site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 16, 2024

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

4
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

There are lots of people jumping into the conversation who have not looked into it. People will say: why waste my time? Simple answer: its fun. Its a mystery and clearly people get a lot of enjoyment from participating in the whole thing. Its trivial to go on X and watch some videos, read some threads, and come up with an opinion.

Here are few thoughts I've had from watching this for the past week:

  1. a narrative started to form over the weekend that the drones were military WMD sniffing drones doing a grid search of NJ. It originated with some DOD drone manufacturer speculating on tictoc and then went viral. It seems plausible, if not more likely than not, that this story was the psyop. If the cover story is a lost nuclear warhead coming to the USA, it makes you wonder what crazy shit is actually going on.

  2. It seems like there are at least 3 categories of phenomenon. 1) misidentified airplanes, helicoperts, and lens flares, 2) unmanned drones (the size of a car or a SUV) flying very low over populated areas using traditional aerodynamics and 3) orbs, lights, or other true UAPs that are hovering or exhibiting flight maneuvers that do not correspond to known physics. I am not convinced that the things in category 3 are easily explained. The debunkers are just as invested as the pro-UAP crowd and they generally always assume the person who filmed the object is a liar or an idiot. There are pilots, air traffic controllers, and professional photographers that are posting some interesting evidence. Air traffic control reports of objects at 50k ft elevation. Military air traffic control shutting down a base due to extreme UAP activity. The ABC video of the "orb" is professionally shot. I would imagine the camera man knows how to operate his camera and is not showing venus out of focus.

  3. There have been a number of high profile military pilots that have been reporting their experiences of seeing objects, orbs, and other unexplained phenomenon. Most people do not think these military pilots are lying. Theyre clearly seeing something. If there has been a large uptick of these UAPs over NJ over the past few months, it would not surprise me if the government were to fly the drones from category 2 in order to muddy the waters. Then you get the mass hysteria and most people start writing off the story.

The answer does not have to be extra-terrestrial. Mark Andresen recounted a story on the Bari Weiss podcast where he was in a meeting with the white house and he is representing that the WH claimed to "have classified whole branches of physics during the cold war". If you take that language plainly, they are not talking about specific nuclear weapons engineering. "Whole branches of physics". It seems fairly reasonable to me that the USG, after realizing how powerful nuclear physics was in WW2, decided to move all fundamental physics out of the public domain. It would not be the least bit surprising for me to learn that there are groups within the government that have spent the last 70 years progressing their tech into something that would look totally alien to us. Such a group, with no oversight, would essentially be a rouge element of our federal government.

There is really no way to know or prove any of this and its mostly speculation. That being said, there is a lot of circumstantial evidence out in the public domain for those who are interested. Eric Weinstein has speculated about this in public. There's a few good youtube channels out there that talk about this stuff.

ET are often part of the story that gets told, but they are not necessary. It could be as simple as "the US Government took all fundamental physics in house after the Manhattan project and the group that controls that tech is doing some sort of power play with feds".

If you take that language plainly, they are not talking about specific nuclear weapons engineering.

I would love to believe that we classified psychotronics or faster-than-light-travel or quantum communications or time travel something crazy like that but I tend to think this was probably just nuclear engineering (which as I understand it can get pretty exotic). If it was something more exotic than that, I just sorta doubt the White House LLM Czar would be familiar with it. Like, if we classified time travel, let's say, what are the odds that you send your Time Travel Czar - one of a handful of people who know Time Travel is real - to go work GAI policy and then he goes around Darkly Hinting that we classified Time Travel during meetings with GAI people? So I tend to think he was talking about nuke stuff. That (and less-remembered, cryptography) were areas of physics and math that were the focus of government containment.

The answer does not have to be extra-terrestrial. Mark Andresen recounted a story on the Bari Weiss podcast where he was in a meeting with the white house and he is representing that the WH claimed to "have classified whole branches of physics during the cold war". If you take that language plainly, they are not talking about specific nuclear weapons engineering. "Whole branches of physics". It seems fairly reasonable to me that the USG, after realizing how powerful nuclear physics was in WW2, decided to move all fundamental physics out of the public domain. It would not be the least bit surprising for me to learn that there are groups within the government that have spent the last 70 years progressing their tech into something that would look totally alien to us. Such a group, with no oversight, would essentially be a rouge element of our federal government.

