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MadMonzer

Temporarily embarassed liberal elite

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joined 2022 September 06 23:45:01 UTC 

				
User ID: 896


				
				
				

			

		

	














	


		


			



	

		

			

			

				

					

						

							
						

						

							
							

								
MadMonzer


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite

				
				
				

				

					4 followers  

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					joined 2022 September 06 23:45:01 UTC
				


				
					

					
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User ID: 896


					
					
					
				

			


					

						
					



		

	

 











			
			

			
			

			




	


		

			
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				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 14, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I detect cope in at least one sense of the word.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 21, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
"Native" anything as a racial or ethnic descriptor was never a standard way of talking about civilised people - most of the Google hits on "Native British" are for plants. In 1900 as in 2026, people using "native", "indigenous" or "aboriginal" to refer to a subset of British people were probably comparing more-indigenous white British people to less-indigenous white British people - either Welsh/Scottish/Cornish Celts to the Anglo-Saxon invaders, or the English to Norman invaders. We have deep enough recorded history that people whose family came over less than 1000 years ago don't generally self-identify as any of those things.


Native (in the proper sense of the word) British English speakers who want to draw the distinction DHH is making just say "White British" which is in practice unambiguous. I have heard "Indigenous British" used as by intelligent racists as a deliberate trolling of anti-colonialist types. "Native Brit" as used by DHH is mostly a tell that DHH himself isn't one.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 21, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
As I remember London says that the fraction of "native Brits" in London has dropped to about a third. Clicking the link (which is to the Wikipedia article on ethnic groups in London) suggests that he uses "native Brits" to refer to people who tick the "White British" box on the census. (I tick "Irish" because it won't hurt me professionally and might help, so according to DHH I am not a "native Brit" despite having four grandparents who were drafted in WW2). The literal English meaning of "native Brit" is, of course, someone born in Britain - and London is still about 60% British-born.


"Britishness is tied to skin colour and being born in London does not make you a native Brit if you have the wrong ancestry" was cancellable back in the 1970s when Enoch Powell was cancelled for it.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 21, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
They are being held up for public ridicule in the Boston Globe, which is somewhat to the left of Pravda. That isn't exactly being disowned and purged, but the only more official way that the pro-establishment left could say "We're sick of these people" is to say it in the New York Times.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 21, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I've read someone who claimed that democratic republics live around 250 years on average. The only exception is Switzerland, but it is a very unusual polity.




Switzerland hasn't been a country for 250 years, let alone a democratic republic. Before the Napoleonic Wars and the Congress of Vienna, Switzerland didn't claim to be a sovereign federal state - it was a treaty alliance between cantons that were de facto separately sovereign under the Treaty of Westphalia. The Canton of Bern was by far the largest and most powerful canton, and was notoriously oligarchic.


If you count America as continuously republican since 1776 or 1789, you would say that Switzerland has been a democratic republic since it was reconstituted after the Congress of Vienna (i.e. 200 years, a slightly worse run than the US). If you think a constitutional rewrite as a result of a civil war is a break in continuity, then Switzerland has been continuously democratic and republican since the end of the Sonderbund war in 1848. (Which is a slightly better run than the US)


Switzerland's political stability is remarkable given the multi-lingual, multi-confessional nature of the country, but it wouldn't stand out against the Anglosphere countries. Part of this, of course, is that the Anglosphere countries have the advantage of not having land borders with Napoleonic France/Nazi Germany/etc.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 21, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
These clowns (and not just the ones that went to clown school) managed to flip Bernie Sanders, or at least get him to put up a "Workers of the World Unite" sign while doing lefty politics. And Bernie is a much bigger man than Kamala.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 21, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Noire paints himself




Does anyone know if "gender-expansive lesbian using he/him pronouns" is a new type of bulldyke or a new type of autogynephile?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 21, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
And incorporated or not, all of these community types can be a "suburb" in the legal sense - the legal definition of a suburb, which is simple and useful and should be retained even if we have an alternative definition based on urban form, is a municipality that isn't the core of it's metro area.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 21, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It's cheap enough if you buy that insulation collectively the way first-world Asian cities do.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 21, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I very much agree. There are two great questions about the self-driving car era that we don't know the answer to yet:


    

  • Will self-driving cars be hired like taxis or will they be privately owned? Or in other words, will people still own a car once renting it on the spot market not longer adds the cost of a chauffeur.
    • 

  • What is the geometric constraint on cities in the world where self-driving cars are the main form of transit? (From Babylon to the Victorians, it was walking distance. In the private car era, it was parking scarcity first and carriageway scarcity for moving vehicles second)
    • 



				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 21, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
My experience is that Dr Google isn't great at differential diagnosis, and absolutely sucks at "What are the potential diagnoses I should be thinking about - either because they are likely or because they are moderately likely but serious - as a Bayesian inference from this set of symptoms?"


