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MadMonzer

Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite

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joined 2022 September 06 23:45:01 UTC 

				
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MadMonzer


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite

				
				
				

				

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					joined 2022 September 06 23:45:01 UTC
				


				
					

					
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User ID: 896


					
					
					
				

			


					

						
					



		

	

 











			
			

			
			

			




	


		

			
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				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 31, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I sometimes wonder if Saddam Hussein was aware there were no WMDs in Iraq - up to the point where resolution 1441 passes the UNSC, he acts like a man who has WMDs and expects to lose power if he gives them up.


I also think that W would have received a sufficient amount of stovepiped intelligence to convince anyone who doesn't start out with the prior that the entire US national security elite are lying liars that there were WMDs in Iraq. Apart from the fact that the national security establishment are lying liars who knew what the White House wanted to hear and were happy to provide it, Cheyney and Rumsfeld were exceptionally able DC power players, partially controlled the flow of intelligence to the Oval Office, and wanted the war even more than Bush.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 2, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
POC, BIPOC, BAME, and all other euphemistic portmanteau terms the lump together non-white people in white-majority countries. They obscure more than they illuminate and the people the words refer to don't like them.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 18, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
This is sensible. Given the nature of IQ 100-115 normies, allowing them to run arbitrary code on a machine is equivalent to allowing the GRU or Lockbit to run arbitrary code on that machine.


God did not intend every individual to have access to a universal Turing machine. On the other hand, Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds did, and the GNU/Linux ecosystem isn't going anywhere because the internet backbone runs on it. In addition, a huge part of the value proposition of the Microsoft ecosystem (particularly relative to Apple) is that it supports organisations doing their own computing without needing to ask Microsoft's permission. Satya Nadella may not want every worker drone to have a universal Turing machine in their pocket, but he wants every enterprise customer's IT guy to have easy access to one. And in practice that means building machines which offer universal functionality to anyone who knows what they are doing.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 23, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


My impression is that getting a progressive to acknowledge something went wrong with the Sexual Revolution is like nailing jello to a wall.




Mainstream progressive (i.e. sex-positive) feminism is happy to acknowledge that women are not getting off on the casual sex available post Sexual Revolution - they just blame men for it rather than reconsidering whether the Sexual Revolution was a good idea.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 2, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


What happens after that is anyone's guess. In a literal sense we move back to where we were this January and do another election for Speaker.




I can only see two plausible outcomes:


    

  • There is another round of humiliating chaos for the Republican caucus, ending with them re-electing McCarthy for the same reason they did last time.
    • 

  • The 10 or so RINOest RINOs in the caucus put up a RINO for speaker and the Democrats vote for him.
    • 



The Freedom Caucus have zero leverage here. The speaker needs to be acceptable to the median Representative, who (a) is a RINO and (b) will lose their seat if they become associated with the unpopular parts of the Freedom Caucus agenda.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 25, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


They're pretty much never middle-class white American or Western European kids.




Jeffery Epstein was picking up local white girls in Florida. I don't think any of them would have qualified as middle class, but several of them lived with at least one gainfully employed parent. Virginia Guiffre (the girl in the famous Prince Andrew picture) was working at Mar-a-Lago when Ghislaine Maxwell recruited her, which makes her at least respectable working class.


OTOH, it does look like he was picking on girls who were screwed up in various ways. For example, Virgina Guiffre had already been sexually abused by two men (one in her mother's house, one while living as a runaway) before moving in with her father, and was trying to become a masseuse.


The Roman Catholic Man-Boy Love Association targetted some kids from normie families who were sufficiently functional to be regular churchgoers. (Although the majority of the victims were children in Church-run children's homes, it was buggering the altar boys which gave the scandal legs). In the UK, the sexual abuse extended to pupils at Ampleforth, which was the most expensive and socially prestigious private school in the north of England. The other smaller religious sex abuse scandals tend to follow the same pattern.


The Penn State sex abuse scandal and similar scandals in youth sports (which is as lousy with sex abusers as the RCMBLA) involved student-athletes as victims, who tend to be middle-class, or at least respectable working class.


So although the "Taken" fantasy is almost entirely a media creation, it definitely isn't the case that normie middle-class white American kids are safe from sex abuse.  It's just that it tends to involve corrupt authority figures, not stereotypical predators.


