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VoxelVexillologist

🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist

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joined 2022 September 04 18:24:54 UTC 

				
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VoxelVexillologist


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist

				
				
				

				

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					joined 2022 September 04 18:24:54 UTC
				


				
					

					
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				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 27, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


"what about shoes?"




Does the posted 10mph speed limit on the paved multi-use path apply to Sabastian Sawe out for a morning jog at 13mph?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 27, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think I recall variants of that meme in literature, although the initial examples that come to mind (The Great Gatsby, The Outsiders) are upper class boys gatekeeping the lower-class heartthrob from upper class girls.


Although I think it's also possible to see it as Chad smurfing the women: they go in assuming it's a fair matchmaking game, but he's hiding that he's got a separate account with lots of experience elsewhere, but is tired of losing all the time (the tyranny of PvP games: the average player loses half the time, and good matchmaking looks like everyone losing half the time).  The classic story (I'm sure there are literary examples, but none come to mind) would tell you that he wasn't after true love, just using her for a cheap thrill.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 27, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


law was like math 2+2 =4




While math like 2+2=4 is generally agreed upon, you might be surprised at the level of disagreement within a given math department.  It's probably lower than the law department, but it's not zero.  Specific examples would be the Axiom of Choice (either accepting it or not leads to unintuitive results like Banach-Tarski) or opinions on computer-assisted proofs like the Four Color Theorem, although I haven't been in a math department class since ChatGPT came out.  Even the analysis vs. topology folks come to somewhat different conclusions based on their chosen axioms.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 27, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


How do our civic norms survive?




I'd agree that a decent chunk of security is theater, but probably not all of it.  That theater (at least potentially) can make its watchers take better precautions: air travel is, in part, safer not due to "air marshalls" (have we been paying them to just, like, fly around for decades now?) but because passengers know that active resistance to hijackings is the right behavior.  Having to take off your shoes (they ended that, finally) is at least partly a reminder of that.


The theater also allows for fairly straightforward laundering of parallel construction, although most of the issues seem to be lone wolves and I haven't heard as many accounts of foiled plots as I might expect.


None of this is to imply that these measures are efficient in doing so (not the biggest fan of the TSA or anything), but I do think it'd be remiss to ignore the theater aspect of security theater as theater, not as direct security.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 27, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
We still don't have a tremendously convincing theory for how primitive primates managed to cross the Atlantic: their appearance in the fossil record is long after Africa and South America separated.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 20, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Aren't semi-auto shotguns known to be fairly unreliable? It's probably because they have to deal with a far wider range of scenarios than rifles (buckshot, bird shot, slugs, and a range of choke settings), but maybe with the correct settings it'd be reliable for some applications.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 20, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
From looking, Comrades and UTMB both have total prize purses at least on the magnitude of B-tier marathons.  But a couple big races in the whole sport doesn't justify whole training cycles and injury risk.


It's tempting to compare to gravel bike racing, though: at first it was a scrappy, self-driven sport where everyone nominally toed the same start lone, but it seems to be rapidly commercializing and a number of ex-ProTour riders have decided to retire there and keep riding at a high level.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 20, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Modern elite marathon shoes use carbon fibre plates and advanced springy foam




It is interesting that Nike got most of the press and coverage for these sorts of shoes for quite a while when they came out (see the sub-2 project with Kipchoge), but both sub-two marathons in London appear to have been run in Adidas shoes.




only east Africans can be elite long-distance runners




This seems to be at least somewhat true at the absolute peak of the field: the Ethiopians and Kenyans are quite dominant, but there are rather elite runners from other continents that get fairly close and win occasionally: Ryan Hall and Conner Mantz are not examples of slow, even if they weren't/aren't really dominant in the sport.  American women have done somewhat better than the men, too (probably thanks to Title IX increasing women's athletic scholarships and development opportunities):  Molly Seidel placed third in the Tokyo Olympics Marathon, and Des Linden won Boston in 2018 (the men's winner that year was Japanese!).


