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BurdensomeCount

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The neighborhood of Hampstead is just at present exercised with a series of events which seem to run on lines parallel to those of what was known to the writers of headlines and "The Kensington Horror," or "The Stabbing Woman," or "The Woman in Black." During the past two or three days several cases have occurred of young children straying from home or neglecting to return from their playing on the Heath. In all these cases the children were too young to give any properly intelligible account of themselves, but the consensus of their excuses is that they had been with a "bloofer lady." It has always been late in the evening when they have been missed, and on two occasions the children have not been found until early in the following morning. It is generally supposed in the neighborhood that, as the first child missed gave as his reason for being away that a "bloofer lady" had asked him to come for a walk, the others had picked up the phrase and used it as occasion served. This is the more natural as the favorite game of the little ones at present is luring each other away by wiles. A correspondent writes us that to see some of the tiny tots pretending to be the"bloofer lady" is supremely funny. Some of our caricaturists might, he says, take a lesson in the irony of grotesque by comparing the reality and the picture. It is only in accordance with general principles of human nature that the "bloofer lady" should be the popular role at these al fresco performances.


				
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BurdensomeCount


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				
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The neighborhood of Hampstead is just at present exercised with a series of events which seem to run on lines parallel to those of what was known to the writers of headlines and "The Kensington Horror," or "The Stabbing Woman," or "The Woman in Black." During the past two or three days several cases have occurred of young children straying from home or neglecting to return from their playing on the Heath. In all these cases the children were too young to give any properly intelligible account of themselves, but the consensus of their excuses is that they had been with a "bloofer lady." It has always been late in the evening when they have been missed, and on two occasions the children have not been found until early in the following morning. It is generally supposed in the neighborhood that, as the first child missed gave as his reason for being away that a "bloofer lady" had asked him to come for a walk, the others had picked up the phrase and used it as occasion served. This is the more natural as the favorite game of the little ones at present is luring each other away by wiles. A correspondent writes us that to see some of the tiny tots pretending to be the"bloofer lady" is supremely funny. Some of our caricaturists might, he says, take a lesson in the irony of grotesque by comparing the reality and the picture. It is only in accordance with general principles of human nature that the "bloofer lady" should be the popular role at these al fresco performances.



				

				

				

				

				

					

					

					
					
					

					
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				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 25, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Anybody Here? ...


Nobody? ...


Well, alright then:


A large study from all of Sweden has found that increasing people's incomes randomly (actually, increasing their wealth, but you can convert wealth to income via an interest rate very easily) does not reduce their criminality. The authors find that via a cross sectional model, people with higher incomes are less likely to commit crimes (this just compares rich people to poors and sees rich people are less criminal), while when they switch to a "shock" model where people who won what is effectively a lottery don't see reduced criminality in either themselves or their children. This is a pretty big blow for the "poor people are more criminal because they don't have money for their basic needs" theory.


Original study here: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w31962/w31962.pdf


Marginal Revolution post discussing this here (also reproduced below, post has an additional graph at the end on the link): https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/12/why-do-wealthier-people-commit-less-crime.html




It’s well known that people with lower incomes commit more crime. Call this the cross-sectional result. But why? One set of explanations suggests that it’s precisely the lack of financial resources that causes crime. Crudely put, maybe poorer people commit crime to get money. Or, poorer people face greater strains–anger, frustration, resentment–which leads them to lash out or poorer people live in communities that are less integrated and well-policed or poorer people have access to worse medical care or education and so forth and that leads to more crime. These theories all imply that giving people money will reduce their crime rate.






A different set of theories suggests that the negative correlation between income and crime (more income, less crime) is not causal but is caused by a third variable correlated with both income and crime. For example, higher IQ or greater conscientiousness could increase income while also reducing crime. These theories imply that giving people money will not reduce their crime rate.






The two theories can be distinguished by an experiment that randomly allocates money. In a remarkable paper, Cesarini, Lindqvist, Ostling and Schroder report on the results of just such an experiment in Sweden.






Cesarini et al. look at Swedes who win the lottery and they compare their subsequent crime rates to similar non-winners. The basic result is that, if anything, there is a slight increase in crime from winning the lottery but more importantly the authors can statistically reject that the bulk of the cross-sectional result is causal. In other words, since randomly increasing a person’s income does not reduce their crime rate, the first set of theories are falsified.






A couple of notes. First, you might object that lottery players are not a random sample. A substantial part of Cesarini et al.’s lottery data, however, comes from prize linked savings accounts, savings accounts that pay big prizes in return for lower interest payments. Prize linked savings accounts are common in Sweden and about 50% of Swedes have a PLS account. Thus, lottery players in Sweden look quite representative of the population. Second, Cesarini et al. have data on some 280 thousand lottery winners and they have the universe of criminal convictions; that is any conviction of an individual aged 15 or higher from 1975-2017. Wow! Third, a few people might object that the correlation we observe is between convictions and income and perhaps convictions don’t reflect actual crime. I don’t think that is plausible for a variety of reasons but the authors also find no statistically significant evidence that wealth reduces the probability one is suspect in a crime investigation (god bless the Swedes for extreme data collection). Fourth, the analysis was preregistered and corrections are made for multiple hypothesis testing. I do worry somewhat that the lottery winnings, most of which are on the order of 20k or less are not large enough and I wish the authors had said more about their size relative to cross sectional differences. Overall, however, this looks to be a very credible paper.






