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Voting for the lesser of two evils

That's dumb. I guarantee your local morons running for city council aren't important enough to be puppeted by whatever evil group you think controls america. Yes, choosing between the soccer mom who thinks harry potter is satanic and should be banned from every school in the district versus the strung-out ex-hippy that wants the police to raise sales taxes by 0.5% to fund their vision of renovating the playground in park fuckhill is less glamorous that voting for GOOD versus EVIL in the national elections. But mediated by the fact that local elections are often one or lost by only hundreds or even dozens of votes, the compounded effect of voting in your local elections dramatically outweight any possible impact you could have in national elections-- and that's even if the national elections were actually composed of the good party and the kicking-puppies party.

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 23, 2024

You could have made this point without calling people “it” or insisting that your outgroup are ghouls. But no, you’re doing the always-popular thing, deciding that this time, the behavior is so egregious that normal rules don’t apply.

We’ve warned and banned you repeatedly for this. We’ve permabanned better users for the same thing. Consider this one month ban your final warning.

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 16, 2024

Have you come up with an argument for why this should not be done to you instead, since freedom of speech is "worthless at best"?

I've gotten banned from /pol/ several times for making (non-bait/troll/rule-breaking) left-leaning posts. I find it pathetic but I'm not going to demand to speak before Congress and advocate for a law that requires me to post whatever I want there. My options are either to accept it or use a different site. People can (and should) moderate sites as they like.

Why shouldn't anyone who finds you "harmful" or simply irritating get everyone like you kicked off the Internet or arrested? What principle do you have against it?

I tried to make it clear in my post that I'm referring to speech within the confines of a private organization/community. The people I describe above (neo-Nazis agitating for race war) are people I would want banned from the particular site, not banned from the Internet or arrested. Of course as a red-blooded American I'm proud of the first amendment and remain a huge believer in it. I just no longer really believe in the non-legalistic value of freedom of speech.

Btw, can you link the community you moderate, so we can see what your policies look like in practice?

It's a draconian, authoritarian hellhole. About what you'd expect.

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 23, 2024

I mean, we're probably not going to agree, but in recent years, when it comes to things that actually have salience to the population, as opposed to a salience among cultural conservatives, it's the Republican party that are "betraying normal voters" via excessive abortion bans, as seen by those bans losing in any referendum, even in deep red states like Kentucky.

But, there's also a categorical difference on what a "normal American" is, since your "normal" seems to be opposed to any liberal cultural values, when that's close to 40% of the country at a minimum, up to a strong majority on some issues.

Like, the median American is basically a woman who went to college for a year or two to get a associate's in medical transcription who works at a doctor's office, is pro-choice, pro-gay marriage, mildly pro-transgender rights but doesn't really care, thinks the border is an issue but also broadly pro-DREAM Act, wants more gun control but doesn't want all guns banned, thinks the cops have issues but we shouldn't defund them, and so forth, and all of that would likely be considered "pushing a cultural agenda on normal American's" to conservatives.

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 23, 2024

Absence of evidence is, in fact, evidence of absence.

Absence of evidence is evidence of absence when qualified, competent people make good-faith efforts and are met with good-faith assistance. It may be too cynical but I think any investigation into the 2020 election fails every qualifier: the investigators were not competent nor good-faith, and they would be met with resistance at every possible step anyways.

To be slightly conspiratorial, I'll throat-clear saying the 2020 election was not stolen (though whatever propagandist came up with "most secure election ever" should've been fired and sent to Siberia), but I think there is an awareness that it is not really in anyone's best interest to find that evidence even if it exists (which it almost certainly doesn't). As much as Trace has come to be a disappointment, he's not wrong that right-wing media is even more disappointing and doesn't really care to find evidence (that in this case doesn't exist) so much as grift from the idea of it.

I also don’t think Democrats are categorically against security measures.

Is there any good reason ballot harvesting shouldn't be banned and treated as a grave offense against the private ballot and the democratic process?

For a few additional comments, a now-deleted account that reported (positively) on performing ballot harvesting in California back at the old abode, a few of my reasons why ballot harvesting is so open to abuse yet wouldn't get reported, and some other guy you might recognize makes offers on what to trade for banning ballot harvesting.

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 23, 2024

On The Edge of Glory Disconnected Thoughts on Nate Silver’s New Book

TLDR/Judgment: Nate Silver’s latest falls flat in a pale imitation of the kind of thing that is done on the Rat-Adjacent internet. He plods through soft-rock covers of Moldbug, SA, Big Yud on his way to no particular conclusions. Nate strikes me as a man without a country, who doesn’t know who his friends and who his enemies are, able only to observe and unable to understand changing.

I’ve been a Nate Silver fan since the PECOTA days, so I won’t pretend to total neutrality. Nate is, to be simple, my kind of dude. I bought his new book on a trip to the beach and just finished it. I enjoyed it more than my thoughts here will probably imply, but the pop-sociology and science here just doesn’t add up to a cohesive thesis. I’lll comment that I’ve gotten addicted to poker, again, as a result of reading it, evidence of its infectious joy. But the core thesis of the book is so thoroughly muddled, that I’m left agreeing with Hanania that a lot of books could be better as blog posts.

This Would Have Been Better as an Email

At core I agree with Hanania, a lot of nonfiction books I read today seem like blog posts that have been collected, or a special series of blog posts or podcast episodes that have been collated into a book. Much of it has to do with consumer spending habits. Spending on books is in decline, but many consumers (your humble commenter included) will rarely if ever spend money on a blog, but will spend money on a book quite happily. I’ve rarely subscribed to premium on a podcast or substack, and when I have I’ve nearly always unsubscribed within a month or two disappointed with the cost vs the premium content I got access to. Occasionally I’ll get talked into subscribing, but my net spend is pretty low, and to be honest I feel like kind of a dope when I do it, like I’m wasting money. I think it’s just hard for one or a few content producers to make enough standard content to attract subscribers, and then squeeze out enough premium content to make subscribing worth it. On the other hand, at this point in my life, I’m actively happy to spend money at my local small bookstore, I feel good about spending money on a book to support the store, and I’m happy to buy one from a writer I already like. Meanwhile, my subscription to Audible means I end up buying one audiobook a month, and I’m happy to buy something from a creator I like. Perfect example would be Karina Longworth’s Seduction, which was essentially identical to a slightly-longer season of her podcast You Must Remember This, covering similar topics in a similar way. I was happy to buy it, I love Longworth’s podcast and want to support her work, and enjoyed it; even though I’ll probably never pay on her Patreon for the main podcast. So the phenomenon of books that feel like blog posts, for me, ties back to customer willingness to pay for books vs blog posts. I’d be more likely to buy a physical Scott Alexander or Richard Hanania. This strategy makes sense even if you’re already making good money on your premium substack, as the existence of some subset of customers that will buy the book but not the podcast gives you a chance to hit more customers; I’d also imagine that for example Seduction sold well to people who read every book about Howard Hughes who might never have heard of her podcast.

