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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

They've blown up the civilian infrastructure and all the hospitals

If you don't want your hospitals and civilian infrastructure blown up, don't use them as weapons caches in flagrant violation of the Geneva convention. I really don't see what's so complicated about this.

You claimed that Israel was being restrained and fighting with one arm behind their back.

When did I say that?

But when I look at what's left of Gaza now the idea that this is Israel being restrained just makes me believe that they need to be stopped or denazified before they get the chance to do this to anyone else.

How do you think Israel ought to have prosecuted a war against a combatant like Hamas? What would you have done differently?

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

That's the thing; they're not just an extension of OSHA. Their primary focus isn't labor safety, or environmental quality, or industry standards, it's process safety, which touches all of those. Their role is inherently cross-functional, as you can see from the variety of organizations they make recommendations to.

Anyway, it's not being moved, it's just being destroyed. Whatever the talk there is about it being redundant, it's not being consolidated with something else, and its function will go unfulfilled.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

Merits are merits; descent is descent.

Of course, you notice that the SJ position is the exact same as tradition but with the labels swapped. This makes perfect sense, because reversed stupidity is intelligence (or revenge, if you prefer).

What you have labelled as the Marxist position is just the classical liberal position, but with a class angle grafted on.

This is an obvious pattern to me- traditionalists and progressives have a... significant amount of inertia in their political philosophies, and while liberals might actually be able to accomplish the tasks at hand, they're also generally outnumbered so unless you have philosopher-kings in charge like the US did after WW2, you're stuck with either traditional stupidity or modern ytidiputs.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

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

I've actually already posted and discussed this particular story on the motte with multiple people - my apologies for assuming that this was just commonly accepted knowledge.

https://edition.cnn.com/2024/10/21/middleeast/gaza-war-israeli-soldiers-ptsd-suicide-intl

making it abundantly clear that the primary function of all this explosive ordnance was not the taking of human life for its own sake, but the destruction of Hamas's tunnel network.

Actually it doesn't make that clear at all - and if that's the case, then the IDF was actually just extremely incompetent, given that the tunnels are still there and they're making noises about how important it is that they be let in to clear out the tunnels. They've blown up the civilian infrastructure and all the hospitals, and there are more amputee children in Gaza than anywhere else in the world. If that was the goal then the IDF is incredibly incompetent - but they've demonstrated enough competence elsewhere that I just can't accept the claim that this was to destroy the tunnels.

I'm baffled as to how you expect me to be horrified by this metric.

Horrified? I'm not expecting that at all. You claimed that Israel was being restrained and fighting with one arm behind their back. But when I look at what's left of Gaza now the idea that this is Israel being restrained just makes me believe that they need to be stopped or denazified before they get the chance to do this to anyone else.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

Quite possibly this was not an attack but I don't think it's a post-hoc claim; the warning that Russia would strike our infrastructure has been registered in some corners well in advance of this happening. Jack Murphy reported in 2022 that the CIA was conducting a sabotage campaign inside Russian soil and I've been operating under the assumption that the Russians would retaliate in kind (if the claims were true, which seemed plausible) ever since.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

Looks like they're only being targeted because they're "independent". Seems to me it would make sense to move them under the Department of Labor.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

Having better weapons makes you the bad guy?

No, that's not the point being made.

Winning is evil? When they get attacked, the Israelis should chivalrously lower their military power to be equal to their opponents? It strikes as sour grapes; 'They're only winning because they have more weapons!' See: don't pick fights you can't win.

Would you apply this argument to the jews of Nazi germany? Was it their fault for attacking the big meanie and then having a sook and cry about how badly it went for them? Why did they pick a fight they couldn't win?

I don't think that argument would convince you to support the nazis, and it isn't going to convince me to support the Israelis.

Every time someone says that the Israelis have killed more Palestinians than vice-versa or set off more bombs or whatever, my only thought it that they clearly haven't done enough because the Palestinians haven't stopped fighting yet!

If the Palestinians stop fighting they believe they will be wiped out, which is supported by a vast number of statements from members of the Israeli government. What alternative are you leaving besides a final solution?

You can hardly ask the Israelis to stop fighting and wait for the Palestinians to catch up in the kill count.

