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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 February 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It's the old "foreign prolefeed becomes high-status because consooming foreign product shows cosmopolitan sophistication" scam. In my youth it was Asterix and Tintin being more sophisticated than Marvel and DC.


In Japan, anime is slightly higher-status than Mickey Mouse because there is no animation age ghetto, but it is fundamentally mass-market TV. Sturgeon's law applies, and also the 10% that isn't crap is still passive entertainment for Japanese normies.


I remember seeing bus-stop ads in NYC ripping off this issue for beer in the late noughties. I don't remember who paid for them - the vibe is right for Yeungling but it may have been a generic Drink American ad by a trade association. There was a picture of two bottles of Stella Artois. One was captioned "The beer of the poor in Holland" (This is cuts even deeper than the target audience would have spotted - at 5.2% Stella has a relatively high ABV for mass market beer, so it is the beer of drunks and hooligans. In the UK at the time, it was called "beater" because it was said to be what you drank before beating your wife) and the other "$7 a bottle in the US" (or whatever a bottle of overpriced beer cost at the time).


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Feynmann's report on Challenger said that the NASA engineers estimated the chance of a catastrophic failure at around 1/200 (contrasting it to middle management who thought the figure was 1/1000 or better and senior management who insisted it was 1/100,000). So even the engineers were optimistic.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
My gut reaction is that this issue should have been resolved earlier because it is analogous to the situation of a child adopted by a same-sex married couple (which while not exactly common, is something that happens often enough to be legible to bureaucracies), or to a child born by IVF (with donor sperm) where the mother's lesbian partner is a legal parent (which is routine).


I wonder if lesbians are happy to just fill in the online form as "father" but transwomen are not.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 26, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Trump's pageant was Miss USA, where the winners skew slightly younger, but also haven't been under 20 for a long time. But the reason why Donald Trump, pageant baron, stinks of kiddie-fiddling is that he also owned Miss Teen USA, and bragged about being able to hang out in the girls' changing room because he owned the pageant.  A quick look at Miss Teen USA winners shows that there is no paedophilia here - the girls look like the physiologically mature women they are. But it isn't and shouldn't be socially acceptable.


Outside Red America, both feminists and social conservatives think that teen pageants shouldn't be socially acceptable at all, but that boat sailed a long time ago.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


As somebody who has a mortgage and is considering moving, I think about housing prices a lot. The conventional wisdom seems to be that high home prices are a good thing for homeowners, but I can't entirely figure out why that's true in the general case.




In a world where most buyers are downpayment-limited (which was the case when the conventional wisdom became conventional), your current home going up by x and your dream home going up by 2x still makes the move-up more affordable (because your available downpayment went up by x but the required downpayment with an 80% mortgage only went up by 2x/5). In a world where most buyers are income-limited (which is the world we are mostly in today) it makes the move-up less affordable (because the additional borrowing needed goes up by x).


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Inflation also builds wealth for people with leveraged real assets (like mortgaged homeowners) because the price of the house increases and the mortgage balance doesn't. The resulting equity is real wealth that people can cash out or borrow against. This is how the "housing ladder" worked - in an era where the need for a downpayment was the binding constraint on how big a house you could buy, the easiest way to save a downpayment on a large house was the inflation-and-leverage-driven capital gain on a small house.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Exactly- since rooming houses were banned almost everywhere, the default entry-level housing option is a bedroom in a HMO (House in Multiple Occupancy). To change this you both need to ban HMOs and spam sufficient purpose-built studio flats to make them affordable (many non-elite US cities have done this - it isn't that hard). If you only ban HMOs without spamming studios, then the entry-level housing option is a bedroom in an illegal HMO.


In 90% of illegal HMOs and about 50% of legal ones only 1-2 of the roommates are named on the lease and the others are cash-in-hand lodgers. (In legal HMOs it is more common to rent a bedroom directly from the landlord).


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


(see the recent disclosures about Peter Mandelson).




