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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022

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Anything political that doesn't directly and immediately affect you on a personal level is something that you should be concerned about only to a limited degree.

If white replacement ends in the destruction of your society and perhaps the deaths of you and your descendants in 50 years, as many replacement theory believers perceive, that would be a larger threat than the maybe 1% chance of a nuclear exchange tomorrow.

More broadly I don't think that this kind of 'I should only think about my personal and immediate interests and not give a shit about the broader society I live in or the long-term future' attitude actually holds up that well. It's a recipe for extreme short-termist thinking, a politics that is incapable of solving problems on any kind of significant time-scale. Coming from a country that I believe has been totally ruined by this kind of attitude, I am much more worried about what the country will look like in thirty years than whether someone might randomly invade us tomorrow.

1% per day of nuclear exchange is extremely high. That's in the ballpark of what the per-day risk would be if Taiwan were under attack in earnest and the USA/PRC were at conventional war; it's crisis levels (I think it very likely a Taiwan war would escalate to cities being nuked, but that's mostly because it could last for months without a conventional resolution and the 1-2%/day adds up).

I've been sounding the alarm regarding nukes for a long time - I think a full-scale nuclear war's more likely than not before 2050 - and I'm quite sure we're at much-lower levels of risk at the moment than 1%/day (for the next week I'd say <0.001%/day, though I'm less confident over e.g. the next three months). At 1%/day of nuclear exchange it is entirely correct to not worry about where trendlines are heading in 30 years' time, because unless that risk goes away inside a few months those trendlines are going to get scrambled (demographic trends especially-so - the deaths would be highly-correlated with living in cities which correlates with ~everything).

Your argument isn't entirely meritless, but the number you give is way out of line for that argument.

Yes, I think that 1% chance of a nuclear war tomorrow is high - I am using the word 'tomorrow' figuratively, to mean 'in the foreseeable future'.