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MadMonzer

Temporarily embarassed liberal elite

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joined 2022 September 06 23:45:01 UTC 

				
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MadMonzer


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite

				
				
				

				

					4 followers  

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					joined 2022 September 06 23:45:01 UTC
				


				
					

					
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				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


If the Democrats win the Senate, which I am hopeful they will not, then they will likely refuse to confirm all of Trump's judicial nominees, which will start a constitutional crisis whereby judges will only be confirmed when the same party controls both the Presidency and Senate.




Out of interest, I took a look at the list of failed SCOTUS nominations. Only 8 since 1900:


    

  • Parker. Nominated by Hoover. Rejected by a bipartisan (Dems and Progressive Republicans) vote because of his anti-union jurisprudence.
    • 

  • Fortas. Nominated for promotion to Chief by LBJ. Rejected by a bipartisan (Republicans and Dixiecrats) vote on grounds of corruption but lefties think it was really ideological. Resigned as an Associate justice a year later due to another corruption scandal.
    • 

  • Thornberry. Nominated for Fortas's soon-to-be-vacant seat as an Associate justice, nomination lapsed due to the lack of a vacancy.
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  • Haynsworth and Carswell. Nominated by Nixon, both rejected by bipartisan (northern Dems and moderate Reps) vote because they turned out to be closet segregationists.
    • 

  • Bork. Nominated by Reagan, rejected on a near-party-line vote. Dems said they voted against based both on his role in the Saturday Night Massacre and his ideology. Bork and his supporters said that Bork did not hold the extremist views he was accused of and the motivation was pure partisanship.
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  • Miers. Nominated by GW Bush, would have been rejected on a bipartisan, non-ideological basis due to being obviously unqualified.
    • 

  • Garland. Nominated by Obama, rejected by McConnell based on pure partisanship.
    • 



So of the seven substantive rejections, at most two (Miers, and probably Fortas) were on personal grounds. The other five were all an ideologically coherent bloc in the Senate opposed to the President, rejecting the nominee based on their political views. The change is that the ideological line-up in the Senate now matches the partisan one in a way it historically didn't.


Given that only the Bork and Garland rejections became scandals, I think the mos maiorum that people want to exist (but doesn't, given that there was no political price in either case) is "Party-line rejection of the President's SCOTUS nomination by a Senate majority of the other party is inappropriate."  Unfortunately, given increased ideological coherence and party discipline in the modern Senate, this would cash out as "the President can nominate anyone he wants as long as they are broadly acceptable to the President's own party", and would be a bad rule on that basis.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think that TDS is powerful enough that their supporters in the country will expect them to impeach Trump regardless if there is any chance of conviction.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I saw (both at the time and as part of the discussion of the recent Iran war) "Trump's pulling out of JCPOA will make a war with Iran (or a nuclear Iran, which nobody wants) inevitable, and the people* who convinced him to pull out of JCPOA know this and are actively trying to maneuver America into a war Americans don't want."  That isn't "Trump, personally wants to start a war" but it is close.


* Whether the people in question are Netanyahu and the Israeli right, or GOPe neocons and the Deep State in the US.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Some cases of genuinely disabling PTSD exist, but it is easy to fake.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Normalizing to miles or equivalent trips helps reduce the range and can put them around motorcycle risk, but helicopters as a full class remain a good bit more dangerous than cars. To be fair, that’s heavily driven by training flight and Robinson incidents, so fair-weather flight operations under Part 135 are a lot less concerning, but it’s still a risk-taking behavior.




Part 135 helicopters are only about 2x as dangerous as part 135 aeroplanes and 2-3x as dangerous as cars, and it isn't clear if this is driven by things like search-and-rescue work where you know you are taking a risk. My guess is that fair-weather part 135 helicopters are safer than cars.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Checking the statistics, road fatalities in the US are 1.2 people per 100 million vehicle-miles, which is slightly less than 1.2 fatal crashes per 100 million vehicle-miles because most fatal crashes only kill one person.


Part 135 (i.e. all commercial flying except scheduled airline service) has about 1 fatal crash per 250,000 flight hours. If we assume an average speed of 200 mph for part 135 flying, that works out at 2 fatal crashes per 100 million flight-miles (and the typical fatal crash is going to kill everyone on the plane) - i.e. worse than driving, but not much. Part 135 helicopters are more dangerous than planes, but the FAA thinks this is because the helicopter accident rate is driven up by specific dangerous missions (like bad-weather search-and-rescue) and the intrinsic safety gap is small.


Scheduled airline service has less than 1 fatal crash per 5 million flight hours, which at airline speeds gives you <0.05 per 100 million flight miles. Very safe.


Bizjets will be safer than the part 135 average, but not as safe as scheduled airlines. So potentially not that much safer than driving.