This sounds implausible. As the saying goes, "Three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead".

As an example of a rather successful government conspiracy, consider the NSA spying program. Pre-Snowden, there were certainly credible rumors that the big ISPs passed their cables through a government-controlled room. It would take an especially naive person to say "Surely the US government would not spy on its citizens." Internet veterans will remember the crypto wars, the US gov decision to classify PGP as munitions for the purpose of export restrictions and the attempts of the NSA to push broken crypto on the people. The thing which Snowden delivered was rather substantial evidence regarding the specifics -- which was admittedly a bit worse than I would have estimated. But the fact that state actors had the tech, the money and the incentive to spy on people was plain as day even before that.

Now you claim that the US government decided to move all fundamental physics out of the public domain (but bizarrely only after the Teller-Ulam design became public knowledge). Consider what it would imply. A cabal of Nobel laureates sitting in some smoky room in their anti-grav chairs having a meeting to decide what the exact mass of the Higgs particles which will be "discovered" at CERN should be. Of course, CERN is international, and over the decades, a lot of countries who were antagonistic to the US (i.e. the USSR or China) have had their own "fundamental physics" research programs. Unless the first secret discovery was a particle which makes it trivial to change the outcome of any physics experiment on Earth (in which case why keep pretending to have a cold war), the US would have had to have the convince at least some senior physicists in these countries to keep their mouths shut. Now if I were a senior researcher in the USSR, no amount of Nobels would convince me it would be a good idea to deceive the party leadership about the nature of reality as related to the feasibility of new weapons. Or would the Soviets have been in on it, too?

Also, there have been some areas of applied research where the US has allowed and indeed lead tremendous progress over the last few decades. Modern electronics and computers certainly seem to make physics research of all kinds so much easier. "They" must really feel secure in their absolute superiority to allow such tools in Muggle hands. If I was trying to keep fundamental physics secret, I would certainly not allow society to develop into an information society with more and more physics graduates poking at things.

I can see a state government keeping some particular design a secret (e.g. "You can ignite fusion bombs through fission bombs in precisely that way"), but not the basics ("Fusion exists. The sun is powered by fusion. Some people have been wondering if the power of fusion can somehow be harnessed by mankind.")

I thought I was pretty clear that I’m speculating - not claiming claiming anything. But address some of your points.

  1. Secrets. There is no shortage of people out there giving interviews, claiming to be part of programs, publishing book, patents etc. These people are generally ignored, mocked, or written off as cranks no better than some skitzo in his basement. The political economy of academia makes dissent from the party line unthinkable. And for what? It’s not unreasonable to think that some step function change in our understanding of physics could be legitimate threat to humanity.

  2. Ridicule. The second part of your reply is building a strawman of my alleged claim and then mocking it. At its most basic level, I’m saying that that the USG, having just unlocked nuclear weapons through physics, decided it was best to have a black fundamental physics program and made advances over the last 70 years. It would almost be irresponsible for them to have not done something like this. If I had to guess, I’d guess that they made progress manipulating another fundamental force - gravity. There appears to have been at least a lot of talk about that in public before everything and everyone involved vanished and mainstream physics focused string theory. No time travel or antigrav chairs needed. Just a relatively small group of scientists, in the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, already nearly merged into the MIC, deciding that this is the most responsible path for physics.

It seems plausible that the USSR and China came to similar conclusions either independently or loosely connected. We seemed to be able to understand the importance of a hotline or other space research despite hostilities. Given the stakes involved, it doesn’t seem ridiculous to me to think that everyone agrees to not make this public. Of course these other programs would likely be far behind the US. In fact I’ve heard speculation that the US governments abrupt change in UAP policy in the last 10 years could be a result of these other programs having finally caught up with us.

Again. None of this sounds even remotely ridiculous to me. Yet people get their backs up on even the most mild version of this story. Why is that?

As I said, the whole topic is a lot of fun. There is so much interesting stuff out there. And it’s easier than ever to find.

I know the guy who developed the gravity bomb concept. Want a miles-wide chunk of Earth gone? I know which book to point you to.