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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 January 26, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'm on board with the object-level counterpart to the first three points, but only partially with the last one, because I think standards for federal agents (who are supposedly a selected group) about killing should be higher than standards for men in general. Likewise, with the bar story, if you replace the generic man at a bar with, I don't know, a social worker involved with prostitutes, I would absolutely consider him not being able to resist the temptation to rape a slag a signal in favour of "male prostitute counselors are vicious opportunistic rapists".


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 26, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


When criminals commit a robbery, and police accidentally shoot and kill civilians, the robbers get charged with those murders too for creating the conditions in which they happened.




Yeah, that always struck me as stupid tough-on-crime porn that creates wrong incentives too. It's not like the people who do messy robberies have the executive function or maybe even just the value function (would you not just think caught = it's over in the US?) to be influenced by this additional threat, but for the police it would just strip away incentives to pursue even low-hanging fruit as far as proportionality or care for bystanders is concerned. US police already looks spectacularly unprofessional compared to other first-world countries; I'm familiar enough with all the structural arguments about their job being uniquely hard, but it seems to me that forcing them to shape up has never really been tried.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 26, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
From whom? I'm not surrounded by enough Americans in real life nowadays to actually get organic interactions about this stance, and on this forum I certainly get the sense that a lot of posters think there ought to be zero negative consequences for the agents. I wasn't sure if OP was in that class, which is why I responded asking for clarification (as should have been made clear by the very first sentence of my post).


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 26, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
That's fine, if that's all that is being pointed out. OP was not clear about that, and either way it's pretty pointless to point it out here where approximately everyone participating in the discussion is in agreement about the basic facts of what happened.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 26, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


No one on the Blue side is arguing merely "there should be some negative consequences for thr officers that killed him", or "it's bad that he died"




I'm arguing those things (and not particularly much more, except perhaps that ICE is just engaging in accelerationism rather than acting rationally towards their declared aim, because I actually am against illegal immigration). I'm surely more "blue" than "red", so there, you're wrong.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 26, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


He interfered with ICE arresting someone else. There's no self-defense for him to appeal to. He could have simply done nothing and be alive today. It was his choice to involve himself in an arrest that set in motion the events that lead to his death.




The putative self-defense argument is for ICE, not him. There is no law that says police can just shoot you if you annoy or obstruct them; either they justify their choice to kill him by arguing that he was an active threat to their safety and they acted in self-defense, or this was a summary execution (definitionally, because it was not preemptively sanctioned by the legal system).


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 26, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'm having some trouble discerning what exactly it is you are arguing for here. That there should be no negative consequences for the ICE officers who killed him? That it is a good thing that he died? That the circumstance that he was killed should not make people update in the direction of a negative opinion of ICE, their mission, or the way they are implementing it? These are all different assertions, and a post that only amounts to a nebulous "boo Pretti, and boo all of the people who say yay Pretti too" does not do a particularly good job of defending any single one of them unless all you are doing is playing the Ethnic Tension game.


However antisocial or stupid he was seems irrelevant to the immediate charge which got so many people (including, seemingly, ones who are otherwise sympathetic to ICE and police shootings) riled up about the case, which is that his killing was unambiguously unnecessary for the safety of the ICE officers who did it. Whether this charge is actually true can be debated separately, with no reference to Pretti's character or past actions. If it is in fact false, his character doesn't matter anyway because you have as much of a right to self-defense against Mother Theresa as you have against Hitler. If it is true, I wish you would be more explicit about the actual contours of any right to performing summary executions you want to grant ICE if the target is a sufficiently bad person.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 19, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Yeah, these are both Xwitter posts shouting copypasta into the void? The point I was making is that this sort of troll farm activity is expected and sensible; the person nitpicking your post in some local newspaper comment section being from a troll farm is not. However, the latter is the setting in which people like throwing around bot/troll farm accusations the most.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 26, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
But, if we accept the premise that most migrants are not being personally sheltered by white progressive Democrats in Minnesota, why would white progressive Democrats in Minnesota fearing ICE solve the problem of large-scale migration? There is no clear mechanism by which the Democrats being afraid would translate into fewer immigrants, unless it's actually fear on the level of "ICE will find me in my house and kill me if they determine that I did not support ICE enough", and I doubt I need to argue that turning the US into an ICE-glorifying North Korea would be throwing a lot of babies out with the bathwater.