Incidentally, private flying is about 1 fatal crash per 100,000 flight hours, and speeds are lower, so you are looking at 5-10 fatal crashes per 100 million flight-miles. Which I suppose is safer than a motorbike (about 30 deaths per 100 million miles).


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Yes - the only reason why trans bathroom laws are not an 80-20 issue is that thirty seconds of thought tells you that they will be unenforceable in practice because of false positives. Most female-presenting people with manjaws are cis women and, given that nobody gets undressed outside a stall, it doesn't matter enough to make it worth asking cis women to bring ID to go to the toilet.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Agreed. Male homosexuality is a bigger sticking point than trans - all three Abrahamic religions unequivocally prohibit it, and to be a leftist in good standing requires you to take Pride in it.


If the Abrahamic God, heaven, and hell exist, then there are no unrepentant Sodomites in heaven, and this is a hatefact by conventional left-wing standards. Tim Farron was forced out as leader of the UK Liberal Democrats over this point - he was unwilling to say that male homosexuality is not a sin, and the party was not willing to be led by someone who believed that it was.




I can’t see “anti-Israel” being a core belief




I think "Israel is the permanent hereditary enemy of my tribe" can sensibly be a core belief if Palestinians, or Arabs or Muslims more generally, are your tribe.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Christian views on lying are complicated. As far as I am aware, only Quakers categorically forbid both making false statements and selectively making true statements with intent to induce false beliefs. The Biblical passages normally cited as unequivocal condemnations of lying appear in contexts where it is clear that they refer to defamation (thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour) or commercial fraud.


It is an edge case of "Christian", but Mormons explicitly encourage deception-by-selective-truth-telling as a seeker-sensitive way of introducing LDS doctrine to potential converts. The traditional term is "milk before meat".


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
In so far as the mos maiorum required the Senate to confirm qualified SCOTUS appointments even if the President's party was in the minority, it was thrown out some time ago. Democrats think it was thrown out by Senate Republicans when they refused to hold a vote on Garland and then rush-confirmed Barrett, Republicans try to both-sides it going back to Bork. The Garland precedent is that the Senate can reject nominees based on pure partisanship in order to hold the seat open for their own party President. Since the Republicans paid no political price for it, it is the new mos maiorum.


I think the real issue is that Presidents of both parties have working increasingly hard to nominate partisan justices, that Bush v Gore made this a lot more salient, and that party discipline in the Senate has been getting stronger over time. The last nominee who was sufficiently less-partisan that an opposite-party Senate should have confirmed them was Roberts.


The other point is that strategic retirements mean that a vacancy coming up other than when the retiring justice's party controls the White House and Senate is a rare event. There were no vacancies with opposite-party control of the White House and Senate between 1991 (Souter and Thomas were confirmed by a Dem-majority Senate, but one with a conservative majority if you count Dixiecrats as conservatives) and Scalia's death in 2016.


Assuming regular alternation of the parties in office, and that incoming Presidents have strong enough coat-tails to control the Senate in the first half of their term, the default is that the partisan composition of SCOTUS is fixed. The Democrats obviously have an incentive to disrupt this.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It is also different in the Senate (where individual Senators have agency) vs the House (where the majority leadership controls the agenda). A 51-seat majority needs to keep Fetterman on every vote. A 52-seat majority can lose Fetterman, but needs to hold the rest of the caucus together. And a larger majority can afford to lose even more. A big Dem win opens up the possibility of bringing in secret ballots for impeachment and trying to pick up enough shy NeverTrump Republicans to get to two thirds - this would require a Senate rules change, which could be done in a filibuster-proof way by "nuclear option" at the start of the new Congress or with Roberts' co-operation at the start of a Trump impeachment trial.


As long as the Dems take the House (and possibly even if they don't - Massie thinks he has the votes to do it in the lame duck), a Hegseth impeachment will happen, and will be seen a dry run for a Trump impeachment.


The Squad are not going to make McCarthy-style trouble - both the squad and the Dem leadership know that Trump can veto any substantive legislation, and they are broadly in line on how to grandstand.  The pro-establishment left hate Trump as much as the far-left do.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
People who understand both betting and polling (of whom Nate Silver is the most prominent) are saying that the prediction markets are entirely consistent with the polls - Republicans doing well enough to hold onto 50 senate seats would require correlated polling errors* within the published margin of error, which is entirely consistent with a 28% probability. (As was the case with the 2016 and 2024 Presidential elections). Republicans holding the House would imply a polling miss of world-historical proportions. This should not be a 5% real-world probability, but it is well known that 5% implied probability on a sportsbook does not correspond to 5% probability on the real-world measure because (i) gamblers overback longshots and (ii) backing a sure thing at 19-1 on/1.05/-1900 odds isn't as profitable as it looks because it locks up a lot of money.


Polling isn't (and never was - 1992 in the UK remains infamous in the industry) good enough to call close elections, and the 2026 Senate election is close.


