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				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 12, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Some % of Iranian Americans are likely Shiite extremist or Iranian extremists simply as a matter of statistics; it is not unheard of for extremists to be the children of those who left their country because of extremism. According to the official documents they were “voluntary telephonic interviews” and




SHAKERI's stated reason for participating in the interviews was to attempt to obtain a sentence reduction for another individual ("Individual-1"), who is serving a sentence in U.S. prison, by providing assistance to law enforcement on this individual's behalf.




But this really stretches the imagination, as Iran would brutally torture him to death for conducting such an interview, were he a real person.




Iran has a documented history of using criminals, foreign and domestic, to conduct assassination operations because they have leverage and plausible deniability




Plausible deniability would be paying someone who is not Iranian. Really this all sounds similar to the string of antisemitic arson attacks in Australia, where some mysterious overseas organization hired criminals to commit random acts of criminality against Jewish organizations, most of which never constituted a real threat, coincidentally as the Australian Jewish community pushed for tyrannical antisemitic hate speech laws:


https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8057j0mz5mo.amp




Australia's federal police have said they are investigating whether "overseas actors or individuals" are paying local criminals to carry out antisemitic crimes in the country.






There has been a spate of such incidents in recent months, the latest of which saw a childcare centre in Sydney set alight and sprayed with anti-Jewish graffiti. No-one was injured.






Prime Minister Anthony Albanese called a snap cabinet meeting in response, where officials agreed to set up a national database to track antisemitic incidents.
Thus far, the federal police taskforce, set up in December to investigate such incidents, received more than 166 reports of antisemitic crimes. Albanese said it appeared some of the crimes were "being perpetrated by people who don't have a particular issue, aren't motivated by an ideology, but are paid actors".




These “attacks” were designed specifically to cause no damage: https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2025/3/10/mob-faked-attack-on-australian-synagogue-police




The caravan had been easily located, the AFP said, adding that the explosives were clearly visible and no detonator was present, suggesting there was never any intent to attack Jewish targets. “The caravan was never going to cause a mass casualty event but instead was concocted by criminals who wanted to cause fear for personal benefit,” Krissy Barrett, AFP’s deputy commissioner for nation




This has also been blamed on Iran, because of course.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 12, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
IMO the allegation that Iran tried to kill Trump is frankly too absurd to take seriously. The Iranian agent conducted an interview with the FBI while in Iran? Like he is employed by Iran for a super secret mission, and voluntarily decides to confess guilt in an interview with the FBI, while still in Iran? And it’s a phone interview, so it could be literally anyone on the other side of the phone? Disregarding the absurdity of Iran ever trying to do this, never in a million years would they task a 50-year-old who spent a decade in prison with such a mission; that is like a television drama’s idea of how intelligence work plays out in real life. I think whoever is responsible for this bizarre event gave the game away with this:




he allegedly told the FBI of the IRGC's desire to kill an Iranian American activist and target Israeli tourists in Sri Lanka with a mass shooting event. Shakeri also told investigators that the IRGC tasked him with surveilling two Jewish American citizens living in New York




Would Iran, with its half-million strong diaspora in America, able to call upon thousands of Shiite Muslim Americans to do their bidding, task a criminal for four of their highly sensitive operations, none of which have anything to do with each other? And we know all this from a phone call interview? Press X to doubt.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 12, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The first sentence of your analysis is a mischaracterization.




The moment the agent fires, he is standing here to the left of the SUV




The agent is hit in such a way that “to the left of the SUV” is a mischaracterization, as his torso makes contact with the left of the car. He is hit by the car. Thus he is not “to the left of the SUV”, but in its path. More to the point, the only consideration is what the officer reasonably believed would happen and the actual direction of the car’s tire at the moment of shot is immaterial, because self-defense is in the reasonable eyes of the reasonable beholder. Our officer had only one second to respond to the speedy change of tire direction. It’s one second between “absolutely going to hit me dead on” and the shot. And it is half a second between “still definitely going to hit me and run me over” and the shot. Because she changes the direction of the steering wheel that quickly. The average person’s raw reaction time is .25 seconds, and the time it takes to calculate whether a car is going to run you over while you hold a gun, a phone, and are surveying the driver’s car is more than .75 seconds or .25 seconds (depending on how badly you want to be hit by a vehicle).


