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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 2025

I will cop to being a serial breaker of Overton windows. It's really quite hilarious the things people say when one does so

Fellow serial breaker of Overton windows here, and can confirm; I’ve gotten a slew of these insults myself. Most of them I’ve forgotten by now, but one that really sticks in my mind is the time I was called an “incest porn aficionado who roofies women”. I mean fucking Christ lol.

Hell it’s quite noticeable how much even the more charitable descriptions of me conflict with how I actually act. I imagine most of these people would likely find me to be rather good-natured in real life.

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 2025

You might object, "yes, but the rape of white British girls really is that big of a deal! We need propaganda to get across how bad the problem is." Maybe! but I hope you can see that this is not exactly an asymetric weapon as far as truth is concerned.

No, the way I would object would be to remember the last ten years of mainstream media and laugh at your concerns about propaganda until I hyperventilated.

You are right, it is an asymmetric weapon. And the establishment want to keep it that way. So it doesn't matter that explicitly government backed propaganda was used to protect migrants who raped little British girls, or to cover up said rape of little British girls, or to protect the people who covered up the rape of little British girls. It doesn't matter that slightly less explicitly government backed propaganda has been used in the decade since to paint the 'migrants' as scared women and children fleeing tyranny and to defame and punish anyone who doesn't like them. It doesn't matter that government propaganda hid nigh constant protests in France for years, or was used to defame a presidential candidate, to censor social media, to protect corrupt and incompetent politicians, to launder public support for useless and pointless wars, to hide the intel agency to big tech pipeline, to convince everyone to fear their neighbours and cripple childhood development and wear a stupid fucking mask/not wear a stupid fucking mask and give up their bodily autonomy in the name of self righteousness. What matters is that Tommy fucking Robinson can whip up a meme in ten seconds. That's when propaganda is dangerous.

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 2025

Killing some percentage of the population is not in the liberal Overton window.

Actually, yes it is. Kamala Harris was fully on board with ethnic cleansing of brown people, and so committed to it that she preferred supporting wiping out the Palestinians to actually winning the election. Hell, even AOC voted for more weapons and bombs! Extermination of unwelcome minorities is very squarely and firmly in the overton window right now thanks to what's happening in Gaza.

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 2025

I think it does demonstrate that people are starved for a heroic/mythic figure to rally around or organize under and to inspire them to collective action towards some (ideally) righteous goal.

We're really short on such people these days. No politicians really live up to their own hype. Trump's reality warping field is strong enough that people DO find him inspiring. But he is simply not a 'leader of men' in the sense that one can't imagine him at the front of a cavalry charge on a battlefield or marching into a conquered city to personally accept terms of surrender.

Unlike, say, George Washington or Ulysses S. Grant.

Made all the worse in the U.K. which has a literal king who has a literal sword and in theory has the ability to deploy the military inside and outside the kingdom.

But, and maybe some British Citizen can clarify, its also impossible to imagine the British military rallying under the king's declaration to purge the isles of the invading hordes or what-have-you. Just, wouldn't happen under the current structure of things and social expectations.

And so, the right is really groping around for ANY figure that could possibly rouse their tribe to war and actually hold the coalition together long enough to rout the hated enemy. And they grasp upon a 13-14 year old girl with behavioral issues as their long-awaited queen.

And hey, the U.S. does it too. Rittenhouse, Daniel Penny, Shiloh Hendrix... just 'normal' people who happened to pull off a 'win' in a very specific place and time, and weather the onslaught of publicity and scrutiny, and did something that lefties really didn't like.

They get elevated to the status of 'heroes' but man, they pretty much fade out once it is clear they don't have the chops for maintaining the spotlight, much less being the core of a movement. And who does? Who can you actually imagine being dynamic enough to challenge existing power structures, stable enough to not fall to personal scandal, and somehow also strategic enough to win meaningful, repeated victories when it counts.

