usually a host of hidden channels that all require separate hidden handshakes to enter. It's policed by mods who seem to take their jobs very seriously. Then there's so many different users, all spamming things at each other, and so many different notifications. It's literally impossible for me to read everything even from just one discord channel, let alone if I'm in multiple.

Bad experiences that I've had:

  • had been chatting with people on there for a while. Tried to set up a dinner to finally meet offline at an event. It got too hectic and we never managed to find each other.
  • had been chatting for a while with a different small group. We had our own subchannel led by a mod. The mod apparently had some hiddend drama with the admin (I have no idea what), got banned, and our whole group was kicked out. We all lost contact.
  • Went to a newly created channel where there was only 1 other regular user. We chatted for a bit about random stuff, then got warned by a mod for being "offtopic" and moved to separate rooms. We were literally the only people there.
  • in general just a flood of notifications and messages that I find incredibly distracting. I can't keep it open if I need to do anything else. I have no idea how some people manage to just sit on there all day and respond to everything.
Culture War Roundup for the week of June 9, 2025

Grey vinyl plank should have been banned before it ever hit the market. I think it had to do with that farmhouse kitsch thing that was popular a few years back. The thing that pissed me off about the whole trend more than anything else was that, having grown up in a semi-rural area, it looked nothing like any farmhouse I'd ever been in. I'm guessing that the grey is supposed to look like weathered wood? Except wood only looks like that if it's been outside for years, and wood from inside a house doesn't ever look like that. Luckily my house was built in the 1940s and has real hardwood, but if I didn't have it and couldn't afford to put it in, I'd at least pick something that imitates real wood. If it isn't already obvious from the material that it isn't real wood, I'm not going to let the color just give it away.

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 9, 2025

I'll argue (and have long argued) that it's something upstream; the direction of causality is pointing from a common source. There's a pretty wide variety of spheres where millenial-focused media is absolutely bright-colored, especially where designs and decisions come from the grassroots.

There are a lot of things to complain about in Helluva Boss (cw: lots of profanity, some sexual 'humour') or Brand New Animal, but they're not grey or even My Little Pony-pastel. Look at MMORPGs and going from the most conventional subscription model like FFXIV to the most gatcha-like Genshin they've only gotten brighter over the last decade even as they've increasingly targeted the same demographics. The furry fandom overwhelmingly favors bright and high-constrast to the point where there's a term for hitting it too hard and the bar is high (cw: extremely bad bad color selection). Even the artists who do focus on the greys have a lot more soul than corporate metis. Go into Blue Tribe heavy spaces, and the corporate grey laptops are spangled with every sticker cause celebre available.

But if you're putting tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on the line, you paint your house grey. Nonconfrontational uber alles, in the most literal sense.

There's an optimistic story where the growth of spaces to be maximally yourself have lead to a cleaner division between the personal and the public (well, optimistic until you poke at it), and a pessimistic story where we just banned everything and ignored the consequences.

But I think there's a more cynical one: everything adds up to normal, and this is the local maxima.

Friday Fun Thread for June 6, 2025

I remember back in the boom years of online poker before it got banned in the US, a number of people did things like that. People who weren't good enough to make money playing in a normal way would play just enough to clear the bonuses that sites gave to new players. They called it "bonus grinding" or "bonus whoring." The main caveat, I think, is that it's an incredibly soulless, boring way to make money. It still requires a certain amount of mental effort, and without even the fig leaf of pretending like you're doing something beneficial to society. So most people got bored of doing it, and started to play for real, sometimes losing back the money they earned from the bonus.