I created an imgur album of three still images from the video above. The first image is before the officer realizes the car is coming, the second is right before impact, and the third is how far he was displaced by the car. The middle red dot shows the distance of the officer’s torso from the car from a static parked park to his left, and the right-most red dot shows his feet placement. https://imgur.com/a/cM5z4Xc








				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Some questions I am puzzling over currently:


    

  • 

    Has anyone done the napkin math on how safe it is to be apprehended by ICE? I think it’s 30k ICE agents and only 1-2 people shot with questions of justification this year. It’s likely that on a per-hourly basis you are safer being around an ICE agent than you are around the most criminally-prone young male demographic, or walking around certain cities at night. I wonder what a top-tier AI would calculate on this. If ICE agents in the line of work are safer than the average person, then I’m not sure why anyone would be worked up about this event for a rational reason, but if there’s a non-rational reason then…
    

    • 

  • 

    … Do humans have some instinct to argue about death? This would explain the perennial popularity of these stories + TrueCrime. I suppose it’s possible. Or is there an instinct to really, really hate when a low status male kills a female in the “tribe”? “White police officer” is coded extremely low status in Progressive America, and I can’t imagine anything near the same response if the officer was a Somali woman (!!!). Would these White progressives really shout “shame” at a Somali woman in uniform, which would connote high status and deference? Re: low status femicide, this would explain why the national park couple murder event got so much traction some years back. There was a uniquely large amount of vitriol online expressed against the murderer in this event, as in, more than both the typical murder (no one really pays attention) and the typical true crime murder.
    

    • 

  • 

    Were it the case that everything is so instinctual, is there any way that ICE can short-circuit the instincts at play here? Maybe they can paint images of empathy on their car (cute animals, maternal colors, mothers protecting their young). Or better yet, like the Ancient Greeks with their apotropaic magic imagery, they can paint a Medusa’s head on their car, except the Medusa is actually an image of a strong disabled black woman in a same sex relationship. I have a hard time believing the protesters would yell at vehicles wielding the ultimate seal of inviolability within their own cultural norms. It would be a bad look. Or maybe there is a way to change the entire “spirit” of the social encounter through music. What if you played really relaxing Enya or Jack Johnson music from loud car speakers? Or, going the other direction, just for curiosity, Richard Wagner? I wish these kinds of things were studied.
    

    • 



				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
These are qualitatively different events. The Babbitt question is about whether the police officer was justified in killing someone for tresspassing non-violently because (a) previously the protesters were violent, (a2) though they weren’t violent upon gaining entry into their desired locations, (b) pursuant to the security of VIP politicians, (b2) though the politicians had already begun evading minutes before, (b3) and despite no imminent danger to any politician. As we do not ordinarily kill on sight those who are trespassing while non-violently protesting, it is the politician’s security which is the pertinent detail.


In the ICE officer’s case, he was in the process of being hit by an accelerating car, and arguably excused for believing he would be run over in the center of the car rather than the side.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 29, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I can’t conceive of a motive for that. He has an interest in downplaying them and assigning them to the fringes


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 29, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
He’s anti groyper and claims to have reached out to people in the know in dc so in this case yes


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
She doesn’t seem panicked at all in the video. She is smiling, unstressed, comes across as giddy, arrogant, cognizant


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It seems intuitive to me that a woman who goes out of her way to impede the law and disobey orders is going to be more likely to resist arrest violently, whether with a firearm or a blade or a car. The average woman would not do this, thus you can’t place her in the population of average woman, any more than the average Jan 6 protester is not representative of the average population of Trump voters. The small segment of the female population who would do this is radicalized, which is a small sliver of the female population, like 0.001% of them. A woman who believes that ICE is so evil that you must illegally stop them and then evade them is simply going to be more likely to commit violence against them than the general population of women. This is a filtered, or “preselected”, radical population, in a climate where the news is constantly radicalizing people and where death threats have previously been made.




it is notable that her planned way of impeding them was non-violent




The officers did not / would not know that. She could easily be luring them to the vehicle, which is common tactic in anti-police violence.