AI is good for creating imagery from that slightly-more-idealized world you wish you lived in. I do it pretty often, to create a vision of the future that I find appealing and would like to live in/escape to. But I try not to very directly make alternate versions of the present, especially one that supposes people or individual persons are different than who they really are.

That is, I don't want my actual perception and memory of reality to be supplanted by a version that I prefer but that simply isn't correlated with the truth. Believing the true things even when you'd prefer the true things be something else means NOT believing the false things even when they are exactly what you would prefer be true.

No. A 14 year old girl is not going to rally a nation to war, no Trump is NOT a divine instrument of retributive justice who also has six pack abs and a ten inch penis (he does alright, regardless, mind), no Zelenskyy is not some genius defensive strategist who can beat back Russian invasion via sheer grit and guile (and billions of dollars of aid and western weapons), no Luigi Mangione is NOT an avenging Saint, so on and so forth.

But people do, really really do, want that idealized version to be real and true, which is probably why they're ready to accept the digital fictions so readily. Which spells very, very bad things for our shared epistemic environment.

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 24, 2025

Evo-psych makes a bad turn when it tries to explain behaviors this specific. It's a sign of status, simple as (which can flip valance depending on the time period and conditions, like being tanned vs. being pale). The costs and the planning are a part of the point, as they gatekeep those that can't afford it.

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 24, 2025

I'm sure you all are tired of evo-psych stuff, but why do women like to travel so much? I think traveling to a different country would be kinda cool but I'm really not as crazy about it as most women seem to be. To me, there's other higher priority things that don't cost so much and don't require a ton of planning.

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 2025

What? They weren't even attempting to reach orbit with this one.

https://www.spacex.com/launches/starship-flight-10

Starship completed a full-duration ascent burn and achieved its planned velocity, successfully putting it on a suborbital trajectory.

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 2025

Great timing on the tag, it looks like they made orbit tonight. https://x.com/SpaceX/status/1960179929204596907

Thanks for the bet, I have to admit I was sweating a bit by launch 10. Happy to discuss but as I understand it landing in a stable orbit was the main bet.

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 24, 2025

I don't understand your confusion. What's the difference between those categories, in your mind?

The difference is that the emergency fund is something you feel the need to separate from your regular savings and refill by spending much less money while you do so. If you were spending your regular savings, you wouldn't let having to buy a new car change what you else you spend. The cost would be spread over decades or even generations.

Any car with a market value high enough that a bank would consider financing it is going to be depreciating at a rate I'm not comfortable being liable for.

I don't know what you mean by being liable for depreciation.

There will be interest, at rates likely higher than Ultrashort Treasury yields.

But less than the expected rate of return of the S&P 500.

If I want said interest payments to be less than ~11%, the financer will force me to purchase Collision coverage (and I remind you, avoiding purchasing this was the entire point of opening this thread in the first place.)

This is higher than I would expect. I just got a call from a car dealer offering me about 4%. Maybe that's with insurance. This makes little sense. I can borrow at about 8% I believe from my unsecured line of credit. Why would the interest rate on a car, which is secured loan, be higher than that?

If interest rates are really that high, then maybe it's a bad idea to lease, but still, I don't see the logic in eating rice and beans for six months to recover the expense. You can spread it over your lifetime by just having less savings.

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 2025

It's a paraphrase of Isaac Asimov. But I can elaborate of course.

Pragmatists like Willard Van Orman Quine hold that language is not reality but a model of reality, which makes any logically constructed principle or ideology an inherently imperfect tool to observe, predict and interact with the world.

Principles are a map of morality rather than its territory, insofar as one regards morality to be an inherent property of the world rather than a logically constructed proposition in itself (but then that that opens itself to Nietzschean skepticism).

Correct conduct may therefore be at odds with what is logically prescribed by principle in the real world. We most often call this "paradox".

Well known examples of this often quoted in this utilitarian neighborhood include the mere addition paradox or the paradox of hedonism. But this imperfection is a general property of all theories, not just moral or political ones.

