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4bpp

Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs

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joined 2022 September 05 01:50:31 UTC

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4bpp


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs

				
				
				

				

					3 followers  

					follows 2 users  

					joined 2022 September 05 01:50:31 UTC
				


				
					

					
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				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 13, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I don't know. Many societies (e.g. Germany) have decided to not acknowledge a right to contractually sign away your bodily integrity (e.g. you can't sell your arm, while you are alive; the person taking it will be criminally liable for the mutilation regardless of your consent). I don't think there are obvious reasons why this is bad, beyond an easy-to-draw Schelling fence around "consenting adults shall not be restricted in their dealings with each other" which never actually existed anywhere. Once you have this, though, making reproductive autonomy another thing that a woman may not contractually sell is not a far leap.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 13, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
...but doesn't that mean you don't in fact make the distinction? You seem to be saying that the cases of undesirable outcomes I mentioned (guns, procedural acquittals) are in fact all instances of slippery slopes, and there is just nobody making the claim that expecting the slope to be slippery is fallacious.


(When I say "slippery slopes", I really do mean what I understand that lemma to mean, not shorthand for "instances of the slippery slope fallacy". My view is that neither of the three cases in discussion (abortion, guns, procedural acquittals) should count as an example of having slipped down a slope, because there was no widespread slipping - guns caused a rounding-error number of mass shootings and still approximately nobody likes mass shootings, and legal abortion plus surrogacy are now producing a rounding-error number of surrogates being pressured to abort, which also approximately nobody likes)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 13, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'm happy to accept that refusing to publicly concede that there is such a thing as a tradeoff at all, and their policies might not be all upsides, is an endemic vice of US progressives as well as many other movements that code left. I'm not sure if it's so much a left-wing thing as it's a "progressive and in power" thing, where if you have some utopian vision that you are already ramming through and just want to ram through faster against the feeble protestations of a browbeaten conservative opposition, conceding that there might be downsides at all is tantamount to surrendering to those voices who are begging you to slow down and reconsider (and you suspect are just angling for some more time to extract value under the curve of their evil ways before they are reduced to zero).


Regardless, do I understand correctly that are you saying that this is really a "slippery slope" rather than an "unfortunate consequence" specifically because the hypothetical progressives beforehand said "this won't happen"? (and if they said "it will happen but that's a good thing"/"worth it" that would be enough to make it an "unfortunate consequence"?) Not only am I not sure I've seen evidence that the proponents actually addressed this specific case, it seems a bit strange to me to pin such a great distinction in evaluating a policy and its consequences not on anything about the policy and consequences, but instead on the honesty of the propaganda of its proponents.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 13, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


It absolutely is because it never could have happened in the first place without the prerequisite social and legal changes at the top of the slope.






This is like the entire point of the slippery slope as an argument.




Are you willing at all to make a distinction between "slippery slopes" and "unfortunate consequences"? With the particular case at hand, I doubt a lot of progressives are particularly happy with what is going on either; it's just that they would pin their displeasure on the surrogacy aspect of it, not the abortion one. If almost nobody wanted an outcome and it happened in one instance, is that enough to make a slippery slope? In that case, there are really a lot of slippery slopes everywhere. Is every gun murder and mass shooting is at the bottom of the "slippery slope" that started with the 2nd Amendment?  Is the entirety of the Anglo-American legal system a slippery slope that led to OJ Simpson walking free? If not, what's different there?




