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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 6, 2025

Generally yes, more so because in today's day and age we can indefinitely keep someone in jail for the off chance that they are later exonerated (and given the amount of red tape to go for the death penalty I think life in prison is cheaper).

But I said this more because of the motivation of the situation. If the context is along the lines of wishing a politician that is not even on trial gets a trial with the specific outcome of the death penalty, I think you've cast your thinking far enough ahead that you want to see the person dead.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 6, 2025

The only freedom at threat is the freedom to be an illegal immigrant, which is what Americans voted to see persecuted.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 6, 2025

ICE is even worse than the ATF in terms of how much freedom it destroys, if you hate the ATF you should hate ICE even more.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 6, 2025

Generally, I place very little trust in confessions, little trust in eyewitness accounts and a lot of trust in technological evidence.

We know that Reyes raped her. It is reasonable to assume that this was the same incident in which she was also murdered. We know that there is no DNA evidence linking any CP5 to the rape, which is at least strong circumstantial evidence that they did not rape her.

The accepted standard for criminal convictions is "beyond reasonable doubt". So the prosecutor had to convince the jury that the police had reconstructed the crime correctly. I doubt they told the jury "or perhaps some unknown third party raped her, we don't really know". We know that the police had done no such thing.

So we have cops who extracted confessions which were later falsified in the details, and sold them as the truth. This puts really sharp limits on the trust we can place on the police investigation.

Now, it is technically possible that they were randomly directionally correct and framed the guilty party minus one. But even if they were, the penalty for investigatory misconduct in the US is generally that the gathered evidence gets thrown out, which sets the correct incentives.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 6, 2025

I don't think faul_sname meant that the reaction is overwhelmingly negative. But if the positive reactions are along the lines of "hell yeah! make illegals afraid!" rather than "ah, normal policemen doing their work normally, how neat and orderly" then it's still support for the claim that ICE is deliberately projecting an image of themselves as scary chaotic mofos. Which they are. You might very well think that's a good thing because it'll intimidate illegals into self-deporting, but "ICE are scary goons" isn't left-wing slander, it's the image they're deliberately leaning into because that's what Trump's base wants them to do.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 6, 2025

If there is one single issue I think you will have trouble rallying cops to kill feds for I really think, "Actually we don't need to allow law enforcement to use greater force on criminals and we should decriminalize even more vagrancy and brazen public lawlessness" is it.

If local cops start shooting at feds, it is going to be because the feds are engaging in hostile and warlike acts in their communities. Trump talks about sending troops into cities to quell general lawlessness, but apart from DC he has not done so - the facts on the ground are entirely about immigration enforcement.

The MO of ICE is to seal off an area, arrest everyone vaguely Hispanic-looking, detain the citizens for a few hours and most of the legal immigrants overnight to show who's boss, and throw the illegal immigrants and a few legal immigrants for good measure into immigration detention for eventual deportation. There is enough of a pattern that I think we can assume this is policy. If you are a Hispanic-looking citizen, or a legal immigrant, or the friend, pastor, employer, or local political leader of such people, you are going to interpret this as violent hostility to your community, because it is. The MAGA base who are cheerleading the immigration enforcement operations on right-wing social media are not hiding the fact that they would be happy deporting legal immigrants and non-heritage-American citizens if the opportunity arose. The federal legality of these tactics is currently being litigated - if ICE are exceeding their authority under federal law then as a matter of state law they are committing all the crimes.

The South Shore apartment raid in Chicago is an escalation, both in terms of the tactics (SWAT tactics were used, including doors kicked in in the middle of the night) and the targets (the Blacks were arrested as well as the Hispanics). And a deliberate one - Kristi Noem put out a celebratory Youtube video. It doesn't look like ICE stole enough to matter this time, but the nature of rapidly-recruited and poorly-trained goons is that if this type of operation continues ICE are probably going to start stealing from US citizens on a large scale due to poor discipline, even if it isn't policy. If and when that happens, local cops shooting at feds who are also robbers and kidnappers seems plausible, particularly in core cities where the local police are more black tribe than red.