My position, which I have stated on here, remains that there should be a single state solution which includes the Israelis and Palestinians both.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

I feel like the whole debate completely misses the point entirely. Political violence can mean anything from violently resisting laws, assassinating politicians, to murdering random civilians with opposing views.

When people say “just kill fascists”, is the latter one what they mean? Would they have considered morally acceptable to open fire on a train of Mussolini voters during Fascist Italy? To kill a random grandma for supporting Il Duce, even if she was retired, had no influence whatsoever and just believed it because that’s what most people did?

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

It would be really cool if the USCSB wasn't being shut down; if you haven't seen their investigation videos about industrial disasters, they really are wonderful.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

If the prosecutions go ahead and it is determined that the entire thing has been a misinformation campaign or other convincing evidence arises that it was all fake I'll absolutely drop it. But I've seen the videos and comments posted by IDF soldiers, and I've actually read some translated Israeli media - it'll take a vast amount of convincing evidence to make me change my mind, but if you've got it then please lay it on the table. I'd honestly love to be proven wrong and learn that the Hind Rajab and Mohamaed Bhar stories were just a bad dream, or that all those translated comments by Smotrich and Ben Gvir were lies - but I really don't think you actually have the evidence required.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

Many people with this condition incorrectly label themselves with a bunch of other stuff that may or may not be real but generally doesn't apply to them.

Just chiming in to note that I've personally heard mental health professionals admit to incorrectly diagnosing borderlines as well, ostensibly so that they could receive mental health services that explicitly excluded borderlines from eligibility in their guidelines. I strongly suspect that several percentage points of bipolars are misdiagnosed borderlines.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

I suppose it wouldn't be in YouTube's interest to add an AI auto summary to videos

Actually, YouTube nowadays is adding automatic AI summaries to many videos, though apparently not the one linked above.

Example

Confused by Magic: The Gathering zones? This video explains how cards move between the library, hand, stack, battlefield, graveyard, and exile. Learn how hidden and revealed cards interact with gameplay mechanics like flicker and mill, improving strategic understanding.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

Because Russia can only lose. This will give Trump reason to throw way more assistance to Ukraine, where as right now he does the bare minimum of support to shut down the critics. Also - they are not that competent to pull off such kind of thing traceless. If they are going to risk the wrath of Trump it is going to be for something big.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

I suppose it wouldn't be in YouTube's interest to add an AI auto summary to videos but it'd be nice because I'm not watching that to find out what your point might be.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

As ever, Scott’s take was fair as far as it goes, but the entire discussion of when is the right time to start murdering your political adversaries in the concrete gives me pause. It’s impossible to broach that topic and not tacitly endorse murder. The conversation is definitely more murdery than the post itself, including his own replies in which he suggests coordinated ???

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

Does that mean woke activism is just a far right extension of Nazi legal theory adapted to modern times?

I don't know if that's what it means, but this is certainly an elegant summary that mostly accurately describes what woke-ism is. Woke-ism is just the latest iteration of an ideological structure for justify bigotry against types of people one dislikes, that has been adapted to be palatable to high status people. In the past, it might have been things like "grace of God" or "they're genetically predisposed to being lesser than us and thus belong in the fields" or whatever, but in modern times, it involves narratives around "oppression means that people we dislike are actually each individual, down to the last baby, guilty of [crime]."

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

And so on and so forth. This model really doesn't make sense and ignores quite a bit of known medical knowledge.

A perfectly fair accusation. I do indeed ignore quite a bit of 'known' knowledge of psychology and psychiatry. I find this perfectly reasonable given the replication crisis, the obvious corruption in the field, and my own personal experiences.

ETA: For the record I still love you @self_made_human!

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

On a tangent, the EPA kind-of expects some of this at scale, and requires environmental standby trusts. While Noxious Chemical Co., Inc. is operating its plant making substances that for-the-love-of-God will hopefully never leak out, it has to put money aside in a trust that it can’t unilaterally withdraw without the EPA’s joint consent.

This way, if there’s a catastrophic explosion loosing horrid material at its plant, Noxious Chemical Co. can’t just file Chapter 7 and leave the rest of society solely responsible for the cost of cleanup.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

No, the point of doing that is because people who say they have it are usually using it as an excuse to be destructive

Idk man, I have experienced the opposite where I am genuinely hypermobile (source: my joints pop around!) and if anything it was less of an excuse to be destructive. I think that you and mister throwaway are being far too negative towards this subset of the population, though I'm sure he at least has fair reason having to deal with many more of them than I do.

