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MaiqTheTrue

Renrijra Krin

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MaiqTheTrue


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				
Renrijra Krin

				
				
				

				

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					joined 2022 November 02 23:32:06 UTC
				


				
					

					
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				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 21, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Some rot more slowly than others.  Monarchy has worked in England I’d argue from the fairly early Anglo Saxons to Victorian times.  That’s a thousand years.  300 years seems to be a hard limit of democracy.


The big issue with democracy is that it by design tends to replace feedback loops with fake feedback.  The common game is to insulate the mechanisms where the real decisions are made (the administrative state) from both electoral processes and from the consequences of bad decisions and failures.  The steering wheel and the sensors are both disconnected and the driver has been told over and over to want to go wherever the car happens to be going at the time.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 21, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
If you’re careful about it and actually enforce the rules, sure.  If I can join the church and get away with bending or breaking the rules and codes, then no.  That’s kinda what happened with the episcopal church.  They officially have Cramer’s 24 articles.  They just ignored them until there were more rainbows than crosses.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Wellness Wednesday for September 23, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Im gonna blow your mind.


These kinds of things — they are, in a sense, the important stuff.  Caring for yourself and your family, and figuring out how best to go about it is how real life works.  Real life is jobs, chores, family and home care and so on.  The ordinary stuff is where you care for yourself and the people and community you actually care about.  Fake shit is the global type issues like international politics where you have no control over, culture war stuff that’s happening far away from you, AI stuff being done in companies you can’t control.  They’re interesting to talk about, sure, but you have no control over it, and obsessing about it is not going to make your actual life better.


Im a woman, and a lot of older female conversations are about cooking, cleaning, husbands, and child care.  Why?  Because this is what adult female humans do with their time.  Adult male humans deal with mechanical issues of the home and car, the yard, kids’ sports, and careers.  And so you talk to your older relatives, you’ll get that, weather, and sports.  Weather and sports are fun ways to connect to people around you, and the rest is real life.


To be honest, especially as I get older, I find the people who obsess over politics, culture war, fandoms, and so on to be the boring ones.  They obsess over things like that mostly because their real life isn’t all that great.  They don’t care about normal everyday life because they have nothing in their real life worth caring about.  They don’t care about cooking because they live alone in an apartment and have no boyfriend or girlfriend to cook for.  They don’t care about their career because they work in basement level restaurant or retail and thus they don’t have a career to care about.  Their car is a junker, why worry about upkeep?  In order to have time to obsess about politics and culture and viral trends and fandoms, you have to have the kind of life only a Redditor could love.  They don’t have anything going on in their real life, so they can sit around and argue about non-real-life stuff.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Christian Controversy over Contemplation
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The issue I have specifically with modern meditation is that the older version of this was explicitly Christian and often was meditation on Christian themes and often explicitly the Bible.  David might have meditated, but he was mediating on the Bible, not just sitting there with an open mind watching his thoughts.  The Orthdox use the Jesus Prayer, again not just sitting and breathing.  Some older traditions use the psalms.  The idea that Lectio Divino is the same thing as New Age mantras is not only silly but potentially dangerous syncretism.


Part of my issue with modern Buddhist and New Age meditation is that it makes a distinction in practice between the spirit and body.  You are supposed to be training your spirit to be better often by ignoring the outside world.  It thus tends to, in practice, lead to a kind of mind body dualism (which Buddhist philosophy accepts) where the practitioner identifies with his spirit as “his real self” and his body as a shell.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 21, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think part of the infighting is the need for a strong immunity from entryism.  Leftist groups don’t need to worry as much as rightist groups simply because it’s a constant issue.  Rightists are the outgroup and they need to be sure that everyone in the group is there for the cause and not undermining the cause.  A conservative Christian church needs to worry about liberals entering and changing the way the group views themselves.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 21, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I mean I think there are a lot of philosophical reasons that we ended up here.  First of all, you have the blank slate growth mindset memes that say that any kid no matter what can do literally anything and that the only failure is to stop trying.  This isn’t true, or at least not as true as we would like it to be.  You might get a 10% improvement if you’re putting in more work, but you can’t take a kid who in tenth grade can’t do basic algebra and send him through the MIT engineering program.  A second related problem is that equality of outcomes is expected, and thus any attempt to put kids into skill appropriate classes is going to be illegally discrimination if the classes are not absolutely equal numbers of all races and genders in each track.