In their most important result, shown below, Cesarini et al. convert lottery wins to equivalent permanent income shocks (using a 2% interest rate over 20 years) to causally estimate the effect of permanent income shocks on crime (solid squares below) and they compare with the cross-sectional results for lottery players in their sample (circle) or similar people in Sweden (triangle). The cross-sectional results are all negative and different from zero. The causal lottery results are mostly positive, but none reject zero. In other words, randomly increasing people’s income does not reduce their crime rate. Thus, the negative correlation between income and crime must be due to a third variable. As the authors summarize rather modestly:








Although our results should not be casually extrapolated to other countries or segments of the population, Sweden is not distinguished by particularly low crime rates relative to comparable countries, and the crime rate in our sample of lottery players is only slightly lower than in the Swedish population at large. Additionally, there is a strong, negative cross-sectional relationship between crime and income, both in our sample of Swedish lottery players and in our representative sample. Our results therefore challenge the view that the relationship between crime and economic status reflects a causal effect of financial resources on adult offending.






				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 17, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I hate the antichrist!


Modern technology is in dire need of modern solutions


Our story starts a few days ago when I changed the IP address of the VPN I use to connect to my BurdensomeCount accounts and identity. This is a fairly regular thing I do for Opsec reasons. I also scramble the MAC address of my devices every once in a while, same reason. Normally this is all fine and dandy except that last time I decided to do both of these things together. Looking back this was a very bad idea indeed. While minor minutae of misfortunes I've had to face in my daily life aren't worth making a mottepost on my struggles over those pained few hours, if only for didactic reasons about the current state of modern large technology companies and the decay of the anonymous free internet, are well worth writing about.


On Saturday I tried to log into my discord account for a voice game of Blood on the Clocktower (on a server that originally sprung up from The Motte so populated by smart people, it's quite a fun way to spend an afternoon if you have nothing better to do). After inputting my email address and password and solving the captcha- these days they're using one with a picture containing multiple objects, all but one of which are in pairs, so like 2 trucks in the image, 2 lions in the image, one rabbit and you have to click on the unpaired object to pass- Discord did the whole "new login location detected, please check your email address" thing, all well and expected because of my VPN reset.


At this point I went to Gmail to log in. Email address, check; Password, check; no issues here. Since I was using a new IP and MAC Gmail asked for an extra security check before they let me in: they wanted a mobile phone number to send me a 6 digit code. This was the first sign that something was wrong: I didn't even have a mobile phone associated to this account so why was Gmail asking for a phone number? Like seriously, why do you need me to associate a phone number before you let me into my own account? I tried to see if there was a way around this but apparently not, Google wanted a phone number or it was no dice for me.


Obviously I didn't want to provide my registered phone number linked to me in real life but fortunately I have a burner phone. I gave Gmail one of my burner numbers and got the code from Google. Note that since I didn't have any associated phone numbers with the account anyone could have used literally any phone they had lying around for this so it's not like this was providing any real security benefit to my account against intruders, it was all a charade for Google to get its hand on a phone number. I was medium annoyed at this but I had a voice game to play so let it slide. I got my six digit code and put it in, only to be told:




Google couldn’t verify this account belongs to you.
Try again later or use Account Recovery for help.




No shit you couldn't verify this account belongs to me when I don't even have a phone number associated with the account? What possible reason related to identity verification could you have to ask me for a phone number in the first place?


It was off to Account Recovery for me. Google again wanted my email address and password, which I provided. I also had some security questions registered to my account that I knew the answers to but Google didn't even bother asking me about them, instead taking me straight to:




You didn’t provide enough info for Google to be sure that this account is really yours. Google asks for this info to keep your account secure.






If possible, when signing in:
Use a device where you’ve signed in before
Use a familiar Wi-Fi network, such as at home or work




and leaving me at a complete blank wall. My only reaction at this point was WTF?? Locking people out of their accounts when they've forgotten their ID details is one thing, but doing it to someone who remembers literally every single piece of identity information associated with their account is a whole new level of bastardry. Do no evil indeed.


All this meant I needed a new Discord account, which meant a new disposable email account as well, and I needed it fast, the games were starting in less than half an hour. I wasn't gonna create another Gmail account after their recent treatment so I went to what I thought was the provider most open to anonymous accounts and least likely to pull another Google on me: Protonmail.


Fortunately making a new account with Protonmail was fast and without issue. I took this new email and tried to use it to create a Discord account. Discord though was much less nice. Firstly it wanted all the standard details: username, email, date of birth (1st Jan 1984 in case anyone is curious) and password. Before making the account it wanted me to verify I was human: it was time for another captcha but that wasn't enough to sate Eris, she also wanted me to verify my phone number to create an account, which as usual I didn't want to provide for Opsec reasons.


At this point I was already feeling some burnout so tabbed over to other stuff for a few minuets. When I came back it was to the landing page Discord has for all new accounts where they tell you about how they are a worse IRC clone and try to upsell you into buying Nitro (but hey, at least it's still better than Slack). Thinking I had lucked through somehow and wouldn't need to go through the whole phone number charade and was home safe I closed these popups but instead of the expected stuff I was presented with the login screen again. It looked like I had timed out instead on the previous screen and would need to login again into the new account.


No matter, at least I was getting somewhere. I put in my new email and password and hit "Log in", only to be rewarded with "Wait! Are you human?". It was captcha time again. I got my burner phone ready and clicked on the rabbit, just about having had it with Discord. Time was ticking, the game was about to start soon and I didn't want to miss out on the first round.




Your Account has been disabled




Fuck me with a pointed stick. Why has this account been disabled when it's never been properly logged into ever in the first place? What possible reason could you have for disabling the account? No phone number? In that case why not just ask for one instead of nixing the account straight up? I hadn't got the time to seethe here so I went straight back to the account creation screen. Since the previous attempt had failed to create a working account I tried to create another one only to be told "Email is already registered", but not before going through another round of captchas.


Great, because I had the temerity to switch over to another tab for a few minutes you've now basically made it impossible to use my email address with discord forever. Normally at this point I'd have gone outside and touched grass to cool off a bit but there wasn't any time for that right now. I immediately went back to Protonmail and created a new account then returned to Discord signing up for another shiny new account with my shiny new email. One more captcha later I was back to the "verify your phone number page". This time I had my burner in hand and gave Eris my number post haste prior to her fickle nature banishing me again only to be met with another "Wait! Are you human?" before she'd send me the six digit code needed to gain access to her inner valuables.


