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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
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


If it was a bad shoot only if the shooter had precognition,




It was a legal shoot for the reasons discussed to death on this forum, but as a matter of policing technique it was a bad shoot because


    

  • if the car had been driving at him, it would almost certainly not have stopped it. (Cars don't have dead man's switches, and the shooting did not, in fact, stop the car)
    • 

  • if the car had not been driving at him, it would have been an unnecessary-in-hindsight shooting of someone the officer would rather not kill. (This happened)
    • 

  • the shot was fired in an urban setting without time to verify what was behind the target, so the risk of hitting an innocent bystander was high.
    • 



There is a reason why real police are trained not to shoot at moving vehicles as a first-line response to dangerous driving.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Discrimination by Ashkenazim against Mizrachim does not line up with any US protected groups, so western SJWs (who are either American or have American-addled brains) don't care about it. (See also widespread blindness to anti-gypsy racism in Europe). But given the demographics of Israeli airports most of the people hit by racial profiling of "people who look like Arabs or Muslims" will be Mizrachi Jews, and Ashkenazi-on-Mizrachi racism certainly used to be a live political issue in Israel.


I do not think that TSA can distinguish Muslims from non-Muslims by sight*, and the people who support racial profiling against "Muslim" flyers are the kind of people who are just fine with generalised government harassment of brown people in the US, which is what it would turn into in practice. There are enough white ethnic Muslims (Chechens, Albanians etc, including Boston bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev), fair-skinned Arabs who could pass with some makeup (including Mohammed Atta), white converts, and ADOS/Black British black converts that an organised jihadi group would have zero difficulty recruiting people who would not be profiled to actually set the bombs off.


* Note that traditional dress of Islamic cultures is not a good tell for "likely jihadi" because jihadis don't wear traditional dress while blowing things up. The 9-11 hijackers wore business suits, and the 7-7 bombers in London wore sportswear. They also shave their beards.




so the 70 year old ladies are not as scrutinized




I support profiling by sex and age. Both German and Australian airport security profiled me when I was a military-age man, and were right to do so.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


(Do I actively believe Trump would order ICE agents to threaten people into voting Republican? No, not really.




The point wouldn't be to threaten people into voting Republican. It would be to suppress turnout in blue precincts in purple states. There are a lot of US citizens who care more about not attracting the attention of hostile government authority figures than they do about voting.


Would Trump order ICE to run a major publicity campaign before the elections to say that they would be carrying out random immigration checks outside polling stations in Atlanta, Philadelphia etc? (State Republican parties have pulled this kind of stunt in the past) Actually carry out the checks? (probably not, although if it was Stephen Miller's call he would).




courts,




This is an interesting one. The key policy point here is that ICE should not be picking up illegal immigrants who came to their attention because they were victims or witnesses in criminal trials - otherwise you create bad incentives which undermine justice for US citizens and legal immigrants. But not arresting at courthouses is both over and underinclusive here - you do want to be able to arrest e.g. acquitted defendants, and you want a credible commitment not to arrest witnesses and victims outside the courthouse as well as inside it.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It sounds like most of the problem here is even dumber than that. There is no law requiring cops to press charges every time they catch someone with contraband - but apparently some police forces have policies that cops should do so.


If police forces have dumb policies that have only survived because beat cops ignore them, then those policies should and can be changed without involving the legislature. In most municipal police forces it wouldn't need to involve elected officials at all.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
@aldomilyar is the person who brought up the third term, not me. I explicitly said I think Trump is too old to run for a third term.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Which is also what you would do if you really were planning to run for a third term and trying to normalise the idea.


If anyone who wasn't Trump was selling official merch with "Candidate Year" on it, you would say they were running.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I just said I think he won't, because he is too old.


But the thread isn't about betting odds - it is about why people who worry about MAGA authoritarianism are behaving rationally or not. A 10% chance that Trump is Hitler is a good reason for Americans who don't want to live under Nazi rule (or foreigners who might have to fight a future Nazi America - the main reason why Hitler is the worst is the aggressive war) to be worrying, but I still wouldn't want to bet on it.