While there is some validity to the general point, the idea that Mandelson/Epstein is an example of a specifically European need for censorship to conceal elite depravity is silly - the decision to do the Epstein cover-up was taken in the US, and the British have promptly thrown every Epstein associate under the bus as soon as the Americans allowed their involvement to become public. The deroyalling of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and banning from the financial industry of Jes Staley remain the only meaningful punishments of Epstein clients, and Mandelson is now the subject of a criminal investigation. The reason why the UK police investigation into Mandelson only just started is because the Americans kept details of his wrongdoing secret in order to protect US elites who participated in his crimes - in the case of Mandelson particularly, Jamie Dimon, and in the case of the Epstein files more broadly Donald Trump.


90+% of what European authorities want to censor is either accurate information about the harm caused by immigration, or malicious lies exaggerating the harm caused by immigration. And, of course, the reason why free speech is an issue in the first place is the difficulty in distinguishing between the two.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for January 9, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
For a lot of people, driverless cars is high stakes.


Car culture in its various iterations is about the feeling of freedom, self-sufficiency and control that comes from driving your own vehicle, and incidentally some things that have become associated with it like the sound and feel of a petrol engine going "vroom".  I am one of the Motte's resident Euroweenie car-haters, but I get this - part of the reason why I don't own a car is because I can hire the right vehicle for optimum fun each time I go on a road trip - whether that's a Ford Mustang convertible or an 8-seater crossover with one of those wonderful illegal Volkswagen diesel engines that cheat on emissions tests.


A lot of people in a lot of countries have made participating in car culture part of their identity, and Red Tribe Americans have made it part of their tribal identity.


Ubiquitous driverless cars, and particularly driverless cars that are co-ordinated by a central server (and for driverless cars to get significantly more capacity out of urban roads you need that co-ordination) give up all of that. The idea of taking a driverless car out on the open road - even if the open road in question is a moderately congested British motorway - fills me with horror, and I'm not even a proper petrolhead.  And (from the point of view of a car culture participant) most of the benefit being that low-status people (kids, drunks, and the decrepit) gain undeserved mobility.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for January 9, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Or because they are being rewarded by the customers who get the low prices. Remember what happened when JC Penney abolished sales and tried to market themselves as offering "everyday low prices".


People who complain about price discrimination are doing it from the frame of "if we ended price discrimination, everyone would get the low prices". But in the real world people love price discrimination when it gets framed as "you get a discount, you get a discount, you don't this time but try harder next time". There are a whole load of businesses where the main purpose of the sticker price is to frame the (often discriminatory) real price as a discount. This doesn't work for airline full fares or hotel rack rates any more because people got wise, but it still works for clothes (see JC Penney above) and it appears to be the norm in a wide range of sectors including new cars, college tuition, and consumer SaaS.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for January 9, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Even Disney World has MBA'd itself into a place I would no longer remotely describe as the "happiest place on earth".




The kids for whom Disney World is supposed to be the happiest place on earth didn't see the schedule optimisation that old-school Disney adults used to do, and they don't see the bills for Genie+ or whatever the latest incarnation is. They either get the promised happiness if the parents get it right, or spend the day underwhelmed waiting in queues and wandering around theme areas if they get it wrong.


The Motte preferentially attracts the sort of person for whom autistically optimising a day at a theme park is fun, rather than a chore which normies who can afford to will pay money not to have to do. But I don't think poring over planners is obviously happier than working overtime to pay for Genie+, and neither is supposed to be part of the happiness in the first place.


I agree that the US Disney parks are more crowded in general than they used to be, even given the continuously rising prices, and that this makes them less happy. It would be good for humanity (though not necessarily for their monopolistic bottom line) if Disney opened a third US park in the Midwest.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for January 9, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I remember hiking across the Agerola plateau (above the Amalfi coast) - we decided that the Path of the Gods wasn't hardcore enough and we were going to make it a full-day mountain hike from Positano back to Amalfi - and something was happening. I assume it was the volcanic soil and not the microclimate, given that everyone says it is the soil. Everything was huge - I particularly remember the sunflower/tomato fields. (The two crops are often planted together - a quick google suggests that the sunflowers attract pollinators for the benefit of the tomatoes) The tomatoes were bigger than the specialty tomatoes you used to be able to buy at farmers' markets in the south of France, and the sunflowers were far taller than I remember sunflowers elsewhere.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 26, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
As a matter of technical statistical terminology, the null hypothesis when testing two groups for equality is that the relevant average (usually the mean, but median tests exist) is the same for both groups.


