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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 5, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I find I frequently get into bed with the same woman more than once. Do you, Sir?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I think it is pretty common for academic jargon to be watered down as it reaches the masses, losing whatever small meaning it might have once had.




I think the issue isn't specific to academic jargon - it is more to do with negative terminology. Negative terminology is mostly used in phatic communication bashing the shared outgroup, and pointing out that Bad Person A may be Bad Word B but he is not in fact Bad Word C is a buzzkill.


Consider "Enshittification", which is definitely not academic jargon. Cory Doctorow only coined the term three years ago, and he used it to describe a specific process where the experience of a non-paying user of a platform like Facebook gets worse over time as the platform owner shifts from attracting users to monetization. The term is already debased to the point where it can be used to describe any case where a product or service gets worse over time, and the Wikipedia article says it is a synonym for "Crapification", which originally referred to the entirely different process where a product or service (most famously, US domestic airlines) gets worse because price competition is more vigorous than quality competition.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


This is incorrect. It would be more accurate to say that it is not only incoherent but economically irresponsible to apply an entirely different regime to ‘prediction market bets’ than we do to sportsbooks or any other form of betting.




Insider sports betting isn't illegal, but essentially every sports governing body has rules against the sort of people who might count as insiders betting on their own sport. Sometimes violating these rules involves committing broad-spectrum crimes like mail fraud or wire fraud and there is a criminal investigation into insider sports betting.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Did they ever find out who bought the airline puts before 9-11?


(FWIW, my view remains that the puts were bought by well-connected non-terrorist Saudis with a back channel to Bin Laden, the Bush admin knew this by early 2002, and it was covered up in the 9-11 commission report).


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 4, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
50 worthless internet points at evens that "left-wing extremists" in Berlin is a euphemism for Islamists.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 4, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Also frequent fainting. My blood pressure was something like 105/60 before I gained weight during the pandemic, and I fainted about once a month.


Though more significantly, if you are just comparing two single point-in-time readings, the difference between 114/66 and 119/71 is within the range of normal day-to-day variation, and many people have slightly higher blood pressure in the doctor's office than they do elsewhere because of stress response.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 4, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
While I agree that EY is a better philosopher than the vast majority of people currently teaching in university philosophy departments, a rock with "Touch grass daily, call your mother weekly" written on it would be even better.


Analytic Philosophy as a discipline is the discipline of thinking deeply about things we don't understand well enough to have an actual discipline to think about in an informed way. "Natural philosophy" has been replaced by physics. "Philosophy of mind" should have been replaced by psychology and neuroscience. "Moral philosophy" would have been replaced by sociology and social anthropology if those disciplines functioned properly. Continental Philosophy is what bullshit looks like if you try to make it look like it was translated from French badly.  Both are by definition unlikely to produce actionable insights.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 4, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The hype mostly comes from his cultists. For reasons that are unclear to me because I wasn't there, he managed to get a large number of the readers of his Harry Potter fanfic to move to Berkeley and join his weird sex cult, which described itself as a "rationalist community" and devoted to "systematised winning" but was significantly less rational and winning than a randomly selected group of Greater SF techies.  A few smart people who were attracted by his rationalist blogging were also involved.


To the extent that he matters, it is because he was the tech-elite certified wunderkind who had been banging on about then-hypothetical AI safety issues for years at the point where they suddenly became relevant, so when other tech elites suddenly realised that there were non-hypothetical AI safety issues they needed to start worrying about, some of them treated him as an expert.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 4, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The WWW goes mass-market around the time Mosaic (1993) and Netscape (1994) are released. So there has only just been 30 years of web history that a website could have been active for.


