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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

				
				
				

				

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					joined 2022 September 06 23:45:01 UTC
				


				
					

					
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				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 13, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The best British example is former Home Secretary and Vice-President of the European Commission Leon Brittan


De Gaulle remains the best example globally, I think.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 13, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Although blocking oil exports while continuing to freeze Iran's foreign assets will mean that food and essential humanitarian imports will cease reasonably quickly because Iranians can't pay for them.


This happened to Iraq between the two Gulf Wars - food and medicine imports were excluded from sanctions, but the exports to pay for them were not. There was an oil-for-food programme at one point, but it never worked because Saddam didn't care about disfavoured ethnic groups starving and accordingly didn't actually want food imports, he wanted to embarrass the countries imposing sanctions.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 6, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
There was the time a major-party Presidential candidate sang a "Bomb Iran" filk at a rally. The American voters rejected this rhetoric, but I think the Iranian voter would reject "Death to America" if they got the opportunity. The American establishment didn't reject it - McCain remained the Great White Hope of pro-establishment centrism until his death. Donald Trump spent most of his life as part of that establishment, and his recent behaviour re. Iran is strong (although by the nature of such things, not conclusive) evidence that he is fake-anti-establishment controlled opposition and not the turncoat determined to cleanse the Augean stables that his supporters like to think he is.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 6, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


What would that look like? Some of the things he's done, notably on migration, necessarily involved picking fights with Brussels. Are those issues no longer salient for the EU leadership?




The EU institutions have never been committed to unlimited immigration, its just that most players (including potential illegal immigrants) correctly see Germany as more powerful within EU politics than the leadership of the EU institutions, and Merkel was committed to unlimited immigration.


A deal where Hungary lets in a small number of vetted refugees (who are already settled in Italy) in exchange for a large amount of cash and promises not to close its intra-EU borders works for both sides.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 6, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It isn't Iran's model. It was first set out a written policy by the Kennedy-era CIA (the "plausible deniability" memo which would later be made public by the Church Committee) and had already been in use by the USSR since the late 1950's.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 6, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Mao also did the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, which are a lot crazier than anything the Iranian mullahs have done.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 6, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
If Americans say "Fuck Iran", are they expressing a literal desire to copulate with the mullahs?


"Death to America" is an idiom with a similar meaning in a different language and cultural context.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 6, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


This take hugely discounts the tail risks of having an unstable country with a history of exporting terrorism having these things.




Iran exports less terrorism than the USA (probably) or the USSR (definitely) did during the Cold War. Unless you think that Israelis count for more than, say, Londoners, which I suppose the American establishment does. Both superpowers funded the IRA, although I suppose the involvement of Rep Peter King (IRA-NY) doesn't technically make the IRA an official US client group. Empirically, being a state sponsor of terrorism is not strongly correlated with being a country that can't be trusted with nuclear weapons under MAD.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 6, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
In the vast majority of traditional societies, male status continues to increase with age until you are visibly decrepit. I don't think there was ever a society where young men were at the top by default.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 6, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


He hasn't lost until he has signed. He is kicking the can down the road and not taking the hit and signing a peace treaty. The US should have pulled out of Afghanistan at least 18 years earlier than it did. It was easier to continue the war than to take the short term loss and accept defeat.




I note that one of the best things 1st-term Trump did was admit this and surrender to the Taliban. For face-saving reasons he had to sign the surrender agreement in the last year of his term, dated to take effect after he left office - I am not going to complain given that the alternative was continuing to throw good men and money after bad.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 6, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Leaving the TDS angle aside, the conventional dovish view on Iran (which was also the official MAGA position during the 2024 campaign) was "Of course the US can curbstomp the Iranian military, but the consequence of winning is that you either have to occupy Iran (which would be a worse quagmire than Iraq) or you have a failed state on the shores of the Straits of Hormuz." Fundamentally, it was a prediction that Iran would end up like Iraq, but bigger, coupled with the long-standing and extensively battle-tested conventional wisdom that you cannot effect a regime change by air power alone.


Iran is exceeding my expectations in terms of its ability to put up a meaningful resistance to American air power, but the problem is that either America is planning to invade or they are not, and neither is a good outcome. If America bombs Iran back to the Stone Age but leaves the regime intact, then they can carry on obstructing shipping on the Straits of Hormuz with stone age technology (plus imported Russian or Chinese drones).