If indeed the mechanism by which white progressive Democrats implement and safeguard the immigration pipeline is saying "ew" at people who want to do something about it (and, perhaps, by extension voting and turning up to the odd protest), then inducing any fear that falls short of fear to do the aforementioned things seems highly counterproductive, because people generally hate being afraid and want to get rid of sources of fear, and contrary to what a red-blooded conservative might think most white progressive Democrats do not in fact already commit 100% of what they could theoretically give to migrant-maxxing.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 19, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It makes a lot more economical sense that troll farms would be active on a maximum-reach platform like Twitter, and is a lot more plausible that they would repost (possibly with minor alterations) shovel-loads of cookie-cutter "viral" content, than the idea that they would produce bespoke comments and engage with people in a complex way that requires solid command of English in comment sections and niche forums. However, these accusations are almost always flung in "close quarters" by people who are exasperated that someone specifically disagreed with something they said, not at faceless Twitter accounts retweeting Indian link farm pages into the void.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 19, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Yes, this is a good point. It's a strange recurrent piece of internet psychology that people have a real aversion to believing in organic disagreement. Normie comment sections are replete with improbable accusations of Russian or Chinese payrolling; and even 4chan has traditionally conducted arguments by asserting that all disagreeing posts are made by a single person (even when this is at odds with post cooldown timers) or more recently that they are organised by a Discord cabal targeting the thread. Maybe this is the modus tollens of the democratic feeling that numbers and diversity make right: if you are convinced a view is illegitimate, you conclude that it can't be espoused by a large and diverse set of people.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 19, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Well, first of all thanks for choosing to not offer examples of political movements you think fit the bill; that would almost certainly just have turned your post into a crude "DAE my outgroup is deluded" exercise that made some readers feel fuzzy and others mad, while this way we can discuss the proposition for its own value in the abstract.


That being said, I don't agree with your thesis. The part where you say




The people pushing the Experience Machine would promote the idea that the life you live inside the machine is actually reality; it's everyone else who is living a lie.




bears a lot of load. It may be philosophically/poetically appealing to draw comparisons between ideological frameworks/theories and a putative machine that literally puts artificial data into the user's brain's input stream and tries to pass it for real, but at least at the current level of ideological framework technology, the political Grand Theories, which both with an outside and an inside view are purporting to explain how actual, material, top-level reality functions, are not at all similar to a Matrix-style spinal tap, which explicitly aims to input something that is self-evidently not reality; and nobody would have trouble distinguishing them. What would a convergence of the two classes of technology have to look like, for your argument to work?


A Matrix that is more like ideology would have to be some sort of neurolinguistic programming scifi device, where hearing the right sequence of words can force your brain to non-consensually perform essentially arbitrary computations. Perhaps 4chan's Tulpamancers are moving in that direction, but otherwise this is not where the smart money in the building-the-Experience-Machine business is right now. Even with a streamlined process to induce full blown schizophrenic psychotic breaks where you move to TulpaTown, there would be no obvious way to reframe the process as bringing you closer to reality.


An ideology that is more like the Matrix would maybe look like They Live-style goggles that purport to reveal the true face/hidden aspects of reality to the wearer. The problem there is a chicken-egg issue: anyone peddling such goggles would have to convince the potential user that they actually reveal reality before they agree to wear them. This puts strong constraints on the shape of the Experience that can actually be conveyed: you can't just take people straight to TulpaTown (or anything else too obviously different from the world they saw with bare eyes) and you can't even really make them happy in obvious ways, since political movements only really recruit through misery. This looks quite different from the original thought experiment where people are straight up asked "would you accept fake good qualia to replace all your real bad ones", and I suspect political movements wouldn't be very successful if they even just made the implicit deal that is a very weak form of this ("would you accept the fake good qualium of purpose to replace your real bad one of your life being pointless") explicit. Every step further away from reality would also come with additional friction, in the same way in which every failed prophecy of a doomsday cult whittles down its follower base.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 19, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
America's jilted bitches still have a handful of trump cards up their sleeves too, like e.g. repealing the DMCA-equivalent legislation that they were treaty-compelled to pass, or, as was suggested elsewhere in the thread, giving China access to ASML's crown jewels. If the rest of the world stops honouring American copyright, what can they do? Build a great firewall of their own to stop the jailbreaks and pirate sites from washing back in, thus actually surrendering the soft power playing field to China?




Especially when there are existing issues with Chinese influence and espionage (not that China did Venezuela much good). It's a bit of a rock and hard place.




Does anyone outside of their Asian periphery actually have a problem with Chinese influence and espionage other than that it makes the Americans really unhappy?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 19, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The "IP theft" thing seems like a forced/propagandistic framing of something that only really amounts to "they are different from us", because it's using the non-central fallacy to associate a nearly universal among humans moral principle (no taking someone else's exhaustible goods) with something quite different and more narrowly distributed (no copying ideas).


Going down this route just will result in us relitigating multiple decades of standard internet piracy arguments, but you need to acknowledge that at least "the notion of intellectual property is fake and gay corporate propaganda that Western culture was successfully brainwashed into believing" is at least a view that exists and therefore nonchalantly using it as an argument that Chinese society is "morally bankrupt" is a form of petitio principii.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 12, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Well, whether it is actually growing is what is yet to be established.