Anyone willing to murder a few ICE agents in the process of impeding their progress would not waste their time on non-violent resistance




Disagree per above, and also because the violent do not behave rationally. Irrationally and violence go hand in hand.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for January 9, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I’ve been listening to the Hallowfall OST for WoW, though I haven’t played in more than a decade. Really nice pieces esp for the Lorel’s Crossing, Armory, Church of the Sacred Flame areas. I am a sucker for airships (always loved treasure planet), Halloween-themed things, and fictional renditions of Christianity, so I love it. I think they fucked up by implementing widespread flying mounts though, doesn’t seem like you can connect to locations if you’re rushing through them so quickly.


I’m also paying attention to ARC Raiders because I’m interested in why it is so popular. It seems that “coalition-building” is a really big joy that people get out of it which you don’t find in alternative titles, and the designers have implement some cleve matchmaking algorithm that puts all the cheaters in the same lobbies. And how just three years into the nature of war changing with drones, we already have a drone-heavy war simulator, which is interesting.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I’m confused if you’re criticizing the isolationist faction or the interventionist faction here as you’re mixing the two together in your last sentence. And you’re providing examples of criticism while claiming there’s an extremely narrow window of criticism, which doesn’t make sense. In any case, we live in a two party system, so each party comprises strange bedfellows, like those who want American Imperialism and those who want strict interventionism, or those who want it in some cases but not every case.


IMO Venezuela is indeed very different from Iran / Ukraine. We didn’t cause harm to their citizens, whereas our pressure in Ukraine destined hundreds of thousands of young men to perish in absolute agony and demographically destroyed an entire nation. Our intervention in Iran could destroy an ancient and high-science civilization for little reason except that it benefits Israel and KSA. (Just months before Israel killed Persian scientists and their families while they slept in their beds, Iran was publishing about their important nuclear medicine products which formerly only Germany was able to produce). Personally I am all for Venezuela-type resource grabs and even taking Greenland, but I don’t want to see hundreds of thousands of guys just like me be slaughtered in Ukraine, or see science take steps back because of Israeli neuroticism and expansionism. There are reasonable utilitarian grounds for this imo


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It shouldn’t matter if shooting her was ineffective at preventing the hit, because if there is even the tiniest chance that shooting mitigates serious injury, then it is rational and moral. The person receiving the unjust serious injury has every right and reason to prevent as much of it as he can; it is the aggressor who forfeits their claim to life. The chance of being stuck on the front of her car until she crashes or runs you over is slightly lower if you shoot her.


You can’t profile this woman as the average member of the general class of women, because she belongs to a very small class of people trying to illegally impede the law. I imagine those who go out of their way to impede ICE have a much higher risk of carrying a weapon.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The car drives in reverse as the ICE agent walks toward her door from the front of the car. It abruptly stops in reverse with its tires faced in the exact direction to hit this ICE agent. If the last moment of “stopped with angle of hitting agent” is set to 0 seconds and 0 milliseconds, there is 1 second and 5 milliseconds before the shot is fired. Within this 1 second, the driver changes the angle of the tires as they begin to accelerate, which narrowly prevents the officer from being run over by the driver. Cold, fatigued, and stressed, the officer has all of these concerns within a single second:


• Do they have a weapon? His eyes need to be on the driver through the windshield, because ICE agents have previously been shot and weapons have previously been brandished. This is normal policing: you take out your weapon when someone belligerently refuses to listen to orders.


• Do I have my weapon out and ready? He needs to get his weapon out and aim toward the driver in case she has a weapon, which is normal police work.


•  Is she going to hit me? It looks like she is, but my attention is not on the split-second angle turn of her tire, but on whether she has a weapon.