Overall, this book might just not be meant for me, or other Mottizens, in that it is an intro course to so much that I already know about, Effective Altruism and the Trolley Problem and the idea of Expected Value. But as is, I just don’t think it did enough to justify its efforts.

Describing the Elephant

Which brings us back to Silver and On the Edge. This doesn’t feel like Silver’s online work, Silver has always been more small scale and topical in his blogging. But it feels like someone’s blog posts, maybe because of the core conceit of the book, and how it fits into other blogs I’ve read over the years from Moldbug to SA. It felt like a riff on an internet conversation that happens all over the DR and rat-adjacent internet.

Silver’s core thesis is that one can distinguish between two school of thought in American industry and intellectual life: the River and the Village. As near as I can tell, the River consists of Risk Takers; Silver labels everyone from Wall Street traders to professional poker players to sports gamblers to US Army generals and astronauts. The Village is largely coterminous with the Liberal Establishment, the Cathedral, the Blue Tribe elite, all the other terminology that has been mooted around to talk about the media/academia/Democratic Party policy complex. Silver identifies himself as a “Riverian” (a rather unfortunate neologism), while identifying most of those who criticized his election forecasts as Villagers.

The place where I fit in is what I call “the River”. It’s a place for people who are very analytical but also highly competitive. The archetypal activity in the River is poker...There are other communities in the River, though: Silicon Valley, Wall Street, sportsbetting, crypto, even effective altruism, all of which are covered extensively in the book. And I found I had a lot in common with these people too, even if I sometimes disagree with their politics. There are traits like decoupling, contrarianism and a high risk tolerance that I share with the River, for better or worse. And these seem to be correlated with extremely high-variance outcomes: tremendous success or tremendous failure (as in the case of Sam Bankman-Fried, who is sort of the antihero of the book).

The Village is portrayed as more risk-averse. And this is my first problem with Silver’s thesis: one of the archetypal activities of the Village is electoral politics (largely from the D ballot) and nothing is a bigger risk than electoral politics. The average state-house candidate in a coastal-urban state is spending thousands of dollars, and months of their time, on what is often at best a fifty/fifty proposition. This is making bets on a level that would gag a professional poker player, not just the money but the time and the reputation; you risk not just monetary loss but potential disgrace and embarrassment. You’re risking making your family a laughingstock. Friends of mine who ran for local positions, got tangled up in school board politics about trans kids in bathrooms and CRT; you risk not just your money spent running, but that some portion of your neighbors thinking you’re a transphobic nutcase obsessed with genital testing, or another portion thinking you’re in favor of boys committing rape in the girl’s bathroom! The risk goes for safe seats just as well as for contested ones, where the result in the general is already determined then the politics reverts to the primary. Where the primary is fixed by the local party machine, the politics reverts back to maneuvering for years prior to the seat opening up. If you want to be a judge, or a city councilman, or a mayor, you’re often spending years sucking up to the right people, going to the right parties, giving money to the right committees. That’s a series of investments, long term slow bets that might never pay off, that would look absurd on any VC spreadsheet. Similar Villager occupations like Academia and Media are positions that one reaches against vast odds (leaving aside nepotism) with enormous odds of failure, and extremely high variance between successful outcomes. A successful hedge fund investor might hit a few 100x deals and might lose 1x, a popular writer or musician hits, what, 1000000x what an unsuccessful writer or musician gets?

Meanwhile, some of the model Riverians* he cites strike me as rather weak in their risk tolerance or in their calculation of expected value. US Army generals get where they got not through bold risk taking, but mostly through careerism and political maneuvering, though perhaps you could cite their risk-averseness as the problem with US Military performance in the past sixty years. Maybe we need to increase upside for great generals, rather than putting them in situations where the upside to success is largely identical to while the downside to apparent failure is large.He cites Bill Ackman’s twitter tantrums about supposed academic anti-semitism as symbolic of the conflict between the River and the Village; I can think of nothing more Villager (collectivist, tribal, risk averse) and less Riverian (individualistic, analytical, risk neutral) than advocating for your ethnic and tribal interests to be privileged over those of others. Nate doesn’t really talk about Idpol, and where he does reference it he associates it with the Village, but Ackman (and Trump to some extent) are clearly engaging in classic Idpol plays, just for a different team than the Village.

The softness in the categorization, along with the way that Silver’s categories overlap and intersect with other versions, gives me suspicion that we’re dealing with the parable of the blind men and the elephant. Silver’s Village is very like SA’s Blue Tribe, Moldbug’s Cathedral, the various Republican conceptions of the Liberal Establishment and the Woke or of Cultural Marxism, even elements of Richard Florida’s Creative Class. Every version gropes towards a vision of the Them, this great other that is suffocating, strangling the writer. They can feel this out group out there, they can feel Them, but they can’t see Them, they can’t properly describe Them, even if they think they can. The way this out group becomes such a potent Them, the way they describe some things exactly the same but others completely differently, the way it includes or excludes those the writer and his friends, tend to tell me that none of them are exactly accurate, rather that all are grasping at some aspect of the Elephant, and none are really describing it. SA and Yarvin and Silver all want Sillicon Valley in their friends, and outside the Them. Most MAGA Republicans very much categorize Sillicon Valley elites as the core of the Them! Alexander, Yarvin, Silver, and Florida are all Smart Guys, so the fact that they keep trying to come up with a new concept to describe what is largely the same concept rather than building off of each other should tell us that they don’t think the concept has been properly described yet.**

Silver’s River, in turn, has more in common with SA’s Grey Tribe, Moldbug’s Dark Elves, and other elements of Florida’s Creative Class. While Yarvin talks of most people being Hobbits, Silver doesn’t make room for most people at all in his worldview. It might simply be that he doesn’t intend the book to be all encompassing, but at times it feels weird that his map doesn’t include anything outside of these two power centers. Where are the Mountains, or the Deserts, or the Plains? He shares with Florida and SA a tendency to smuggle into his classification system a glorification of a group that he identifies with, places free from the flaws of the rest of the hierarchy. It’s unclear if The River is a classification, or an achievement. At times Silver seems to treat it as a qualification, saying Trump “doesn’t quite make it” on several occasions. So to some extent, it feels as though Silver kicks you out of the River if you lose on too many bets, which is obviously problematic to Silver himself as he points out how randomness can cause even a skilled Poker player or sports gambler to go through long cold streaks. It also calls out a glaring blindspot:

The Only Game in Town

The finest line of poetry ever uttered in the history of this whole damn country was said by Canada Bill Jones in 1853, in Baton Rouge, while he was being robbed blind in a crooked game of faro. George Devol, who was, like Canada Bill, not a man who was averse to fleecing the odd sucker, drew Bill aside and asked him if he couldn't see that the game was crooked. And Canada Bill sighed, and shrugged his shoulders, and said, 'I know. But it's the only game in town.' And he went back to the game. — Neil Gaiman

Inasmuch as there is a clear concept at the heart of The River, I’d say that Silver identifies it as a focus on Expected Value, the River is risk-neutral on postive EV bets. If you’re ruthlessly thinking about finding the odds, and happy to make a bet that has only a 5% advantage making it +EV, then you’re a Riverman. Nate’s assumption is that the games are completely fair, if random in nature. Where the odds are unfair or predictably -EV such as slot machines, it is predictably unfair.

There’s one incident which is discussed in the book in which a woman may have cheated on a poker stream. She made an incredibly lucky move, causing her opponent to lose a lot of money to her. As a result, many thought that she cheated. No one ever made it clear exactly how she supposedly cheated, or why, merely that they were certain she had done so because otherwise her actions were irrational. Evidence free, the accusations ultimately flounder, Nate lands on the alternative explanation that she forgot what was in her hand. But I think the implication was that she cheated by knowing what was in her opponents’ hand, and reacting accordingly.

What Nate doesn’t stop to consider, is why he assumes the cards were dealt at random. Why one would go on a poker stream on the internet, or watch one, and assume that it is all fair and on the up-and-up. What stops your host from stacking the decks, marking the cards subtly, rigging the whole room with actors like The Sting to take your money? This grimly appears in the section on VC money, where frauds like Theranos or WeWork are hand-waved as a cost of doing business. Oh, sometimes somebody steals a few billion, but it's fine as long as the whole system keeps rolling along.

Nate’s system can’t conceive of systematic cheating. We get an extensive view of sports gambling, but only the vaguest glance at the idea of cheating. Consider: Kyle Juszczyk, fullback for the 49ers, was a popular prop bet at +/- 4.5 yards receiving Week 1 on Monday night against the Jets. The theory was that Juice was quite likely to get a few extra targets with Christian McCaffrey out for the game, and 4.5 is really low, just one reception could easily break that. But 4.5 is also so low that it would be comically easy for just a few actors to force Juice to get the yards. If Shanahan or Brock Purdy decided to fix that bet, not the game just that prop bet, they could call a few plays designed to get the ball to Juice, and get him the yards pretty easily. Hell, if Saleh from the Jets and a couple linebackers on the defense decided they wanted to give Juice 10 yards, they could leave him open pretty easily. Juszczyk would finish with 2 receptions for 40 yards, winning the bet easily.

He spends a lot of the end of the book examining SBF and FTX, and how overconfident EV calculations about the unknowable are dangerous. But never does he consider the base-rate of unknowability that underlies the simple games he loves. Sports betting lines are no match for a career backup in the NBA with a "sore" knee. Online poker counts on code you can’t see to guarantee fairness, as you play against people you can’t even really prove exist; it could just as easily be a sophisticated slot machine pretending to be an online poker game while slowly taking your money.

Silver tries to cite NFL players as Riverians, but it falls flat again. Football players aren’t making +EV calculations in their decision making, or they never would have dedicated themselves to football in high school and college, knowing that the odds of making it to the NFL after college are just 1.6% while the odds of suffering a chronic injury as a D1 athlete are over 50%. (This calculus probably alters with NIL deals but I don’t follow college sports enough to really say). Rather than taking the odds, NFL players make their own odds. One of the paradoxes of the Moneyball revolution in sports, is that while the analytics are often very useful for analyzing the professional game, every player who arrives in the professional game did so by ignoring the analytics. The core axiom at the heart of most analytical approaches to sports management, the intuitive false hope that is called out over and over again as the core of “dumb” sports fandom is that players don’t really change outside of decline. Analytics is a world of entropy. Players don’t reliably tweak their swing, improve their plate approach, find a new pitch, get in the Best Shape of His Life in the off season, etc. Those stories are the chaff in the mill of traditional sports journalism, and the constant chatter of WIP sports radio call ins sure that if the coach just played this other player who looked good in limited time…

But no player gets to the pros by accepting things as they are. Every player who makes it to the Show believed that he was different, special, and he did change when he needed to. He did get in The Best Shape of His Life, he did adjust his swing or learn a new pitch, he did improve. He did exactly what they said you can’t really do.*** They, by definition, did not accept the odds. Dumb money can drive out smart money. If people are willing to take -EV odds, for reasons outside your model, then you’ll never get the edge you need to make +EV bets. This is the case in many risky professions, acting or athletics or politics, you have to take the long odds, they’re the only game in town.

And of course that brings us to Silver’s most famous project: election prediction. Nate spends a lot of time trying to defend his record on election modeling, pointing out that his “edge” over other models would be huge for a sports gambler or a hedge fund, even if he can’t predict with 100% accuracy. But how useful is it compared to the ability to steal an election? The polls all become so much noise if the vote counts aren’t real, just like calculations figuring out the correct number of yards that Kyle Juszczyk will run after catching a pass from Purdy becomes noise if the team decides they want him to get those points or if they don’t want him to get those points. This is a massive blindspot for his project, and inasmuch as it is coherent for the entire Riverian concept. Positive and negative EV assertions can only be reached by creating a closed universe, analogous to a poker game

Leaders don’t accept polls and determine a +EV path through them. That’s the path of the risk averse, the noise before defeat. Leaders don’t accept the facts, they change them. Trump didn’t accept the issue polling, he changed it. Tariffs were almost dead as a policy tool in a world where the Ds and Rs agreed on free trade, Trump has moved the needle to where the question isn’t whether tariffs will be imposed, it is how many and against whom. Problems are changeable, and then the polling will follow.