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 6, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
A man for every woman and a woman for every man, no less. Also one of many johnny foreigners the Brits sent packing, although not in the schoolboy history. (Sellars and Yateman in 1066 and All That say that British schoolboys remembered that Julius Caesar conquered Britain in 55BC. I remember being taught that Caesar's expedititions to Britain in 55BC and 54BC were failures and that Britain was conquered by Claudius in 43AD). Not to mention a world conqueror, possibly a God, and an author of remarkably clear Latin prose that makes his memoir good material for students.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 6, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I can't forgive Microsoft for making its first stab at virtual assistant so annoying and usurping the name of Cortana to do so.




Not Microsoft's first offence on this point. Remember when Clippy wasn't a misaligned AI. (I suppose the OG Microsoft Clippy was misaligned and artificial, but it definitely wasn't intelligent)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 6, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Because the Cold War was a planet-scale existential conflict lasting almost half a century, it provides examples of most of the tropes human conflict can generate. Because nukes made a direct heroic battlefield victory obviously impossible and, with hindsight, the goodies won almost entirely by soft power, most of the lessons of the examples come out in the "war bad" direction.


The basic argument against waging Albigensian Crusades is timeless. I suspect it was already old when Croesus crossed the river and destroyed a great empire.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Where is a Man to Go?
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
TV as the dominant medium across a wide range of IQs was taking us towards the post-literacy era, but the text-based internet probably pushed it back a couple of decades. Respite over, I now go full old fogey every time the content I want exists in Youtube videos or podcasts but not text-based websites.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 6, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I chose Suetonius' Twelve Caesars (in English translation, natch) as a school prize, and everyone except the Latin teacher wanted to squee about how intellectual and committed to classical scholarship I was. He had recommended the book, and knew exactly what a tween boy was hoping to get out of it.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 6, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


This is a fringe view. The majority position is that Imam Mahdi will reappear first, and then he will lead the forces of Islam to liberate Palestine and defeat the West.




And note that this is a general point about escheatology. Treating end-times prophecies as warnings about events that will happen in the future by manifest divine intervention (with no-one to know the day or the hour) is effectively harmless.


The dominant interpretation of Christian escheatology in Catholicism and mainline Protestantism is preterist - i.e. that most of the apocalyptic prophecies in Revelation etc. were already symbolically fulfilled by the destruction of the Temple after the 66-73 Jewish-Roman war and the expulsion of the Jews from Palestine after the 132-135 Bar Khoba Rebellion, but it isn't dogma. Treating it as a symbolic roadmap for contemporary geopolitics is something that only happens in American evangelicalism, and even then it is a minority view. (The most popular escheatology in American evangelicalism is the Rapturism of the Left Behind novels, which are mainstream in the limited sense that they treat Revelation as a warning and not an instruction manual, and they predict that the prophecies will be fulfilled by manifest divine intervention and not human action)


Similarly, in Judaism the Third Temple movement (which seeks to actually act out parts of the Messiah prophecy) is fringe even within religious Zionism.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 6, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Before the events of the various Watch books, policing in Anhk-Morpok is provided by a criminal gang that has cut a corrupt deal with Vetinari (the Thieves' Guild) to fund itself by explicitly permitted arbitrary confiscation from citizens (thief licenses). That is corrupt by modern standards.


Vetinari comes across, and this is deliberate on the part of Pratchett who has said that he is modelled on, among others, Machiavelli, as someone who would cheerfully engage use aggressive war, assassination, torture etc. as policy tools if there was a way to do so to advance what he really cares about, which is the good of the city. But Pratchett's worldview (which I share) means that there rarely is - Ankh-Morpok works as well as it does because those things are rare. Also, if there was wetwork to be done for raison d'etat then he would outsource it to one of the dodgier guilds, so his hands would stay clean from the reader's perspective.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 16, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


America is a pretty chauvinistic and patriotic country but tomorrow if news came out that negotiations were underway to sell American Samoa or Puerto Rico or Guam, most people would actually not care.




If the American government announced that they had negotiated the sale of Guam to Japan, I don't think anyone except a few right-wing diehards would care, although if the local population protested the sale people might start caring.


If the Chinese announced that they expected America to sell Guam, and that they would cut off the rare earth supply if America did not, then I would expect the resulting outrage to make it politically impossible to sell Guam to China as a matter of US domestic politics.