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 21, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The only reason we "know" that WIV was doing gain of function research on-site is that a virus leaked and caused a pandemic. There is weak circumstantial evidence that they were doing gain of function, but officially they were only collecting the virus samples and the dangerous work was happening elsewhere.


If John is known to hang out with fraudsters, this is Bayesian evidence that his lottery win is fraudulent, but it is much weaker evidence than knowing that John is a criminal himself. The lottery operator would need something better than "While not a known criminal, John hangs out with fraudsters, so his lottery win is probably fraudulent" to deny a payout.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 21, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
At the level of handwaving where lab leak is "one entirely banal human accident", zoonosis requires exactly one step of unlikely shit, namely that the next big zoonotic virus coincidentally showed up in the city that hosts the WIV.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 21, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Assigning blame serves an important function for vulnerability patching. If no one involved is ever responsible than why would they spend the effort to fix anything?




Given the existence of two plausible origin theories, both of which involve large-scale idiocy rather than individual criminality (which is not to say that nobody committed a crime - just that under both theories there is no criminality needed to end up with a pandemic), attempting to assign blame makes vulnerability patching harder because it creates high-powered incentives to hide the root causes. In practice, it also makes it harder to create common knowledge about root causes and appropriate responses because you require a higher standard of proof to assign blame to individuals than to identify patchable vulnerabilities.


In fact this is a more general point. If a disaster requires systemic vulnerabilities (whether in place of or in addition to individual culpability) then attempting to identify culpable individuals after the fact makes root cause identification, and therefore vulnerability patching, harder. There is a reason why both medicine and aviation try as far as possible to have blame-free accident investigation processes.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 21, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I typically hesitate to say that people aren't seriously believing their claims but Lab leak theorists have a major missing mood problem going on.




The best versions of both theories imply similar levels of culpability on the part of the Chinese. Zoonosis implies that the Chinese continue to allow an unsanitary practice (the sale of live-caught wild animals in wet markets) that is banned in most western countries, had already caused at least one pandemic (OG SARS) and had been called out as likely to cause others in the future. Lab leak implies that the Chinese were doing a type of dangerous research that was controversial but not banned in the west with grossly inadequate containment practices.


The claim that COVID-19 was deliberately developed as a bioweapon, as opposed to being the result of civilian gain-of-function research of the type proposed in the DEFUSE grant and promoted by Fauci, does not make sense. SARS-like coronaviruses make shitty bioweapons for reasons which should by now be all too obvious, and nukes (which China has) work better than sci-fi doomsday viruses as credible MAD.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 21, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Yet, if you look at a random US "city" in Google Maps, you will see lots of single-family houses with their own backyards and limited access to mass transit.






So, what do you actually mean when you say "urban", "suburban", and "rural" living? Maybe it's something like this.






Urban living: Row houses and apartment buildings, with incidental retail
Suburban living: Single-family and two-family houses, and nothing else
Rural living: Incidental single-family houses in land that is largely agricultural or undeveloped




My personal tongue-in-cheek definition:


    

  • Urban living: cars are an optional purchase to support specific careers and/or lifestyles.  Middle-class aspiration for non-car owners includes frequent taxi/Uber use.
    • 

  • Suburban living: Working-class respectability requires one car per family (with carless living possible for the childless possible but not ideal). Middle-class aspiration is one car per employed adult.
    • 

  • Exurban or rural living: Working-class respectability requires one car per employed adult. Middle-class aspiration is one car per licensed driver, with the car being a pickup, SUV or 4x4 if the driver is an employed adult who doesn't drive a van for work reasons.
    • 



Note that on this definition, a lot of American "suburbia" falls into the exurban/rural category. This is deliberate.  "Urban" living by my definition is compatible with upper-middle-class people having houses with private gardens (many such neighbourhoods in London zone 2/3), though probably not detached ones.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 21, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Also we lack evidence exactly because Chinese communist institutions refused to cooperate in independent investigation and actively acted against it - they destroyed data, slaughtered animals on the market, bleached residual evidence and gagged researches. So it is doubly ignorant to use lack of public evidence as evidence of absence.




