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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 14, 2023

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So 65% of Twitter are cooperatebots who don't think rationally about the specifics of the choices presented? Could be worse. I for one am thankful for such people because in real life "just save yourself bro" isn't always possible.

This makes me think 65% of Twitter are very gullible and easily manipulated if you stroke their egos correctly in the direction of "I am such a Nice Person, so moral, so pro-social, so generous!". No wonder there are so many online payment scams about "buy me a Ko-fi/donate to my tip jar, I need to pay for my dying mother's operation and I'm an only child and my abusive father left us years ago and I'm currently living in a cardboard box existing on one can of cold baked beans a month".

Disagree. Picking blue is painless in the Twitter poll. There is zero harm to them. So they can posture with zero consequences.

I realise I'm being very mean and horrible, but hey, I'm a red picker so what do you expect? 😁

Yeah, posturing is what it seems to be all about. I'd be more convinced of the Ethical Upwardness if there were less "and you're a dirty mean no-good if you pick red" about it.

And I'd still rather have such choices be up to them rather than oh so rational, so actually prosocial, so non-virtue-signalling Mottizens.

I'd prefer somebody who thinks I have a brain in my head, not that I'm a dementia-patient developmentally challenged toddler who will run into a blender, so they have to tie the bib around my neck and make the White Saviour choice for me.

I have a saviour, thanks; Jesus Christ, our Lord. The salvific death on the cross is sufficient once and for always, I don't need the Twitterati to save my soul or my ass.

Good, it's not about saving you.

I don't know what people on Twitter are thinking - I suspect it's a non-representative audience. I was imagining something on the scale of a nation or the world.

My assumption is that no matter how obviously dumb the choice, any binary poll like this is going to have some significant number of people choosing each option. Is it okay to just kill Lizardman's Constant of a population? Given that picking Blue is voluntary, you might have a different calculus around that.

But my thought was that this is a question that depends very much on how everyone else is voting. My feeling is that a complete wipeout either way is fine, but realistically a complete wipeout is unlikely, and even something as one-sided as 80% Red or 90% Red is still far more casualties than I'm willing to shrug off. And if it isn't? A narrow win for Blue is fine. A narrow win for Red is the worst thing to happen to civilisation in recorded history. Even the Black Death killed, what, 30% of Europe? 40%? 60% Red is one of the worst disasters to have ever happened. Shooting for 51% Blue and asking people to cooperate seems like a safer strategy.

I feel like you're approaching this as if you have a lot more control than you actually do. If you expect 80% of people to choose red sure it's tragic that 20% of people are going to die but you can't stop that tragedy by picking blue too. You're only killing yourself

Yes, if I think the result will probably be 80% Red, then of course I pick Red myself. If this is done like a referendum with a lot of polling and a chance for campaigning, it would be very interesting and that would affect my vote.

If I had to choose completely blindly... well, that's where it would get scary.