There are two differences here: one is whether the territory is being sold to an ally or an enemy, and the other is that giving up inhabited territory in the face of threats is generally considered dishonorable. Trump managed both to sound like an enemy to most of western Europe (not clear if he is or not) and sound like he was making threats (which he clearly was, although it isn't clear how serious they were).


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 6, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Technically Francis was a Jesuit, although he saw St Francis of Assisi as a role model and frequently talked like an pietistic Franciscan. Based on the stereotypes the various Orders had back in the day, I would expect a Franciscan to resort to the kind of soft-headed pacifism that generally makes you a useful idiot for the aggressor, an Augustinian to intelligently but not necessarily productively apply Just War theory, and a Jesuit to make a political calculation based on what they thought the interests of the Church were.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 6, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Essentially all open-borders supporters on this site are libertarians. The standard model of libertarian ethics assumes that ownership of land is, as a matter of morally binding property rights, unitary except when limited by explicit contract, and that the current freeholder is the legitimate owner and the rights claimed by the State are usurped.


Libertarianism is largely an American movement, and in the American context this is justified by saying that the rights of landowners were mostly acquired by a series of voluntary transactions beginning with the natural-law title acquired by a homesteader (and that the exceptions can be ignored as a matter of expediency) whereas the rights of the State were acquired by usurpation under the threat of violence. Ignoring the historical argument about the nature of American homesteading, or about what fraction of US land has been subject to a nonlibertarian transaction that would break the chain of natural-law title, this theory is obviously false when applied to other countries.


So from a traditional libertarian perspective, the difference is that you own your land and the government does not own the country. The government has the right to exclude foreign citizens (or to admit them under arbitrary conditions) from land which it acquired by voluntary purchase, as does any other corporation which legitimately owns land, such as the one owning @celluloid_dream's data centre.


Within the classical liberal tradition, we make the analogous argument in terms of freedom of association. If I wish to associate with Jose, and he is willing to travel to associate with me, but the government won't let him, then my freedom of association is restricted. If we are able to associate in ways which don't violate generally applicable laws or impose large externalities on my fellow-citizens (i.e. Jose is not a criminal or a bum) then this is an unreasonable restriction on the freedom of association of a citizen.


You can make exactly the same kind of argument about private landlords - there is a reason why clauses in leases restricting the tenant's visitors are generally unenforceable except in situations like group houses where the tenant's visitors are inevitably going to be imposing externalities on the other residents.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 6, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Pratchett thus has sympathy for the idealists - consider Sergeant Carrot, or the good Omnians like Brutha or Mightily Oats - but ultimately he's closer to Vimes or Weatherwax or Susan Sto Helit.




And even more importantly, he is closer to Vimes as a matter of worldview, but he isn't on Vimes' side because there are no two sides to this question. Carrot and Vimes are absolutely and always on the same side. (And the one time it comes up, Vimes and Brutha are also on the same side). In the Discworld, Good is good no matter whether it is real or not. And part of what is good is systems that work - Vetinari reads as an amoral snake, but he is also consistently on the same side as Vimes and Carrot because what matters is that Anhk-Morpok remains safe, free and prosperous.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 6, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
There was in the nineteenth century, although their jurisdiction only ran within gunboat range of navigable waterways.


There is currently a hilarious social media row going on in the UK, that began with Nigel Farage saying he would cut off visas to citizens of countries demanding slavery reparations. It turned out that the British Green party officer responsible for campaigning around reparations for slavery and colonialism is a direct descendent of the last Oba of Lagos, who was deposed in 1851 by the West Africa Squadron (with the dynasty retaining most of its wealth) because he wouldn't stop selling slaves (mostly to Brazil by this point).


So the Green Party's campaign for British taxpayers to pay reparations for slavery is led by the descendant of a slaver, who personally benefitted from slavery more directly than any white Briton now living.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 6, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
That is what I was trying to say with my second option. Thanks for putting it more clearly.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 6, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Yes - SaaS raises prices for consumers because the total amount you can extract from a consumer over a multi-year subscription is significantly more than the highest price you can stick on  a shrinkwrapped product with a straight face. But at constant EV of price paid, SaaS is better because you pay more for the successful purchases and cancel the stuff that doesn't work out for you, so trying a new product is a lower risk proposition.