The shot appears to be fired just as the officer is hit by the side of the vehicle, though the officer probably had no idea that the driver intended to swerve out of the way in the last milliseconds so that it would simply brush against him, rather than giving him life-altering injuries which he doesn’t deserve (like paralysis). A reasonable person would infer that an accelerating driver with its tires angled toward you, and who sees you, is not going to serve away right at the exact moment to avoid life-altering injuries. If this inference is correct, then we are not discussing whether lethal force is justified over a trivial injury but over a serious injury or death.


IMHO we are left with these possibilities:


    

  • 

    Never allow police to stand in front of a vehicle. I have no idea what the discussion on this would look like. If standing in front of a vehicle is helpful in determining whether a driver is reaching for a weapon, then this would be a complicated determination.
    

    • 

  • 

    Tell police to do a barrel roll away as soon as they see a car beginning to move in any direction. I guess they can do that. But that interferes with safety per above. This officer could have jumped out of the way when she reversed, but did he know that she was about to accelerate toward him? This would require a change in policing strategy, so it can’t be blamed on this sole officer but the whole of society who elects lawmakers and so forth.
    

    • 

  • 

    Require police to accept probable but not certain life-altering injuries in their line of work. This seems unreasonable and unethical.
    

    • 

  • 

    Tell people to obey orders and not accelerate toward a human being in front of them.
    

    • 



Someone might say, “were I the officer I would have used my split second reaction time to get out of the way”. But for you, this event would put you in a hyper-vigilant and high adrenaline state of heightened attention. For the officer, this is simply one of the 40 hours of monotonous work that he must do every day. You can’t compare your state to his; you should compare his state to the periods of low or moderate attention that you sustain in your own occupational hours.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Photogenic woman whose last name is Good. Hard to imagine a name more suited for emotionally-charged polemics.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 4, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It’s anecdotal but so was most of what you’d see for these issues on Reddit in the mid-late 10s. You’d routinely see stories like “this black immigrant student got into every college”, “this person was jailed for racist violence”, “this person was a victim of racist violence”, “TIL about Black Wall Street”, “this person was the recipient of anti-immigrant violence”. Selectively positive and negative anecdota have a big impact on opinion because a normal person simply assumes that they represent reality, like how a person who watches K-Dramas might unconsciously develop a positive image of South Korea. And many of the anecdotes on Reddit were never really verified anyway.


The story of deprave cultural practices in Africa is the balance to the curated stories of positive cultural practices in Africa or negative cultural practices of colonists in Africa. There’s not really rational grounds to consider one witchy and the other run of the mill


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 4, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Do you see Scott’s own example image for these supposedly hyper-problematic witches that must be eradicated from all civil discourse? It’s three links: a program that tells you if the entertainment you buy is injected with SJW themes; a video on the frequency of economic schemes in Africa and the risk of their migration to the EU; a black serial killer who targetted only white children. What witchcraft!




The moral of the story is —




that Scott was proven wrong, horrifically so. Scott’s idea (or rather those in agreement with it) paved the way for the BLM hysteria and the largest amount of ineffectively-altruistic charitable giving ever. Were these witches allowed to discourse freely, maybe the public would have double-checked the reports on racial homicide / police stats, and maybe the leaders of Minnesota wouldn’t feel pressured hide the report on billion-dollar Somali schemes, etc. What is so wrong with these witches? They made Scott too uncomfortable? Or is he just not aware that, at the same time, the top stories on Reddit were on all inverses of this supposed witchcraft — a list of the most inclusive games, a story of a successful African immigrant family, a white serial killer who targeted only blacks — these sorts of stories were allowed to proliferate without any counterweights for years.


I digress. Undesirables are now all on x and short form video content; few now have the bandwidth to read two paragraphs.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 4, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I still think this site has strong potential for growth that just hasn’t really been activated. You just have to create an iceberg meme titled obscure and high iq discussion sites and place it in a conspicuously high or low position, and then just post about that in whatever userbase “market” you’re interested in recruiting from. There are like a dozen such gorilla marketing things you can do to 100x the userbase in months, were this desired by the mods / community. That and making the front page more intuitive. You can even select with precision the demographic you want using keywords , going old fashion with magazine ads in top university newspapers… can even market it as a “retro” forum which would work… there’s a lot of unused opportunities tbh. A lot of intelligent people would like to participate in a forum better than Reddit and X!