You can see a lot of 30-year-old websites here most of which are corporate/government/university websites which are "still active" in the sense that IBM or Stanford still has a website. Amazon launched in 1995, which is now >30 years ago. As far as I can see the only 1993-4 vintage websites that are still up that are not information pages put up by pre-existing orgs are Yahoo! and the now-Yahoo-owned Altavista and Geocities.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think your idea that Helberg was rolled by the journalists makes sense. But I don't think the message Helberg had hoped to deliver was particularly about growth and deregulation.  Given his personal interests, and the stuff he was talking about when he was in control of the agenda, I think the message he was trying to deliver was that the US and EU could and should still co-operate on anti-Chinese supply chain policy even as the relationship deteriorates in other areas.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
And Singapore executes an order of magnitude more, per capita, than the US. It is a stretch to call Singapore a democracy, but it is clearly part of "the free world" or "Western Civilisation" in a way which most dictatorships are not.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
But female popstars don't attract a straight male audience with the fanservice. Swifties and Arianators (who seem to be the biggest still-active popstars with that vibe) are overwhelmingly female - men aren't willing to pay that much money to see Taylor Swift gyrate in a bodysuit while singing chick-orientated music. (Male artists who use female backing singers and dancers as fanservice is a different proposition - that isn't going anywhere and the male fanbase like it).


Google AI says that the female solo artist with the largest male fanbase in absolute terms is Mariah Carey (who was as thirst-trappy by the standards of her day as Swift and Grande are now), but her fanbase is mostly female with queers over-represented - she's just big enough that the substantial minority of straight male fans is a big number.


Female soloists with male-skewed fanbases (again, per Google AI) include Joan Jett (and the Blackhearts), Stevie Nicks, Alanis Morisette, Pink, Hayley Williams (leads Paramore), and April Lavigne. Of those, only April Lavigne does sexy, and her sexy persona is much more gothy and less girl-next-door than the singers with female fanbases. (I also think there is a pattern of female singers leading mostly-male instrumental bands having more male fanbases than female singers who rely on session musicians).


Whatever Taylor Swift and Ariana Grande doing with the minidresses and bodysuits, it is appealing to young women far more than it does to men. The Freudian analysis would be something on the lines of women wanting to be the centre of attention for their sexual desirability and therefore wanting the icons they vicariously live through to perform sexual desirability when they are the centre of attention. An interesting point about female popstars' slutty stage outfits I remember reading in a dentist's waiting room was that the outfits are designed like technical dancewear - and suggesting that part of what is going on is that "slop-creating female pop musicians" (great turn of phrase, @Botond173) see themselves as dancers (who were always more sexualised than singers).


The other point of comparison is women's athletic uniforms - where the only reason they aren't continuing to get skimpier is because they can't without an unacceptable risk of wardrobe malfunctions. It is very obvious that most (but not all) female athletes want people (probably other women at least as much as men) to look at their toned bodies. And this isn't just a chick thing - straight male bodybuilders are desperate for other men to look at their toned bodies.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Greater DC has an urban area population of 5.2 million vs 9.8 million for London and something similar for Paris (the French don't publish urban area population estimates). Metropolitan area population (defined by commuting patterns) is 6 million for DC, 13 million for Paris, and 15 million for London. And DC hosts a bigger, richer government and so has more government and government-adjacent jobs.


There just aren't the people to staff another industry in DC. The US is a big enough country that (apart from NYC, which does everything except government) its major cities are functionally specialised.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The essay deserved an F (that is 0 at some schools including this one and, bizarrely, 50 at others). Some of us think that grading rubrics giving F-quality work D and C grades in order to avoid giving earned Fs to protected groups are precisely what's gone wrong with higher education. When the F student isn't politically sympathetic, most Motteposters do.


The rule being selectively enforced here is "Undergraduates should be able to do undergraduate-level work". It isn't the specific rubric.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Without diving deeper into the raw data I bet that the actual situation on the ground is something like this; Close to 30% of all kids will be referred at least once in their lives.




We have now been referred to social services twice, both routine and in one case leading to a 15-minute home visit and a no-action letter, and in the other case to literally nothing at all. Plenty of mandatory reporters consider "Toddler with head injury of unclear origin" to be a mandatory report. It wouldn't surprise me if 30% of all kids get this kind of routine referral - and apart from the waste of CPS resources I don't see it as a problem.