All this being said, I'm not sure how this line of argumentation applies to the original point that some people with these health issues have shamanic abilities/tendencies. Can you tie it back for me?

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

The bailey may be true - you'd have to defend it

I mean, there's this obvious pattern where if you look at the SJ and traditional positions on most cultural issues, the (actual) Marxist position is right in the middle. How did I put it?

Tradition: "Men should be in charge of women", Marxism: "Sex divisions are a distraction and should be ignored", SJ: "Women should be in charge of men".

Tradition: "The white man is the best man", Marxism: "Racial divisions are a distraction from class struggle; be colourblind", SJ: "Whites suck".

Tradition: "White culture is scientifically superior to natives' primitive culture and we should raze the latter", Marxism: "All cultures suck and we should make a new, constructed culture designed by science", SJ: "Indigenous ways of knowing are just as valid as science; traditional Western culture should be razed".

And as others have noted, there is a direct line of descent. The obvious culprit would be the Marxist academic community attempting to out-Marx itself on cultural issues (having adopted a virtue axis of "Marxism good, tradition bad").

You are of course correct that this interesting historical tangent is not dispositive of the question "is SJ good or bad?". Merits are merits; descent is descent.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

A lot of those communities were pretty left-wing and peace-minded and I don't know to what extent that position changed after the massacres.

The violence of the Second Intifada wiped out the electoral-viability of Israel’s left. I would be surprised if issuance of work permits resumes anytime in the near future.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

If no one else is going to link to Scott's latest CW-related post, I guess I'll try to meet the mods' wishes for a top level comment... (Though I didn't re-read it, so...)

Fascism Can't Mean Both A Specific Ideology And A Legitimate Target

I agree, inasmuch we stipulate "Political violence in America is morally unacceptable" means "literally, categorically unacceptable, due to our assessment of the threat of fascism" and "(at the current time)" ignores the possibility of near-future change in the threat-assessment. Though I emphatically oppose political violence, I don't think it would be logically incongruent to leave open the possibility that fascism is bad enough that we're near the point of political violence being acceptable. But I don't think Scott's doing a motte-and-bailey, by using a narrow denotation; just stating a motte, with the expectation his readers take it at face value.

Characteristic of Scott, the post is a neat exercise in logical tidiness. However, it only gestures at the bigger, scarier question: How do societies classify danger and determine when violence becomes permissible? The classification of threats is important, because names carry significant policy weight (e.g., Trump labeling Antifa a domestic terrorist organization...). Label something "fascism" as a distinct ideology, and you direct attention towards connotations and lineage. However, use the same term as a moral epithet (i.e., a catch-all for political enemies) and you alter the rhetorical perception.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

Even without apartheid jews would be in control of the state institutions for decades, decent treatment would be enough to keep non-jewish citizens in check, time would do the rest. Problem is that jews want their state jewish.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

So the war is (at least temporarily) over.

No one, myself included, fully believed Hamas was going to actually hand over the live hostages until they did so. They are now withholding the dead ones, which is more typical.

The joy about the hostages' release was obviously mixed with other feelings, hence Israeli social media being full of posts commemorating the dead, and Israeli talk in the streets full of mourning the release of terrorists and the inevitable encouraging of more kidnappings (an attempt at kidnapping was foiled the day before).

Still, there was a lot of joy to be had.

As for the long term repercussions of these two years of war... No one knows yet, obviously.

One thing I am somewhat curious to see is what happens with Gazans getting work permits to enter Israel — before the war that was a thing (thousands of permits and millions of dollars in wages), but in the wake of the revelation that they then gave maps of the places they visited to Hamas (in fairness — they were probably being threatened by Hamas if they didn't) I don't know if the communities surrounding Gaza will be willing to allow it again. A lot of those communities were pretty left-wing and peace-minded and I don't know to what extent that position changed after the massacres.

Also before the war the government was pursuing a strategy of "surely with enough money Hamas will just focus on governing" hence the (in Israeli terms) scandal over how much money Netanyahu was giving them from Qatar. I think the dream of them being pacified with money is pretty thoroughly dead on the Israeli side these days, and that might also affect the work permit equation.

