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MadMonzer

Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.

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joined 2022 September 06 23:45:01 UTC 

				
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MadMonzer


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.

				
				
				

				

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					joined 2022 September 06 23:45:01 UTC
				


				
					

					
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				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 26, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
British police uniforms are a very dark blue, to the point where they look black in dim light. It is a sufficiently from standard US police uniforms that I think the "Union Army surplus" theory is more plausible.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 26, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The ceiling painting in the Painted Hall in Greenwich, London is an allegorical depiction of the Hanoverians bringing the blessings of liberty to Europe and trampling Tyranny (as represented by Louis XIV) underfoot. The angels blessing him hold fasces, which was seen as a sign of ordered liberty at the time, by analogy with the Roman Republic. The docent who provided this explanation was not embarassed by it, although some of the other tourists were.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 26, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The point isn't to change the way the outrage machine responds. The main point is to change the way normies encountering ICE/CBP in the street respond. The secondary point (which I agree probably won't work) is to change the way normies who watch the viral videos respond.


At the margin, does the Trump administration want Minneapolis wine moms to feel like an unpopular law is being enforced in their city, or does he want them to feel like a defeated people resisting a successful belligerent occupation? I don't know, but I think the question is important.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 26, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Of course, Niemoeller is hardly the closest friend of the regime the Nazis murdered, that dubious honor likely falls to the SA leadership around Ernst Roehm, whose loyalty to the cause only bought them a quick death.




I would say that Strasser was a closer friend to the Nazis than Rohm, who left the party in 1925 because he objected to Hitler's strategy of legality and worked as a mercenary in South America for a few years before it became clear that the legality strategy was working after the 1930 election.


Niemoeller was a curious character. His background would make him a natural DNVP voter, he publicly opposed the Nazis almost immediately after they came to power (initially because they extended their anti-Semitic policies to ethnic Jewish converts to Lutheranism), and he would go on to cofound the explicitly anti-Nazi Confessing Lutheran Church with Dietrich Boenhoffer. So not exactly your typical Nazi. But he was an enthusiastic NSDAP supporter, even when they were in the wilderness in the 1920's, and the Volkischer Beobachter promoted his book. I understand why he spent most of his life after getting out of the concentration camp on an apology tour.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 26, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The operation in Minneapolis is a joint ICE/CBP operation. (I think the CBP element is part of the Border Patrol, but I might be wrong on this point). CBP have a cop-like blue working uniform that would be completely appropriate for this operation, although it is mostly used by CBP Field Operations. Border Patrol still use the green paramilitary-style uniforms that they used before integration into CBP, which are not ideal for urban policing but are a lot better than the grey cammo I am seeing on my TV screen.


If I was trying to make Minneapolis look like dispassionate law enforcement then I would put ICE and Border Patrol in matching uniforms similar to the CBP Field Ops uniform but with the appropriate agency badges. Call it the "urban operational duty" uniform to distinguish it from the existing green Border Patrol "rough duty" uniform that they wear when patrolling the actual border. But if, as I suspect given what MAGA Twitter wants to see, part of the point is to look like a paramilitary operation against the blue tribe, then the grey cammo makes better social media copy.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 26, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
In a surprisingly apt example, The Great Silver Bubble says that movies were cancelled in 1979 because the Hunt brothers had created a shortage of film by buying up all the silver. The amount of heirloom silver melted down so short sellers could overpay for it and deliver it into the Hunts' longs was also socially destructive.


The good news that time is that the Hunts ended up paying for their fun - the unsuccessful attempt to corner the silver market cost them 1.7 billion dollars  (6.5 billion adjusting for inflation, 17 billion adjusting for GDP growth, so a loss that would embarass Bill Gates but not Elon Musk)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 26, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
"Bus them over" was based on a particular population of obviously-net-negative but sympathetic-to-Blues migrants (namely newly-arrived "refugees") which no longer exists because of better border enforcement under Trump. In addition, it was a group of people who couldn't legally be deported, so centrist Democrats couldn't call the bluff and say "If you want them deported, why are you bussing them over instead of deporting them."


The red tribe are no more going to bus their own illegal employees to Massachusetts than deport them, for the same reasons. And even if they did, established illegal residents with jobs, homes, families and friends in Texas wouldn't go to Massachusetts voluntarily, and shipping them involuntarily to Massachusetts would look as bad (and be almost as bad, or worse if you care about the law) as shipping them involuntarily to Mexico.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 26, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
ICE (and CBP - Minneapolis is a joint operation) is arresting every illegal immigrant who comes to its attention, including schoolchildren. They have said they are doing this, the media say they are doing this, and supporters of the operation (including on this forum) say they should be doing this.