the past




Actually, I have to apologise there - I expected to find a particular shape of scenario (like "some nobleman forces his mistress to get an abortion") but after putting in some time to search it did in fact not seem to have occurred (at least not in a way that left any evidence known to us today). The closest-in-vibes stories I can find are Henry VIII/Anne Boleyn, a variety of "queen used her legal authority to torture pregnant mistresses" stories, and the whole lot of sexual violence in American slavery (though I guess someone very upset at abortion in particular would find compelled impregnation/reproduction much less reprehensible than compelled abortion?). Mea culpa, my claim that similar things must have happened in the past was unsupported.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 13, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It's not evidence of a slippery slope if someone, somewhere, did one thing that maximally enrages you, out of hundreds of millions of opportunities for people to do such a thing. Do you see evidence of an epidemic of surrogates being pushed by their clients to abort? Do you have any particular reason to believe that things like that, or things that you would find worse than this, did not happen in the past? My vague impression of humanity in general and European history in particular (which I am of course more familiar with than the totality of humanity) is that there was never a shortage of any of the ingredients here, like sexual compulsion, inferiors being made to bear children for superiors, abortion and actual infanticide out of convenience. It seems very likely that something like this would have happened many times in the past, say, some high-status man impregnating a domestic worker or slave and then using his superior status to force her into abortion or to kill the child after birth. But if it did, when exactly did we supposedly slip down a slope?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 6, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
This theory of ownership seems bizarre to me. If I convince the local paper to run an article saying my house is much nicer than my neighbour's, and this results in his property value going down while mine goes up, am I stealing from him?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 6, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The thing is that with such a loose definition of "in the training data", the hypothesis that AIs will only be able to do what's in the training data is not reassuring against doom. Persuasive propaganda is in the training data. Mass murder is in the training data. Deadly diseases are in the training data. World wars are in the training data. Doing all those things hundreds of times faster and cheaper than humans, like the current set of programming and science tasks where AI doing them faster and cheaper is being dismissed as uninteresting because it was all in the training data, would be more than enough to largely end humanity.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 29, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Is this like the common left-wing ideation that you could just take Elon Musk's wealth and solve world hunger, the housing crisis and grandma's medical bills all at once? A quick search says that USAID funding was on the order of tens of billions of $ in a year, while the Obamas' net worth is 70 million. You would need to reduce about 500 Obamas from caviar to dumpster diving to fill the gap for a year.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 29, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I do have the feeling that politicians tend to be able to draw on remarkable reserves of ability to compromise and act cooperatively when their personal interests are actually threatened (as they would be by randos with nukes). The wild defections you are talking about seem to be the province of things the electorate may care deeply about, but the politicians themselves are happy to game.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 29, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I imagine that if the current regime of stretchy interpretations fell (i.e. the SC really came out and said that sorry, but the law as written says yes to personal nukes, deal with it), it would take between nothing and a single tiny backyard plutonium spill for bipartisan momentum for a constitutional amendment to circumscribe the 2nd to materialise.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 29, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Granting for the sake of argument that this is true, there are lots of groups in the world that meet that criterion (the easiest example for reductio ad absurdum probably being any assorted Islamist militia in Africa), without the US subordinating every other national interest to supporting whoever happens to be fighting against them.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 28, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It does really just remind me of those searchlights they used to have all the time in the German countryside to advertise disco nights, somewhat like this. You can get all sorts of weird cloud layerings that would result in them getting diffusely reflected off of a narrow volume.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 29, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
You literally claimed, in the line of yours I quoted, that there are "plenty" of examples. Can you actually produce one, or should I take your response as you retreating to a weaker claim (from "plenty of countries have..." to "there is no reason to believe it couldn't be done")?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 28, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'm happy/would find it fun to look at videos, though as much as the Half-Life apocalypse sounds more fun than the AI apocalypse I'm pretty convinced at this point that no real UFOs have been sighted and we are doomed to be #foreveralone.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 29, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


plenty of countries have done mass deportations without turning into genocidal states




What's an example, meeting your criteria of (a) the target countries don't take the people in voluntary and (b) no military force is involved?


More specifically, how do you imagine this happening for Somalis in Sweden? Somalia doesn't even have a functioning government that deserves the name, let alone one that would willingly accept and provide the infrastructure to take in millions of highly reluctant coethnics that they often won't even have a language in common with. There's no obvious route that doesn't look like the Swedish military filling up a concentration camp, sending a fleet of prison ships to the Horn of Africa, conquering a beachhead and forced-marching boatloads of people onto it at gunpoint (probably also with a temporary holding camp/fortification at the target site, so the first 500k can't interfere with unloading the second 500k). Then you get all the problems with rounding up the people you want to send off at home, deciding what to do with the third-generation Somalis, half-Somalis and quarter-Somalis, Somalis being hidden by and protected by sympathetic Swedes, possible Somalis who swear they are Ethiopian, et cetera et cetera. You can't just slow-walk it either, because your flotilla that is parked off of Somalia is draining the budget more than the welfare payments did. Soon you find that between the ballooning military operation and the home front, you have to take a lot of inspiration from everyone's favourite continentals in the late 1930s.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 22, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Is there anything you believe you came to know, beyond that I am happy to logic-chop and split hairs even when this topic is involved? If that's enough to make you not want to continue the argument, I'm sorry, but high-decoupling everything is one norm I can't get myself to feel bad about ramming down people's throats.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 22, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Is that a vibes-based "100%" or does the figure reflect some real confidence estimate? Because the typo+awkward grammar in the very last sentence, if nothing else, seems very organically human to me.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 22, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


To believe this to be even remotely possible is to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of the charges against the prairieland suspects, and the law itself.