Im mostly a pragmatist in most social issues.  The best solutions are the ones that work for the majority of people involved.  And I don’t really care to pretend that blank slate is real when most of my practical experiences with real people across all kinds of contexts show that humans are individuals practically from birth.  There are vast differences in skills, interests, personality, and diligence that affect what a kid is capable of doing from birth.  What’s funny to me is that we are fine with this in sports.  We don’t take the kids who throw dirt clods in the outfield and shunt them through select high skill baseball as if they are simply one outstanding coach away from a future million dollar contract with the Yankees.  They have tryouts, and you either make the team or you don’t, and everyone understands it and accepts it.


As far as schools becoming everything a kid needs, I think this is a problem of the government taking on those roles.  It happens all the time.  The government starts offering a service and other groups that had been doing those things tend to step back until the government is the only game in town.  Why would you take the time to teach your kids to be good citizens when the government will do it for you?  Why would a church or community group do that when they can outsource it to government?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 20, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I appreciate the idea, but I don’t think you can take the corpus of Islam and remove the hostility simply because it’s central to the foundation of the religion.  Muhammad was a warlord.  He conquered a territory which he then governed.  There are lots of references in the Quran and Hadith to wars, rules of war, and historical battles.  This is unavoidable, much like it’s unavoidable to say that Moses and Joshua had wars of conquest in the Torah.  What changed for Judaism was that it had later revelations that encouraged peace and getting along with other tribes.  Unless you have a second Quran, you’re stuck with the book and traditions you have written.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 21, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I’m not convinced it’s actually possible for AI to be “kept in a box”.  For one thing, if you want it to be useful as anything other than a cute toy, it needs to be able to gather data and use that data.  That means giving it access to other systems. And those systems may well have back door access to other programs that have access to either critical intranet or the general internet, probably both.  In order to have that not be a problem, in order for the box to be foolproof, it needs to be physically air gapped from any other system.  If you have an open socket, it’s not a foolproof box.  But, having your AI agent on a single computer not connected to any other computer in your system and make sure that no one enters the AI room with any sort of device they can connect to the computer, you have no reason to use it.  If I want AI to test code, I have to let it read the code.  Am I going to write thousands of lines of code in a notebook, carry it to the clean room and spend two weeks copying it into the secure AI box?  It would slow the process enough that it would not be worth it.


Furthermore, there are always bad actors and stupid people.  The stupid won’t see any problem with releasing AI when the AI tells them it’s a nice AI and it will give that person a reward of some sort (or stop blackmailing them, which AI did in a safety test).  Or maybe the Houthis who are putting AI into missiles and then asking Claude why the missile missed the target will give AI access to real world things beyond missiles.  Or a criminal gang will.  Or a rogue state.  There are plenty of reasons why a human might purposely break containment, and it’s out for good.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 21, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I’m firmly in favor of tracking kids.  I think kids should be in some form of education through 18.  I just don’t think trying to force everyone through a pre-college curriculum is good for lower achieving students.  No amount of IEP and extra help is going to take a kid who reads like a first grader in ninth grade and make him capable of doing even community college work.  I’m not even convinced you could take a kid with the reading comprehension and math skills of a sixth grader and get him ready for university level work.  The bad thing, for them about trying to do such a thing is that basically you set his expectations far above what he can actually accomplish, so anything less than university and white collar work is beneath him, but you also fail him by not teaching him the kinds of skills he can actually use to support himself.  Teach a kid with a sixth grade reading comprehension and math skills to do trade work, and he can not only support himself, but if he works hard enough might even own his own business.  A kid with worse skills might not be able to do that, but maybe could do simple line cooking or manual labor or something.  But if those kids try to compete with high achieving students who can leverage those skills, they’ll just end up unemployed and probably unemployable.


At the same time, those kids will slow down the education of the rest of the class to their level.  The kid who’s disruptive because he doesn’t understand the concept of algebra is holding back other kids.  Having the teacher repeat lessons because he can’t do them slows the class down as well.  The smart kids end up never developing their skills to their potential because they’re stuck in classes with kids much dumber and the curriculum is geared to them.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 21, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It doesn’t work that way.  If you’re in a public school, ADA accommodations are legally required, IED plans and extra teachers for the low performing kids are required.  There’s no requirement for AP to even be offered.  So when the budget cuts come, they cut the non-required elective programs, and AP and advanced courses.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 14, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Two problems:


1). Unless you can do this enforced at a global level, it doesn’t matter (the same is true of the safety stuff btw) because if it’s illegal to use AI to do say translation work in the USA, then the cheap solution is to simply use AI to translate things in Canada.  The humans are still going to lose those jobs, you just get the added bonus of not only losing the human paychecks, but the taxes paid by the company as well.  Or if we’re talking safety, we slow down and limit our technology for safety.  China is under no such obligation and will happily lap the safety conscious American companies and dominate AI.