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It is not a fallacy to look at the conditions humans evolved in to determine whether someone is a “monster” for not feeling a particular way about a behavior lol


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
If a variety of distinct hunter-gatherer societies spread across the globe all have the same behavior, it’s reasonable to believe that this behavior was a common hunter-gatherer behavior. Most evolutionary psychologists hold that the Hunter-Gatherer lifestyle informs modern behavior but maybe that book has a compelling argument against the majority position? Agriculture would need to present some pressure on the genes related to paternal love and play to affect those genes; I suppose that’s possible but I don’t think it should be assumed.


If you look at an agricultural society which is still primitive like the Yanomami, it appears the fathers play with their infants for 15-30min in the morning: https://www.thetedkarchive.com/library/irenaus-eibl-eibesfeldt-human-ethology . Maybe someone with a good AI can trawl it to see what else it says about play.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Very interesting. 11 million views on this.


My first thought is to look at how much time primate fathers spend with their children. They do spend more time playing with their own children than with those not their own. However, I can’t find how many minutes they do this. This study indicates that for hunter gatherers, after toddlerhood, it is rare for fathers to play with their children, as they have similar-aged playmates in the neighborhood.




Lancy’s (2007) review of collected ethnographies from the Human Relations Area Files
suggests that, except for some foraging societies where children have little access to playmates,
children rarely play with mothers and almost never play with fathers. Playmates are almost al-
ways other children. Even children are the main caretakers for each other, especially past infancy
(Weisner and Gallimore 1977). With regard to work, we acknowledge Bradley’s (1993) pioneer-
ing and detailed study of children’s work discussed in more detail below




I would say we are in a society “where children have little access to playmates”, because in primitive societies children play pretty much all day, but today they have school and don’t have access to playmates to do this unless they are in a lucky neighborhood. And even then, it’s an insufficient amount of play. To throw another variable in, hunter gatherer children play based off of what they see their fathers and elders doing. Our environment is double unnatural: they never get to model behaviors from their elders, and they never get to play. This leads me to believe that father-child play is an essential replacement activity to the sort of play that children typically enjoyed with other children in their ancestral environment. Play with their father today is now essential because (1) he is the only male elder they will ever get to have rich personal experience with, (2) the child gets to model the father’s accumulated social-emotional wisdom, eg learning motivation and emotional processing and planning even just in a simple game of catch.


Another thing worth noting is that Christianity is unnaturally (supernaturally?) concerned with the Father-Son bond. It is possible that Christian culture boosts the interest that a father has in the wellbeing of his son, given that this is a microcosm of the Christian’s relationship with God, and that the decline of this culture corresponds to less interest in the father-son relationship.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 29, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The Groypers have been wildly successful at promoting their views just by creating online propaganda, which I imagine is crafted in small networks on Discord etc. if Rod Dreher is correct, 40% of young RNC staffers are now Groypers. It’s interesting to compare their success with the failure of the RNC-TPUSA complex in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s death. Every Erika Kirk appearance seems to decrease support for conservatism and the attempt to replace him with Brilyn Hollyhands was a failure.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 29, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
You still haven’t quite addressed why, in your worldview, men like to simulate realistic violence against each other, as even implying that these are not the most popular games, they are so popular that a majority of American men have played and enjoyed them. If it were “just that boys like competitive games”, then why don’t they just stick to a pong-like game, or Wii tennis, or a soccer title? There is some reason why they like to shoot each other and take their resources, and while my etiology of this has explanatory power, it seems to me you refuse to even offer an explanation for this phenomenon. Consider that, if men were offered a game where they get to inflict suffering on an innocent animal, I think most men would never play this and would find the whole concept abhorrent. So it’s not “blood and gore per se”, it’s not that men are interested in experiencing some novelty related to that; instead there is something particular about the act of blood and gore coming out of enemies. I can’t force you to supply an explanation, but surely you notice the dissonance here: in a highly competitive marketplace with tens of thousands of options, males enjoy a particular feature which — in your worldview — they would be either be naturally averse to or naturally ambivalent to choosing.