The problem is where CPS see "free range 7-year old" as the kind of referral that needs more than a no-action letter.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Which is about $1900 a month, and babies are more expensive than toddlers. Seems entirely consistent with the other numbers we are seeing.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


So the easy scam is to just put pretend kids in and unqualified staff in place with fake credentials if ever interrogated. No auditor will investigate on their own and the local vote boss just says ' I will take care of it'




Checking staff genuinely have the paper qualifications they are supposed to have is very easy and the government does in fact do it if it isn't deliberately tolerating fraud. Part of the problem with non-fraudulent daycare costs is that the IQ floor for getting the paper qualifications is higher than the IQ floor for keeping a 1-year-old alive, so a system which tries to pay the going rate for keeping a 1-year old alive can't hire staff with the legally-required paper qualifications.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


The consequences for the pakistanis are miniscule




They got 10+ year jail terms, eventually. (The exceptions were minor players where the only crime they could prove was consensual-looking sex with a 13-16 year old, which normally gets 5 years in England). The rapists who were not British citizens (the vast majority were) have long since been deported.


The Pakistani rape gangs scandal that Musk and right-wing X poasters latched onto is about behaviour which was allowed to continue for far too long in the 1990-2008 period with minimal accountability for the political machines that protected the rapists, not behaviour that is tolerated in 2025.  I don't know what is going on between 2nd-generation Pakistanis and chavettes in 2025, but the race/immigration/crime story that right wing media in the UK are pushing nowadays is about crimes committed by more recent humanitarian-route immigrants.




So too will be the censure for the Somalians since the US is already a low punishment society that can barely punish the most easy criminals to indict,




The US is not a low punishment society. You are the most punitive society in the rich world for the criminals who are actually caught and punished - the only countries with a higher incarceration rate are Bukele's El Salvador and countries in the middle of severe political repression. (The US is also one of a small number of countries which still execute people, although not many). You guys are also perfectly capable of punishing black criminals roughly proportionally to the number of crimes they commit. The problem is that the US is a capricious punishment society with third-world quality policing and a somewhat random judicial system such that most criminals (and particularly white-collar criminals) go unpunished.  (We are still noticeably better off than you on this point in the UK, although moving in the wrong direction fast since the government decided that the criminal justice system would be shut down first as the welfare state for the old eats the economy).


But that isn't relevant here - the point in Minnesota, as in noughties Rotherham, is that the miscreants are protected by a powerful political machine. Tolerating this kind of thing was, and is, a choice.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


There is a world apart between making rhetorically weak arguments and fabricating evidence whole cloth.




There is also a world apart between a zero on a single assignment which is 10% of a single course grade and firing a tenured academic in disgrace. Both would be the appropriate punishments in a sane academia for the respective crimes, but are enforced far too rarely.


In both cases, the argument being made is of the form "A fundamentally righteous but rarely-enforced rule was enforced against an obviously-guilty member of a protected group - and discrimination by selective enforcement is worse than the underlying crime" (and the scissor is "Given the history of malign discrimination and current underrepresentation, should conservatives in academia be a protected group?"). The structure is symmetric, even if the relative severity is not.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Explicit meritocracy’s emphasis on grinding, explicit competition and credentialism does not seem to produce maximally good results.




I think this is key. As I see it, most successful societies historically either had open aristocracies (a small number of exceptionally able outsiders could get in, often by marrying into aristocratic families) or enarchies (my coinage based on the French ENA - the point is that you select down to an aristocracy-sized elite by a single high-stakes exam which is more heavily g-loaded than the modern American meritocratic grind).


"Being from an aristocratic family" is sufficiently g-loaded to select a plausible class of potential elites if the aristocracy is open and not inbred. In the alternative patronage system, so is "sufficiently interesting to attract a patron", providing that patrons actually have to patronise their proteges rather than just writing a note in exchange for a favour from the proteges father (see for example the role of patronage in the Royal Navy when it was the winningest organisation in human history).


I may do an efforpost later on the broader advantages of this approach.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
US Undersecretary of State for Economic Affairs Jacob Helberg gave a somewhat surprising briefing in Brussels to the European press today. See the Official transcript and UK Grauniad coverage - the most comprehensive coverage in an English-language publication.


The quote that attracted most attention is in response to a question about EU AI regulation. Helberg says "I know that the National Security Strategy, the language around Europe and around civilizational erasure, drew a lot of attention in Europe.  What I’d like to highlight is that that language is a warning.  It’s not an insult.  And – because there is a growing sense of concern and alarm in the United States about the fact that Europe’s economic – relative economic decline as a share of the global GDP is a crisis." The Guardian's headline writer describes this as "doubling down" on the criticism of Europe in the published strategy, but the actual article correctly points out that Helberg is doing the opposite - he is walking it back. The published strategy is crystal clear that "civilisational erasure" the US wants to prevent is about cultural change driven by mass immigration, that the main threat to the Atlantic alliance is the possibility that major European countries will cease to be majority white*, and that concerns about economic policy are secondary.