I got the code and typed the digits in one by one, then hit enter. My reward for this was, yep, you guessed it, another captcha. These newfangled automatic registration bots must be getting really good now at inserting themselves directly into the middle of the process given that you need to verify your humanity basically every other click.


Even this was not enough to satisfy her, she wanted me to verify my email as well before letting me in. I clicked on the button to send a verification email only to be presented with yet another captcha. This was too much, I was one sliver away from going full REEEEEE now: Verification can was supposed to be a meme you guys, not an accurate description of reality! Nevertheless I kept my composure, clicked on the rabbit and waited for the fated email to arrive.


Instead of the signup email from Discord I was expecting I got one from Protonmail instead:




Dear User,






Thank you for your interest in our service.






Our system has flagged third-party service registration emails shortly after your account creation, which goes against the intended use of our service and may indicate disposable account usage.






We've implemented these measures to enhance the overall reputation of Proton Mail. This helps protect our domain and prevents the risk of our IP being banned by third-party services, which could affect service availability for all users.






Currently, your account has some limitations, restricting its use for registering on third-party services.






To remove these limitations, you will need to add a verified recovery email address or phone number, or consider upgrading your account.






Learn more about how to verify your account recovery methods here: https://proton.me/support/set-account-recovery-methods.






Thank you for your understanding and cooperation.






Best regards,






The Proton Anti-Abuse Team




WTF???????? The fact that you knew this was a registration email from Discord implies that you have scanned my email. I thought one of the unique selling points of Protonmail was that you were so privacy focused to the point that everything was encrypted and if governments served you a warrant you wouldn't ever have any info about your customer's emails beyond their encrypted inbox you couldn't do anything about. Scanning their emails is about the biggest breach of trust possible here. And it turns out you aren't just doing it when your hand is forced by the government (understandable) but willingly to make some extra pieces of lucre.


What's even the point of Protonmail then if you're going to be just as bad as the big providers when it comes to privacy but also provide a paltry amount of free storage compared to what they give, and we haven't even started talking about how you gimp new accounts or your sketchy and misleading advertising (they say new free accounts get 1GB storage but it's actually only 500MB by default with the rest requiring you to set up autoforwarding from your gmail account to use their UI and also download their app; oh and to create a sense of FOMO you only have 15 days to do this or you're forever stuck at 500MB).


I remember the days when you used to have two passwords for protonmail, one to download your encrypted mailbox from the site and then the other to decrypt the mailbox locally on your own machine. Oh how you people have fallen. I used to be highly supportive of them in the past but after seeing this I would't piss on them if their servers were on fire.


And of course by now Discord had timed out again and my fledgling account had been disabled. I would have to start the process from the beginning and go through the captcha gauntlet one more time. I was legit malding now, why did they have to make it so fucking hard to create a usable discord account? I was close to giving up by now, no clocktower game was worth this much strife.


Eventually I had to go to Microsoft and create an Outlook email to be able to create a functioning Discord account. I had just about given
up and didn't expect much from them but surprisingly the process with them was completely smooth. All those capchas by the end though had me channelling my inner Elmer Fudd and I was just about ready to kill that damn rabbit. I noticed quite wryly that in the year 2024 AD Microsoft, that old bogeyman of the 90s, was somehow more OK with completely anonymous accounts than services which a few short years ago were loudly trumpeting how pro-anonymity they were.


But even now I was not home safe. I may finally have had a working Discord account but still needed an invite to the BOTC server because surprise surprise my last link had expired. Even though we're an open fun server that's happy to welcome pretty much anyone from rdrama/themotte in 2022 Discord got rid of permanent non-expiring invitation links unless the owner designates it as a "community server" which means giving Discord full rights to scan all content as well as getting it listed on a public directory on the discord website (not a good thing for us, the server's culture risks getting run over). This means we are forced to rely on invite links that expire every seven days...


This change by Discord making user experience worse sounds completely nonsensical until you realize that Discord wants to compete with other established social media sites like Twitter.  That means they're trying to incentivise people to spend as much time as possible on their site and pushing community servers that people can self discover is one way of doing it (same reason they switched to fixed usernames). These incentives also have a side effect of Discord cannibalizing other smaller discussion sites like drama where Aevann who runs rdrama.net now hardblocks links to them because they very noticeably siphon off conversations and people; I can't say this policy is wrong either, something like it is probably necessary for the long term health of the site.


In the end I ended up messaging multiple different people I knew to be on the server and very obliquely asking them for an invite link (because I didn't want my messages to get filtered), hoping one of them would respond so I could join my game. Fortunately @everyone saw my message and I was able to join the game, but not before he got his drama account temp shadowbanned for falling afoul of the Discord filter. After wandering the modern technological desert I had eventually made it to the promised land, but not without half a headache and an intense burning hatred inside of me for the way these big companies operate...


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 20, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Should Nature endorse political candidates? Yes — when the occasion demands it:




How tf do you get from the conclusion that endorsing Biden didn't help him at all but reduced public trust in your paper as an argument for doing more political endoresements?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 22, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Don't even have to be blank slatist here. Modern armies have multiple logistics and support personnel behind each solider, many of which are jobs that don't require strength. Women can be conscripted to work those jobs and free up men to go fight on the frontline. The fact that they are not being done so suggests an attitude of valuing female life more than male life rather than mere blank slatism.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 2, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


The point isn't to "hand your money over to a woman," it's to avoid having unsupported children who become the state's responsibility.