Second problem being that effectively, there is no way to enforce such a treaty even if we make it.  The UN is a glorified debate society.  To the degree it allows wars or issues arrest warrants, it’s basically dependent on member countries to go along.  It doesn’t have a military or police force, it doesn’t have a police force.  It doesn’t have the legal right to put boots on the ground to arrest war criminals and instead must depend on the countries to volunteer to abide by the treaty or resolution.  If Trump were accused of war crimes and was supposed to stand trial in The Hague, so what?  The USA is not going to agree to let a sitting president be tried in an international criminal court, no military is going to volunteer for the suicide mission of trying to defeat the USA military to arrest him.  And other treaties are on the same honor system.  We have the Paris Treaty on Climate Change, right.  But countries face  no actual penalties for not keeping to their carbon limits.  That’s the same international body that’s supposed to police the AI treaties when countries have trillions on the line if they win the race.  The first to create a human level AGI has enormous power and influence and can basically print money.  It’s worth trillions, conservatively in GDP.  It means military superiority.  No one is going to even pretend to follow the treaty if it even exists.  The only use of that treaty is to try to trick other countries into slowing down so you can catch up or pull ahead.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for September 18, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think, as I said above, or at least hinted at, is that fast travel really only becomes attractive if getting there is basically a throwaway experience.  If I can walk between towns and nothing happens and I experience no problems or dangers, it’s not worth spending time doing that.  Skyrim’s slow travel was boring mostly because unless you made a point of going out and looking for something, you really never had to do much more than smack some wolves or low level bandits along the way.  And the environment itself wasn’t a danger.  You didn have to eat, your weapons didn’t dull or break, and even in blizzard conditions, you didn’t freeze to death (there is a survival mod that adds such things). Making meaningless travel take longer doesn’t help.  Making it difficult enough that you’re glad you finally made it to safety helps a lot.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 14, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Or the Louisiana purchase.  St, Louis never voted to leave France.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 14, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I don’t think full independence of an island in a strategic location and that has oil and other minerals is possible.  The island is too sparsely populated to make a real go at defending itself.  Autonomy within another country is probably the best option for them


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for September 18, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I like the concept, but I think probably the best way to make it work is to make the environment itself dangerous.


Just for an example, imagine a space based game.  You’d have to worry about resources, crew morale, environmental hazards like radiation or asteroids or gravity wells or something.  And that makes the “boring” bits a lot more intriguing.  You don’t just travel, you have to plan the trip knowing that if you run out of food you starve, if you break a critical system, you can’t make it, and if you run out of laser battery power or missiles even a weak attack will kill you.  So now, instead of traveling being just a boring trip to the exciting parts, traveling is the excitement and planets and star bases feel like oases in a dangerous world.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 14, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It depends on the group.  I would think that it’s a lot more difficult with a group like Hamas with a stated goal of ethnic cleansing Jews out of the Levant than it is with some other groups.  Once a group decides that killing and genocide are on the table, it’s hard to say “they have a point about X” while not condoning all the negative things they want to do.  The Autobahn might be a good idea, but it’s kinda hard to simply take that one good thing and ignore the terrible things that are more central to the group.  Saying I supposed that group that wants to kill the Jews but I don’t want to kill the Jews is incoherent.  I take it more as “I am fine with that outcome, but I don’t want to be caught saying it.”


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 14, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
If you have three independent AIs do the numbers and they match, they’re likely right.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 14, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Also one of the things the Yuddites seem incapable of doing is figuring out that superintelligence does not mean omnipotence. The laws of physics will still work and some other too. Internet is trivial to be made more secure, not every infrastructure needs to be connected to it anyway.