And of course leaders and sports stars don’t accept the rules. “If you ain’t cheatin’, you ain’t tryin’!” Silver can cite to his polls all he wants, and he can try to model them to reality, but they’re little use unless we grapple with the realities: examining the fundamentals of the race doesn’t matter if voters don’t really believe in reality anymore. If the same people look at the same data and see a good economy and a bad economy, what can economic indicators tell us? And if there were widespread cheating, how would Silver ever know? Eventually he’d just adjust the model to show a shift in the vote to mirror the persistent cheating, and have a good enough model, and be satisfied. But that wouldn’t get us much of anywhere here in the real world.

*One of my minor quibbles with Silver: I feel like he does the woke-writer thing of shoehorning in “diverse” characters wherever he can. He’ll say openly that most of his Riverdwellers are male, and hint that they are disproportionately white and asian in many cases; but his examples are plucked disproportionately from women for the group, and his hypotheticals are often female. Just enough to be noticeable, and sticks out to me a little.

**An alternative interpretation is that Silver is engaging in Hidden Power Levels, utilizing what is largely ripped from Yarvin or SA, but not acknowledging their influence to avoid being stoned by association with them.

***This is why fitness is, at some level, inherently associated with Rightism and individualism, by definition anyone who has achieved some level of fitness has personally put in effort and overcome adversity through hard work, in a visceral way, no one else could do the work for you.

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 16, 2024

Why is "the nation" relevant?

Not just "the nation", the world. It's a global website.

It's not too far to the left of the subset of Americans that are very online.

After they've banned everyone that disagreed, they've found that everyone agrees... Not particularly surprising.

Another way to think about is that if you look at the crosstabs the last election by age and compare with the average demographic of Reddit's readership you'll get the idea.

What makes you think you've got the direction of the causality right here?

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 16, 2024

I would love a new and better Reddit.

The problem with Reddit is that it is so incredibly easy to game and astroturf. /r/thedonald did it in 2016 and they were wildly successful. Then the admins put their fingers on the scale and banned them. Today, left wing shitlibs are doing all the same stuff but get away with it. The front page is all just low rent political memes now.

Major subreddits that used to have milquetoast funny content are just left-wing bot farms now: https://old.reddit.com/r/AdviceAnimals/

And leftist activists have taken over abandoned subreddits and then game the rules to get their posts on the front page. One trick: if a subreddit has a post with an outsized number of upvotes it gets promoted. So, if a sub with only 10,000 users has a sub with 10,000 upvotes, the algo sees it as a valuable post. This must be the most important post in the history of this subreddit! Except it's just some Kamala is Brat meme on a subreddit supposedly about economics.

In any case, there are good subs out there. Slatestarcodex is still decent. Redscarepod is good. But mostly it's a wasteland. Bots and activists rule the day. It's a tragedy that anyone is exposed to this stuff.

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 16, 2024

Reddit matters, unfortunately.

When reddit came out in 2006, I was instantly enthralled. I loved the branched conversation style over single-threaded forums like PHPBB that dominated the web before. It was a new architecture for conversation, a better one. Plus, it had a smart, techie community that was fun to discuss things with.

Fast forward to today, and the world loves reddit. It's ranked as a top-10 website by traffic. Reddit is the default place to find an intelligent discussion on any niche topic. Whenever I have a medical issue, or I want to explore a new piece of technology, I go to Reddit. When I want product reviews for a pair of leather boots, I go to Google search and type "Best men's leather boots reddit". The cutting edge LLMs are being trained on reddit content. It's an important piece of the foundation of web content.

Which is unfortunate that it's moderated so poorly, and that policy comes from the top down. You know what I mean. themotte.org is one of several diaspora communities that fled reddit due to its heavy-handed, leftist moderation.

It's incredibly frustrating to use. My politics are somewhat esoteric but definitely of the right. On an occasion I'm baited into a conversation with political valence and I'll state a right-wing argument, and more often than not my account gets banned. On X, I saw screenshots of an /r/askReddit post "Republicans, why are you voting for Kamala this time?" and it had had thousands of upvotes and comments. The equivalent self-post "Democrats, why are you voting for Trump?" was banned with zero comments. If a thread is allowed to live for a few hours that draws popular heterodox views, it results in the inevitable thread lock and thousands of deleted comments to prevent "hate"

From my memory, the leftward drift of reddit seems to have occurred over the last 10 years. It hit an inflection point with the election of Trump and the ban of /r/TheDonald. It accelerated again since 2020 with BLM. That was the year that the TERFs were banned en masse (a community that mattered to me, as it helped me get over my own trans-dreaming and be happy with my gender).

Reddit's politics reflect the fact that the company is based in San Francisco. But it is left of center for San Francisco, which puts it far, far to the left of the nation.

And it's a shame! I'd love a higher-quality general purpose discussion forum. The world needs it. When Elon liberated X, that provided an important venue for free speech. But X optimizes for a high-addiction feed of quick information bites. It doesn't allow for as in-depth discussion and community building.

What would such a forum look like? I have some ideas:

  1. It would maintain the threaded format beloved by so many

  2. It would be seeded by a high quality community, such as that found here or on LessWrong

  3. It would have some sort of governance body that would maintain high quality of moderation for the main subs

The easiest, but not cheapest way to liberate Reddit would be to find a billionaire backer to buy it. It's a public company and its marketcap is a hair under $10 billion. The other alternative would be to try to get an alternative off the ground, perhaps building on active and healthy diaspora communities. It would be possible, for example, to give new users credit for karma they have earned on themotte or LessWrong. Selfishly, I would love a forum where I could ask questions to the high-functioning on-the-spectrum folks that populate these places. Reddit without the bottom half of its IQ spectrum would be a superior place for discussing nootropics, health, AI, and similar topics.

I'm a computer programmer. I care about providing community discussion forums. I've spent a good chunk of my life on them. I'm kinda bored at my day job and looking for a new adventure. What do you think?

Friday Fun Thread for September 20, 2024

Oof. That's a mess.

While it (and even the publicity) might not completely kill this guy's career, it definitely chops a lot of potential off it. There's some civilian uses for the sorta skills the software parts of that career field do, and some cybersecurity shops won't really care, but quite a lot of them either depend on background checks or lower levels of clearance that are gonna red flag this. Even if he didn't plan on staying in the DoD, having a security clearance before leaving can be worth a lot of salary.

(LinkedIn points to a higher education nonprofit, which... works, I guess, though depending on exactly where it falls in 'higher ed' would raise different concerns if he really were a threat. Dunno if it's more or less of a Google Problem than having your real name tied to the other sort of 1000-year-old dragon.)