WARNING FOR PARENTS - THIS IS IMPORTANT - YOUR KID IS NOT PROTECTED FROM SEXUAL ABUSE BY CORRUPT AUTHORITY FIGURES BY YOUR MONEY, POWER OR COMMUNITY STANDING UNLESS YOU ACTUALLY DO THE WORK OF PROTECTING THEM. This starts by giving them the tools to talk to you about dodgy shit, and making sure they feel safe doing so.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 22, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
In the 1980s and well into the 1990s the Holocaust was on the back burner in the UK for the same reason - as long as significant numbers of people who remembered the Blitz were still alive, no Briton was going to bellyfeel that anything else was Hitler's worst crime. The way history was taught in British schools was that Hitler was the evil Lord of Evil because he was bent on Alexander the Great/Genghis Khan style world conquest long after this had ceased to be acceptable behaviour. This became a Problem that required large-scale British military intervention to stop him several years before anyone came up with the Holocaust.


During the heroic period of WW2 (for the UK, from the Nazi invasion of Poland in September 1939 to El Alamein in July 1942), we couldn't have been fighting Hitler in an unsuccessful attempt to prevent the Holocaust, because the Holocaust hadn't started yet.


FWIW, I still think that the traditional British view is correct (which was also the view of the Nuremberg prosecutors), and that the Holocaust lobby is wrong - Hitler's worst crime was starting WW2. He isn't uniquely evil compared to other warmongering megalomanicas, just uniquely deadly because of the large European population in the 20th century.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 3, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Sandy Berger got a fine and probation for doing worse than what Clinton did.


Has anyone ever been jailed for merely mishandling classified information without improperly disclosing it?


ETA - a quick google found this list of example cases. It looks like big shots like Berger and Petraeus get off with probation and fines, but small fry can get 3 months in prison if they are unlucky. The multi-year sentences all involved at least the appearance of unauthorized disclosure.


I think it is pretty clear Clinton would not have been jailed if she was prosecuted. Similarly, it would be an injustice if Trump gets jailed for mishandling classified information (assuming, of course, that he hasn't been disclosing it).


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				What would an updated Grand Tour look like?
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Plan for the development of this post if people are interested:


    

  • 

    Ideas for the key cities (London, Paris, Florence, Rome) including sites and excursions
    

    • 

  • 

    A detailed route through Switzerland and northern Italy
    

    • 

  • 

    A list of key performing arts experiences and the best cities to experience them in
    

    • 

  • 

    A list of key culinary experiences
    

    • 

  • 

    Possible live spectator sport experiences
    

    • 

  • 

    A rough timetable and budget
    

    • 

  • 

    Possible route variations including starting in York or Edinburgh, a southern route from Paris to Florence through Provence, Genoa and the Cinque Terre, a detour via Venice, a detour via Amsterdam/Bruges
    

    • 

  • 

    What is left out (in my view, the biggest omission driven by route practicalities is Barcelona)
    

    • 



				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
This hilarious Noahopinion essay says that modern Tankies are about 2000 people on Twitter who get more attention than they deserve because they are so good at trolling other prominent left-Twitter factions.


I don't know about the 2000 Twitter trolls theory, but I agree with Noah that the root cause is anti-Americanism taken to the level where the enemy of my enemy is my friend.


I think the same applies to the increasingly numerous "right-Tankies" (such as the one who took over the CPAC twitter account), who see the American government and American-led alliance system as part of the woke enemy. I am not sure what you call right-wingers who express Tankie-like sentiments - Quisling seems unfairly harsh, although this really is the kind of sentiment that enabled people like Quisling and Petain in WW2.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 22, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'm equally sure that pro-Israel Jews would prefer someone who moves aid forward while delivering a mild dressing-down for PR purposes to someone who praises Netanyahu to the skies while using aid as a lever to extract concessions elsewhere from his domestic political opponents. The Biden administration is significantly less critical of Netanyahu's policy in Gaza than the Israeli opposition, which most centrist American Jews find a lot more sympathetic than Likud.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 4, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
This is classic social psych bullshit in a right-wing wrapper. There are two lying-with-statistics tricks going on here:


    

  1. 

    Non-standard terminology. The definition of "elite 1%" excludes the vast majority of elites who live in rich suburbs. They define elite 1% as meeting all 3 of postgraduate degree (this covers 14% of the population), household income over $150k (trivial for a two-income PMC couple in a HCOL city - two schoolteachers with masters degrees would probably qualify) and living in a zip code with a population density over 10k/square mile (only a few % of the population - looking at zipatlas.com these zip codes are mostly downtown districts, prisons and campuses with their own zip codes, NYC, and dense inner suburbs of LA.)  So the most restrictive condition is the population density one, which is not a measure of eliteness - it is a proxy for alignment with the tribe Rasmussen wants to bash.
    

    2. 

  2. 

    Garden of forking paths. The authors switch between "the elite 1%", "elite 1% graduates of a semi-arbitrary list of 12 schools" and "politically obsessed members of the elite 1%" as needed to make the point they are making. We don't know how many other cuts of the data they ran before they chose those ones.
    