And yet every single state in the US has safe haven laws where a woman can just hand away the kid after birth and is left with zero (0) consequences. The father doesn't even get to choose to keep the child, the mother can just hand it away. Those children become the state's responsibility as well but nobody cares about the hypocrisy.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 12, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
So, it looks like it's pretty clear who's "on top" in the West and can't be interfered with without consequences:


https://twitter.com/VeraJourova/status/1603689440710369281




News about arbitrary suspension of journalists on Twitter is worrying. EU’s Digital Services Act requires respect of media freedom and fundamental rights. This is reinforced under our #MediaFreedomAct. @elonmusk should be aware of that. There are red lines. And sanctions, soon.




When right wing journalists and conservative commentators were being banned by Twitter wholesale there was nary a peep out of the Powers that Be; however now that Elon is giving left wing censorship fans a taste of their own medicine they have come out in full force crying foul play.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 16, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


The solution is not to instead date inexperienced young things, these being the only things you can get, because their red flag detectors haven't grown in yet.




If someone sincerely believes that young adult women's red flag detectors are so bad that they can't tell the difference between good/bad yet then they should support a chaperone like an elderly family member having a level of control over young women's dating lives who can help them filter out the bad ones from the good ones. Unfortunately feminists really don't like that either.


At this point in my life I basically ignore anything coming from a self-professed feminist. I would encourage others to do the same, your existence will get better.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 9, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


From another point of view looks like he is between pair of thighs and munching like it is his last meal ...




I must say this statue is a masterpiece in demonstrating just how many different ways a single sculpture can be seen as absolutely, totally inappropriate, while at the core being perfectly SFW. If that was the intent of the designers then bravo to them.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 9, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
On ruling well as a substitute for morality


Moulay Ismail ibn Sharif was an Alawite King of Morocco who ruled from 1672 to 1727. As a minor son of the first king of the Alawite dynasty and with his mother being a black slave, he only managed to ascend to power due to a fortuitous series of events where two of his higher ranking half brothers took the throne in succession, quarreling against each other until one of them was killed by forces of the other, and then the other died in a horse accident during a campaign a few years later. Even then, he only really got his hands on power because he managed to make it to Fez and proclaim himself Sultan before any of the other people who could conceivably lay a claim to the throne managed to do it.


As you would expect, his reign started out with a very divided Morocco. A rival claimant to the throne rushed to Marrakesh and had himself proclaimed Sultan. Moulay Ismail had to defeat him multiple times over many years because like a goblin, as soon as the Sultan’s forces went to a city to subdue his revolt he would disappear from there and reappear soon after in a different city where he would agitate the nobles there to rebel against the sultan.


Eventually Moulay Ismail managed to subjugate all the pretenders and unify Morocco as a single state under him as the undisputed king. This led to a period of relative stability where the median inhabitants of the empire could by and large go about their lives in peace. His army reforms also led to the creation of the first professional Moroccan Army, the Black Guards, who owed their loyalty directly to the Moroccan state (and by extension to Moulay Ismail) rather than being a collection of fighters from disparate tribes.


He also invested heavily in building structures, creating over 75 forts over his reign all over Morocco. Not only this, he was also a great lover of nature and created a multitude of gardens in the deserts of western north Africa. He basically built the city of Meknes as a new capital for Morocco, raising it from a few derelict villages to such a splendor that it is now recognised as one of the four Imperial Cities of Morocco. To this day his constructions are some of the most noteworthy landmarks any tourist could visit in the country.


And not just this, but what man can overlook his personal harem of over 500 women, through which he sired over 800 confirmed children, putting him as the second most prolific confirmed father throughout all of history, seconded only by Genghis Khan. He was also quite active in the diplomatic arena, sending letters and ambassadors as far as Great Britain to the court of James II, at one point extorting him to convert to Islam for his own spiritual benefit.


His reign is by and large seen as a golden age for Morocco. He brought order and security to the empire, and his reign was described by the historian Ahmad ibn Khalid al-Nasiri as:




“The evildoers and troublemakers no longer knew where to shelter, where to seek refuge: no land wanted to bear them, no sky would cover them.”




He was often compared to his contemporary, Louis XIV of France with whom he had an alliance and was considered to be the Moroccan Sun King (at one point he even tried to get married to one of the illegitimate daughters of Louis XIV). He had grown Morocco to its largest size ever and not only this, the empire’s economy was also doing well. His rule was a high water mark for Morocco: after his death his multitude of sons had another big power struggle which had the dubious distinction of having a single person, Moulay Abdallah, become Sultan on six separate occasions.


Regardless, it is clear that an ordinary citizen of Morocco would have had a far better life during the reign of Moulay Ismail than either the time before his Sultanate or after it. A comparison can be made here to the Three Kingdoms period of Imperial China between the Han and Jin dynasties when due to strife and extensive bloody competition between small warring polities China lost half of its population in merely 60 years. In many ways the reign of Moulay Ismail was the inverse of this, Morocco thrived and flourished during his almost 60 years on the throne.


One might wonder why such an accomplished king and ruler is so unknown these days, why the name of Moulay Ismail is not mentioned more widely in discourse. Even amongst the well read who know something about the history of Africa the name “Moulay Ismail” is not likely to raise too many eyebrows in recognition. This is because despite all the general prosperity and welfare generated by his half century rule over Morocco, his behavior in his personal life and dealings was very much the opposite, indeed Moulay Ismail is better known to people these days as Ismail the bloodthirsty.


His atrocities were myriad, his actions so extreme that even his contemporaries of the 17th century questioned them. A french captive described his appearance as thus:




He is a vigorous man, well-built, quite tall but rather slender... his face is a clear brown colour, rather long, and its features are all quite well-formed. He has a long beard that is slightly forked. His expression, which seems quite soft, is not a sign of his humanity - on the contrary, he is very cruel...