two books




It’s unfortunate that you can’t provide the relevant passages, evidence, or arguments. Am I supposed to take the view of an economist on the history of Icelandic revenge culture for granted? I managed to torrent it (thanks Russians), and the passage about men being “chickens” in revenge cultures is just sort of a narrative that the author weaves without referring to any real data. Maybe his evidence is on another page.


Here’s a study on how violent men in Iceland conferred a fitness benefit: “We show that, on average, killers gain a very significant fitness advantage despite the often high costs they pay and, more importantly, that they had a dramatic effect on the fitness of their male kin”. This is more scientific than the book you recommended, where the author is all over the place talking about Hamlet and stuff.




Like most of the Germanic and Celtic tribes that occupied northern Europe during this period, an implicit ‘might is right’ rule prevailed, with lethal contests often occurring among the leading members of society for control over its resources. In early medieval Scotland, for example, only a handful of the leading men of the day (kings, earls, etc) died in their beds: most died in battle or were killed by rivals or treacherous members of their own faction (Pálsson & Edwards, 1981; Woolf, 2007). The death toll could be considerable: the violence that engulfed the small Icelandic community at the centre of Njalssaga, for example, led to the deaths of 31 of the 87 adult males. Of 23 families who feature in the saga, four lost all their adult males; only 11 families survived without losing any males






Berserkers, or berserks, were often described as headstrong and unpredictable, being credited with a combination of magical powers (e.g. being able to change shape into bears or wolves) and a reputation for ferocity in battle. Many Norse kings surrounded themselves with a bodyguard exclusively made up of these individuals (Dale, 2021; Speidel, 2002). Famously, they also formed the Varangian guard of the Byzantine emperors in Constantinople (Brøndsted, 1960). Berserkers were feared as much as respected within Norse society. Among the Icelandic Vikings, for example, the relatives of a murder victim were significantly more likely to accept blood money than opt for a revenge killing (the two options on offer under Norse customary law) if the murderer had a reputation as a berserk (82% vs a mere 13% when the murderer was a non-berserker, when a revenge murder was much the more preferred option: Dunbar, Clark, & Hurst, 1995). Because their behaviour could be so socially disruptive, these males were often banished by mainland Norse kings, ending up in places like Iceland that were beyond the reach of conventional justice. The often brutal disregard for others' interests that characterised many (but not all) berserkers is well illustrated by the behaviour of the berserker Egil Skallagrimsson in the eponymous Egilssaga who showed no compunction about driving weaker men off their land (if necessary, by killing them if they resisted) in order to enrich himself.






The selective advantage gained by killers (s ≈ 3.0) is very considerable. In natural populations, the selective advantage of traits under positive selection is typically in the order of s ≤ 0.10 (Kingsolver et al., 2001). This suggests that, despite the costs incurred by killers (a mortality risk ∼2.5 times higher than that for non-killers), aggressive males gained a significant net advantage. Rather similar risk/benefit ratios were reported in a comparison of war chiefs versus peace chiefs in the historical Cheyenne (Dunbar, 1991). In this case, war chiefs risked premature death on the battlefield but benefitted, if they survived, from significantly higher fertility rates than peace chiefs (who were never themselves directly involved in warfare).






In short, there is a net benefit to acting violently in the particular context of medieval Iceland despite the risks of being killed. Since the strategy works better than 50% of the time, individuals may be attracted to it because they exaggerate the payoff. The fact that those who are killed in the process do not have significantly lower fitnesses than non-killers makes the default payoff a safety net, thereby favouring the killer strategy. As in most such cases, however, the risks are unlikely to be randomly distributed among the males: the killers who survive are likely to be ones who are physically stronger, more willing to take risks or, as Palmstierna et al. (2017) showed, have larger extended families to back them up. Knowing this may mean that only certain individuals are willing to pursue a violent strategy – unless the potential benefits of doing so are very high.