The other factor is that ICE can burn through any goodwill they have with local police by acting like arseholes. Too many incidents of accidentally tear-gassing cops or calling 911 on journalists and actually-peaceful protestors would bring the "local cops willing to obey an order from the governor/mayor to shoot at feds" point forward. At the margins even garden-variety assholism like driving recklessly and parking illegally when off-duty (almost all cops do this, but their getting away with it when outside their local jurisdiction is controversial) hurts.

tl;dr: Local cops are going to be sympathetic to feds engaging in immigration enforcement, but the degree of collateral damage that local cops are willing to tolerate is a lot lower than the level of collateral damage Trump's people seem to be aiming for. It is possible but unlikely that this will reach the point where local cops are willing to shoot at feds.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 6, 2025

Yeah, this seems more than a little important to recall when accusing the Democrats of starting the civil war talk.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 6, 2025

No, that's not clear at all.

"Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be.".

Friday Fun Thread for October 3, 2025

I've never really found this complaint really compelling. In fact, I'll top it: You can beat most parts of all DS games by summoning another (often ridiculously overlevelled) player and letting them do everything for you. You don't even need to know anything.

DS is imo very clearly, very deliberately designed to accommodate large differences in player skill without resorting to outright different difficulty levels. That's also the reason why I usually say that DS games are better grouped as high casual, but not quite hardcore.

In fact, arguably much of the games' difficulty is rooted in the fact that players don't know how the games work.

That's mostly an inversion of reality in practice; Plenty of bad players who don't know how the game works follow some online guide for an OP build to do exactly the stuff you're complaining about. Better players deliberately avoid the OP things bc they don't need it and just do a run with some weapon/spells they like. Even better players deliberately use gimmick gear (not me, sadly) or other limitations.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 6, 2025

No — we know someone else was also guilty. Doesn’t mean the CP5 weren’t concurrently guilty.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 6, 2025

I get the theory. It's clearly just not playing out that way.

The fewer white people there are the more various goals conflict because you can't just take it all from them. Asians want meritocracy in education which squeezes out other groups besides whites, attempts to come up with some anti-crime measures that also don't annoy blacks lead to disorder that harm everyone, Latinos simply don't seem to be that interested in being auxiliaries in white progressives' fight against other whites if it comes at the expense of the economy or themselves and the in-group favoritism for random illegals is vastly overstated.

cities across the US are controlled by people who govern badly, let crime and other scams run rampant and, whether this is intentional or not, the result of this is they keep normal, functional Americans out of those cities which protects the machine politics of those cities

That part might be true but this isn't actually helping the electoral chances of Democrats or blacks as a whole. If anything, emigration to red states because of the disorder weakens their voting power.

This is basically what the Abundance turn of the party is about.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 6, 2025

He also flew every deployed star officer and their SEAs to Quantico for the biggest set-piece speech to the brass since Washington was alive, and told them that the people of Chicago were domestic enemies of the United States and that the officer corps should prepare for war against them.

History suggests that when Trump (i) says he is going to do a bad thing, (ii) the bad thing is wildly popular on right-wing social media, and (iii) appears to be doing the bad thing, he probably actually is doing it. If I was the mayor of Chicago or the governor of Illinois, I would be making "war" plans. After the attack on the South Shore apartment building, I would be thinking about activating them.

OpenAI seminar at work has me thinking of the "Ai Bubble"

IMO AI has a lot to do with how you prompt it, you need to give it the necessary docs and then do some troubleshooting with it. It won't usually one-shot a complex issue but it can eventually nail it... which is exactly what that guy said I guess.

I guess it's my 'lived experience' that it works eventually and there's not much else I can say.