An easy thing to do, given how mainstream sources have not been exactly forward about the details. All I'm saying is that you don't need to theory-of-mind someone who knows/believes the same version of the events as you do, and then is outraged by the verdict - all that you need to understand is how someone who has probably not heard a version other than "a bunch of people went to protest for a Good Cause with fireworks, one of them had a gun because he was an ex-marine, and shot a sketchy cop thinking he was acting in self-defense; the state used it to lock them all away for believing in the Cause" from any source they considered credible would come to be.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 22, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Look at this screenshot from the dataset




I'm getting a "not found" CDN page from the link.




didn't bother to record the ethnicity of 71% of people it convicted of criminal offences




Where did the 71% figure come from? Up until this point it seemed like the no-record figures you mentioned were more around 30%.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 21, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I mean, how close-knit a group is it? If I were going with my SO, who I know is significantly more into spectator sports than I am, and she pushed me to, I would grit my teeth and go. If it were a big group of people who vaguely know each other, and some guy in the group who I "kind of know" asked me, even if he had nobody else to go with - yeah, I would wiggle out with an excuse. It's not like he can't go to the game by himself! Maybe he will even make some like-minded friends there.


To pass something like normative judgement, you really have to disentangle the question:


    

  • 

    How unreasonable do you think is it to generally dislike spectator sports (at least in person)?
    

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    If you dislike them as above, how unreasonable do you think is it to not go to one anyway when such a "few in a life time opportunity" presents itself?
    

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    If you are unswayed by the opportunity as above, how unreasonable is it to refuse to "take one for the team" and go to make it easier for another person who really wants to go to do so? How does this depend on the degree of familiarity with the other person, and how much worse off they would be if you refuse?
    

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  • 

    How unreasonable do the three things above have to get before it becomes reasonable for you (the other person) to exercise some form of social pressure to punish them for defecting?
    

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				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 22, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


of me raping my five year old kid and the kid himself






C'mon, don't blur out the features of the kid in the photos used in the article, I wanna be able to imagine forcing my cock down his throat! There's no magical link! So there's no harm done! MAP rights when?




So is your imagined paragraph written from the perspective of the rapist parent, or some random person looking at the picture afterwards? The perpetrator, if he even needs the picture to keep the memory fresh, surely should have more problems than the blurred-out features; if you are in a position to force him to blur the pixels in every copy of the picture he has, you could just jail him for the act.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 22, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Are you making a distinction between people who are outraged about Song's verdict and those who are only/primarily so about the others? That Song was convicted seems undisputably reasonable (though US prison sentences continue being bafflingly draconian to my European eyes - an effective life sentence, and he didn't even actually kill anyone?), but from what I gathered a lot of people do believe the others' claim that they did not know that Song planned to have a shootout at all (however plausible or not that claim is). If you buy into that narrative, it does really seem like a precedent for severe collective punishment if your politics are a bit out there and one of the people you associate with turns out to be crazier than you bargained for. I mean, what's the guarantee that if a Mottizen goes postal under a future Blue administration, there won't be calls to put us all on the hook based on this precedent?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 22, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
There's are a lot more baileys out there than the "women under 30" one, including both ones farmed by the left-leaning and the right-leaning. The motte, as I understand, is "legal adult literally having sex with a prepubescent child". Baileys include e.g. adults fantasising about doing this to a child (imagined or real), but not physically doing it; older legally underage individuals; underage individuals having sex with each other rather than adults; adults fantasising about the latter ("I wish I could have acted on my crush on Stacy in seventh grade"). For each of those, it is in fact not hard to come up with virtuous principles and sympathetic situations.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 22, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
With /r/combatfootage, you generally have the argument that the people who die in it either outright volunteered to be there or at least are perpetrators to the same degree they are victims.


I'm personally actually rather on the "decriminalise possession/distribution, punish production" side here, but I do think that one the flip side if you want to have that kind of moral system then for consistency real people (preemptively) or surviving relatives ought to be able to suppress circulation of /r/watchpeopledie style non-combat death videos too.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 22, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Are they? I thought they mostly care for battles involving real people getting it on; defending East Asian coomer games would put them on the side of people they don't like against people they like, without advancing any cause that affects them directly.