Medieval Iceland was violent, their heroes were violent, their wives came from captured Irish slaves, and they descended from the most violent of the Norse who had inflicted violence upon all of Europe. This should have made you intuitively skeptical of Miller’s hypothesis that Iceland proves that all men are chickens naturally averse to violence. If someone insulted you in Iceland, the norm was to fight them. There are sagas celebrating men who request to kill another man because they want rights over a particular woman. So, a lot of the violence was purely volitional, as was the entire Viking raiding and pillaging over Europe, and the Varangian Guard.


However, I deny you really need any extra evidence on this. The “look at what males like to do” argument is strong. The next best argument would be “look at how brothers behave”. IMO this doesn’t require strenuous argumentation.




But the claim that Somalis are somehow much more keen on this




Yes, because of their culture, their religion, their tradition, and probably their biology.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
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The problem with “men do not like the sheer joy of bashing another guy’s skull in” is that we literally have “sheer joy of bashing another guy’s skull in: the game”, and it is enjoyed by many men. Mortal Kombat and Tekken are also like that. A couple weeks ago there was “sheer joy of bashing another guy’s skull in: Jake Paul Version”, and this was watched on Netflix by 33 million people and hit #1 in 45 countries, including America. I don’t like these games, or boxing or MMA. But Jake Paul kind of got his skull bashed in. People loved it.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
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Numerous people have offered you other interpretations with examples




I don’t recall seeing an alternative explanation for the popularity of the violent männerbund video game genre in my replies. I’ll look again. There has been the argument that male video game players actually like a variety of genres, and while this is true, there’s still reason to believe that they especially like the violent genre. The reason this is the edifice of my argument is that it’s a surprisingly strong edifice. If there is one strong argument, there’s not really a reason to reinforce it with additional arguments, which often proves cumbersome in forum discussion imo.




you reject them because looting and raping sounds like a good time to you and therefore it must be natural to all men.




I am curious why you keep bringing up rape. I never mentioned rape in my post. Why do you have rape on your mind? The Conan the Barbarian quote only mentions the lamentations of the defeated women. Very odd.




There was a lot of sentiment in Master and Commander.




You’re welcome to peruse the script. They get very sentimental about Lord Nelson (in real life: an impious and vainglorious adulterer, who happened to be exceedingly good at killing the French, and thus became the eternal hero of Britannia). The sentiment is all between the männerbund. Here is what they have to say about the women back home: “(toasting) to wives and sweethearts: may they never meet”.




the idea that men don't like or feel sentimental about things like home, family, nation, faith, is a stunning declaration.




They do. But that’s not why they enjoy warring. And it’s not why the premiere guy movie is the premiere guy movie. I think the only women are some topless natives.




Men like Mafia movies in general for the same reason we like all kinds of power fantasies, but most men want the money and the chicks




You must have watched a different Sopranos. Money and chicks factor very little in the show. Tony has, what, one mistress? Two? And an annoying wife? And enough money for a boat and a McMansion. This isn’t Entourage. The Sopranos is popular because it follows the conflict of Tony and his crew as they pursue dominance against their competitors. It’s crew vs crew conflict and inter-crew conflict. Men like to see Tony steal the resources and fealty from rivals. They like to see men act within a männerbund to win resources and power. Does the average male viewer really crave to learn about the sociology of the mafia in the turn of the 21st century? Is he a criminologist who wants to explore the depths of narcissism in Tony Soprano? IMO, no.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
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That’s only two brief sentences in the whole movie. I don’t think they ever really talk about home apart from that. The whole film, the viewer follows the men plotting and fighting against the Acheron. They spend more time romanticizing about the ship and Lord Nelson than their homes and wives. That’s what makes it such a good movie: there’s none of that sentimentalslop that guys don’t actually care to watch.


The whole mafia genre is another case of this. Why do guys love mafia movies? It is not because of the subtle sociopolitical commentary and ironies of the Sopranos.