Also, even if it's not helping you much as a researcher, is what you do representative? How many people work with tomography as opposed to spreadsheet jobs or just plain old programming? How many people even know what tomography is? It can be simultaneously true that it's not helpful for you but is for many others enough for it to not be a bubble. Terence Tao seems to find it useful for his rather abstract work.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 6, 2025

I have no objections to looking at only the murder rate - but that doesn't actually change anything, just check out the demographics.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 6, 2025

Even if it was that severe of a break, a month in the hospital is an extreme outlier. I've known kids who all but destroyed an entire leg or hip socket in football who were home sooner than that.

"A couple hours in outpatient then follow up with an ortho" is actually the overwhemingly most common response to a broken leg, in my experience. It's what I literally did when I broke mine.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 6, 2025

Oh, that looks like obvious malicious clown garbage. He has a broken leg. Why is he in the hospital for over a month with a broken leg? Unless that is understating his injuty to a hilarious extent, a broken leg is a couple hours of outpatient care and then getting released.

What? I admit to being possibly out of date regarding orthopaedics best practice, but my impression is that most tibial +/- fibular fractures require operative management. Isolated fibular shaft fractures maybe? Even for conservative management it's going to be a cast and crutches and no weight-bearing on that leg for weeks, with at least a couple clinic visits. Certainly not to the extent that you can be so blasé as to say "couple hours of outpatient care then getting released"!

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 6, 2025

Consider the possibility that you are in a bubble. Twitter will show you what it thinks you want to see. When I look at the last "cruel" ICE post on twitter, it shows 161k likes and 10k comments, almost all of which appear to be positive on the logged-out, incognito-mode mirror I'm checking.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 6, 2025

The optics suck, you can tell they suck because they're terrible. You can tell they suck because people are shooting at ICE officers. You can tell they suck because city mayor's think they'll score political points by making it hard for ICE agents to do their jobs.

"Yeah, ok, you didn't actually do those things, and I'm just describing normal policing like a total asshole, but doesn't the fact that I could believe you would do something so horrible say something terrible about you?"

No. It says something about you. As does your eliding that, per your own link, immigration is still Trump's best polling policy.

Sorry, you were lying?

A solid majority of Americans still want every illegal deported. The relentless propaganda you are cheerfully participating in hasn't actually changed that. I wonder what the polling would look like if people were asked to choose between an ICE agent doing his job versus one of your trantifa insurrectionists trying to kill his family over it?

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 6, 2025

Ah yes, how could I forget all the wonderful government benefits that illegals most definitely qualify for. The rest is quite frankly a parody of how other people think and what motivates them.

They explicitly do in blue states. I tangentially interact with the process on a daily basis. And deeper than that, there's a thriving market in fraud and fake SSNs. Things like "free healthcare for illegals" are fucking budget items in California. NY and other states spent billions on free housing, free benefits and free money for illegal immigrants. This was widely covered. The relentless playing stupid about this is honestly kind of breathtaking and intellectually damning.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 6, 2025

What are the clear misdeeds of the current ICE offensive?

From my comment, quoting the comment above.

Masked and armed bouncers dragging people away at gunpoint.

There are documented cases of people being deported to random nations, a few people have been disappeared (from public tracking, limiting a family's visibility into where a loved one is)

Breaking a guy's leg and holding him in a hospital for 37 days without any charges after signing him in with a fake name.

Blue tribe emotions are not a reasonable guide to material reality.

Quite literally half of the country hates something and you live in a democracy so you unfortunately don't get to not care lol.

You can tell the optics suck because the economist shows his approval on immigration is down to -10% now versus +10% in January. Nate Silver shows him going from ~+9% to -4% with now (just) over 50% disapproval.

This was an incredibly popular electoral issue. He crushed the election on it. Now he's underwater on it. I wonder why???

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 6, 2025

I don't really understand what your comparison is here. I also don't care about whatever algorithmic rage bait slop event you're talking about. The Republicans shit their pants once about Obama wearing a tan suit. Does that mean all Republican concerns are now invalid?

The optics suck, you can tell they suck because they're terrible. You can tell they suck because people are shooting at ICE officers. You can tell they suck because city mayor's think they'll score political points by making it hard for ICE agents to do their jobs.

