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				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


The first impression is he’s some sort of Muslim Brotherhood type.




Are we playing five degrees of separation here? I have not seen credible claims that he is personally a member. His mother was reportedly active in the Egyptian MB (EMB, henceforth) in the 1970s, and reportedly he defended a friend who was imprisoned for funding the EMB in 2021.


Now, to be frank, I think the goal of the EMB -- making Egypt more Islamic -- is a shitty idea, for pretty much the same reasons why I hold that trying to make the Western world more Christian is a shitty idea. Still, their idea of accomplishing this seems to be through competing in the marketplace of ideas and getting elected, and this is a meta-strategy I generally like. The EMB was briefly in power in 2013, and sure some of the stuff they did (like declaring themselves beyond the courts) seems shady as hell. In any case, things went as they usually do and a military coup saw them disposed from power and outlawed.


Reading between the lines of my Claude conversation, I would think of them like Erdogan in Turkey -- certainly not gold-star democrats, but also not Daesh. My baseline expectation for political movements in the ME is just not very high, most governments there are Problematic in one way or another. On the other side of the Red Sea, there are plenty of polities which are at least as theocratic as anything the EMB envisions while also making zero pretense to democracy. From where I stand, it is not immediately obvious that a military dictatorship is preferable to some democratic rule by an elected religious-leaning party.


The other problem with the EMB is that the Palestine chapter of the MB is Hamas, whose evilness I will not dispute. Trump alleges that the EMB has helped Hamas with recruiting. So far, I have seen little evidence why I should give this claim more credit than the claims his administration makes about the causes of autism. I mean, it is not exactly secret who besides Iran was funding Hamas. The reason why the EMB is designated a terrorist organization an Qatar is not seems simply because the former was in no position to gift president Trump a new airplane.


So the story in total is something like "Abdul El-Sayed -> has a mother who was/is in the -> Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood -> whose members have allegedly aided -> Hamas." Clearly that makes him more dangerous than Osama bin Laden.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I'm sympathetic to Jonah Goldberg's argument in this podcast, that is, that El-Sayed wants the Democrats to be a straightforward anti-Israel party.




To be fair, at the moment the Democrats, like the Republicans, are a straightforward pro-Israel party. Most state governors would probably be thrilled to get half the per-capita resources from the USG the US spends on propping up Israel even without the ability to also drag the US into wars for their benefits. Most US states might even spend a smaller fraction of comparable federal resources on killing people.


We know how it looks if the US is 'anti-$COUNTRY'. They find themselves internationally isolated, their nuclear facilities get bombed, their leaders get assassinated or kidnapped, their military (and sometimes educational) facilities get annihilated, their civilian infrastructure destroyed, Trump calls them bad names on Twitter.


For Israel, that is currently far outside of the Overton window, which is a good thing, because most of these tactics are net-negative for global utility no matter who is on the receiving end.


What is reasonable is unfriendly neutrality. "We think your government is doing bad things, thus we might do some trading with you but will not sell you weapons or go out of our way to protect your interests." If Israel can persuade Gulf monarchies to shoot down incoming missiles for them, good for them, otherwise, bombing the shit out of each other seems to be a quaint ME custom which us Westerners can simply not get, it would be disrespectful to their religions interfere on one side or another.




But he is, I think, basically a middle-class western Muslim who attributes a disproportionate level of importance of Israel, and it has become organising for his thoughts in a way that it is not for other people.




The problem is that Israel and AIPAC clearly have an outsized effect on US politics. If someone told me that the Uzbek or Peruvians were largely responsible for US foreign policy, they would have a hard time providing evidence for that. With Israel, the claim that they do not have a higher influence than Uzbekistan on US policy is plainly absurd.