It's also at least interesting that trail and ultra running is not (currently) dominated by Kenyans and Ethiopians, but that may be a function of smaller prize purses and career opportunities.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 20, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'll observe that the history of Christendom has no shortage of examples of both types of this behavior here: it's not like rank hypocrisy is a modern invention.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 20, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


running his church in Manhattan in the 1990s and 2000s and raising the kinds of objections he got constantly from New Yorkers who engaged with him and more traditional Christianity in that context




I feel like the older I get the more evidence I have that religion (and sadly, bigotry, although I'm not going to comment on the relationship between those) are a kind of zero-sum quantity in human nature.  We can recognize them when we see them, and make efforts to move away from them, but those are doomed to just ooze out in other, often less well-understood places.  New Atheism thought it had defeated God, but it really just built its own idols and called them something else.  I don't think years of progressive anti-racism activism has managed any broader changes than merely changing the acceptable set targets of bigotry (in "proper" circles) in the modern era (in: Jews and rural white people, out: everyone on the "progress" flag).


And I say this as someone generally neutral on religion:  I have my own beliefs I'm content with, and I'm happy to let-live with reasonably wide bounds on others'.  And I find racism and bigotry generally to be pretty abhorrent and I'd love for there to be less of it in the world.  I'm just not sure how to actually fix human tribalism and it's downstream failures.  But I'm open to suggestions.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 20, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think existing laws as applied to corporate insiders writing the quarterly reports before publishing and to soldiers and government employees about revealing sensitive/classified information are probably defensible, although modern times may require some extra head-knocking training that specific types of transactions like these fit the description.  I bet this guy had to sit through a training about not leaking classified performance stats on the WarThunder forums.


As for applying the laws to our representatives, that sounds IMO like a good idea, but we'd have to convince them to vote on doing so (or use the amendment process, perhaps).


For bonus points, consider the French guy who found some of the temperature sensors used for city weather predictions markets and started betting on them before applying localized heat.  Is that "insider trading"?  It seems at least adjacent.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 20, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


degrades ... readiness




This is true in the short term with stockpiles and deferred maintenance, but long term (12+ months, at least) is less clear if investments are made in production rates and improved tactics and technology.  For sufficiently large conflicts, day zero stockpiles are less a deciding factor than production and distribution rates.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 20, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Tokyo, one of the best big cities in the world is filled with apartments




Honestly, my takeaway when I visited, expecting an unending sea of apartments was that I was surprised at how many freestanding (small footprint) single family houses Tokyo has.  They exist within walking distance of even the densest city centers.  Plenty of them only slightly larger in footprint than the single car garage they stand on top of.


Also lots of small multi-family houses, seemingly where a single small-footprint house was presumably replaced with a five story (ish) walkup.


Tokyo is constructed very differently from European Metro centers, and both are quite different from American ones.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 20, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It's not that unusual: Assange was charged in the Eastern District of Virginia, despite never having touched US soil.  Kim Dotcom never did either, and was also charged in Virginia.  I don't think this is a particularly uncommon fact pattern, and also shows up in enforcing international sanctions regimes.


And even when the fact pattern supports a locus within a specific district, I think there are very real questions about whether Virginians, and New Yorkers are uniquely qualified to decide "[defrauding/attempting to overthrow/saying mean words about] the Federal government" sorts of cases even if the office in question physically sits there.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 20, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Have you read the WWII CIA sabotage manual?  Starting on page 28 sounds a lot like what you're suggesting.  Of course, it's meant to plausibly sound like normal organizational issues.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 20, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Sure, but plenty of crimes with ambiguous jurisdiction, especially international ones, are consistently tried in NY or DC.  What did Maduro do in New York, specifically, that justifies a New York jury deciding his fate?  Plenty of SDNY press releases include "across the United States".


