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WandererintheWilderness


				

				

				

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WandererintheWilderness


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				

				
				
				

				

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					joined 2025 January 20 21:00:16 UTC
				


				
					

					
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				Chesterton's Pill
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Nor are they necessary, we have medical regulators and legislation to cover professional ethics, and their authority supersedes the oath.




Perhaps. I think I'm with Scott in believing that there is important, difficult-to-replicate social power in the solemnity of a time-honored oath, as distinct from the bureaucratic fuss of laws and guidelines. It's easier for an overconfident doctor to think his confidence in his personal judgement should embolden him to voerrule the letter of Subsection 7B of Amendment Fifteen to the O.V.E.R.L.O.N.G.A.C.R.O.N.Y.M. guidelines for the state of New Guernsey, than to tell himself that his confidence in his personal judgment should embolden him to overrule the sacred internationally-recognized pledge that all western doctors have taken since before the birth of Christ.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 9, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Define "converted". I think jihadis are generally gunning for a world where infidels are made to mouth along to Muslim prayers and follow shariah law; I don't think most actually care whether the infidels come to really, truly accept Allah into their innermost hearts, or at least, even if they think that on the margin this would be preferable to forced worship, I don't think they expect to ever get that far. Thus the goal qua desired-endgame-worldstate is "a world in which some people are forced to worship against their will", which is an evil thing to want regardless of how you get there. Perhaps our disagreement stems from my thinking of the "goal" as the "once you reach this step, stop" endpoint in the decision tree, while you restrict the "goal" to "the specific features of that worldstate that make it desirable"?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Chesterton's Pill
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Oh, that shouldn't be taken at face value, and there's some kind of implicit utilitarian calculus involved?




I would argue that it should instead be understood under an informed-consent framework, where it's only "harm" if informed consent is violated. You still need asterisks for treating unconscious patients first on the assumption that they'll retroactively consent to it afterwards, but it at least preserves "harm" as something which ideally shouldn't be happening at all and should always be minimized, rather than something which is sometimes actively necessary.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 9, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


We were talking about the goals themselves being evil, you shifted the goalposts to the means of achieving the goals.




I think of "achieve a world in which all infidels have been forcibly converted or killed" as a goal, which armchair jihadis can believe in whether or not they personally do anything violent to bring it about. In any case, I did say that all of this forced-conversion stuff was simply the cherry on top of much of shariah law already being evil, ie all the misogyny and killing and corporal punishment.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Chesterton's Pill
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The following meant as a genuine question to a professional, not a combative gotcha:




My colleague argued against ODD because the kid was perfectly well behaved in the clinic. I countered that ODD typically manifests at home first, and is usually restricted to familiar adults.




Of all diagnoses that look like they're made up, ODD is the one that has always sounded the most outrageously made-up to me. What do you mean, "not obeying your parents" is classified as a mental illness? Activists who claim that the mental healthcare system is just a tool of state oppression usually come across as hopeless idealists who've never had a schizophrenic try to chew their face off, or indeed, never been a mortified schizophrenic returning to sanity after a try-to-chew-people's-faces-off episode. But on the face of it, the existence of ODD as a condition real doctors take seriously seems like exactly what you would expect if their model of psychiatry was correct. It looks so ludicrously like a gerrymandered way for parents and medical professionals to pathologize and thus de-legitimize the behavior of a lucid but uncooperative patient, for their own convenience or indeed revenge.


So I guess what I'm asking is: do you think a real case of ODD looks more like your Bangladeshi young man who occasionally flips out and bites his family members for no reason, while getting along with them the rest of the time and having no coherent complaint against them? Is that what it's supposed to look like, and thus, the reason why non-obviously-corrupt doctors take it seriously as a diagnosis? It doesn't sound like it, since you weren't sure about the diagnosis in this case. But if not, what is a perfect platonic case of ODD supposed to look like, and how do you distinguish it from a perfectly sane kid who dislikes their authority figures (or authority figures in general)?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 9, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Not every religion teaches that humans should submit totally to the will of the divine in the way fundamentalist Islam teaches. Even among faiths whose teachings could be phrased this way, it is by no means a majority who hold that it is acceptable or desirable to force such submission at the point of a sword, or that people who won't convert should, all else being equal, be killed rather than allowed to live outside the faith, which I would define as the key beliefs that mark a "jihadi".