    3. 



Rasmussen are saying that they have surveyed the elite and found that they are out of touch with America. What they have actually done is surveyed the subset of the PMC that chooses to live in the densest 2% of zip codes, and their interns played with crosstabs until they found some subsets of that group who are, indeed, profoundly out of touch with America. This is about as meaningful as doing some vox pops with stoners in downtown Portland.


See this Arnold Kling post and comments for more details.




I think it’s clear that these are the people with actual power and influence, the ones who set the agenda, the key actors in tech, media, government and law. They create outcomes, or lack thereof. Just about every judge would be elite by this definition, along with nearly all AI workers (OK maybe not the work-from-home guys in the Colorado mountains). All lobbyists, the heads of most NGOs, the most important lawyers – everyone except the right-wing politicians who seem unable to achieve any of their goals.




Apart from Manhattanites, quite the opposite. Who has more power and influence - the residents of DC or the government officials who commute in from the burbs? The people of Anaheim and Inglewood or the people of Beverley Hills? 90210 is by the definition used in this study a non-elite zip code.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 11, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Upvoted for capital-T Truth.


We can argue about the allegorical meaning of Genesis 2 and how it relates to human sexuality until we are blue in the face, but you should always start with the literal meaning.


The literal meaning of Genesis 2, if you give it its usual context in the Christian story (as, for example, represented by its use as the first lesson in a standard Christmas carol service), is that the original sin was independent moral discernment. Satan's promise is not money, or sex, or power - it is to possess the moral wisdom of God. There are plenty of other scriptural passages reinforcing this. And certainly when I was taught Christian morality, both as child in nominally-Christian schools in the UK and as a potential convert in university, the key message was that the only real sin is rebellion against divine authority, and the drinking and sabbath-breaking flows from that.


All the Abrahamic religions are fundamentally about total submission of human will to God's. Judaism, Islam, and Protestantism all have a tradition of religious scholarship where all moral wisdom that humanity will ever have is already written down in a closed canon of fundamental works (either directly from divinely-inspired authors, or preserved commentary based on lost divinely-inspired sources) and the work of religious scholars is just to interpret it. Catholicism and Orthodoxy both claim that there is a still-living tradition capable of generating new moral wisdom, but that there is no access to God outside it.


This is why "Abrahamic religion bad" comes so easily to non-religious Americans - the great American social experiment is fundamentally about allowing independent moral judgement at the lowest possible level.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 4, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I don't think the government with the silly mustache guy and the Hindu good luck symbol cared if they accidentally rounded up a small number of non-Eskimos as collateral damage - particularly because they were mostly rounding up and deporting citizens of defeated enemy countries. A single citizen deported by mistake is enough to sink a mass-deportation programme in a Western democracy (and probably should be).


This happened in the UK with the Windrush Scandal. The problem is particularly bad in the UK because the mess created by changing citizenship laws as the British Empire as dismantled - the scandal concerned people who immigrated from the Caribbean before their birth countries became independent (and were therefore born and remained British and never crossed a border) or between independence and 1973 (in which case they lost British citizenship when their home countries became independent, but were not subject to British immigration control and therefore would have arrived without paperwork). But I'm sure the INS has had paperwork screwups similar to the UK decision to destroy the old disembarkation records in 2010 which left us unable to work out which long-resident undocumented Caribbean immigrants were citizens, which ones were legal permanent residents, and which ones were deportable.


Historically, the US has not tried to maintain a central register of everyone in the country legally such that it would be easy to only deport the right people - and the people who favour mass deportations generally think that keeping such a register would be tyrannical overreach.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 23, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It doesn't help that Musk has actually got stupider as he got more famous. Everyone who worked with him at early-stage Tesla or SpaceX said he was scary because he understood the technical aspects of your job better than you did. But since he was normie-famous he has mostly been signal-boosting right-coded midwit conventional wisdom.


You can tell this by looking at what experts in his fields think of him. The car and rocket people all had the initial reaction of "This is a longshot, but it could work, and I want it to work." People who know anything about civil engineering's reaction to Hyperloop and The Boring Company was "Musk doesn't even understand why the last N people who tried this failed, so he is going to repeat those mistakes." And people who know about AI tend to think that Tesla is well behind Waymo and Cruze in autonomous driving.