The real failure mode is that people over-update on the evidence, and it becomes a lens through which all of the world is perceived. If you have just learned about the Van-der-Waals force and are excited about it, you might start to attribute all sorts of effects to it which are vaguely explainable by it but are in actuality unrelated to it. Similar things happen with all sorts of lenses: you can probably discover something worthwhile about international politics by looking at it from the perspective of gender relations, but if you are unable to take off the gender lenses, you will be blind to a zillion explanations which have nothing to do with gender.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
While I think the world gets a bit better every time a founder of some evil tech company goes up in a fireball, karmaic retribution is simply not reliable or selective enough to rely upon, and we should instead use well-scaling social tech (e.g. legislative and judicial) to align corporations.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Seems like nothing burger to me. You can probably get my identity by putting it into a LLM and tracing for linguistic patterns.




This seems to be completely orthogonal to the tech described here? This one is not about doxxing smut authors, it is about doxxing smut readers. Most website UIs do not feature enough navigation elements using natural language to make IDing individuals based on their language use feasible.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


This is the price that we pay for freedom. Nothing like this would be possible in Europe under the GDPR.




As a German, I am happy to give up my god-given right to collect any data of my neighbor if in turn it constrains others (realistically big tech) from tracking me.


(My real pet peeve with the GDPR is that unsolicited consent requests are terrible UX, and the sane default would be to tell websites that they have to use HTTP headers instead which the user can once configure in their browser. Oh, and IP addresses being personal data is also a bit silly. A sane compromise would be that you can keep your logfiles, but are not allowed to do data mining based on IP addresses.)


Generally, I am fine with conceptions of rights evolving alongside with tech, and privacy/data protection is one such right. I guess the US conception of rights is that because the founding fathers did not envision the tech to send messages into peoples brains, if the tech gets developed everyone has the natural right to spam other people with ads in their sleep. But at least you don't have to house soldiers!


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I will grant you that there are even some actually democratic states where this is the case. The CSU has ruled Bavaria since the current iteration of Germany. It probably helped that their economic policy was generally sound, so there was no economic pressure to replace them.


Still, I think in general it is better to be part of a 60% winning coalition than an 80% one. You already had a solid majority with 60%, but now you need to spend a quarter of your political capital on their stupid pet cause instead of your great cause.


I think this applies generally to coalition-building -- if you plan a bank heist, you do not want to bring along extra accomplices who do not increase the probability of success.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
While I am pro-choice, I feel that Roe v Wade was something of an original sin for the SCOTUS in the last century.  "Legislated from the bench" is not a minor flaw you can overcome if your cause is just righteous enough. I am sure it seemed like an amazing hack at the time, bypassing the consensus of the governed entirely and doing the right thing, but most people who make a Faustian bargain come to regret it eventually.


The saner approach would have been a federal law backed by the commerce clause. Sure it would have taken decades, been subject to attempts to revert or constrain it, and sure, you would have had to torture the commerce clause into shape to make it regulate abortions-as-a-commercial-service, but quite frankly the commerce clause has been tortured far worse in other decisions.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


It will lead to a permanent one party state.




No, it will not. Demographics and attitudes have changed before. For example, around 1861, the (Southern) Democratic Party was openly pro slavery, and a few years later that was simply no longer a majority-winning proposition, thus the Republican party ruled in perpetuity.


Not. Instead, what happened was that the Southern Democrats went from pro-slavery to merely horribly racist, which still won them elections. As attitudes changed, so changed the parties, because any party which does not try to be palatable to the median voter will generally not win elections (depending on gerrymendering, obviously).


If your model is e.g. that the Democrats will invite in zillions of Muslim third-worlders to bolster their rank, I would predict that at some point the woke leadership would clash with the immigrants over LGBT and women's rights, for example. For a Republican, campaigning on "should minors be allowed to get puberty blockers against the religious objections of their parents" would be an easy win.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
To be fair, there were also informal norms about judicial appointments and under what circumstances it was proper to block them in the Senate, but during the Bush years these norms started to break down and since then both parties have been happily ridding themselves of century-old norms to win the political fight of the day. The remaining survivor so far is the blue slip (effectively giving senators veto powers over appointments to their home state), but I am confident that is only a matter of time.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Or is it mainly, like, if they win the presidency in 2028 that things are gonna be bad?




Why would it be bad?