Anti-Yuddites Don’t understand that you don’t need omnipotence to do major damage here.  AI is probably, if so directed, perfectly capable of taking down the banking system.  And since few people have cash on hand and governments could not produce that much cash quickly, you could easily destroy the global economy that way.  Most people would be ruined if their bank accounts were deleted, and im not convinced hard copies of that data even exist.  You can probably easily assume the same of most infrastructure which isn’t up to 2000s standards of two factors or even strong passwords.  So you could direct AI to take out power grids, water treatment plants, nuclear power plants, and traffic lights.  That doesn’t require even much intelligence, but it certainly doesn’t require omnipotence either.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for September 18, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think most of that is on purpose.  The German (or in some cases Dutch) is deliberate as if you train the dog in English, the perp could easily give commands in English that the dog would understand.  As a bonus it can’t be confused by other English chatter.  The dog isn’t listening for the English words “no” “down” or “stop”, all of which a person might shout when a dog is running at them ready to attack.  They listen for “nein” and “fuss”.  And having the dog trained to obey anyone on scene is likewise a problem as you don’t want crooks to be able to simply Duolingo some German and tell your police dog to go away.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 14, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
All holidays are technically made up, and most actual Irish are rather bemused by the holiday as they see it as more of a thanksgiving kind of holiday rather than a “get drunk off your arse on green beer” holiday.  It’s probably not controversial anymore mostly because who doesn’t want to cut loose and get drunk on a saint’s day?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 14, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
He dressed as a literal Jewish caricature and saying that Israel existing is an occupation.  There’s nothing subtle about his opinion.  If I wrote a song about Trump being fascist and performed it dressed as a redneck in a MAGA hat after saying “Trump is evil” I don’t think it could be seen as a dog whistle.  Its not a secret.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 14, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The problem is that essentially there’s little chance that there’s a limit to the complexity that AI can handle.  It’s not just a calculator, it can do all kinds of data analytics and so on.  That’s the issue of saying that “maybe the people will just do something else” is that we’re talking about a general intelligence that can learn to do the next jobs created — probably before you can set up a training program to teach a human to do that job.  It takes 4 years of school to make an accountant.  It’s probably a lot less time to give the LLM training data and have it learn to do those tasks.  And that’s true for a lot of tasks.  Actuarial skills are basically “find patterns in data”.  X-ray and diagnostic imaging is the same thing, but with images.  So we’re going to have a problem simply because any newer, more complex job enabled by people using AI can be done by AI probably before you can teach a human to do them.  Then that enables more work, except that AI can do that work too, and probably the next set to infinity.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 14, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Well, not really, at least not in my view.  Non-political used to be the default on almost everything.  Stores didn’t go out of their way to support political causes, made up political holidays, or anything along those lines.  Sports used to be just games, music used to be just entertainment and movies were just movies.  There wasn’t a need to trumpet your opinions on stage or curate your stock of items in a store.  You didn’t have to post signage Celebrating gay, trans, obscure religious holidays, or racial history months.  It was … just a store.  Just songs.  Just a story.  Just baseball.  And it wasn’t alienating to political people, it was creating a space where people could be together with people who they might disagree with politically.  Where they didn’t have to be on guard lest someone find out they were political heretics.  You can’t even just go to work and just work without the need to be careful about what you say out loud or what you refrain from saying that reveals you as a heretic.  It doesn’t have to be that way.  It wasn’t always that way, in fact for much of American history, politics wasn’t even discussed in public.  You just didn’t know how someone voted or their beliefs.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 14, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Well yes, but the Amish and the Hasidism have huge barriers to entry.  To be Amish, you have to move to that region, get baptized into the Amish Mennonite Church, and agree to live by these rules.  There’s something of a language barrier as well.  Hasidism have similar barriers: Yiddish, becoming a Jew, and living by the rules of Hasidic law.  In principle, a lot of those things could be mapped onto a Christian commune system.  If you create a church owned commune you can require that the person join the church to live there, you can establish rules, you can vet both residents and tech to limit entryism.  But short of that, it’s going to be impossible to keep the community Christian long term.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 14, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I agree with that, but I’m more thinking about cultural organs as well.  Things like religion, particularly organized religion, the family, education, clubs, etc. are potentially points of resistance.  I see this as a weak point of the Benedict option.  Unless you’re living in a commune owned by a church and have no cell phones and filtered internet, the chances of keeping your community intact and fairly pure are small. Zoning laws, school testing requirements, nondiscrimination laws, and so on will conspire to force you to conform, and entryism will be tried.