The argument about whether it is possible to be out of legal immigration status innocently has been done to death, but if you think the answer is "Yes" then ICE are absolutely rounding up innocents, and this is what the core MAGA vote want. The claim that Trump-era immigration enforcement is focussed on "the worst of the worst" is a lie for the benefit of low-information normies. MAGA think ICE are deporting them all and this is good, Minnesota Nice thinks ICE are deporting them all and this is bad. So mocking the "worst of the worst" lie is an entirely normal thing to do.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 19, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I agree that Americans have more of an excuse for caring about the I-P conflict than other Westerners do.


"The UK should butt out of the I-P conflict, and individual Britons who pick a side either have dual loyalties or are idiots" is probably my most dangerous political opinion in polite company.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 19, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Mostly ignoring Gaza is a sign of a healthy forum culture, unless your forum has a mission that specifically includes paying attention to obscure third-world humanitarian disasters. The Israel-Palestine conflict is boring, notoriously intractable, and has a low death toll relative to a mid-tier African civil war. It gets far more press than it deserves because it somehow became a proxy for the US culture war.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 19, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Zero fahrenheit was supposed to be the coldest precisely replicable temperature Fahrenheit could create in his lab - the freezing point of saturated ammonium chloride solution. (Ordinary salt brine actually freezes at -6 degrees fahrenheit, but Fahrenheit didn't have access to sodium chloride that was pure enough to make this temperature replicable).  The upper fixed point was supposed to be body temperature at 96 degrees fahrenheit (in the spirit of Imperial units, using a number with lots of factors including powers of two, rather than one that looks pretty in decimal), but it turned out not to be consistent enough, or easy to measure with the thermometers fahrenheit had access to.


The scale was restandardised to 32 and 212 as the freezing and boiling points of pure water after the Royal Society endorsed the Celsius scale.


But "Freezing point of brine is about zero, body temperature is about 100" is the original motivation of what the numbers are in degrees fahrenheit.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 19, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I think it's the sense that they would rather lose as long as they satisfy their own personal feelings of being a good person first and foremost.




The one thing Christianity isn't about is your own personal feelings. If the God of the Bible is real, and his only-begotten son Jesus Christ died on the Cross for our sins, then this matters. Different strains of Christianity differ over the precise relationship between "being a good person" and faithful acceptance of the gift of Jesus' sacrifice, but the end goal is mutual love between God and Man, and "If you love me, you will keep my commandments". (John 14:15). There is a lot of moral and social teaching in the Bible (although very little about secular politics), and if you find that 100% of it agrees with opinions your allies have adopted for secular reasons, you are engaging in motivated reasoning.




It's like a desire for martyrdom or something




Many people who are sincerely religious desire martyrdom. Read the lives of the Saints, or the sermons at your local Salafi mosque. The reward they seek is not of this world, and trying to point out the worldly unwisdom of what they are doing invites and deserves ridicule.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for January 23, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It seems quite different to me - the Church as Bride of Christ is portrayed as in a subordinate relationship to a male figure, whereas Britannia, Columbia, Lady Liberty, Marianne etc. are generally portrayed as powerful in their own right with no man in the picture. Both Britannia and Lady Liberty are usually portrayed as, in effect, reigning queens while Columbia and Marianne are portrayed as successful rebel leaders. Obviously all of this is downstream of the thoroughly pagan portrayal of Athena as patron goddess of Athens, including the statue in the Parthenon.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for January 23, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
In this case surely Britannia would be the canonical example?


As an interesting aside, both the US (Uncle Sam) and the UK (John Bull) have male personifications as well as the female ones, which most countries don't.


Also, can Americans on this board comment on the relative visibility of Columbia and Lady Liberty as female personifications of the US - the America that is presented to the rest of the world uses Lady Liberty a lot more, to the point that the Columbia who appears onscreen in the opening credits of a Columbia Pictures movie looks more like Lady Liberty than traditional portrayals of Columbia.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 19, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
38k is for a family of three. There aren't 200 million of those in America.


This is a bizarre blindspot of UBI proponents. The groups who need a UBI most are children and seniors (who effectively already have one), because we don't expect them to work. Various UBI-for-kids schemes are easy to imagine (in the US, the most obvious is the fully-refundable child tax credit) but only Matt Breunig and about three other pro-natalist Berniebros seem to be strongly in favour of them. But the culture that produces Anglosphere wonks (including left, pro-establishment right, and libertarian wonks) sees children as consumption goods and not human beings, so it keeps coming up with adults-only UBI, or thinking in ways which assume a single-parent family of three should get the same UBI as a single childless adult.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 19, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The war of 1812 felt existential at the time (once it became clear to the Americans that the British would actually fight back - something Madison had assumed they wouldn't), even if modern historians with access to British archives think it wasn't.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 19, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
"Americans" are not a homogenous group with uniform preferences about urban living - some like it, others don't. A lot more Americans want to live in places that resemble European or first-world Asian cities than are currently able to - we know this because such places (or even simulacra of them like New Urbanist suburbs) carry a price premium.