I mean, I do not dispute that there are generally election outcomes which are bad, even capital-B Bad. Hamas winning the 2006 elections in Gaza comes to mind. Nor is it the case that US elections can not be bad or even Bad for people. I for one would not tell people killed in this or that airstrike by Obama or Trump that their outcome is not bad. Or more centrally some kid in the global south who previously benefited from some cheap health interventions courtesy of USAID.


But my impression is that for the median US citizen (as well as for most citizens of the Western world, thankfully), the outcome of a US election is rarely good or bad but seems mostly meh. Sometimes you get abortion bans (which can be circumvented through going to another state, ideally permanently if you care about that kind of thing), or Obamacare, or more DEI or less DEI or an Iran deal or Iran bombed or a federal minimum wage or a relaxation of environmental standards or deported immigrants or whatever. Perhaps a few more kids die of measles or get prescribed puberty blockers. The price of gas might move up or down, some large bodies of water might change their official name.


What Trump's policy which you consider a resounding success would be threatened by the Dems taking over Congress? They could certainly put a stop to his tariffs, thus costing every American whatever check he had promised them again. They could put a stop to his Iran adventure, but that was well within the expected outcomes from the start. They might get rid of all the cuts on social services from his Big Beautiful Bill scheduled to take place after the mid-terms, but if the GOP had been serious about cutting expenses why did they postpone these?


Or do you think that this time the woke Democrats are finally getting around to establishing Sharia law and making gayness mandatory? Or abolishing private property?


The strongest argument I can think of would be that due to the rise of AISI, we are not living in normal, boring times but in a pivotal time for the future of our light cone. For example, the USG ASI alignment strategy seems to be that their president is very smart and thus can not possibly get outwitted by a rogue ASI. Under this premise, I agree that the US electorate picking someone who is less of a genius than Donald Trump might indeed spell disaster for mankind. Fortunately, I consider the premise so implausible on the face of it that I will not lose sleep over it.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 26, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Valid nitpick.


Also, Potato, potato.


For practical purposes of non-fantasy economic systems beyond Dunbar's number, it makes no difference if they are owned collectively by the population or by the state. If I  am digging holes in my back garden under the mistaken impression that there is gold to be found, I can insist all day long that this is just the exploratory phase and the proper gold mine will come once the assay is done, in practice I will end up with garden with a lot of holes in it (which will come handy for the mass graves though, to stretch my metaphor a bit).


I also think Marx was intentionally vague on these letter steps after the necessary but distasteful dictatorship of the proletariat. After all, our minds are toiling under the yoke of capitalism and class struggles, so we can not even hope to grasp the heights to which the human spirit could soar without these fetters. (All horseshit, obviously.)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 26, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Not to my knowledge. I think the FPTP voting system of the US makes for some pretty bizarre coalitions on both sides.


I do believe that the Republicans dominate around the "math with numbers in it is fake math for fake jobs" demographics (at least among the Whites), but will happily concede that this is just a part of the GOP coalition. There is the religious right, libertarians, rurals, blue-collar workers, billionaires, foreign policy hawks, anti-vaxxers, etc.


And the Democrats are the party of the urbanites, PMC, LGBT, racial minorities, wokes, college-educated, recent immigrants, etc. I am sure that some of these groups are on average less intelligent than some of the Republican demographics.


Nor do I believe that putting the stupid front and center has always been a GOP thing. In my mind, GWB, the leader of the free world under whose tenure various torture prisons of different levels of avowal were established was evil in a way Trump has so far failed to match, but despite countless memes to the contrary I do not believe that W was stupid himself or putting most of his focus on the stupid demographic.


However, I do believe that the MAGA version of the GOP is putting the stupid as their base demographic. This was Trump's appeal from the first primary. He is obviously less Christian than even I am. He is not rural, or had any foreign policy stance, or political convictions such as libertarianism.  No, his appeal was that the political establishment cried "Anyone but that buffoon" any time he was mentioned. He was the kid who managed to grab attention by taking a dump in the swimming pool. Any other candidate would have been done for when the "grab them by the pussy" thing got leaked. But him it hardly hurt because it was so on brand, nobody was under any illusions that he was not a sex pest. The more the establishment (both the parts which went to Epstein's island with him and the others) whined about how absolutely unacceptable this behavior was in a candidate, the greater his appeal.