Estimates vary, but point to him having killed or ordered the deaths of over 50,000 people during his reign (not including losses in battle). He was exceptionally cruel to his personal slaves. One of his favorite pastimes when out riding was to pull out his sword as he was climbing his horse and decapitate the slave who was holding the stirrup. Why? Because he could. Ismail the bloodthirsty needed no other reason.


He was also extremely jealous in guarding the women of his harem. Each of them had their own eunuch to guard her from straying. For a man, merely looking at one of his concubines carried the death penalty and it was common for men to throw themselves face first upon the ground with their eyes down to prevent any accusations from the king, which he was very liberal in brandishing, truth be damned. Once he had one of his viziers executed because a storm hit his traveling army and caused large losses, even though the vizier had zero control over it.


It wasn’t like he behaved any better towards the women of his harem either. Any one even suspected of being unfaithful to him was sentenced to, you guessed it, death. In this case the Sultan himself would strangle the unfortunate woman, or if he wanted to be extra cruel, first cut off the breasts and remove the teeth of his victim. And his method of acquiring these women in the first place was not particularly nice either, one of his conditions to make peace with a tribe he had defeated was that he would be given a daughter of the tribe’s chief for himself.


Even blood kinship did not limit his personal depravity. He had multiple of his own sons killed, perhaps most famously Moulay Mohammed al-Alim who was once the Sultan’s favourite son, but was convinced by another one of his wives to revolt as she wanted her own son to be heir to the throne. When Moulay Mohammed was captured his father ordered one of his executioners to cut an arm and a leg off in punishment. The executioner refused to spill royal blood and Moulay Ismail had to get a backup executioner to do the deed. Moulay Mohammed died of his injuries two days later.


Afterwards Moulay Ismail had both of the executioners killed as well, the first one for refusing to obey the Sultan’s orders, and the second one for spilling royal blood…
I needn’t go on with further examples of Moulay Ismail’s personal depravity, although there is a lot I’m leaving out (the reason his proposed marriage with the daughter of Louis XIV did not work out was because the French feared for how she would be treated by him if she went to Morocco).


The point of the matter is, despite how immoral and nasty a person or group may be themselves, it is still possible for them to be a net good for the world on a consequential level, and this possibility only goes up the more power they have. A nasty but competent weak person will not influence wider society at all, all they will do is make life worse for those close to them. A nasty but competent powerful person has the ability to enforce order and stability throughout society, and the positive knock on effects of this can very easily outweigh all the bad stuff they get up to In their personal life.


The nastiness doesn’t have to be restricted to your personal life either, Moulay Ismail treated his Christian slaves extremely cruelly, but as long as the damage your nastiness causes is less than the benefits you provide through your competence, and there is no believable alternative that would be plausibly better, it is best for the world if you are the person/group in charge.


Note the necessity of the plausibility of the alternatives being better. The multitude of different factions competing for the Sultanship before/after Moulay Ismail all believed that they would be better for the country than any one else, but because none of them were able to convince enough nobles etc. enough to consolidate power, there was a lot of strife and the country as a whole suffered. It could even very well be true that a certain claimant to the throne after Moulay Ismail would have been a better ruler had he been given the chance, but because he could not convince wider society of this, the end result was that people were worse off.


There was a comment here a few weeks ago which mentioned that on societal scales, there is no difference between stupid and evil. I think that not only is this true, but even more, you can be so much more competent compared to the alternative (as Moulay Ismail was compared to the lawlessness that was prevalent either side of his reign) that from a consequentialist point of view it is far better for you to be running things than the alternative, your outbursts of evil notwithstanding.


Connecting this to more topical matters: Israel is obviously a morally questionable but technologically/socially superior power compared to the Arabs of the middle east. Even when they aren’t busy killing each other in internecine conflicts (see Saudi Arabia vs Yemen etc.), the are hardly able to create technologically advanced societies where humanity can flourish unless they were blessed by nature with huge oil wealth right under their feet. You can compare e.g. the UAE vs Tunisia, both are similar sized states with very similar cultures, the only big difference is that the former has oil and the latter doesn’t.


The way to see whether Israel is good or bad for the Arabs is not to compare the quality of life led by your average Israeli Jew vs your average Israeli Arab, but to compare the quality of life of an Israeli Arab vs a non-Israeli Arab. Sure, Israel treats it’s Arab citizens as second class citizens compared to the Jews, but this absolutely does not necessarily mean that the Arabs of Israel are worse off than they would be in the counterfactual.


There was an observation made by Scott on one of his old posts that the best place to be an Arab in the Middle East outside of the oil rich states was Israel. Regardless of the lack of rights afforded to Israeli Arabs compared to their Jewish counterparts, the level of ambient prosperity in Israel is so so high compared to non Oil-Rich Arab states that the quality of life enjoyed by as Israeli Arab is higher than the Arabs unfortunate enough to be born elsewhere in the middle east.


Note that is argument is general, it doesn’t apply to just the neighbours of Israel (for which you can claim that the consequences of Israeli actions have damaged those states so much that their citizens now live a much worse life not due to any faults of their own, but rather those of Israel), but to all of the non Oil-Rich Middle East. It is certainly better to be an Israeli Arab compared to a Tunisian Arab and you can’t say that the current situation of Tunisia can largely be blamed onto Israel.


Now someone may counter by saying that it doesn’t matter how much material prosperity you may have if you don’t have political rights and “freedom”, defined in some nebulous way that aligns with how westerners think of it. Except that empirically, people behave in the complete opposite way, gladly sacrificing those things for higher prosperity.


For instance, you can make a strong argument that the average hetero man back in my home country has a lot more “freedom” than if he were to go to, say the UK (freedom to own and shoot guns, freedom to drive without having to follow a huge amount of safety regulations and low speed limits, freedom to develop his property as he wishes, freedom from an onerous tax burden, freedom to buy most medicines by just showing up at the pharmacy and asking for them instead of needing to waste a GP’s and his own time, freedom to hire servants at a mutually agreeable wage instead of minimum wage regulations getting in your way etc.). I feel this personally too, when I go back home to visit my extended family compared to the life I live in the UK. However the difference in the sheer amount of “stuff” a person can buy in the UK vs back home is big enough to create a pool of millions of people who would love nothing more than to give up all this freedom just so they can go and live in the west and be able to buy more things, while there is minimal demand for my co-ethnics in the west to go back home and enjoy all this extra freedom.