The whole point of frequentist statistics is that the test doesn't care about what you believe or what the results mean, its just a handle you can turn and get a publishable paper out 5% of the time (if the null hypothesis is true) and rather more often (if its false). A null hypothesis and a prior are different things that exist in different paradigms.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 26, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The Gramscian concept of the Long March Through the Institutions was developed by Gramsci, who was not a mainstream liberal. The mainstream liberal concept of institutional dominance is much less sophisticated - basically that liberals dominate institutions because institutions are IQ-selected and liberals are smarter than conservatives - and this opinion is an example. Judge Biery assumes that everyone smart enough to read a legal opinion already agrees with him, so there is no need to write in a way which assumes good faith on the other side of the argument, or that seeks to persuade.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 26, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
This isn't a negotiation. Donald Trump (in his personal capacity) is suing himself (as head of the Executive Branch), either as a publicity stunt or in order to transfer money from the US Treasury to his personal account. But the whole point is that the same human being is on both sides of the table.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 26, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The young Robert Maxwell procured weapons for the IDF from Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe during the Israeli War of Independence, and the details of precisely what he bought and how he bought it are still not public. That would be sufficient to explain Yitzhak Shamir's presence and remarks.


Athough I assume Robert Maxwell was talking to Mossad regularly, there isn't a good reason to think he was some kind of super-agent that would explain parts of the Epstein story. In addition, he would have been most useful to Mossad for his contacts in the Soviet Bloc, which didn't pass over to Ghislaine, and were a lot less valuable after 1989 anyway. John Major also hinted that Robert Maxwell had been useful to British intelligence during the collapse of the Soviet Union. Conspiracy theory shower thought - Maxwell jumps off the boat at almost exactly the time he ceases to be useful to British and Israeli intelligence.


The dates also fail to line up for a Robert Maxwell-Epstein connection. Ghislaine moves to New York shortly after Robert dies, and starts dating Epstein about two years later, after the Epstein-Wexner connection (which is the key to Epstein's wealth, and therefore to any sane conspiracy theory) is in place.


Robert Maxwell did know Epstein in the 1980's, but only in the vague sense that all elite coethnics know each other. Their business interests didn't overlap except for about 10 months in 1991 when Maxwell tried to expand in the US - Maxwell was active in the UK and Europe whereas Epstein was focussed on the US and the Gulf.


None of this means that Epstein wasn't Mossad, of course. Just that Mossad didn't use the Maxwell family to recruit him.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 26, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'd be happy to double down on "he was destroying the fabric of our society", in that he was a major player in the campaign to delegitimise the 2020 election by telling blatant lies to his gullible co-partisans. I think the full adoption of his political programme (which was not moderate) would have done a lot of damage to the fabric of American society, but most people with strong, genuine political views think that about the other side. But I think the claim that Charlie Kirk was motivated by profit and fame is unlikely - there are a lot of pure grifters in politics, and they don't behave like Kirk.


The simplest explanation for Kirk's behaviour is that he genuinely believed that doing the work of politics (talking to voters, organising coalitions, training cadres etc.) was important and pro-social. I can snark about Kirk being the kind of Christian who thought that Republican electoral success was more important than the commandment against bearing false witness, but his faith was clearly sincere and was clearly driving his politics in a pro-social direction as well.


The world would be a better place if there was more room in politics for men like Charlie Kirk. The problem with Kirk's politics is that to make room for more men like Charlie Kirk, you need fewer men like Donald Trump.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 26, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I am shocked, shocked to find a Trump administration official saying the thing that is not.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 26, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It's roughly the number of people who will give the most trollishly partisan answer to a poll question regardless of what they actually think. Scott Alexander's post on the Lizardman constant in polling says 13% of Americans, including 5% of Democrats (so c. 21% of Republicans by elimination) told pollsters that they thought Obama was the antichrist - which was not a popular anti-Obama conspiracy theory at the time. Of course the 21% includes 4-5% of lizardman responders who are in effect engaged in for-the-lulz nonpartisan trolling. But "15% of respondents use polls for partisan trolling on top of the lizardmen" is pretty much correct.


Unless you think "Republicans who are so deep into politically-driven heresy that they think their political opponents are the literal antichrist" are a problematic group, I would treat "Democrats who support the Charlie Kirk assassination" with the same skepticism.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				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)