Hence, any reasonable political actor, who actually has to enact his moral ideas in this imperfect real world may have to encounter the difficulties of his ideological framework when confronted with the real workings of the world, and if he is to succeed he will have to make compromises. After immediate collectivization failed, Lenin enacted the NEP even though it's totally against Marxist principles in theory. Yet can we really say that Lenin was not a Marxist?

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 2025

From Merriam-Webster:

sucker

5.a : a person easily cheated or deceived

From Oxford:

sucker noun

(informal) a person who is easily tricked or persuaded to do something

I think my usage is perfectly appropriate. But it's not like I've made a mystery of what I meant. You certainly seem to have understood it.

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 2025

The police haven't outlined any of the circumstances around the video such as was the foreigner harassing the girls. The will likely keep details to a minimum using the excuse of privacy for the minor.

Without clarifying that the girl was casually carrying the weapons before having met the foreigner, the situation is going to be memed into 'Scottish Boudica defends herself against the foreigner; where are the men?' I know this because this is currently being talked about on /pol/

Edit: There is also a shitshow of a thread on the scotland subreddit where you can expect usual reddit takes.

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 2025

Which just invites the question of why the left isnt using the same weapon against the right. Make its own cartoon memes of how bad things really are for the poor migrants and refugees and oppressed BIPOC.

Why, it may just be that the language wielding elite prefer to wage war on their turf where they can use vague words to shape perceptions using the moral weight of such words asymetrically. Refugee, child migrant, trans children, urban youth, journalist, UN worker. All these terms elicit a mental approximate closer to the stock image photo of what a sympathetic portrayal for such looks like, usually a prepubescent child eyes full of wonder or a do gooder westerner in squalid conditions with a heart full of hope and a belly full of vigor.

Maybe the push from leftist media to scrub images and videos of what happens on the ground is entirely because the definitional warfare breaks under reality and repeated evidence of "17 year old" of certain demographics being statistically overrepresented starts making Noticing more common. Worse if the left tries to pretend something is the inverse, like when Rittenhouse was portrayed as killing Blacks to supercharge the narrative of white nationalism running unchecked.

The Left can't use the low hanging fruit of visual art to its cause, a fruit plucked only by Ben Garrison or Stonetoss in the past but now accessible to every angry person with an internet connection. The meta is shifting, and its not in the favour of the left.

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 2025

but Ghibli is a dead giveaway . The concern over fakes is that they are subtly indistinguishable from a real-life event or the original image (e.g. slightly slurring someone's speech to convey inebriation) . Those examples you give are obvious fakes. Those fakes go viral for the novelty factor, not because people are confused or are mislead. Also, those are based off of photos, so there is no artist.

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 2025

When they do fuckery like the examples I'll provide below nobody has any recourse unless they randomly manage to fuck up the CEO's healthcare or something.

Or if they manage to fuck of the CEO of healthcare.

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 2025

yes it has that shitty Ghibbi style or whatever it is called with the obvious sepia background. it's not even good animation

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 2025

The video is real , but what was the sequence of events that led to her brandishing those weapons .It's not like people carry axes when they go walking. were they just on the ground lying there or something.

Why does advice work so poorly?

  1. Standard American redneck brand loyalty. One guy is convinced that Jeep makes reliable vehicles, like the grand Cherokee.

  2. there's a guy who literally didn't believe in oil changes. He has bought a long series of PoS $3k cars that all inevitably quickly break down irreparably within a year or two. Oil changes are a ripoff! The mechanic just wants you to throw away good money for no reason because the car is going to break down in a year or two anyway!

  3. On the opposite end, some truly poorly modified civics and f150s

  4. Some awful and idiotic ways to rip off your insurance company or auto repair shops.

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 2025

but very rarely will this shitty slop rise to the top over real artists.