If both sides feel that they must "fight fire with fire," it's easy to envision the situation spinning out of control.




It sure is easy, but that just sounds like an indictment of us here. This community and its predecessors have been in the business of Envisioning various happenings of the sort for as long as we have been around. The lesson to learn for the internet culture war commentator is that the sheeple can remain asleep for longer than you can remain solvent (in testosterone needed to be excited for a paroxysm of political violence).


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 12, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
So, how big or significant is this group? "Got quote-tweeted by the outgroup and caused a wave of outrage" is not a good measure of relevance, and all Wikipedia has to offer is that it once got nominated for some award (that I haven't heard of). It's not like the other side doesn't have self-published clickwhores who fantasize about political violence to give their audience warm fuzzies.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 12, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Why do you figure they would not consider encouraging more wars of territorial expansion in their interest? I think you could make this argument for France (which, uniquely, still has some sensitive possessions all over the world that would be juicy targets for their neighbours), but there at least doesn't seem to be a direct threat from it to anyone else in the EU.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 12, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I still don't quite understand which parts of the European leadership genuinely consider Ukraine a core interest of theirs, which ones are playing the part because of personal obligations to the US (to gaslight their population into believing/accepting US interests as its own), and which ones are doing so because the former two groups have them by the balls. I would've guessed the split is roughly Baltics/Germanics+France/actual Europoors like Spain and Greece.


Since the Greenland "tripwire" deployment is essentially from the second group, they might have thought Greenland is a demand too far after everything they are already surrendering, or (more likely?) see their loyalties as strictly being with the stable "deep state" core of the US and judging the grab for Greenland to be a personal Trump project rather than reflecting an authentic priority of the immortal soul of America.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 12, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Iran went down on its current path because its democratically elected secular government expropriated BP, whereupon the UK and the US organised a revolution (quoth Wikipedia):




In 2013, the United States government formally acknowledged its role in the coup as being a part of its foreign policy initiatives, including paying protesters and bribing officials.[15]




Do Iranians have any reason to believe that if they let a revolution/civil war happen, the first condition the US will impose on its chosen winner will not amount to giving back control of their oil plus 46 years of interest? If there is one thing revealed preference shows, it's that the one class of grudge the US never forgives or forgets are slights against allied petroleum corporations. It was a pretty open secret that the US hate-boner for Venezuela was rooted in how it likewise expropriated US petrocompanies, and Trump (who has a talent for blurting out things that were supposed to remain plausibly deniable in polite company) just abducted its president with his apparently only real demand being that he be given their oil.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 11, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Turns out Scientology was prescient! You have to periodically exorcise the Thetans to maintain the Clear status.


(The prescience being about having someone in a position of authority poke around your psyche occasionally being both happily accepted and conducive to keeping the population compliant. Of course, you could argue that the Catholics got there first with confession, but it was the Scientologists who gave it a "scientific" coat of paint and the idea that it is for your health rather than otherworldly obligations.)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 12, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Was it really so relentless? There sure were a lot of videos of random explosions floating around, but the Yemeni cities that appeared in them never seemed to be anywhere near the total rubble state that the Gaza strip, or Ukrainian frontline cities, were reduced to. I would guess that there was some consideration for the Saudis there, who probably don't want one of those "joining a terrorist militia is the best/only career path available to young men" territories on their border.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 12, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


The Iranian opposition don't seem to be armed, unless they're armed I don't think they're too relevant, the government can crush them if they want Tiananmen style, it's just that they don't particularly want to.




Obviously in this day and age you can't trust anything (and I can't even dig the video in question back up), but Russian telegrams were circulating something that purported to be a CCTV video of protesters acting like a not completely incompetent fire team with some sort of machine guns. I'm sure the Americans and Israelis would have no trouble getting some of them trained and equipped if they wanted to.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think the more relevant conflict in the Babbitt case might just be that police (as a group) and harsh policing (as a principle) have traditionally been pretty central to conservative identity, and so it is difficult for many Reds to take sides against them, or even more generally come to terms with a world where the "boys in blue" more often than not are the enforcers of Blue hegemony. In fact, isn't all of Jan 6 really rather incongruous with conservative aesthetics?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
This gets pretty close to calling for legalisation of entrapment. Do you understand why that particular fence was put there, if you want to remove it?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I mean, it's not great, but have you seen any top-level "DAE the outgroup are evil hypocrites?" posts from the right getting modded? If "OP has to know this offends the local circlejerk, so he must be consciously baiting" is necessary and sufficient grounds for moderator action, we might as well pack up and just call this a forum for right-wingers rather than the bag of niceties that is in the sidebar.


(...and either way, the Gabbard thing seems rather interesting and was new to me, so I don't think you can argue this is just bait.)