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 20, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Is there a reason a state should generally allow private actors to play "undercover informant"?  Citizens aren't generally encouraged to start writing dossiers on each other even if they did say they were going to turn them over to law enforcement.  Doubly so for not-even-illegal activities, some of which are constitutionally protected.


Seems at least arguably a road to privatized secret police, although I'd steelman the reverse by saying that Target should be allowed to have a loss-prevention department and take evidence to the real police.  Open to other thoughts on the principles here, though.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 20, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The outsized sway of DC and NY juries on federal law enforcement has seemed like a viable opportunity for reform, but I haven't seen any political operatives (conservative, presumably) actually talking about it.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 20, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
If they're not all aware of each other's status, that just looks like an earnest Klan meeting.  Didn't it come out that a majority (or near majority) of the Malheur occupiers were informants, including some of the leaders?


Honestly, some required coordination of this sort of thing might make some sense, but I'm sure it's a confidentiality risk to investigations.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 20, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Does that imply as strong of a correlation between the two incomes of a two-income household as it seems at first glance?  Something like "the average 1% individual earner is married to a top 5% individual earner or higher" seems like it would follow unless the distributions are particularly oddly shaped.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 20, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Everyone always talks about "Medicare for all", but "Medicaid for all" is probably more achievable: people with existing insurance options probably aren't going to drop it en masse because it's definitely a downgrade in provider selection (read: quality) and availability.  Heck, more than half of Medicare beneficiaries now opt to use those dastardly insurance companies as intermediaries rather than traditional Medicare.


But I haven't tried to figure out the costs of doing this, this post is mostly an observation that the two nominally-similar services have different valences with the nation and politicians.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 20, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The VRA and related court precedent demands a mutually-contradictory set of requirements on drawing districts.  That Gordion knot is maybe going to be (partially?) untied by the current Louisiana case.


Although my personal thinking is that eliminating geographic districting in favor of something more like slate-of-candidates parliamentary systems is probably the cleanest of the available options.  None are perfect, though.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 20, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I have a corner of the extended family that includes a man who, after his kids were grown, divorced his wife and remarried someone slightly older than his kids and had a full second family.  They are nice folks that clearly love each other and I like them, but I can tell it's been rough on them in various ways due to the age gap: the dad hit (practical) retirement age while the youngest kids (one with special needs) were still in middle school, and I know the wife has had to start working, presumably to close the budget.  I know she's been having to take care of him (now in his 80s) physically too since before the last kid left the house, and I can't help but occasionally think about how she's actuarially likely to be widowed in maybe her early 60s, and how she'll handle that long-term.


Nothing against them personally, but I think they'd have been happier overall if they were closer to the same age and met earlier.  I wish them well, though.  Life throws things like that at you sometimes.  I hope it goes well for the GP here, too.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 20, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


the power of Holocaust as a story is weakening




When I was a kid, the Holocaust was still in living memory enough that tattooed survivors were showing up to school classrooms to tell their personal stories.  At the time, the last WWII vets were retiring and still alive to tell their stories.  The entire era there is passing out of living memory and I suppose it isn't surprising that the emotional and political valence of those events is changing as the torch is passed.


I don't think it was ever possible to maintain that story forever: it's hard to sell multigenerational grievances generally, and worse when the aggrieved party seems to be doing "mostly fine, actually" (opinions may vary) in the present.


But I do look at these changing attitudes and wonder what will happen in the next decades as other traumas fade in the collective memory.  We're already seeing politicians first elected during the civil rights movement dying in office in their 80s, for example, and Vietnam veterans aren't as able to get out and protest as numerously as they used to.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 20, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


blacklivesmatter




Sometimes it amazes me that the BLM crowd is so content to throw their weight behind the Palestine crowd, elements of which are also funding actual genocides of Black people in Sudan and Nigeria.  But the self-centered-ness of the political activist class isn't that surprising, I guess.