* The difference between Nate Silver's measured bullishness on Clinton immediately before the 2016 election and less numerate poll-driven pundits thinking that she had it in the bag was that a lot of stupid people didn't understand why polling errors are correlated by default.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I bought into "Trump is not paid off by, and is rich enough not to need to be paid off by, the Saudi-Israeli Axis of Idiot, and will therefore pursue a saner foreign policy that may lead to less Salafi jihadism" in 2016.  Hilary Clinton seemed to me to be unusually close to the Saudi influence machine, which I thought was more dangerous (in terms of corruptly influencing the US to pursue policies contrary to the national interest, and potentially in ways which would increase my personal risk of being blown up by Salafi jihadists) than the Israeli one, though the two machines were (and remained until the current Iran war started going wrong) sufficiently aligned that this may be a distinction without a difference.


Given the amount of Saudi (and Israeli? not sure) baksheesh the Trumps took in his first term, I didn't find this argument particularly credible in 2024. I also don't understand how anyone believed "Kamala is likely to do a forever war for Israel" strongly enough that "Trump won't" became a viable campaign message rather than a Captain Obvious kind of thing.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I think we're using different definitions of "closed".




Pre-Pao Reddit was not noticeably less censored than dial-up era Compuserve or AOL, and nobody thought they were the open internet (except in so far as people used them to access the open internet). The internet pioneers definitely thought that "open internet" meant "interpret censorship as damage and route around it", not "the corporate censor is in a generous mood today".




it will be because agentic 'great men' made it so




If you are talking about Musk buying Twitter, he isn't trying to open up the internet - the best case is that he is trying to ensure more ideological diversity in the range of curated walled gardens that exist. (The worst case is that he was being serious when he said that he wanted X to be a tool of totalitarian domination modelled on WeChat). X plays less well with the open internet than Dorsey's Twitter did - particularly in terms of suppressing tweets with links.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The most important item on the Democrats' positive agenda, arguably going back to Clinton, has been "fix healthcare". Their problem is that this is popular in the abstract but that any particular concrete proposal is unpopular - particularly because most sick people are covered by Medicare, which works in every respect except cost control.


But you are right that the Democrats' agenda in 2026 is mostly-negative (and popular for it) - basically "stop Trump making things worse" and "do not use our electricity and water to build the Torment Nexus".


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


(with a minor problem of the Iran war)




Apart from that, Mrs Lincoln, how was the play?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 1, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Any political movement that isn't explicitly liberal is going to trot out "freedom from speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences", "the first amendment only applies to the government" etc. as soon as they enjoy even a little temporary, local power over the culture.


Woke cancel culture was a Thing in the left's own spaces since 1990's PC, and got a lot worse starting in the early 2010's (I think the turning point is the failure of Occupy and the collapse of economic leftism as an activist outlet, other people think it is Barack Obama's re-election campaign). The interesting question is why corporate America (including but not limited to Big Tech) went full woke during the first Trump administration.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Quality Contributions Report for October 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


We don't have good Star Wars 7-9 because the left ruined it.




I think Disney corporate could have ruined Star Wars VII-IX without politics. For that matter, George Lucas could have ruined Star Wars VII-IX, and given the way he ruined episodes I and II that would be the way to bet. The problem is the existence of the plot holes (most obviously Rey's backstory) that Disney tried to fill with woke politics, not the woke politics.


I think politics made movies worse by suppressing criticism of movies that were bad anyway, more than by causing people who could have made good movies to make bad ones.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 26, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'm with Orwell on this - I think they are equivalent in substance and differ only in coalitional politics. If you didn't already know, would you be able to work out which of "National Socialism" and "Socialism in One Country" was the fascist slogan and which was the communist one?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 1, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


They did like Mort, though, and haven't tried other Ringworld novels yet.




I bounced off Discworld at 10, and came back to it slightly older and fell in love, as all true geeks do.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 1, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Foundation is a collection of longer short stories, anyway. Foundation and Empire and Second Foundation are each two novellas republished in a single bound volume.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 1, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
For me, it was Narnia and Dark is Rising. The MiniSTEMLord bounced off Narnia, though it is probably worth trying again.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 1, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Don't worry about the disclaimer - we need to index on both things simultaneously, so we know how difficult it is.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 1, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Mini-STEMLord loved the Ender's Game film - I refused to buy him the book on the grounds that it encouraged megalomania in gifted children. I do not want my son to see himself as the next Peter Wiggin. But I might be able to relent on that. Rather scarier was that his 6-year-old younger brother also understood and enjoyed the film.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 5, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I have not had sex with Aella, and would have no interest in having sex with Aella even if I was not happily married to someone else. I believe AI poses a threat to the human race for broadly the same reasons that the people who have had sex with Aella do.