In his first administration, his effect was mitigated because he was surrounded by normal Republicans and career bureaucrats, though he did go through quite some personnel. This time, it is no longer just him. Hegseth or RFK Jr seem to be his equal in being outrage bait rather than having any qualifications. In retrospect, I think Trump missed out on the obvious pick for education secretary, which is a field in which his performance of triggering the establishment has been lacking. Tucker Carlson appearing with Trump on stage announcing that henceforth, federal funding would be denied to any schools which teach "fake letter math" would have done to math teachers what RFK did to epidemiologists.


I can't comment on the long term effects of replacing all the policy wonks with guys whose main qualification is that the establishment goes "anyone but him". Perhaps his tariffs will bring the US to prosperity far beyond anything I can imagine. Perhaps Hegseth's testosterone-boosted warriors will outperform the somber, inclusive professionals of previous administrations on the battlefield. Perhaps RFK Jr will cure autism. More centrally, perhaps "nothing ever happens" will continue to hold.


Personally, I am still hoping that the Americans will learn that voting the pool-shitter class president is great for disgust-maxxing your teacher, but comes with some downsides which will only gradually reveal themselves during his tenure.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 26, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


The right-wing government didn't ignore that, they changed the rules so that their new appointments were valid. The court then recognized these new appointments as valid.




Did Poland not get into trouble with the EU over that? If president Newsom appoints 20 new justices to the SCOTUS in 2029, and then the SCOTUS decides 20-9 that he totally had the authority to do that, some constitutional scholars might have reservations about that ruling.


Now, it is of course possible that the EU is full of leftist bureaucrats who whine about the rule of law whenever an EU-skeptical government does anything. But this is not my general impression. Nor do I expect them to be particularly partisan, "Tusk gets to do whatever he wants because we like him" seems unlikely.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 26, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Communism is a political and economic system under which the means of production are under state ownership rather than private property. In the contemporary US, this is very much a minority position, I recon that the fraction of voters who want to abolish private businesses is about as large as the fraction which yearns for the reintroduction of feudalism -- both should poll about the Lizardman's constant.


Basically, when the left wants to regulate something about corporations, the right will surely cry "Communism". Not that the right is generally a very good champion of laissez-faire capitalism. There is a broad consensus that businesses need regulation, though there is disagreement on the amount and the particulars.


Mostly, the control the government has over corporations is not by virtue of ownership but because existing regulations have enough leeway in them that its agencies could just adopt a regulatory interpretation which will destroy their business model.


The Aryanization of TikTok last year is one such example of the power the state has over businesses. My understanding is that it was a bipartisan effort. Congress had decided that having the lion's share of short form videos rotting the brains of kids under control of the Chinese was a national security risk. So they passed a law to remedy that, and because Trump was in charge he managed to have have one of his allies take control of it, thereby ensuring that Red Chinese propaganda will not reach the impressionable minds of future generations.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 26, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


He is somewhat fine/normal most of the time but occasionally drops mind numbingly stupid thoughts or ideas that make me recoil with disbelief.




That would still make him top notch leadership material for his party. I think the current incumbent differs mostly from him in that Trump's brain would be unable to latch onto a thought like "symbolic math is fake" because it is a claim about reality which does not involve himself. Once you add a handle for his ego to grasp, my estimate is that Trump's brain would have no problems matching Carlson in unhingedness. "Democrats are using algebra to score political points" - "They are using their fake math to spread lies about me." "The Fields Medal is a prestigious award sometimes called the 'Nobel of mathematics'" - "Then Norway should award it to me, for my revolutionary work of doing math with letters which had my teachers in awe in 11th grade."


I mean, this is what happened when Trump somehow learned about the problem of AI alignment. His brain latched onto the intelligence part and decided that a machine which was his equal in cognitive ability was just as absurd as another human which was, thus trivially solving alignment. Having thus proven his superiority, he then graciously awarded the machines the mandatory label of "super intelligence".