As you point out, the Red Chinese were destroying both potential evidence that could have supported wet market zoonotic spread and potential evidence that could have supported lab leak. This is not surprising, as the official Chicom position at the time the evidence was destroyed (being enforced inside China with the usual Chicom techniques of truth suppression) was that the virus originated outside China. There is no revealed preference on the part of the Chinese authorities for people to believe zoonosis over lab leak (which is unsurprising - both theories make China look bad, but only lab leak lets them absolve the leadership by throwing a small number of people under the bus). The campaign to suppress the lab leak hypothesis came from the US medical establishment, which did not get access to Wuhan unfiltered by the local Chicom authorities or Chicom-aligned WHO leadership until after any evidence had been destroyed.




I can also reverse it and say that based on the publicly available information none of the animals was proven NOT to be infected with SARS-CoV-2.




You said "provably infected" (in your earlier post), not me. I'm happy to stipulate that any evidence that could prove the infection status of the lab animals at WIV (in either direction) has been lost.


As I said in my first post, the specific cover-up required is implausible (not impossible, but all I have ever claimed is that it is at least as implausible as a zoonosis coincidentally showing up in the home of WIV). The only way WIV can have had access to a suitable starting point virus (i.e. BANAL-52, or some other bat virus more closely related to BANAL-52 than to any bat virus known to exist in 2019) is that a civilian lab which was openly and notoriously conducting gain-of-function research, and seeking to collaborate with UNC and get research funding from NIH on that basis, and which had a financial incentive to boast about and was in fact boasting about their virus-collection programme and large published virus database, was running a separate parallel secret gain-of-function lab with a separate parallel secret virus-collection programme which didn't contribute to the database and that was using separate secret furin cleavage sites that shouldn't work according to the pre-2019 public literature, confirmed in the general case (obviously not specifically for SARS-CoV-2) by post-2019 AI-enabled simulations.


Your response is isolated demands for rigour and (entirely plausibly) slinging allegations of dishonesty at the Red Chinese authorities. But this cover-up would have required dishonesty maintained over several years by academics who did not have an obvious incentive to be dishonest.  And from the point of view of the academics, the cover-up failed, and predictably so. If COVID-19 was provably a lab leak, then the Chinese authorities, who are the ones in a position to punish the academics, already have the proof.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 21, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Based on the publicly-available information, none of the animals in the lab were infected with SARS-CoV-2 or any virus closely related enough to it to be the starting point for a gain-of-function experiment. And the timing of the required cover-up to make this true but not publicly-available information is not particularly plausible. (Again, the argument is on the ACX debate page, and is Fat Tony intelligible but not short enough that I can make you read it and check the receipts as a condition of debating with me on the Motte).


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 21, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I went to German public school, even though my parents could probably have afforded to send me to some private school instead.




Germany has academically selective public schools which have not been overrun by a high-IQ, high-grindset immigrant group. Completely different ballgame to NYC.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 21, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Can't think of any from India




Cholera originates in India. That the most famous Indian disease is a water-borne bowel disease whereas the most famous Chinese diseases are respiratory may say something about the difference between the two countries.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 21, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I'm also aware of the Root Claim debate which I've encountered as a wall of text and like 30 hours of videos. I'd love an explanation of why this debate matters, but my tendency is to dismiss it as a gish gallop.




A Gish gallop is a performative one-sided dump of low-quality arguments which is designed to be superficially convincing if unrebutted and to be a lot harder to rebut than it is to generate.


The Rootclaim debate was adversarial, with both sides bringing their best. Multiple observers who found it worth their time to read the wall of text on ACX (I have done) or watch the multiple hours of video (I have not) have confirmed that the arguments being made are persuasive, and that most of them stand up to well-informed, well-resourced attempts at rebuttal. The vast majority of the people who have spent time engaging with it (including me) have come away with the conclusion that the zoonosis hypothesis is at least plausible given the publicly available information, and most (not including me, probably because a lot of the receipts are buried in the 30 hours of video or the documents cited in an already-long wall of text) have come away accepting the argument that zoonosis is orders of magnitude more likely than lab leak.