(I think it's, empirically, entirely possible to be a Muslim without being a jihadi, so I don't mean to be condemning "every Muslim" - though it does require taking certain liberties with the text of the Quran which I don't think any major Muslim authorities would publicly endorse.)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 9, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I don't think this is the same kind of "picking and choosing". Sure, not all the aims of jihadis and Nazis are evil, but all jihadis and Nazis pursue at least some evil aims - whereas many (most?) environmentalists have wholly good aims. Thus any given jihadi or Nazi, even if they're non-violent, has some amount of evil intent, while the same is not true of a given non-violent environmentalist.


(And anyway, insofar as "bringing humanity to the light of Allah" is ultimately a euphemism for "enslaving humanity to the tyrannical will of a supernatural being" I would consider that an evil aim in itself, even before the specific of shariah law are taken into account.)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 9, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Jihadis and Nazis, whether non-violent or violent, are pursuing evil aims. At least some environmentalists are pursuing good aims.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 9, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
They needn't believe that it's risk-free; they simply think that the point of protests is to intimidate and shame the bad guys into retreating by showing how many people stand against them. This can involve knowing there's a risk of being shot, and still be a very different mindset of "the point of protests is to create martyrs".


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 9, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


and besides, why did you say [the drugs] had a completely different purpose less than five minutes ago?




Well, maybe his delusion is that his zombieness is obvious - so that he thought self_made_human and the other medical stuff were only trying to be polite, or indeed gaslight him for some nefarious purpose, when insisting that as far as they could tell he was a normal living man with psychosis.


So his reasoning could have been: "these guys want me to take these drugs, and they say it's to cure my psychosis. but I'm obviously a zombie. they don't want to acknowledge it, but they can see it and smell it plain as day. so these drugs can't be for what they say they're for, and I should refuse them. oh wait! you say they're just to make my rotting flesh less stinky? that's what you were too polite to mention? riiight, I see why you tried to lie to me about 'psychosis', but no need to spare my feelings, I can face facts. gimme the pills."


Anyway, there's a lot of breadth in "regular people who believe things". They're not like rational people who believe things, but lots of "regular" people believe utter nonsense for irrational reasons.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 9, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
To steelman, there could well be principled AI users who would use LLMs if it was allowed, but will be stopped from trying to covertly do so if they know it's against the rules, whether or not there's an actual enforcement mechanism - whether by their own conscience because they don't want to be knowingly circumventing a rule, or out of pique because they're pro-AI and they don't want to contribute to a forum with a "We Don't Like Your Kind In Here" sign nailed to the door. So I do think an outspoken "No LLM Posts, Pleas" rule can work to reduce the number of LLM posts even if the mods do nothing to actively enforce it. (Whether it reduces it by a useful amount is another question.)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 9, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
As others in the thread have noted, the specific phrase "late stage" is reminiscent of "late stage cancer". I think people who use it in the absolute rather than the relative sense are thinking of it this way, and therefore, are not hopefuls looking forward to a revolution, but doomers who anticipate that runaway capitalism will literally kill the planet - or at least Civilization As We Know It - in the foreseeable future.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 9, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Worse physical health due to a sedentary lifestyle. Vitamin D deficiency when too little time is spent outside




I did say I granted you "worsening health from lack of physical activity".




Worse social skills and fewer friends




Not necessarily a negative in and of itself, except in the trivial sense whee spending your time on one hobby will prevent you from getting very good at another. If people prefer television - and/or online interaction - to having real-life friends, that might genuinely be what makes them happy! It's not the case that hanging out IRL is inherently preferable to watching TV and people only do otherwise because TV hacks the addiction centers in their brain, it all depends on the quality of television and the quality of friends. Lack of socialization might be a problem for society, but it's not inherently a problem for the individual.




being constantly bombarded with viral posts and articles that are often emotionally charged, leading to compassion fatigue




Well, I was mostly talking about fiction - TV binging, gaming, even reading novels or comics - as distinct from real-world-politics-oriented social media. That's what I took you to be talking about as per "losing your life to escapism"; I will more readily call doomscrolling an inherently negative experience, but it seems kind of the opposite of escapism.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 9, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I believe this has very real negative impacts on people that result in negative consequences for society.