And while not the most central case of where these definitions break down, and squicks me a bit (especially "intent to continue doing so" as he stops being a teenager, though not being able to read the complaint leaves me some concern for how accurately that's being repeated), it's still the sort of thing that also gets played at Cannes or put into a school library when there's a sufficient bow slapped on top. Law is filled with these sorta graduations, but if you wanted a similar level of 'officially banned, unofficially tolerated or sometimes feted' the first place to come to mind would be marijuana legalization, which... hasn't worked out great.

It's not clear whether it's illegal in the strict formalist sense. Ashcroft v Free Speech is usually what people point to as suggesting that obviously fictional works can't be generally prohibited, but that opinion allowed such speech to be restricted under the rules around obscenity, and Congress did do that. While that definition is vague (imo badly so) and counterproductive (imo badly so), modern technical advances have made Rehnquist's dissent much more persuasive at the same time that SCOTUS's makeup is more skeptical of the ACLU takes. From a legal realist perspective? It's a clusterfuck to determine if any one piece has 'redeeming value' (though a majority of furry porn is straight-up porn that would directly fail by honest tests, and others by close-enough checks), whether it offends community sensibilities, whether the ways it does offend community sensibilities are actually the sort the courts unofficially overlook because it's a proxy for 'animus', what the age of characters even are (is this goat the probably-older-than-universe-but-woefully-immature Asriel from Undertale, the unknown-aged-but-probably-late-high-schoolish Ralsei from Deltarune, an aged-down version of either, an aged up version of either, or an Original Character Donut Steel?), yada yada. Prosecutors generally don't want to deal with it, but they have on rare occasions with especially clear cases.

On the other hand, this isn't criminal prosecution: especially this level of higher-tier security clearance. There's a reason you can tell who's been through that level of interview from those who've just heard about it by the extent they flinch at certain questions. For all the official guidelines are about really overt behavior showing sympathy to foreign governments, illegal behaviors, or blackmailable targets, the practical guidelines are looking for broader understandings of strong impulse control and good judgement, pretty vaguely defined. If playing War Thunder is an unacceptable security risk -- and I think it's pretty persuasive that it is -- it's not like this is that unreasonable.

On the gripping hand, the extent the underlying laws and definitions are a mess and largely unconfrontable is gonna keep making the paradoxes more present, both here and in cases with more serious consequences. I get that critics of the law are (understandably!) looking for cases with perfectly sympathetic defendants and especially clear legal processes, both for normal legal tactics and because a decent number of the 'it's ephibophilia' people end up taking off the mask, but in practice there's been thirty years of establishing a pretty harsh new social norm.

((On the other gripping hand, it's quite possible we'll seriously confront those central cases where the definitions completely break down and decide that's because we do need to crank up enforcement of stricter social and legal norms. Totally fictional porn by people who are just working through their own missed opportunities in their youth still have the Kabier problem, and there's a lot more evidence in favor of even sometimes-above-age-of-consent sexualization being either risky or prone to abuse.))

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 16, 2024

It wasn't me, but several of my posts on reddit were included in the maintenance of a cultural Marxism "thread" (maybe on CWR?) for a time, that included numerous materials. But at some point the creator deleted it, presumably either by quitting reddit or by being banned from it. This was not my first post on the topic, but Google is not helping me find older ones and I haven't got the bandwidth just this moment to dig up the others.

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 16, 2024

Not in the way it is used in the top-level comment here, though - and in my judgement, not in the way that it is casually used in right-wing discourse.

Let's take some specific examples. The Federalist has a whole category for cultural Marxism. The currently most recent article is about a day care in Wisconsin. So let's have a look - despite being tagged 'cultural Marxism', the article itself does not mention Marxism once. It describes a training programme that repeats the clichés of the social justice left, but nothing specific about Marxism.

The second-most recent article is the same story. Next. The third-most recent is a piece criticising Tim Walz. This one does use the word 'Marxist' in the article itself. The story here is that Minnesota teachers will be required to 'affirm' a range of protected identities, including LGBT identities. The article frames this as 'banning Christians from teaching', which doesn't seem like the most sober approach, but never mind. Where does Marxism come in? It offhandedly describes "race, sexual orientation, [and] gender identity" as "cultural Marxist categories", and describes department standards regarding race and cultural sensitivity as "race Marxism", but no further explanation is offered. It is not clear how any of the programmes described are Marxist. (For what it's worth, I think the programmes these articles describe are genuinely bad, even though The Federalist's descriptions of them strike me as histrionic to the point of undermining their credibility.)

Skipping down a bit more, let's try to find one that explains what it means by 'cultural Marxism'. Perhaps this story on Bari Weiss and cultural Marxism might help. Let's see what we learn here. It describes 'intersectionalism' as a doctrine of cultural Marxism, and then... we don't see a lot sense. Apparently Marxism denigrates men? Unfortunately there's still no explanation of what it actually is. These are all by one author, Joy Pullmann, and it seems to me that for Pullmann, 'cultural Marxism' or 'Marxism' just serve as a shorthand for culturally progressive politics in general.

Well, enough of The Federalist. Let's try another relatively mainstream conservative publication.

National Review tackles the question of whether cultural Marxism exists by linking to another article. This looks promising! Allen Mendenhall, the author, even traces its genealogy. There is definitely a robust argument here. There are elements I quibble (in particular I'd have liked a clearer sense not only of the genealogy, but of the ideas transmitted themselves, and how they evolved and changed; and also the recognition that many of the later thinkers he describes would not necessarily have called themselves Marxists), but Mendenhall does admit that he is giving only a "simplified, approximate version of a much larger and more complex story", which is limited to his specific field of literary studies. So I would be interested to hear more from Mendenhall. I note that Mendenhall's assertion does not justify the rhetoric of authors like Joy Pullmann - he may be using the term responsibly even though she is not.

Maybe we can get even more mainstream. The first non-video content I found for cultural Marxism from Fox News was this article about a book by Ted Cruz. The summary of the book tells us that Cruz sees an evolution from 'classical Marxism', which recommends a violent revolution by the working class to seize and redistribute wealth (a bit of a simplification, but all right), to 'cultural Marxism', which 'transitioned into critical legal studies'. Cruz describes cultural Marxism as "a method of saying the never ending struggle between victims, and oppressors can only be corrected through force by the government punishing the oppressors and rewarding the victims". (I feel conflicted about that definition - I feel it identifies a real and dangerous trend in American politics, something like Greer's Title-IX-ification of American politics, but I think 'cultural Marxism' is a misleading label for it.)

I think what frustrates me about this kind of piece is a kind of strawmanning or oversimplification of even just classical Marxism, long before we start talking about cultural Marxism. It's the idea that 'Marxism' is just the idea that the poor need to revolt against the rich, or that we need redistribution, or something about violent revolution to create justice. It's true that Marxist rhetoric has included elements like that, but to boil Marxism as a school of thought down to just that by itself is to miss its essential nature.