Obviously with Trump nobody is surprised, this guy has been tweeting every brain-fart for decades, it is his whole brand. Statistically speaking, there should be some smart GOP leaders around, but likely they have the good sense to keep that embarrassing fact about themselves hidden rather than alienating their base.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 26, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


If Iceland did have such a programme, it obviously wouldn't be open to Euro-South Africans, because they are mostly Dutch and English rather than Icelandic.




I picked this metaphor on purpose. The Netherlands preferentially accepting Afrikaners in would not be quite as absurd.


On reflection, it more along the lines of some of the Breton and Welsh deciding that it is time for a resurgence of the Hallstatt culture and managing to turn most of Austria into a modern Celtic kingdom. This fits the picture better because there clearly is a cultural link between the ancient Celts and modern Celtic languages (while in my original metaphor there was no such link). Needless to say, I would be opposed to building such a Celtic ethnostate in Central Europe, and if one existed and engaged in further Celt-maxing and expansionism I would be happy to call them racist.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 26, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Under your definition, China is racist; Japan is racist; Liberia is racist; etc.


Agreed?




Fine by me.


I mean, I could nitpick and claim that considering previous citizenship of your parents irrespective of their particular ethnicity is less bad than simply deciding that you generally prefer your main ethnicity even if there is no particular link to your country in an applicants ancestry. I would certainly consider China more racist if their law was peculiar to Han Chinese rather than applying equally to Zhuang. Hoping that it would also apply to Uyghur would be beyond optimistic.


Another difference is how impactful the various return laws are. Poland or Ireland are traditionally seen as countries from which people emigrated. Not a lot of Americans either with or without Polish ancestry want to emigrate to Poland. By contrast, Israel has been heavily dependent on immigration since their law of return was passed. To a good approximation, everyone there is either a recent immigrant or an Arab (or possibly both).


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 26, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


But any anti-semitism they feel now will be trivial compared to what they experience when President AOC leads a Democratic trifecta.




While I am sure that there are cases of genuine antisemitism in the Democratic Party, I think that the median case of what gets called antisemitism is simply hostility or neutrality towards Israel.


There are two groups who claim that Israel and the Jews are one and the same: right wing Israelis and Neonazis (sometimes in personal union). They are wrong.


I think it is fair to suppose that the ~7 million Jews who are US citizens are staying in the US by choice rather than because they have not gotten around to buying plane tickets to Tel Aviv yet. If I had to speculate, I would say that their motive might be that murdering and getting murdered in some god-forsaken desert is probably not their idea of a good time. I know I would feel the same.


Do you think that president AOC will proceed to put them into camps, starting with Bernie Sanders? For that matter, do you think Bernie feels betrayed by the Democrats over their lack of support for Israel?


For mostly secular Ashkenazim, I think the left remains a reasonable option for politics. Sure, Jews are officially not considered a disadvantaged demographic on the woke totem pole, but neither are they tracked as a specific demographic, instead they are mostly considered white, which prevents a lot of headaches with regard to Ashkenazim being over-represented (due to HBD reasons). They have thrived in a multi-ethnic society for a long time, it seems not terrible unreasonable to suppose that they will continue to do so?


Donald Trump has been great for Netanyahu, but has he been great for the median Jew in New York? Did the tariffs boost her shop's revenue? Does she feel NY is safer from nuclear attacks by Iran? Is she happy about the immigration enforcement?


The culture war is a divide between the urban and the rural, blue-collar workers and white-collar workers. I do not think that most US Jews would naturally lean towards the red tribe.


--


My hope for a president AOC would be that the US-Israeli relations would become similar to the US-Uzbek relations. That instead of actively (or proactively) defending Israeli interests and selling them the latest military technology, the US would simply opt to treat them as yet another uninteresting country with a dubious human rights records. Let them buy their military tech from Russia or China. Slap them with trade sanctions if they are especially bad, ease the sanctions if they behave themselves for a while.