You also see this on the other end of the spectrum. Amongst business professionals expat postings that come with higher salaries/fringe benefits in exchange for being sent to a different country where you have zero political rights and are always at the risk of being expelled from the land because your visa renewal was refused are generally highly prized rather than being seen as a trap to avoid. If “political representation” and “right to choose those who lead you” were really all that valuable these professionals wouldn’t be jumping over each other to get these postings where you get paid 75% more and are given two return tickets back home each year to leave your homeland in live amongst foreigners who probably don’t even speak the same language as you.


Another demonstration of the low value of a representative vote to choose what the future will look like vs getting more material prosperity can be seen in the share prices of public companies that issue multiple classes of stock. Often there is a B class of shares that are exactly the same as the standard A class of shares when it comes to dividends and portion of ownership of the company’s assets, except that the B class shares don’t get a vote. The value of a vote can then be computed by comparing the price difference between the two classes of shares.


Yesterday the Alphabet Class A share (which gets voting rights) closed at 138.06, while the Class C share (which is equivalent to the class A share but does not get voting rights) closed at 139.20 . So actually the share with voting rights was selling for ~1% less than the share without voting rights (this is a quirk of the system caused by a short term supply/demand imbalance, normally the shares are within a few cents of each other). This goes to show how much a vote is actually worth, namely very very little compared to using the extra money in buying cheaper shares to buy more of them and get a better return on your capital (in Google’s case the founders have a majority of voting power so you can sort of explain why a vote you can buy isn’t worth anything, but even for companies where this is not the case, voting stock tends to be valued within a few cents of the equivalent non-voting stock).


Putting it all together it’s quite clear, both from the high level outside view, as well as the empirical evidence of where people choose to go if they are allowed to, that even though the rulers of a society may not be deontologically acting in particularly nice ways, and that there is a subgroup which is doing worse than they would otherwise be doing if the rulers would “just change their behavior” and allow them more say in how the place is run, the choice in reality is often not “nasty” rulers vs “nice” rulers, but rather “nasty” rulers vs even nastier alternative, and in that case the net change in sum total welfare of those “oppressed” by these rulers may well be more positive than every other plausible world, and so the “nasty” rulers are good for humanity as a whole and should be seen as such.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 22, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


It’s not just that horniness is embarrassing. The level of cringe was much greater that, say, merely catching your friend picking someone up at the bar for a one-night stand. The idea that you watch porn instead of actually getting laid makes you - in the eyes of much of society - a loser.




Tangentially related but this paragraph reminded me of a passage from C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity:




If anyone says that sex, in itself, is bad, Christianity contradicts him at once. But, of course, when people say, “Sex is nothing to be ashamed of,” they may mean “the state into which the sexual instinct has now got is nothing to be ashamed of.”






If they mean that, I think they are wrong. I think it is everything to be ashamed of. There is nothing to be ashamed of in enjoying your food: there would be everything to be ashamed of if half the world made food the main interest of their lives and spent their time looking at pictures of food and dribbling and smacking their lips.




				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 14, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Are you stupid or am I evil?


There is a political quote which says that "the Right thinks the Left is stupid while the Left thinks the Right is evil". Today/yesterday there was a poll floating around rationalist twitter which I think is the best example I've ever seen of this dynamic.


It asks you to choose between two options:


    

  1.  (Blue pill) 
    2. 

  2.  (Red pill) 
    3. 



And what happens is that:


- if > 50% of ppl choose blue pill, everyone lives


- if not, red pills live and blue pills die


Now if you think about it for even 30 seconds, it clearly makes sense for everyone to choose Red Pill here: if everyone chooses Red Pill nobody dies, which is the best case scenario from choosing blue, and on top there is no personal risk to yourself of dying. You can even analyse it game theoretically and find that both 100% blue and 100% red are Nash equilibria, but only 100% red is stable, and anyways, choosing red keeps you alive with no personal risk (not present in case you choose blue), so everyone should just choose Red, survive and continue on with their lives. Indeed this poll is equivalent to the following one (posted by Roko):


    

  1.  Walk into a room that is a human blender 
    2. 

  2.  Do nothing
    3. 



And what happens is that:


- if you choose the blender, you will die, unless at least 50% of people choose the blender as well, in which case the blender will overload and not work, making you live


- if you do nothing, you live


You would have to be monumentally, incorrigibly stupid to choose the blue pill (walking into the blender) here and we should expect Lizardman's constant level support for blue.


If only our world were really that simple...


The poll can be found here on Twitter: https://twitter.com/lisatomic5/status/1690904441967575040 . Currently there is a 65% majority for choosing the blue pill ::facepalm:: . At least this number is over 50% so nobody is dying. What justification is provided for people choosing Blue over Red? Well, one of the top replies is that "red represents the values of intolerance and fascism". Now this is an extreme example of a reply but even then personally I am stunned that there are a non-negligible proportion of people who actually think in this way. The best response explain what's going on here seems to be this one:




I’ll take the over on preference falsification driving these results.






If all voters were in a position where the non-zero chance of death for a blue vote vs zero chance of death for a red vote was salient and believable, red would win.






Cost-free signaling is a hell of a drug.




Perhaps expectedly enough, no matter how many Red supporters try to explain to people that choosing Blue is stupid, making the choice really really clear using examples like this:




Your plane crashes into the sea.  Everyone survives, and exits the plane with their life vest.