Sorry to break it to you, but uh, yeah it does.

https://x.com/JudiciaryGOP/status/1833154509222129884?lang=en

https://x.com/WhiteHouse/status/1905332049021415862?lang=en

Turns out demand was elastic. The ability to respond to the current thing in minutes with trivial input costs changes the game. Memes were a big part of Trump's 2016 win, but this is the next level.

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 2025

That image is strictly within the capabilities of any decent artist, and it has that hideous brown tint that every chatgpt imahe has these days.

Sure political cartooning has become more democratized slightly, but very rarely will this shitty slop rise to the top over real artists.

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 2025

The obvious explanation is that the videos are being heavily promoted. But I don't know if this is the case. It's my understanding that YouTubers generally don't pay for promotions,

I saw it said "promoted" under the sidebar, indicating he's paying for views. The low comment to view ratio is what you would expect for a paid video. . Videos with highly engaged fans will have really high ratios.

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 2025

Tariffs are fairly standard policy when it comes to import-substitution industrial development. If they're so bad, then why does the rest of the world have them? Are they stupid?

Because the rest of the world has a different context than America does, and tariffs in those contexts can work much more effectively. In the US, your manufacturing industrial base was shipped to China several decades ago - and that process took decades. In the meantime, all of the industries required to support that manufacturing base have also moved to China because that's where the manufacturing work is. As a result, even American manufacturing is getting hit by the tariffs because raw material costs are skyrocketing as a result and making American manufacturing LESS competitive. The US is so helplessly dependent upon Chinese manufacturing that the tariffs aren't even being applied to them - Trump has to extend the tariff pause over and over again because if it was seriously implemented the US economy would collapse overnight.

You can't reverse all of that overnight. You can't reverse all of that in the space of a single year. You can't even reverse that over a decade when the same forces and people responsible for profiting from the outsourcing of that industry are still in place... and they are. Outsourcing, offshoring - all of these things happened for a variety of reasons that are still here, and until you actually rework the economy to remove those incentives the tariffs will never work. Even then, could tariffs work to resolve the US' manufacturing issues? Yes, they could - but only as part of a larger plan to revitalise American manufacturing. You'd need lots of investment and government support in order to bring all these industries back, as well as large investments in training to build up the skilled workforce required... and that skilled workforce is also going to have to be compensated with the kind of good wages that will drive up the price of their output and make the made-in-China competitors even more attractive.

None of this has been done. Not only has none of this been done, the same corrupt politicians who were responsible for the problems which drove out manufacturing in the first place are still there (literally the same people in some cases) and actively working to make sure that this manufacturing resurgence does not take place because it would be bad for the interest groups and donors that keep them living the good life.

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 2025

AI Propaganda, Deepfakes, and the Law of Undignified Failure

A few days ago, a video appeard on Twitter of two white Scottish girls, 12 and 14, yelling, "DON'T TOUCH US," at an unseen cameraman and weilding a knife and a hatchet. Allegedly (though not shown) the cameraman was a migrant or other ethinc foreigner, was trying some form of assault or harassment, and the girls were trying to defend themselves.

The video is real. The event, insofar as it was depicted in the video, is real. Scottish police really did charge a 14 year old girl with brandishing a bladed weapon.

What is not real is this AI-generated image of a young girl emblazened with Scottish garb and Celtic war paint defending her home and honor with sabre and battleaxe. The image does not even purport to be real. No one could possibly believe that this is a real image. And yet, this fake image (and the countless others in the replies below) elicits much stronger emotions and sympathy from me than the real video. I know that the AI image is not real, it is operating on me at a cognitive level below logical propositions concerning real entities and events. One might say that the AI image represents certain ideals and concepts in a more-or-less true way (a sort of "truthiness" if you will), but the image itself is not evidence of anything.

Unless you are brand new to internet political discussion boards (in which case, welcome aboard) you have heard the concerns that AI-generated images and video will usher in a brave new post-truth world in which you can no longer trust the evidence of your own eyes and ears. Concerns typically center around some sort of incindiary event which is in reality totally fake, but which is indistinguishable from reality due to the photorealism of the AI media generation (so-called "deepfakes"). More sophisticated commentators point out that even just the threat of such "deepfakes" renders all multimedia depictions of events questionable, since it would no longer be possible to use the media artifact itself to determine the underlying truth or falsity of the events it depicts.