You can tell the optics suck because the economist shows his approval on immigration is down to -10% now versus +10% in January. Nate Silver shows him going from ~+9% to -4% with now (just) over 50% disapproval.

This was an incredibly popular electoral issue. He crushed the election on it. Now he's underwater on it. I wonder why???

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 6, 2025

Oh, that looks like obvious malicious clown garbage. He has a broken leg. Why is he in the hospital for over a month with a broken leg? Unless that is understating his injuty to a hilarious extent, a broken leg is a couple hours of outpatient care and then getting released. Obviously this is a ploy to evade deportation, which ICE was trying to counter with the surveilance, and which this midnight Biden appointee, Hispanic activist judge is trying to shut down on ideological grounds.

You're right. It is a trravesty that that woman is a federal judge, abusing her position to subvert the rule of law for her ethnic nationalism.

The Tower of Babel in Reverse

Better than anything I could write, but I assume you are posting it to this vile den of low agreeableness for a reason. So, some personal pet peeves which in my opinion detracted from it:

  • the cast consisting of [generic Anglo name], [generic Anglo name] and a bunch of {REDACTED}s. Names should tell a story; omissions should also tell a story. If this is an internal government brief, why were the other names redacted? I can't suspend disbelief hard enough to remove the feeling that it is "I struggled hard enough to come up with two names that sound like good scifi thriller protagonists and can't be bothered to come up with more". (This is an endemic disease in SCPs - "redactions" following a pattern of "author couldn't be bothered to come up with something that will hold up here" + "some more sprinkled randomly for effect")

    • In the real world, perhaps the field linguist would be Croatian, and the archaeologist come with three or four first names and a surname suggesting Norman British stock (because who else majors in these sorts of subjects with zero economic value and a distinct smell of pink ink on a musty map anymore?).

  • "Dr. Markham". Seems to also be lifted from the memetic public domain's ideas of how scientists talk to each other (which is actually based on the ways of (notoriously face-obsessed) hospital doctors, who tend to be the only people with a doctorate normies ever encounter).

  • More generally, due to the above and more (e.g. dramatic paragraph breaks), my theory-of-mind sense only ever tells me that I am reading the words of an author who wants to tell me a scifi thriller, not the words of a scientist who has to write a concluding report for internal government consumption on a worldview-shattering discovery.

Imagine yourself in the shoes of your characters when writing, not in the shoes of other authors who successfully wrote the sort of story you want to write. Familiarise yourself with what they should sound like: classified US government reports, faculty lists, scientific papers and emails all exist on the internet.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 6, 2025

For one, I don't see why you need any of that evidence. Optics aren't even about truth, it's OPTICS. I'm not taking a stance on if ICE is too cruel, or if the pro/anti ICE narrative is more true I'm saying that ICE's optics as an organization are not good. As in, ICE looks bad to many Americans.

The optics suck, you can tell they suck because they're terrible. You can tell they suck because people are shooting at ICE officers. You can tell they suck because city mayor's think they'll score political points by making it hard for ICE agents to do their jobs.

You can tell the optics suck because the economist shows his approval on immigration is down to -10% now versus +10% in January. Nate Silver shows him going from ~+9% to -4% with now (just) over 50% disapproval.

This was an incredibly popular electoral issue. He crushed the election on it. Now he's underwater on it. I wonder why???

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 6, 2025

Top 5 are Memphis TN, Oakland CA, St Louis MO, Little Rock AR, Tacoma WA. Oakland is the only one of those I particularly associate with immigrants. Also I don't really like the methodology of weighting larceny equal to murder. Looking at murder rate alone which is harder to fudge the top 5 are Birmingham AL, St Louis MO, Memphis TN, Baltimore MD, Detroit MI. Larceny theft alone does put Oakland and Portland near the top, which tracks.

Regardless, the "immigrants specifically make cities bad to live in" hypothesis doesn't seem particularly reflective of reality.