Americans living in suburbia is not a revealed preference because urbanism is mostly illegal - both in the sense that it is literally illegal to build at density in most of the US, and also in the sense that the system will not allow you to do the things you need to police somewhere built at urban densities - and I think we all agree that crime is a good and sufficient reason why nobody with options will live in the typical American inner city. If you ask Americans on this board why they don't like cities, most (not all - people who genuinely prefer more rural-like lifestyles exist) of the responses are about crime.


Empirically, where the system is able to put up low-diversity low-crime urbanism the way America puts up Pulte Homes tackyboxes with two-car garages (parts of Spain, South Korea, Japan), everywhere else depopulates. Even high-diversity medium-crime urbanism (NYC, London, Paris) is a build-it-and-they-will-come phenomenon.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 19, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Does this show the weakness of UBI or weakness of American administrative capacity? California can't do HSR but HSR is still possible. In many countries public transport is perfectly usable, respectable, junkie-free...




I don't think there is any well-run city where the transit system as a whole covers 100% of operating costs at the farebox. Hong Kong covers 100% of operating costs using a combination of farebox revenue and station-adjacent retail, and I think Tokyo does as well. There are definitely routes which do, and there are a few cities where the metro/light rail/equivalent as a whole has a farebox operating surplus (the London Underground is an example) which subsidises low-ridership bus routes and paratransit. But every city runs lifeline services to auto-oriented outer suburbs that lose money hand-over-fist, and almost every city runs paratransit that loses even more money.


This isn't particularly surprising - some of the benefit of collectively-provided transport flows to riders (and can be captured through fares) but some is captured by landlords near the route (and has to be captured through property taxes). This logic applies to roads for cars too, which is why local streets are paid for out of property taxes and not gas taxes in almost every city in America. The exceptions (HK and Tokyo) are where the transit network is the landlord.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 19, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Old Scranton Joe was more generous with the aid to Ukraine than the Don, but he was being a lot more miserly than Europe and the American deep state wanted. He was a bit out to lunch, but his one real red-line policy position that he was cogent of and involved about was no American ground troops in Ukraine.




The Biden administration's limits went a lot further than that - as a matter of vibes it was "nothing that could be considered as a direct confrontation between NATO and Russia because of the risk of nuclear armageddon" and more specifically it included


    

  • No US troops in Ukraine
    • 

  • No NATO troops in Ukraine without plausible deniability
    • 

  • No NATO flights over Ukraine and no missiles launched into Ukraine from NATO countries
    • 

  • No direct deliveries of US-made warplanes to Ukraine
    • 

  • No use of NATO-provided materiel for strikes inside the internationally recognised borders of Russia (it was the Biden administration who blocked the use of British-made Storm Shadow to strike Russia, not the British).
    • 

  • Target-by-target approval of strikes in Crimea with NATO-provided materiel
    • 



The restrictions on Ukraine using British kit to attack into Crimea or Russia proper were relaxed by the lame-duck Biden administration, and never reimposed by Trump.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 18, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
em dash with no spaces is the traditional US standard for serious typography, now adopted by LLMs. en dash with spaces is the British standard. A dash which separates two thoughts and a parenthetic dash are set in the same way.


An en dash without spaces is used for ranges and sports scores in both the UK and the US, e.g. 3-6 months or a 2-0 defeat.


ASCII does not distinguish between hyphens, dashes, and minus signs, meaning that a hyphen with spaces became the online standard for dashes in the era when plain ASCII was what the internet ran on - hence the em dash becoming an LLM marker


LaTeX sets hyphens, en dashes, em dashes, minus sings representing negation, and minus signs representing subtraction as five different characters.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 19, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The list of countries that had tariffs on the US was a lie, Trump didn't write Art of the Deal, and the tactics he usually uses on tariffs isn't door in the face as described in e.g. the linked article.


The last point needs some more explanation. "Door in the face" as understood by people who write about negotiation tactics, involves making an outrageous first ask which functions as a psychological anchor to make the real ask look more reasonable. The announcement of the Greenland tariffs is potentially a good example - if you assume the demand for sovereignty is a DITF which can then be negotiated down to some other concession that Denmark wouldn't normally be willing to make. But Trump's normal approach (see the early Mexico/Canada tariffs, or the Liberation Day tariffs) is to make an outrageous threat without an actionable ask attached, and then invite the threatened party to make an offer.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 19, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


ragebait trump-bad-ally greenland stories are pushed every day,




Trump is the one pushing them.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 12, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The poor people who subsidise the free flights in the non-retarded version of the meme aren't the people carrying a balance and paying interest - they are the people paying cash at prices which have been pushed upwards by the cost of credit card interchange.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 12, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Small business owners who employ illegals are the corest of the core constituency of the Republican party. Exploiting illegal labour requires entrepreneurial spirit, mild evil, and to be working in a sector that is already Republican-dominated (mostly farming or construction).


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 12, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I don't disagree with you - I just don't think the British youth is going to riot over this.


Quite apart from views on the issues, France just has a stronger rioting culture than the UK does. Historically, the kind of British youth who would be a serial rioter in France would have become a football hooligan instead.