It's not precisely that I expect Fox News to start explaining the labour theory of value or commodity fetishism to its readers, but I can't help but read a sentence like like "Karl Marx's perspective of an inevitable conflict between the wealthy and the less privileged" without grinding my teeth and thinking that actually the conflict posited by Marx is between bourgeoisie and proletariat, or that is to say, between capitalists and labour, and those are not quite the same thing as 'wealthy' and 'poor'.

Seen in that light 'cultural Marxism' is frustrating for me because what it usually seems to denote, to me, is schools of thought that, while perhaps historically influenced by Marxism in such-and-such ways, ignore or skip over entirely the fundamental principles of Marxism. If you remove all the economic parts from Marxism, there's, well, nothing left. You can't take away all the pillars of Marxism and still be a Marxist, or so it seems to me.

Wellness Wednesday for September 18, 2024

I did unban him. Now that I recall, I think that happened just before the glitch that forced @ZorbaTHut to roll back the site a week. So apparently he was un-unbanned.

Okay, @SkookumTree (if you're still around), you are unbanned. Post about something other than how a goddamn doctor can't do better than a 500-pound meth addict.

Wellness Wednesday for September 18, 2024

Weird. I could've sworn that @Amadan unbanned him earlier this year, but maybe I misremembered.

Wellness Wednesday for September 18, 2024

even though he has since been unbanned.

Oh? He's still in the banned list, but maybe I don't know how to read that. Good summary, btw.

Wellness Wednesday for September 18, 2024

There was a user here, SkookumTree, who used to post quite frequently about how his prospects with women were so bad that the only woman who would have him was a literal meth addict, or a 500 pound woman. At some point, he got it in his head that what would increase his chances with women was to have risked his life in some way, as apparently women can tell and are attracted to a man who has risked his life. So he kept talking about how he was going to go on a solo trek through the Alaskan wilderness, called the Hock. He was firmly convinced that if he just did this One Weird Trick (TM), he would finally be able to score dates or whatever.

Ultimately he got banned because he kept posting about it so much. I'm talking at least once a week in the Wellness Wednesday thread, and frequently more often than that. It got really obnoxious, especially because he kept arguing against people trying to give him advice on how to improve his game (and it probably goes without saying but it was all better advice than his plan). Basically he got banned until he went on the Hock, with the hope that he would finally stop beating that dead horse. But he hasn't been back around since he got banned, even though he has since been unbanned.

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 9, 2024

Absolutely not, because I remember this exact same scenario playing out at least three times, and in two of those cases a bet would never have been adjudicated fairly.

Really? Bets were made and stakes were put on the table? I don't remember this. People throw "Want to make a bet on it?" a lot, but I don't recall anyone ever trying to set up a formal wager.

And I'm pretty sure that one catholic girl was banned for pressing them on it at least once.

I wish she were still around to react to being called "that one catholic girl."

I don't know which specific ban you are talking about, but her repeated bans were never because she was saying things mods disagreed with or against someone who enjoyed the mods' favor, but because she had a problem saying things without being an antagonistic and personally insulting about it.

Who's going to judge the bet? Some of the mods are the people from those other cases.

Who? Name names and post links.

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 16, 2024

FWIW, I think that this definitely qualifies as MeToo. Powerful man, coercion, promise of advancement, all there. Much more severe than most such cases, imo.

Of course, the ASA (besides being a lex Trump) reads like a prime example of an ex post facto law, which Article one, sections 9 and 10 of the US constitution would prohibit.

But of course I am reading that all wrong. You see, the framers intent of these sections was clearly to only prohibit ex post facto laws concerning criminal cases resulting in criminal punishment, which is defined as narrowly as humanly thinkable. Having to register as a sex offender, being banned from owning firearms or even being locked up indefinitely are clearly not punishments, and having to pay money to some other party never is.

This goes hand in hand with the triple jeopardy for the same act practiced by the US. First we try you in state court. If you get acquitted in state court, we can still try you in federal court. If you also get acquitted there, we will still allow civil cases which might bankrupt you but will at least not send you to prison (unless you do not comply with the definitely-not-a-punishment regulatory prohibition to own firearms, for example).

In Germany, from my understanding, most criminal allegations go to court once only (not counting either side contesting the verdict). Generally, if you want to get damages from the defendant, you would become a joint plaintiff (Nebenklaeger). A civil court will generally be very reluctant to make a finding of fact that one party committed a criminal act in contradiction to the finding of fact of an earlier criminal trial. I also think the statue of limitations for claiming damages is the same as for the criminal act on which they are based, 'we convicted the arsonist but you can't have him pay for your house because the civil statue of limitations expired' would be silly.

--

However, here, the charges made against Combs are clearly criminal charges. I don't know how the law is in NY, so it could be that without the ASA, none of the women who alleged sex crimes would have seen a single penny from Combs, so their motivation would have been limited to sending a sex offender to jail, which is of course not as good a motivation for the painful act of going on the stand and detailing degrading sex acts as the prospect of earning a few millions in damages is.

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 15, 2024

Under the common understanding of consent, CP legalization requires taking that choice away from someone else.

what about drawn porn and adult people distributing recordings of oneself when they were young? The former is almost universally banned, the latter is universally banned. What about people long dead?

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 15, 2024

As to not duplicate from the other comment:

  • Compact utility vehicles, the turbocharged 2-litre 4 cylinder engine, and plug-in hybrids having more performance than non-V8 muscle cars of 15 years ago
  • All new cars are ludicrously luxurious by the standards of 15 years ago (performance models now have 600-1000 HP)
  • Small trucks made a [limited] comeback
  • All new construction is ludicrously luxurious by the standards of 15 years ago
  • Grocery pre-compilation for later pickup is cheaper than the cart rentals; delivery not much more expensive than that
  • Food delivery at very reasonable rates; ride-sharing limits what taxis can charge
  • Board games have gone through a renaissance; RP (D&D, etc.) is much more popular and approachable
  • Credit card skimming was 100% solved via NFC (UX of terminals notwithstanding)
  • Android phones more likely to be supported for the physical lifetime of the device
  • Holosun and Primary Arms drove the price of a good rifle or pistol optic down dramatically
  • Optic sights on handguns now widespread, and the variety and capabilities of compact and subcompact pistols in particular has increased dramatically
  • The collapse in price of good AR-15s, Kel-Tec in general, Palmetto State Armory in general, (US only but has knock-on effects worldwide) NFA being completely trivialized means innovation can continue (shoulder braces mean short rifles mean cartridges designed around short barrels, forced reset triggers mean full-auto is functionally no longer banned, e-Form 1 filing for silencers mean you get them in 2 weeks, not 2 months or 2 years)
  • 3D printing, and the accessibility thereof
  • Anti-piracy law is well and truly a dead letter (people were still worried about BitTorrent lawsuits 10 years ago, VPNs weren't yet a thing, Internet Archive didn't exist [for now])
  • Indie games (Minecraft most importantly), mature online distribution for games and music (Steam, Bandcamp, Spotify to a point) and books, backwards compatibility for consoles, subscription services for games
  • Distributed funding platforms (specifically Kickstarter and Patreon)
  • Effectively unlimited cellular data plans, and cell plans having fallen in price by 50% (especially considering inflation)
  • Dramatically cheaper plane travel (except for the last year or so)
  • People work from home more often
  • Computers are faster and consume 10x less power (netbooks finally reached maturity as tablets and hyper-thin laptops)
  • SSDs made computers dramatically faster (this was later taken away by MS bloat, but was true for the majority of the last 15 years)
  • Functional programming principles make UI development far easier

And that's all I have for now.

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 9, 2024

This

"I for one welcome abandoning anything remotely conservative” and “I must be the most belligerent man to walk the face of earth if I want to be based”,

is just blatantly uncharitable.

And it isn't nice from your behalf to be calling right wingers who aren't abandoning anything remotely conservative being the most bellgerent men to walk the face of the earth, and so what you demand as right wingers to behave like, comes off as an attempt to control them.

The rationalist crowd is not substantially different from the Romney who was a BLM supporter, uniparty perspective. Nor are they, and associated figures like Hanania, and Yglesias above and beyond behaving rather uncivilly. There are people who fail to be nice honest and objective.

The reality is that liberals, including those who have been annoyed by some of the bad behavior of their side start from a conclusion that condemns the right, because they are against it an d want to control it. At such, the right will never be good enough.

In terms of the right, it isn't true that there isn't space in between. Rather what is happening is an inability and unwillingness to render to Ceasar what is Ceasar's and to admit the legitimate and good points made by rightists, because they are inherently against the points and the people making them.

Never will any political coalition even on the issues they are mostly correct on, will not avoid in focusing on areas that are more doubtful too, when making their points. Part of treating political discourse accurately would then be to not miss the forest of the trees, and prioritise things accurately.

This tweet makes some good points on this issue:

https://x.com/hpmcd1/status/1834339581220606449

My honest answer to this, which I hear a lot (not picking on Jesse), is that Trump bullshits—he exaggerates, or garbles details of, things that are basically true, and tends to “lie” mostly when it concerns his personal honor (crowd size, sleeping with the porn star, etc)

Harris, but the Dem apparatus more broadly (for which she’s only a cipher), tends instead to weave technically true statements together into a narrative that is not merely false but egregiously so, often approaching a near-perfect inversion of reality. The result is a hall of mirrors world in which Dem bullshit is laundered through and ratified by society’s sense-making institutions and becomes a sort of distributed knowledge or ‘common sense’ among elites such that no one person or node in the network ever has to bear personal responsibility for the falsehood—they didn’t come up with it, it was reported in the Times or put out by the CDC or American Association of Pediatrics or leaked by sources in the intelligence community, who “requested anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.”

However, Trump can be directionally wrong on some issues too and this tweet underestimates the dishonesty of Harris side on the migration and various debates.

In terms of what is happening in Springfield Ohio there isn't an equivalency between the two sides. The one that brought 20000+ Haitians, and funds it through NGO networks, and is trying to replace Americans, and the side that opposes it.

When Ed Yudkowsky for example agreed with an ex reddit admin that right wingers have been banned more so by reddit mods because they break the rules more, and not because they have been targeted for their ideology, he was engaging in dishonesty that gets more plausible deniability.

Another relevant issue in regards to the norms discussion and the behavior of lib/rationalist space is that righteous anger that is proportionate is also necessary and good in politics, while uncontrolled and irrational rage is bad as is irrational indifference. When I see angry relatives of a murdered son, wife, demanding justice, that is an example of indignation that leads to justice and much better than indifference, or excuses. So there is a problem with the righteous anger from the right being pathologized by people who are unrightfully hateful towards those having a proportionate response to genuine injustices at their expense. Another problem that goes along is n trying to censor them. And this being conflated with people who complain about fake injustices, and in doing so commit genuine injustices. It is actually good to be tolerant of people having legitimate gripes and be intolerant towards those who are promoting unreasonable bs, to screw over the first.

There are no centrist liberals/supposed moderates as a sizable faction who prioritize objectivity and being nice here to save people. That space doesn't exist as a sizable faction, and the faction that paints itself in such colors they have their obvious biases and hostility towards right wingers, on areas the rightists are correct about.

When it comes to the uniparty vs dissident right conflict, on various issues people like Romney who are nice to leftists but cruel to rightists, can have a more unhinged view. Take for example warmongering. Trump can also share this issue, like for example with his comments about the Democrats being insufficiently supportive of Israel, which is completely wrong, not just an exaggeration but a big lie directionally.

There are issues that right wingers are going to have both a correct and a nicer position that takes in consideration important values and facts disregarded by people who market themselves falsely as prioritizing, objectivity, or virtue. They can be politically incorrect and not nice towards sacred cows even if nicer in general, and step over hysterical demands to censor and gatekeep. To give an example,

The secret of much of politics is that people are on an article of faith acting as anti right wing oppositional force without evaluating things. They start from the conclusion and are unwilling to do things otherwise.

The liberal/"ex" liberal, con inc (though in practice not as ex as it potrays itself) space complaining about the genuine right is incapable and unwilling of recognizing these areas and separating reasonable from unreasonable which also exists. Too much resentment and hostility and seeing right wingers as the opposing tribe. Too much ideological hostility and having themselves unreasonable values they are unwilling to tolerate challenge. Some of them use the pretense of opposing tribalism as an excuse to censor and defame and narrow the intellectual space. Even edgier figures also get things right that liberals oppose. There are a few exceptions that also are atypical, like Michael Tracy and that space do manage to get some important things right on foreign policy of Trump and making critiques that deserve acknowledgement.