The Rootclaim debate matters because it involved two smart people with the resources and incentives to produce the best possible arguments based on the publicly available information, and a group of more-or-less neutral smart observers who precommitted to reading a wall of text and watching 30 hours of video, meaning that the debate would not be easily won with cheap debate tricks like Gish gallops (or "spreading", which is the equivalent technique used in actual competitive debate).  It represents by far the largest concentration of IQ-point hours applied to the question of "Based on the publicly available information, what is the most likely COVID-19 origin story?"


Not every valid argument can be made comprehensible to Fat Tony. For an uncontroversial example, Fat Tony can't understand Bell's Inequality. That doesn't make hidden variable theories of quantum mechanics correct.




In 2018, there was a proposal made to DARPA called DEFUSE, in which bat coronaviruses would be studied. Human-specific cleavage sites would be added. Transmissability would be increased via gain-of-function. And this would happen in the United States in collaboration with, you guessed it, the Wuhan Institute of Virology. DARPA ultimately rejected the $14 million proposal.




FWIW, an entirely Fat Tony-comprehensible rebuttal of this argument is included in the ACX post summarising the Rootclaim debate. Understanding it might take as long as several minutes, which you apparently consider to constitute a Gish gallop. But the short answer is that a proposal that was not funded, to do research at a lab that was not the WIV, on viruses that the WIV did not have in its collection, is not smoking gun evidence that a modified virus leaked from WIV.


In fact, most of the arguments on either side of the Rootclaim debate are ones that Fat Tony could understand if he wanted to spend the time to do so. The basic lab leak argument is as @porkpiehat gives it. The first-round rebuttal is that the unnatural-looking furin cleavage site doesn't look human-designed either, and that the bat virus from which SARS-CoV-2 doesn't appear to have been at WIV at the time the alleged GoF research was being done (it wasn't found in the wild until after the pandemic). The basic zoonosis argument is that SARS-CoV-2 is awfully similar to OG SARS (which is known to be zoonotic) and that we found the origins of the pandemic in the very wet market stall which a western virologist visiting WIV had called out 5 years previously as high-risk for zoonotic virus transmission, with the first-round rebuttal being that nobody ever found the intermediate host. What Fat Tony struggles with is evaluating the relative strengths of the arguments (and the COVID-19 origins debate is very unusual for straightforward factual disputes in that there are still strong arguments on both sides after this much expenditure of IQ-point hours). In the context of the debate, it is actually the lab leakers who end up falling back on a Fat Tony-incomprehensible argument about why "A lab leak virus that looks plausibly zoonotic just happened to have its first superspreader event at a wet market 10km from the lab" is not an unlikely coincidence - see Rootclaim's post-debate rebuttal.


I'm not going to blame Fat Tony for falling back on "I distrust the clowns who think that vaccines cause autism less than the clowns who think men can cut their dicks off and become women" but the whole point of the Motte is to aspire to be more rational than Fat Tony.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 21, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Berlin is a city-state, so "Berlin city council" has the powers of a state government - this is a case where EU law (which allows EU citizens to vote in "municipal" elections wherever in the EU they live even if they are not a citizen of the relevant country) gives non-German EU citizens more power than the EU intended.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 14, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
London and Paris aren't Jewish enough for that to be the driver at tourist buildings in those cities. The idea that you would have enough shabbot-observant Jews going up the Shard or Eiffel Tower at one time to fill a lift is implausible.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 20, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Agreed - the Appalachian mountain men are the folk heroes of Red Tribe orneriness now, but in the Civil War era they were the least reliable part of the Red coalition, to the point where West Virginia and Kentucky defected from the rest of the south, and the Appalachian bits of Tennessee were not reliable either.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 14, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think Gorbachev was doing more than waiting for his regime to die, at least in the 1985-9 period. (After the rest of the Soviet bloc collapses, he does seem to be sitting waiting for the USSR itself to die).  I don't know how high his chances of success were ex ante, but he was trying.


And of course Deng in China was trying and succeeding.