My guess is that the underlying cause is some combination of drug abuse, long-term effects of lack of sleep, and no longer feeling the need to do his homework before running his mouth.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 24, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
And you need to put at least three people's heads on the block to make this scheme work - your own, someone to sign receipts on behalf of the charity (you only get to deduct the appraised value if the charity uses the donated object as part of its charitable activities, so someone needs to confirm this), and the appraiser.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 3, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Nixon didn't resign out of decency. His advisors had told him that the Senate would vote to convict, and he didn't have the kind of grassroots Republican support that Trump did that would allow him to seek revenge on the Republican senators that voted against him - the hard-core Republican primary voters already preferred Reagan to Nixon by this point.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for November 4, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The Australian English words "rort" and "wowser" have no simple direct translation into British or American English and are sufficiently useful that I have started using them. I have heard American English speakers reacting the same way to the British English word "wanker".


Can we think of other words which one national variety of English has and others need?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 22, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


It’s not the same people protesting every time.




I'm not directly familiar with US protest culture, but in the UK it so is. Sometimes they forget to change the protest signs and people march against student funding cuts behind a "Free Palestine" banner. We have a single-digit number of activist groups experienced in organising this kind of noisy, disruptive protest, and until the SWP collapsed due to sex scandals most of them were SWP front organisations.


Even if you look at people rather than orgs, we are talking about a subculture (strictly two subcultures because the socialist-anarchist split hasn't gone anywhere) involving a few thousand people split between a small number of big cities (mostly London and Bristol in the UK) which is cohesive to have its own values. The tribal values of the subculture that is socialist protest includes a hierarchy of issues, and Palestine is number 2 on the list after opposing US foreign policy.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 18, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


“God created men, Richard Stallman made them equal” —new motto of the Free Software Foundation, probably




And Eric Raymond merges the Coltian and Stallmanian concepts of equality. Which is more dangerous to the irresponsible user is left as an exercise to the reader.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 11, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Besides, Saruman wasn't planning for "what happens after Sauron is defeated", his entire rationale for throwing in with Sauron was that he was convinced he was going to come out the winner, and Saruman wanted to be on the winning side. He had lost all his wisdom, and wasn't capable of foreseeing that the Hobbits would survive and come out the victors and he would therefore need to be three moves ahead in destroying their homeland. He didn't see this because he didn't want to see this, he wanted the position as trusted viceroy after the victory of Sauron.




This isn't my reading. By the time the Fellowship reach Rohan, Saruman has already attempted to double-cross Sauron (by attacking the Fellowship at Rauros with the intention of stealing the Ring and taking it to Isengard). See this Brett Devereaux post for why Saruman's plan was very unlikely to work. My understanding is that the Unfinished Tales confirm this reading, and that Saruman had been actively concealing the likely location of the Ring (which he had guessed based on Gandalf's excessive interest in the Shire) from Sauron several years before the events of LOTR - with the implication that the offer made to Gandalf before imprisoning him (to join in a Saruman-led scheme to use the Ring to defeat Sauron and seize power for themselves) was sincere.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Kevin Dolan - 2023 Natal Conference: "In our lifetime, every government, every culture, every belief system, and every family on Earth will pass through a bottleneck -- a bottleneck tighter than the Black Death, predicated on one question: will your children have children of their own?"
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The theory that feminism and fertility are strongly inversely correlated (at least within the relevant range as of the mid-20th century - as of the early 21st we are on the flat part of the feminism-fertility curve), and that the baby boom was caused by feminist gains being rolled back in the 1950's, is the kind of theory that is frighteningly plausible but can't be discussed in most spaces because neither side of the culture war likes the implications.


The Jim-tier version of this take is worth reading. I think he is serious. I am too - I think that the sexism was a load-bearing part of the 1950's social model (in a way that the racism wasn't), that 2nd wave feminism destroyed the good bits of the model as well as the bad bits, and that this is a big part of the answer to "WTF happened in 1971"


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 15, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


no, this couldn't be more wrong; Trump wins because he motivates non and low likely voters to show up when they otherwise wouldn't




This presupposes that Trump wins. He lost the popular vote to Dolores Umbridge in 2016 and lost the popular and electoral votes to an empty suit in 2020.


Trump appeals differently to swing voters compared to the Goldman-Aramco Republicans, but it isn't obvious that he appeals more to them. What is clear is that the Republican base prefer Trump to the Goldman-Aramco Republicans that run against him in primaries.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 11, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


    

  1. the second amendment and 2) an active movement of conservatives who continually fight for their gun rights.
    2. 





Wrong order. When there wasn't a large active movement of citizens fighting for gun rights, the 2nd amendment was treated like an inkblot.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 20, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Biden has a disqualifying senior moment, Dems are unable to replace him with a non-senile candidate, Trump landslide with coattails picking up multiple senate seats seems to me to be within the bounds of plausibility. But even with a landslide, I don't see how the Rs get to 60, which is de facto what you need for a large majority.


The reverse scenario where Trump has a disqualifying senior moment and Biden wins in a landslide probably still isn't enough for the Dems to hold the senate given how bad the map is for them.