The sad truth is that none of that shit matters, because reality itself hardly matters. The law of undignified failure states that, "when plans and people fail, they do so in a less dignified way than you imagined." Perhaps you imagined that the forces of goodness would fight valiantly against the forces of epistemic darkness, only being finally overwhelmed by an exploitable quirk in the degeneracy of the vectors that make up abstract image space. In undignified reality, we get done in by anime girls waving flags.

You might object, "yes, but the rape of white British girls really is that big of a deal! We need propaganda to get across how bad the problem is." Maybe! but I hope you can see that this is not exactly an asymetric weapon as far as truth is concerned. I do think that AI-generated propaganda helps the right more than the left in the current environment, if only because conservatives live in more of an inherently audio-visual culture compared to liberals.

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 18, 2025

Must everything be so over-dramatic? Berlin is not burning.

If by Berlin you mean the culture and the fabric of the society ("first we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin"!), then it's definitely burning at the full blaze. At least for me - a regular middle class guy who wants nothing more than being left alone to grill on my backyard - it certainly feels that way. And I am not alone in this.

Trump is not the last hurrah of the right.

No, but Trump is there because of that feeling. He's not even "the right", for Heaven's sake - he's pretty much bog standard moderate Democrat, by the standards of times before Democrats went bonkers. Just watch what people like Biden, Obama, Clinton (either of them), etc. said before the Great Awokening. The difference between them and Trump, if you filter out all the bombastic rhetoric, is minimal. But the right had no choice. It was either Trump, or total destruction.

Your usual leftists on Reddit and some websites

Nope, nope. Remember the case of Gina Carano? She was booted from highly acclaimed role in a successful franchise because she said something right-coded. Reddit didn't cancel her. Reddit wanted to, but Reddit wants to cancel everybody to the right of AOC. No, people with much more power - people who contol billions of dollars - decided that. And now they are settling with her and talking about "looking forward to future cooperation". Did I vote for that? Hell yeah! One small example, of course, but it's everywhere.

I work for a woke company you've heard of.

I work for "maybe a tiny bit woke" company you probably never heard of (unless you're kind of professional that has to, then you did) but probably indirectly using something it did, maybe every day. It has DEI department, and some of the HR training had a little cringey tones but overall is pretty bog standard "these are ways in which you're not allowed to be an asshole" which didn't change much since The Great Awokening. No mandatory diversity kowtowing or pressure. Some people are explicitly woke but most keep it in their pants and don't bring it to the workplace. I am happy to be at this level because it's probably the best one possible in the US outside of tiny startup where everybody are buddies and HR does not exist. But I know that's not the situation in all companies.

Whether he was lying or all professors do, I can't tell you. I'm making the argument that life is often pretty banal

I've lived in Soviet Union (a long time ago). I know how people in evil empires work, and that not all of the storm troopers even want to shoot the rebels. Most of them don't care, they just want to get the salary and the pension. Some of them would purposedly miss or forget to lock the prison cells if they can get away with it. But that does not cancel the existance of the evil empire, and it always has enough troopers to maintain the required level of terror.

Supposedly the students are more woke than many of the professors.

88% of students lie about their politics to get better grades: https://x.com/bumbadum14/status/1957743796357329334 Take one guess to which side the lying goes. I clandestinely suspect that non-zero number of the professors aren't even woke, but they are so terrified to be cancelled they are pretending to, and thus their studends have to pretend in turn. A nice academic freedom the left built for itself, eh?

Billionaires tend towards the woke when it doesn't notably affect their bottom line. They aren't rushing to implement socialism or raise the minimum wage.