For the most part, the more moderate dissident rightists are among the few having some success at separating reasonable from unreasonable, and not purity spiraling. And they are hated too by the Gatekeepers who have failed themselves not to purity spiral. Ironically, not being constrained by the weights of the censorious and authoritarian liberal (including con inc, neocon, etc) gatekeepers is actually a necessity. Even though the bad faith censors pretend their censorship is for the greater good and the epitome of being nice and keeping bad culture warriors down. In actuality it is about stopping and defaming opposition and narrowing intellectual space, condemning what is correct and necessary.

Edited to add: https://x.com/realchrisrufo/status/1834926318883852543 https://christopherrufo.com/p/the-cat-eaters-of-ohio

Christopher Rufo brings evidence of African migrants eating cats in a neighboring town.

EXCLUSIVE: We have discovered that migrants are, in fact, eating cats in Ohio. We have verified, with multiple witnesses and visual cross-references, that African migrants in Dayton, the next city over from Springfield, barbecued these cats last summer.

This reinforces the perspective that plenty of people are inclined to jump to the gun to signal how rightists are getting things wrong, because of having a liberal oppositional anti-right wing ideology.

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 9, 2024

I love dogs, but dog culture should be ended, and anthropomorphism should be banned from kids entertainment. Kids should be learning to understand humans and their variegated expressions, so that they can understand themselves and adapt to the social world in front of them. They should not be bonding with animals to a significant degree.

As one of those "people who are into literature":

'I'll explain to you, then,' said the gentleman, after another and a dismal pause, 'why you wouldn't paper a room with representations of horses. Do you ever see horses walking up and down the sides of rooms in reality—in fact? Do you?'

Yes, sir!' from one half. 'No, sir!' from the other.

'Of course no,' said the gentleman, with an indignant look at the wrong half. 'Why, then, you are not to see anywhere, what you don't see in fact; you are not to have anywhere, what you don't have in fact. What is called Taste, is only another name for Fact.' Thomas Gradgrind nodded his approbation.

'This is a new principle, a discovery, a great discovery,' said the gentleman. 'Now, I'll try you again. Suppose you were going to carpet a room. Would you use a carpet having a representation of flowers upon it?'

There being a general conviction by this time that 'No, sir!' was always the right answer to this gentleman, the chorus of No was very strong. Only a few feeble stragglers said Yes: among them Sissy Jupe.

'Girl number twenty,' said the gentleman, smiling in the calm strength of knowledge.

Sissy blushed, and stood up.

'So you would carpet your room—or your husband's room, if you were a grown woman, and had a husband—with representations of flowers, would you?' said the gentleman. 'Why would you?'

'If you please, sir, I am very fond of flowers,' returned the girl.

'And is that why you would put tables and chairs upon them, and have people walking over them with heavy boots?'

'It wouldn't hurt them, sir. They wouldn't crush and wither, if you please, sir. They would be the pictures of what was very pretty and pleasant, and I would fancy—'

'Ay, ay, ay! But you mustn't fancy,' cried the gentleman, quite elated by coming so happily to his point. 'That's it! You are never to fancy.'

'You are not, Cecilia Jupe,' Thomas Gradgrind solemnly repeated, 'to do anything of that kind.'

'Fact, fact, fact!' said the gentleman. And 'Fact, fact, fact!' repeated Thomas Gradgrind.

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 9, 2024

  • I once believed that political solutions to problems are viable, and now I believe that they are not, and that you need cultural solutions first in order to meaningfully affect the political

  • I once believed literature mattered, but upon inspecting the type of people who are into literature versus who are not, I no longer believe it is valuable. “Literature” is surprisingly new to civilization anyway.

  • I love dogs, but dog culture should be ended, and anthropomorphism should be banned from kids entertainment. Kids should be learning to understand humans and their variegated expressions, so that they can understand themselves and adapt to the social world in front of them. They should not be bonding with animals to a significant degree.

  • I once thought IQ was the be-all-end-all but now I think there are other qualities which are as important but less easy to measure.

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 9, 2024

I replied upthread but yes, I think alcohol is worst than cannabis, all things considered.

The thing is that cannabis was already banned and that was mostly fine. Sure there were some shady drug dealers, but there wasn't massive gang violence like there was during Prohibition. And, let's not forget that Prohibition wasn't a complete failure either. It really did reduce alcohol consumption by a lot with all the attendant benefits such as lower domestic violence and higher productivity. It's just that the benefits accrued mostly to the lower classes.

So yeah, if someone invented alcohol tomorrow, it should be banned absolutely. But once Pandora's Box is open, it's hard to shut. Which is another reason we should have never legalized weed. Now that it's legal, making it illegal again will be near-to-impossible.

Going forward, I think we need to squeeze a little harder.

Option 1) Increase taxes and regulation until the profit dries up. Consumption will go down and cannabis will be treated as a rare treat instead of a daily habit. We'll know its working if some street dealers start appearing again. Tolerate this to some extent as long as there is no violence.

Option 2) State run marijuana stores. Beige buildings run by bureacrats. Open 9-5 Monday-Friday. Inconveniently located and with no advertising whatsoever. Turn the pot industry into the DMV.

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 9, 2024

Sometimes I wonder if part of this is that where I lived during COVID, the measures taken by the government were extremely lax.

Life wasn’t really disrupted all that much, we were told by the governor to go outside and enjoy the open air and hiking trails, although social gatherings were discouraged, I don’t think much of anything of the sort was ever actually banned. There was no curfew, nothing like this. Although there were some limits placed on in restaurant capacity for a while.

When I say “a few weeks”, I’m talking specifically about the period of time in which the local hospital was at max capacity. Since measures of reduction of community spread were mainly up to the individual, then the result here is just a simple question: my community is currently in a wave of a new pathogen and there’s a shortage of beds to treat people who got very sick.

Given that, should I hang back and not go to a big party right now?

For me that’s a simple yes, it’s relatively easy for me to put myself in the place of not having enough beds to treat the sick.

Does that mean I behaved like that during all of the year or so of COVID times? No, I more or less lived normally during most of it.

I do also empathize with people who had their lives severely restricted by the government too, and I do believe that given the nature of the disease what we did was overkill. I remember I visited Peru in late 2021, and wow, in the capital they had implemented a whole host of very strict measures. (To be fair to them, they did have the highest morality rate in the world). Overall our response may have been more appropriate for a Spanish Flu type scenario but COVID ended up being much milder.

My perspective may be biased somewhat in that during COVID for me, I pretty much lived normally and very little changed or was restricted for me. So to the question of “hey the hospital is currently at capacity, would you modify your behavior a bit to put a damper on community spread of this new virus until the surge starts to fall a bit?” … my response is pretty much, yeah. Not much of a problem.