And no, this would not make the US any more antisemitic than their current foreign policy stance on Uzbekistan makes them anti-Turkish.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 26, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
How about exhibit A:




The Law of Return is an Israeli law, initially passed in 1950 and extended in 1970, giving all Jews, persons with at least one Jewish grandparent, and their spouses, legal rights to enter, reside in, and acquire citizenship of, the State of Israel.




I will grant you that it is a mixture of religious and ethnic discrimination (as you can lose your right if you or your grandparent converted to another religion), but this is not "disparate outcome racism" that the wokes like to whine about, but straightforward racial discrimination for the purpose of maintaining an ethnostate.


As a thought experiment, suppose that Iceland guaranteed white people from South Africa a path to become citizens, but not black people. Not through some proxy, but directly. You have two people both of whom apply to a visa, neither has been in Iceland or is likely to have ancestors who were in Iceland within 50 generations, and Iceland decides that it prefers one of them because if his ethnicity, because they want to maintain the "white race" in Iceland.


This Iceland would be about as central of an example of racist as you can be reasonably be. A government has a skin color palette or a DNA origin threshold and explicitly makes policy decisions about individuals based on that, without even the fig leaf of wanting to undo the effects of earlier unequal treatment of ethnicities it did earlier. Whether it decides who goes on a plane to Reykjavík or on a train to Auschwitz or on a overfilled slave ship towards Florida makes a big difference in magnitude but not in direction.


And to be honest, I do not see really much in the way of difference between the fictional Iceland policy and the real Israeli policy. You can make a case if you want that the Law of Return is actually one of these rare cases where racism is good, as apologists of affirmative action make for their cases. But any definition of racism which does not include treating two foreigners different purely because of their ethnic background will struggle to admit any cases of racism, unless you want to go straight for a racially discriminating definition of racism: "racism is racial discrimination done by gentile whites", for example.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 26, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


If you think such a conflict would neatly contain itself to uniformed troops on one side and irregulars on the other, you are very high and should put the bong down. The military is not likely to break cleanly for one side or the other. The military cannot effectively police the north American continent. Everyone involved in such a war would understand it to be a tribal war from the start.




"It does not matter that the military outguns the civilian population by 1:50 (on money spent per year, order of magnitude), because they will fracture in a civil war." -- Yes, but then the civil war will be decided by US military fighting US military, with private gun owners watching from the sidelines.


The only way private gun ownership would dominate is if the US military (including national guards etc) made a decision to sit the war out. This is almost certainly not going to happen. If armed insurgents are fighting police for control of a city, everyone on any side will expect the US military to get involved.




War is about inflicting harm and misery on the other side.




I disagree. War is about achieving strategic objectives through military means. Attacking the will of the other side can be an instrumental goal, but it is not the only or even dominant strategy. Inflicting misery can sometimes be effective at eroding the will, but other times it can be counterproductive.


Populations do not simply have a morale bar and once you have killed enough kids it drops to zero and they surrender. World war one lasted for years for years despite tremendous costs in human misery. Germany only surrendered when the Hindenburg line was breached and the occupation of Germany would have been inevitable. The IDF leveled Gaza, and still Hamas is a dominant political force there. There is a lot of ruin in a nation.


In our enlightened times, we also do not generally consider inflicting misery on the civilian population supporting your opponent to be legitimate tactic of waging war. Typically, states ban tactics which are cruel but not very effective for them. This is why small arms are legal for warfare and chemical weapons are widely banned, for example.




We have actually had a lot of examples of examples of confrontations between government forces and disgruntled civilians lately. A lot of these examples have not gone well for the Government forces, and some of the more extreme ones are notable for the public support the insurrectionists have received. You do not appear to have a conceptual linkage between these many, many examples of the exact sort of thing you're arguing can't happen and the scenario you're trying to describe. I think you should rectify that lack.




Take the anti-ICE protests. To the degree that they are successful, they follow the playbook of non-violent resistance.