Are you sure? New York's Mamdani is financed by a billionaire heiress. Maybe she doesn't expect him to take all of her billions (and he, alone, now, probably can't) but she certainly contributes to the cause. And it's not unique - for example, a lot of rich Russian magnates supported Russian revolutionaires. We all know what happened next.

I think the right is becoming the party of nothing but political grievances and emotional overreactions in much the same way

That's not true. The right has a lot of the positive agenda. Just to advance this agenda, the right needs the ability to rule, and that requires taking control back from the left. If the right wins an election, but the Left continues to control everything in the country - as it happened in the first Trump term - nothing is getting done. Destroying the death grip of the left in virtually every institution of the country is a prerequisite to restoring the equal footing, this is the minimal necessary condition. Note I am not saying destroying the left - the left wants 0% right-wing people in every space. I am fine with certain percent - maybe even 50%, though I personally would prefer less, but I do not prescribe any specific number - of the left in any space they want to be, provided the right is also allowed the same. And yes, for this certain amount of power that the left has now must be destroyed, but while to them it may look as "revenge" and "overreaction", it's just returning to normal.

"Burn the institutions and salt the Earth!" is cringe and could possibly cost you the normie vote in future elections

The right doesn't want to burn the institutions and salt the Earth. The right wants the institutions that do what they are supposed to do. They want the politics be normal again, and so do a lot of normies. I remember the time where politics were about shoudl taxes be 25% or 28% and should minimum wage be $7 or $10. Now it's about whether it's ok to introduce port to kids in kindergarten, whether we need to let somebody to talk them into cutting of their genitals without even notifying their partent, we hear arguments that putting criminals in jail is racist and that deporting a violent gang member with dozen-page rap sheet including murders is fascism, we hear that mass rape and kidnapping is legitimate political tool, and that this kind of politics must be brought to the US, we see cities burned down and any semblance of rule of law eliminated, and we are told that if you are against any of that, you are nobody but a literal Nazi. Yes, we need some pushback to get back from this to what used to be normal, and if Trump can do at least part of it, then I am happy to let Trump do it. So far I haven't seen any better option, and I don't see how not doing it is an option anymore.

Free Speech can mean both the willingness to tolerate opposing ideas and the freedom to choose not to deal with other people.

This is very different for the right and for the left. For the right, not dealing with other people means ignoring them. For the left, at least institutional left, it means destroying them, grinding them into the fine dust and throwing it to the winds. The left has this power - at least had it before 2025 - and they weren't shy to use it. It didn't always work, but they always wanted to. Yes, the right has its history too, with porn in particular, a battle that they lost and will keep losing, and probably in other aspects too. But the left has been much more efficient in this game. Compare what happens if somebody in academia dares to say one of the words proscribed by the left and what happens if they say America must be destroyed and white people must be put in camps.

In a country of 350 million, you can find no shortage of idiots even if they don't matter at the end of the day.

The problem is those are not some lone idiots bloviating on a sopabox. There people are Congressmen, Senators, mayors, governors, prominent politicians, famous actors, academia managers, they control trillions of dollars and command vast power. And they are not shy to use their powers to achieve their goals. Which are diametrically opposed to mine. So I, as a voter, have no choice but to give my vote to somebody who can push back on them and at least slow down the descent to madness. Maybe, if we are extremely lucky, even reverse some of it. What other choice do I have?

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 2025

I just wanted to chime in that I personally think your thoughts written here were so well spoken, worthy of consideration and discussion and sympathetic to many opinions in the way I think your intentions are such and that which the Motte rules encourages that they resurrected my lurking ghost to my corpse to tell you someone out there sees what you say here and appreciates your effort in this post. I think if more posts used language like yours here, the brain drain happening on this site currently will be dialed back a bit.

I've also skimmed and read your responses to what you've said from other users and I want to additionally commend you for what I think is a genuine effort to remain calm and give everyone fair questions and chances to explain themselves. Keep it up!

Now, um. Remember remember the 5th of November. My soul now leaves this husk.