Someone says, “If over half of us turn our life vests into a raft, it can save everyone without a life vest!  Otherwise, we’ll drown!”






Everyone has a life vest.






Everyone wearing a life vest will not drown.






Do you build the boat, or just put on your vest?




And yet, large amounts of people still support blue (taking your life vests off to build a raft). The fact that such people get to vote (and make up a majority of at least this twitter poll) is a fucking scary thought. This is why we can't have nice things people!


</rant over>


In more encouraging news rdrama.net also ran this poll here: https://rdrama.net/h/polls/post/196874/are-you-effective-altruist-enough-to . Fortunately people there were sensible enough to vote for Red by a 90-10 margin, which is basically everyone once you discount the ultra-edgy maximally contrarian nodule on the site ("I want to die, so I pick blue") which will always vote to pick the maximally dramatic option (which on the site would be Blue).


I'd be interested in trying this out here on the Motte too, but unfortunately we don't have poll functionality on this site...


&&Blue Pill&&


&&Red Pill&&


EDIT:


For people who say "Blue" is the right choice for pro-social reasons:


Consider a slightly changed version of the poll where instead of choosing for yourself whether you have Red/Blue you are making this choice for a random stranger who's also taking part (and in turn some other random stranger is making the choice for you). In this case it makes sense from a selfish perspective to choose Blue for that random stranger, since there's a chance that the person choosing for you chooses Blue for you as well in which case you'd want 50%+ Blue as you want to live, while from an altruistic perspective it makes sense to choose "Red" for your stranger, since that way you're saving them from potentially dying.


In this case we'd expect everyone to end up choosing Blue if they play rationally, even though the "altruistic" pro-social option is to choose Red. If you still think that everyone should choose Blue then you agree that there are cases where the non-(pro-social) thing is the right thing to do.


If you say that in this case we should each of us now choose Red as that's the socially good option then since people generally value their own life at least as much as the life of a stranger (note: I say "at least as much", not "more" here) you must also agree that it's just as fine for people to choose "Red" in the case where they're deciding for themselves instead of a stranger.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 7, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Nominal determinism strikes again.




Now I want her to win the case on pure cosmic hilarity grounds. Imagine a woman named "Robbin' Europe" pilfering over $10 million from a bunch of whites because of some made up racial discrimination BS. This is so good that if this stands it's going to be one of my main examples of Nominative determinism alongside lawyer Sue Yu and that incontinence research paper by Splatt and Weedon.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 8, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Man the plot armour on Trump is insane. If the shooter had aimed just a few arcseconds away we'd have a dead Trump right now.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 28, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


It's clearly intended to communicate to the consumer that they're assuming the whole burden of the tax. This simply isn't how taxes work.




Sales tax is also not 100% burden on the consumer but it's very frequently broken out as a separate line item in the US.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The judge was requesting a bribe. Westerners really don't comprehend how corrupt third world nations are even when presented with an example of it in the most direct sense possible.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 1, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
*ding* *ding* *ding*


Claudine Gay, president of Harvard, is out. Yep, it's true, absolutely not Fake and Gay. No Gay here, no siree...




Harvard President Claudine Gay will resign Tuesday afternoon, bringing an end to the shortest presidency in the University's history, according to a person with knowledge of the decision.




...




Gay weathered scandal after scandal over her brief tenure, facing national backlash for her administration’s response to Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack and allegations of plagiarism in her scholarly work.




Even the Harvard Crimson, which is about as institutional-woke aligned as you can get pulls no punches in its article. She really seems to have completely fallen from the graces of the powers that be in academia. The plagierism allegations aren't new either, they've been going around for a year at this point, but it looks like they only really started to matter when she put a mark on herself and the sharks smelled blood.


Before that point they were just ignored and the general fishiness around her dates back to the early 2000s. This means that Harvard did not care about the allegations when they were appointing her to the presidency (just 6 months ago, when these allegations were all out there), but only started to care once she became a personal liability to Harvard rather than merely an academic one. Alternatively they did care but their vetting process is so bad something so open and shut as her plagierism passed through undetected. Either way it looks really bad. A pox on Harvard!


On a more cynical note I admit to being personally surprised by this, of all three presidents she was the one I expected the least to get deposed even though Sally Kornbluth, the MIT president came across as by far the most consistent and reasonable person at the hearing (she didn't do that well either, but it wasn't a car crash at least).


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 11, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


This is the new zoomer take on that old saw about sleeping under bridges.




That old saw was absolutely correct. We ban sleeping under bridges because it imposes a cost on society, and a rich person sleeping under a bridge imposes the same cost on society that a poor person sleeping under a bridge does hence doing so is banned for everyone.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The case here wasn't an introduction. The dude had known the girl and was friendly with her for a long time. He we told by society to be fully open and honest about his intentions with women and when he did this was lambasted for it. Totally predictable and the dude made a mistake believing what society says rather than seeing what society does, but this discrepancy is very much real. I hope he takes this as a learning lesson.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 16, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


If you like lobster, you already eat "bugs".




Lobsters are crustaceans while "bugs" is usually used to refer to insects (Insecta) - not even allowing for the fact that true bugs (Hemiptera) make up an even smaller order. Crustaceans aren't even that close to insects phylogenetically, things like springtails are a lot closer to insects than them.


Otherwise yeah I agree completely.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 18, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


The poker player. This is the hardest to explain, they they seem to be able to read people, manipulate people and navigate around smart people in a manner that no one can. They aren't immediately obvious as the smartest in any room, but they somehow always get their way. Often end up CEOs or millionaires somehow.