Are you sure you don't mean it the other way around? Most of your arguments are examples of negative externalities for society, not of things that are primarily negative for the individual. I'll grant you worsening health from lack of physical activity, but what else? At the end of the day, I think if you're concerned about the consequences of excess of a pleasurable activity on society, you should bite the bullet that what you really care about is society, and you would support moderating it even if it genuinely made the individual happy with no personal downsides. The fact that staying in front of the TV all day turns you into a diabetic couch potato is incidental; you would still see negative effects on society if people were spending too much time on a more photogenic, healthy or #inspirational hobby, just because they'd be doing that when they could be working, raising families, etc.


And looked at it this way, I think it becomes important to emphasize that human beings are not ants. Pleasurable leisure pursuits are not some annoying cost-sink that screws up functioning societies, they're what a functioning society exists to provide for its citizens. The central trade-off of civilization is the question of how much painful drudge-work we are willing to undertake today so as to buy ourselves leisure time tomorrow. Of course, maybe we're currently living beyond our means in this sense - maybe the amount of fun TV-watching we're cashing in is outstripping our ability to maintain that standard of living. But in and of itself, four hours of leisure out of twenty-four don't seem trivially unsustainable.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think the objection here is to the implications of the phrase "coaching him on how to lobby the president for action", insofar as lobbying implies at best trying to browbeat your target into action by being louder and more persistent than the other lobbyists, and at worst, disingenuous persuasion techniques bordering on deceit. In the strongest sense of the word, "lobbying" the POTUS is not only different from seeking "convince" him, but, arguably, the exact opposite.


Of course, this is making a lot out of a word choice that's not actually a direct quote as far as I can tell.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Skibboleth did not actually say that he thought gutting the executive would be easy, or that it is on the Dems' agenda. He said that it needs to be done. It may very well be that no one will do the necessary thing, but it's still necessary.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


We need every single person to learn science? The 95% of people who will never use the periodic table must spend a year memorizing it? There’s not a better way to select the scientifically-inclined at an early age, like by IQ and interest?




I think making anyone memorize the periodic table is a bit silly in the age of pocket supercomputersphones, and I'm not at all against the idea of teaching more practical/homemaking skills in schools - but the point of teaching everyone science is not solely to benefit those who will grow up to be scientists. It's not supposed to be "a way to select the scientifically-inclined at an early age", so even if I have my own misgivings about the current system, that's not a fair criterion to judge it by.


As I see it, teaching science to everybody including the kids who are not in a million years going to go into science has two main purposes, benefiting both the individuals themselves and society as a whole.


Firstly, it serves to make sure that ~all citizens have a basically sane idea of how the world works - you need laymen to have a layman's understanding of science to develop the intuition that science makes sense even if the specifics go over their heads, lest they think that any nerd spouting sufficiently complex and formal-sounding jargon, whether he's a scientist or an ayatollah, should be listened to just the same. Or indeed, lest they start thinking that both can be safely ignored because it's all Greek to them either way. If you don't teach girls basic science, what you're going to get is a whole lot more superstitious, gullible women who believe in astrology and homeopathy and the most bone-headed religious bullshit you can imagine. (Ditto "low-IQ boys".) The world can barely function with the current levels, the last thing we need is to stop vaccinating idiots against woo.