If instead they were aiming at maximizing the misery on their opponents, for example by bombing the families of ICE agents, they would be an utter failure. A vast majority of the US population is against bombing American kids, and they would quickly find themselves slightly more less popular than Al Qaida.


The winning strategy is not excessive violence, but baiting your opponent into using excessive violence. You do not need 2A for that. The only anti-ICE victory related to 2A rights is the Pretti shooting, which is very much not how 2A proponents would have imagined to influence policy.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 26, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Which gets us back to the existential angst about mass shootings, and my claim these are one-man civil wars. So, we could rule in such a way that people don't want to do that- which is what we want- or we could just ban the guns because we're too lazy and selfish to do that (and in so doing discard our ability to be that kind of political actor- naturally, those who believe in mob rule/Democracy and fancy themselves in charge of that mob are most in favor).




The problem with that is that this means the influence of any particular group is proportional to both how many there are of them (good) and how omnicidal they are. Basically, ten jihadists will have more influence on what rules are enforced by society than a thousand quakers.


This will advantage memes which are ready to defect against society at the slightest provocation over memes which are more pro-social. It seems really hard to make a society out of people each itching to prove that they are a crazier motherfucker than all the others around them.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 26, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


My chemistry teacher begged to help any of us who might actually try an Anarchist Cookbook explosives recipe, also based on the proposition that too many of its recipes were suicidal if followed as-written. I don't think anyone took her up on it, though; the wildest homebrew reaction I ever ended up seeing was a friend's thermite in college.




This makes me slightly envious, I would have certainly taken him or her up on it. The fanciest thing I ever got do synthesize in school was nitrocellulose. I can still feel the disappointment like it was yesterday when a teacher who had promised to synthesize any ether compound we wanted reneged on that when I picked an ester of nitric acid and glycerin.


Nor did I ever try that on my own, my balls to brains ratio is apparently low enough that I still have all my fingers. I did thermite on my own though, it is reasonably safe when done outside with some eye protection and plenty of sand so you don't start a big fire.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 26, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The problem with guerrilla warfare in urban settings is that it generally involves war crimes, e.g. fighting out of uniform, relying on your opponent to have qualms about killing civilians by accident. Or getting your opponent to kill a lot of civilians in the process of fighting you, thereby earning a propaganda victory (like Hamas did).


From Mao's protracted war to Vietnam and GWB's adventures, the general rule seems to be that the winning strategy is to give less of a fuck about the civilian population than your opponent. This leads obviously to a race to the bottom.


Besides, the means to fight a modern insurgency against the US are IEDs, not guns. If the NRA were serious about killing the enforcers of a tyrannic US in the future, they would forgo small arms and focus on legalizing the ownership of C4.


Obviously blowing up US troops with your mobile along with civilians while you hide among the civilians is not exactly as glamorous as the Rambo fantasies some 2A proponents might have.


So when I say that almost all Americans do not have the stomach to effectively resist the US government, I mean that as a compliment. I know that I would not have the stomach for that either, and I am thankful for that.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 26, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


2A states "you have the right to retain the means to wage a civil war"




Even under the current SCOTUS, this seems plainly false. You do not even have the right to keep the means to fight the ACW. And warfare changed a lot in the past 150 years. Automatic weapons are not the biggest deal. But what are you going to do about armored vehicles? Really hard to kill a tank with your AR-15.


Realistically, any Americans having a beef with the US military would resort to tactics of insurgency: hiding among the civilian population, striking from hiding and hoping that the feds will value the lives of civilians enough that they do not simply flatten your city block. In other words, war crimes.


The days of Washington when an armed, motivated local population could defeat a great power (though not on their home continent) in open battle are long over. If you want to update 2A for the last century, you would have to allow private citizens to engage in mutually assured destruction against the US, like the USSR did. I have heard few people argue that this would be a good idea.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 26, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Even though the US has the questionable distinction of being a country where gun deaths are the top cause of death for some minor age groups, I do not think that school shootings, although commonplace enough, are responsible for much of that death toll. Under utilitarian considerations, I think that having a few ex-marines with AR-15s on any school grounds is probably not very effective in the cost per QALY saved.