The reason why I wanted to post about this is that this is the latest in a number of pieces of circumstantial evidence suggesting that the US has fallen into the common trap of running one foreign policy out of the White House and a different one out of the State Department. Rubio being both SecState and National Security Advisor should make this impossible, but Vance seems to have taken over the usual role of the NSA as the principal opponent of the State Department in intra-administration battles. A dual foreign policy seems to be the best way to make sense of why the Trump administration is trying to make nice to Putin (in order to end the Ukraine war) with one hand while bombing and invading his clients with the other.


Two things are unusual about the way the Trump national security strategy was published - neither my search-fu nor ChatGPT identifies who wrote it (this would normally be a relatively senior person working for the NSA, and they were unofficially identified with previous strategies), and it wasn't publicly launched by the NSA (i.e. Rubio) at a major press event. Apart from a linguist helpfully pointing out that (unlike the 28-point Ukraine peace plan), the national security strategy was not translated from Russian, the only name mentioned by the press is Vance, with multiple outlets comparing the discussion of Europe to Vance's Munich speech. Does all this suggest that Rubio as NSA was not responsible for the document? Helberg, of course, works for Rubio, and quietly but publicly said that the strategy does not mean the Vance-aligned things it says.   [Helberg is also, personally, a China hawk, and a major theme of his press briefing is that the main thing the US wants from Europe is for us to work with you on keeping China out of key supply chains].


In terms of the major foreign policy priorities of the Trump administration, Rubio is clearly in charge on Latin America - now apparently adding Paraviceroy of Venezuela to his increasing stack of hats. Vance has the unenviable job of going from TV station to TV station telling the ridiculously obvious lie that the ousting of Maduro was actually about drugs. (To anyone paying attention, including e.g. other corrupt Latin American leaders, the Hernandez pardon is a credible signal that it isn't). Whereas on Ukraine Rubio appears to be largely cut out, with diplomacy handled by people who work directly for Trump (Kellogg, Witkoff, and now Jared Kushner) and Vance conducting most of the open mouth operations.


If I had to sum up the difference between Team Rubio and Team Vance it would be that Team Rubio sees the number one threat as Chinese influence (and particularly Chinese influence in the Americas), Europe as a crappy ally that needs to stop freeloading, Russia as a committed Chinese ally, and defending Ukraine as a good idea in principle but a dubious use of US resources, whereas Team Vance sees the main threat as ideological, Europe as part of the woke enemy, Russia as a potential ally that needs to be brought in from the cold and offered a better alternative to their current arrangement with China, and the war in Ukraine as an obstacle to this. All factions seem to agree on Israel/Iran.


* The strategy says "majority non-European" but the meaning is clear in context.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 29, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Day 0 was executed successfully in Iraq and Afghanistan as well.


The US is very good at applying ordinance to targets. It is a lot worse at running countries.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 29, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Your examples aren't "white guy fixed it" - they are either
"Local government is responsive to the kind of thing a basically functioning local government is responsive to if the requestor is a white English-speaker, but not if it is a brown Spanish-speaker" (unlikely in my view) or "Local government is basically functioning for everyone but recent immigrants from dysfunctional countries aren't aware that responsive local government is a thing" (seems like a racing certainty).


I don't see how expecting local government to be basically functional is a superpower that works in Venezuela. It wouldn't work in California either.


But given the demographics of blue-collar workers in metro Miami, I suspect the guy who actually fixed it on behalf of the relevant local government was Hispanic.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 29, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Straight women can get physical affection from female friends without it being weird, whereas men can only get it from immediate family members or a sexual partner.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 29, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


That's a bit misleading. We are not seeing the same kind of increase as we did earlier, so we do definitely see relaxation. We are also quite definitely observing the rest of the population living under sunshine and rainbows.




Given that the level of imprisonment in El Salvador is not something where there is trustworthy data, I am not going to get into an argument about the second derivative.