The best poker players in the world are now robots, they play online, have zero idea about reading other people or how to manipulate/navigate around them.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 23, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Each year millions of people willingly uproot themselves to go to a different country in search of better economic wealth etc, and those who have potential manage to achieve it to varying degrees. India is extremely poor, Indian Americans are very rich, high human capital Indians when placed in an environment conducive to generating wealth do extremely well. Australian aboriginals don't, e.g. Australian aboriginals in large cities don't do paticularly well compared to the median inhabitants of those cities.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 1, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
On giving parents votes for their children


One idea that people here have mentioned a couple of times has been to give parents a vote for each underage child they have. The more I think about it, the better this proposal seems, and not only just that, but almost everyone, no matter where they are on the political spectrum should find something in it they support.


Firstly on the logistics front this is very simple to implement. We already have a database of who is the legal parent of who, and whether or not they are emancipated from their parents. Every non-emancipated child's parents get a ballot paper in a different colour to the standard one (say a green ballot paper vs white for adults) which is worth half of a normal vote. So overall both parents of a child get half an extra vote that they can use to vote as they wish. Then we can just count the votes after the election, giving 1/2 weighting to the green ballots. If you have 4 children you are legally the parent of (and responsible for), then you get 1 white and 4 green ballots every election, totally to 3 full votes. Any emancipated children get their full vote, as they are already considered adults for many other things.


This method removes the argument that children shouldn't get a vote because they aren't well developed enough to choose themselves what they want. We already trust parents to act in their child's best interest for many things, asking parents to vote for them as well isn't much of a stretch beyond this. It also rewards parents for sticking with their children and raising them well, as you only get to vote on their behalf if you accept responsibility for them.


The consequences of such a policy would be very positive. Firstly the greater political power handed to parents over non-parents would lead to policies favouring those with children, which would help increase the abysmal birth rates of many western countries as having a child becomes more beneficial/less of a burden. Parents are generally considered as having more stake in the long term future of society too, so giving greater political power to them would shift society towards more long term thinking too, which is sorely lacking at the moment.


Parents tend to be more conservative than childless people, controlling for all the usual factors. Giving them extra voting power would almost certainly shift the Overton window rightwards. Expect to see greater focus on tackling crime, nicer neighbourhoods and better schools if such a policy comes to pass.


At the moment the age of the median voter is significantly higher than the average age of the population as whole. This leads to greater emphasis being placed on the concerns of the old disproportionately, see for example the UK where attacking the entitlements of the old (pensions, high house prices etc.) is effectively a no-go area, as whichever party does this is certain to take a drubbing at the next election. Giving children the vote via their parents would fix this issue, the age of the median voter (controlled for vote power) would come down a fair bit, thus shifting political focus away from the concerns of the old towards the concerns of those of childbearing age.


Equally at the moment in many western countries due to demographic differences in age cohorts minorities have significantly less voting power than you would expect given their share of the population. This is due to minorities being disproportionately minors (pun not intended) who don't get the vote. Thus current political focus is disproportionately focused on placating whites. Such a change would hand  more power to minorities in the country allowing them to push for policies that are best for themselves and their children, rather than just what white progressives say are best for themselves and their children. Doing this basically just pushes the voting demographics of a country forward by 18 years, it's going to happen anyways, might as well just accept it now even if you are white.


And children themselves probably benefit the most from such a policy. Parents generally put great emphasis on giving the best possible start to their children, and many already vote accordingly to what they believe is going to be best for them. Amplifying their voices relative to the childless will probably lead to these children entering a world more suited for them when they reach adulthood than presently.


Basically no matter whether you are conservative or liberal, white or a minority, young or old, giving votes to the parents of children is a policy that has something to offer you.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 10, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
She can very easily get a partner without resorting to such artifaces, all she has to do is be realistic about what her value as a 36 year old woman like her is. The odds of that happening though, even for a rationalist woman, aren't particularly good.


Once again this isn't all (or even mostly) her fault, but rather it is a fault of the society and milleu she lives in that her (inflated) hopes and dreams are about to go splat on the ground and this is one final desperate attempt from a struggling soul to avert doom.


They say that disappointment is caused by the difference in expectations vs reality, and by sending expectations for middle aged women to the moon without doing anything to change the reality on the ground modern Western culture claims for itself another victim.


What she is able to get and keep lies on a cline between the 21 year old incel and the 60 year old functioning alcoholic, the time to find a long term partner was 10 years ago for her. Had she been told at 26 that if she left it until 36 she'd only be able to get the dregs of society to commit to her there is a very good chance that she'd be happily married today. Instead her society which looks down on inflicting short term pain for long term gain has now condemned her to far greater suffering, probably for the rest of her life.


I've learned to phase out and stop caring about such cases, much as we've all phased out to the massive hunger and suffering going on right now in Africa.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 11, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Yeah, it's extremely weird that Google et. al. went on hiring sprees when they could have just given their employees next level money. All those weird side projects that haemorraged money led to lower return on capital employed, which pisses off investors (even more than not giving them fat dividends does) and also pisses off your employes compared to the counterfactual where they would get millions a year.


Funnily enough I was recently talking to a (leftier than me) friend of mine who didn't know that all the big famous investment banks were public companies and that anyone could buy their shares.


After I told him he was extremely surprised by this fact and opined that they must be an excellent way to make money only to be brought down back to earth after I told him that in reality they were really shitty investments because all that money they made went to their employees as salaries and bonuses, leaving their public investors with mediocre returns.


He said something along the lines of "Of course this happens, typical greedy banker behaviour". Because I value this friendship I wisely left it at that and changed the subject, but deep down a part of me wanted to quip "Firstly you complain about big companies putting investors ahead of their employees and how this makes them capital-B Bad/greedy, and now here you have an example of a class of companies which do the opposite and put their employees ahead of their investors and now you are calling them capital-B Bad and greedy for this behaviour? Make up your mind man!"


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 8, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


With an added bonus that if it proves too hard to return the money, one could just tell the Jews to take a hike




And then those same gentiles would be crying about why the Jews were charging them such high rates of interest, I know that "counterparty risk" was not a term at that time but this is just common sense.