Secondly, it trains kids to actually use their heads and work. Exercises that involve actual reasoning rather than rote memorization are best, but even with the latter, whether they're memorizing the periodic table or the phonebook, they're at least exercising their long-term memory, attention span, and ability to just sit down with boring unpleasant work for hours and focus. That's not nothing, particularly in the age of ipad babies. And if we're going to give them boring learning exercises for the overall betterment of their intellects, we might as well make them learn boring true things like science rather than go with the phonebook.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Conspicuously missing in your analysis is the possibility that the emotional distance from not having these conversations causes the relationship to decay. I would submit that insufficient communication is likelier to cause two people to fall out of love with each other than repeated communication that multiplies the opportunities for minor annoyances and disagreements to build up, even if I agree the latter can happen.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
There's a difference between "wants to listen to how their day went" and "wants to know how their day went". I interpreted the hypothetical as a wife who's happy to listen if you need to vent, not one who will necessarily ask if you'd rather talk about something else.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
If you're being this maximally cynical and high-level, then trying to analyze political ideologies at all, as more than a red flag and a blue flag waved furiously by two warring, unprincipled tribes, loses all meaning. We were talking about the extent to which fascism as a system can be defined as an offshoot of communism, and it seems to me that this is a topic of conversation that necessitates focus on the theoretical systems themselves. If ideologies don't matter then the proper definition of fascism as an ideology doesn't matter either.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think People's Front of Judea jokes make sense with regards to splitting hairs about who's a communist vs a socialist vs a trotskyist and so on, but your proper anarchists are not going to be interchangeable with the above. Certainly, they're not going to be relevantly interchangeable with them when it comes to whether they'd endorse "fascism is basically just a mutant strain of communism".


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
That issue is somewhat confused by postmodernism and death-of-the-author being associated with left-wing intellectual discourse, even though it's also left-wing to hate on AI for lacking soul. It's not quite irreconcilable - you can say, for example, that the fun thing about experiencing art is trying to guess what the author meant, so that the game is equally spoiled by rigid adherence to factually documented authorial intent or by the knowledge that the content was spat out by a machine and there is no 'there' there to guess at. But it's an interesting paradox.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


and further, that "fascism" is universally and obviously "evil" in some incontestable normative sense (also proven through the application of rationality, I guess?)




The steelman of this step in the reasoning is the idea of slippery slopes and logical endpoints. The claim is that any fascistic system of government will inevitably trend towards uncontroversially evil policies like mass murder because those are the natural extrapolations of its founding principles, even if the initial proponents don't intend to go that far. So maybe moderate fascism is benign or even beneficial in the short term, but if you elect a moderate fascist, there is a serious risk that he will gradually turn into a full-blooded fascist dictator - perhaps because he was always more ruthless than he made himself appear, perhaps just because power corrupts - simply because that's the result of putting his money where his mouth is.


Mark that I present this as a steelman, not something I claim is the belief of everyone who uses Trump-is-a-fascist rhetoric. But I do think it's a relatively mainstream understanding of why it's meant to be such a devastating blow to call him a fascist, given the almost voyeuristic lust for a flashpoint they can describe as a mask-off moment, crossing the Rubicon, etc. Hence, I don't think it's quite as simple as a case of Scott's "Worst Argument in the World", which is what the "Magic Word" complaint reduces to. The claim is not just "Trump fits this technical definition of a fascist, the most famous fascist regimes were horribly evil, therefore you must shun Trump", but "Trump fits this technical definition of a fascist, the most famous fascist regimes were horribly evil, therefore you shouldn't be fooled by current-Trump's relative benign-ness: he will predictably get exponentially eviler if he continues along the current trend".


Of course, one might fairly ask if this is uniquely true of fascism, or if any political ideology taken to "its logical endpoint" can turn into an evil dictatorship.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Hardly the only people. There are plenty of leftists with an interest in condemning right-wing figures as fascists who would also regard themselves as being against communism - from mainstream Dems who don't even go as far as calling themselves socialists or anti-capitalists, to radical leftists of a more libertarian-adjacent, anarchist bent.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


You're gilding the past a bit




I think you're misunderstanding OP. In the context of the paragraph, it seems clear to me that "at one point they were admirable titans of industry" means "at one point current billionaires seemed like admirable titans of industry to me", not "I currently think that billionaires actually used to be admirable titans of industry back in the day".