West Bank Palestinians have been having a lot more difficulty getting entry permits since the war as well, I actually do expect that to ease up pretty significantly now, especially if things stay calm for like, a month. I hope I'm right about that.

A lot of I/P coexistence initiatives went into hibernation mode after the outbreak of the war. They had already started to come back before this ceasefire — I went to one a few months ago, a meeting of West Bank Palestinians and Israelis in a relatively more safe area of the West Bank (so Palestinians could get to it without needing entry permits and Israelis would be less scared of going than if it was held in other areas of the West Bank). I feel like that meetup is probably worth a separate post (it was fascinating) but in any case I do expect the coexistence initiatives to start doing a lot better if the sort-of peace also sort-of holds. The veterans of those groups say they're used to these kinds of ebbs and flows.

I am skeptical we get a break from the decades of missiles from Gaza because of the ostensible ceasefire — that hasn't been the case in all previous "ceasefires", so if it happened it would be a sign something is actually different about this one.

We're due an election in a year but historically Israel very very very rarely (aka: it happened one time) makes it all the way to the actual official due date instead of calling early elections. So we'll probably get one soon.

Anyway. For now it's "wait and see". I'm not optimistic about the summit in Egypt leading to any real change but I truly would love to be proven wrong and something good happens for once. And whatever the future holds, in the moment, right now, I am really happy that the last two years are over.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

Regarding the origins of wokeism, recently I chanced upon the concept of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism (MTD), it also has a Wikipedia entry. Basically there are people who argue that general wokification of institutions is an internal development of some of the American elite's religion, via Unitarianism and then Unitarian Universalism, and the general "be nice, don't judge, don't harm" morality of Oprah with a deistic God you can occasionally call upon for some encouragement but doesn't demand much, just to be kind, there are many equally valid paths etc. This is of course not the same as the mandatory activism required by woke, not merely a lack of judging etc. But it is the basis for the willingness of simply nice decent people to obey such demands.

I've encountered the concept before, but while I think it captures something about the secularization of society and the rise of "spiritual but not religious types", I don't think it is very explanatory.

I actually think the Guilt-shame distinction (which you partially touched upon in your third paragraph) probably goes further to explain much of the shape of contemporary life. I honestly think guilt culture is just another angle of approaching Western individualism. In shame-honor culture, what is important is your place in the collective. This is the source of your pride and honor. In a guilt culture, various social technologies are used to make it so that the rules are inside peoples heads, and are pre-enforced by the knowledge of the self-flagellating guilt that will result from stepping a toe out of line.

While Christianity is one path towards a guilt culture, given its emphasis on individual repentance and salvation, I think in modernity things like Wokeism show one way this kind of culture can be maintained in a secular way. However, I think Wokeism is a lot more prone to what I see as a likely failure state of guilt culture: anxiety. If all the social structures of a guilt culture are oriented towards making human animals feel guilt, a basic problem emerges. How do you know when a person has "cooked enough", and feels enough guilt that they won't do bad things anymore? You don't.

So some people get "overcooked" or "burnt" by guilt culture, and do indeed develop a psychology that won't do bad things or break the rules at the cost of crippling anxiety. And I think because Wokeism is an amorphous mass movement, without the supernaturalism or the 2000 years of practical wisdom of Christianity to deal with it, it is a lot more prone to such "overcooking."

Relatedly, I suspect that a lot of dysfunction in pluralistic, liberal democracies is due to clashes between a wider guilt culture, and pockets of shame culture that still exist in various parts of society. For example, in America, I would put forward African American ghetto/gang culture as more of a shame culture. (I know I'm not the first person to suggest this. Thomas Sowell hints at this in his "Black Rednecks and White Liberals", and I'm sure I've read similar things around here, though I am currently unable to properly credit who here might have said something like this.) I think there's always going to be a bit of a clash between the two, especially if elements of the shame culture end up including a rejection of elements of the guilt culture's hierarchies and values.

While I think it is possible that the Kumbaya, "Let's all get along" aesthetic of Moralist Therapeutic Deism (MDT) is one foundation for Western guilt culture, I actually think it is precisely backwards. In the West, people don't decide to act nice and decent because of MDT. Instead, people adopt MDT because their brains have been programmed into guilt machines, and they thus already have a great propensity to act nice and decent most of the time.