"Trump probably won't do the bad things he says he is going to do" is not very reassuring to someone who saw Jan 6th, and is currently watching him do much more of the bad things he said he was going to do than he did in his first term. Even if true, "The President probably won't send troops to interfere with the certification process if his party loses the election" (which Trump has said he should have done in 2020) is a very, very low bar.


The OP claimed not to understand why people were worried. I think it is very obvious why people are worried, even if you disagree with their judgement about the odds. The idea that Trump is so clearly trolling that only a fool or a lunatic could take him seriously, even though his supporters say they take him seriously (but not literally), doesn't seem tenable to me after January 6th, and even less so after the Fulton County raid.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


And I just don't see some losers in plastic Viking helmets running into the Capitol as being comparable to the Night of the Long Knives




The Night of the Long Knives happened after Hitler had already mostly consolidated the dictatorship - by that point the only limit to his power was that Hindenberg was still alive. The question is how Jan 6th compares to the stuff the SA were doing around 1930 - i.e. before Hitler seized power. My knowledge of Weimar history isn't detailed enough to give a straight answer. But "We aren't in 1934 Germany" isn't reassuring to someone who is worried about being in 1932 Germany.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
He's selling Trump 2028 merchandise in the official White House gift shop. Administration staffers don't feel able to say "Of course Trump won't run in 2028 - the constitution limits presidents to two terms" on the record, because Trump wouldn't like it.


Trump is deliberately maintaining strategic ambiguity about whether he will run for a third term. (Even if he wants to, he won't, because age is catching up with him). That is a good reason for people who care about the survival of American democracy to be worried.


In addition, Vance running the show doesn't fix the problem if Vance is also committed to using false allegations of voter fraud to undermine American democracy. And Vance was chosen because he is, indeed, committed to using false allegations of voter fraud to undermine American democracy.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Another example of Starmers self-destructive loyalty to zionism can also be observed in the saga around Peter Mandelson. Starmer and his cronies were so eager to reward the foremost zionist operative in the labour party they were willing to overlook all the shady Epstein business. This one might actually lead to Starmers downfall as a PM.




Mandelson wasn't brought back as a reward for his Zionism (and he is far from the most outspoken Zionist in Blair's inner circle - Blair raised a lot of money in the north London Jewish community). Mandelson was brought back because Starmer thought he was a Trump whisperer. From a cynical perspective, Mandelson's personal corruption and Epstein connections were key qualifications for the role - an honest man couldn't have done what Starmer hired Mandelson to do. Being gay should have protected Mandelson from Epstein-related fallout - I don't think anyone had twigged quite how blatant the bribery could get in a fundamentally criminal elite social network.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
"Antifa is retarded" isn't exactly a rare position among the pro-establishment left. You can't say it in those words because it is ableist, but "Antifa are underemployed young men who are more interested in having an excuse to fight than actually preventing modern fascists taking over America" is something you could print in the NYT.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The worst crime against memetics caused by the British English-US English divide is that the Waffle House Wendy story is not called "Chavatar - The Last Chairbender"


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Juries don't have to give reasons, but this is almost certainly a straightforward jury nullification case. Enough left-wing Britons* believe that arms sales to countries with bad human rights records are per se illegitimate and therefore that vandalising an arms factory is legitimate to hang a jury - particularly in a place like Bristol. The other famous recent jury nullifications in vandalism cases are are the 2020 case where rioters in Bristol dumped a statue of a slave trader into the sea, and the 2021 case where climate protestors graffitied Shell UK HQ. There were also some older cases involving vandalism of British Aerospace factories making warplanes.


* Yes, Britons. This particular facet of left-wing culture is whiter than the census.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I don't think @Nerd's question is "Why did a left that believed it had won try to cancel its political opponents?" - a question to which the answer is as obvious as @Amadan thinks it is. I think it is "Why did a left that believed it had won put so much more effort into cancelling IQ realists, biological sex realists etc. for threatening their social orthodoxy than it put into cancelling the Koch brothers or the US debt clock guy for threatening their economic orthodoxy"


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


It's totally beyond me how this much panic has set in.




You are being deliberately obtuse here. A man who tried to stay in office after losing the 2020 election including (definitely) by sending goons to the Capitol to intimidate Mike Pence into refusing to certify the results and (probably) by meeting with generals to discuss the possibility of a military autogolpe was re-elected in 2024, as the candidate of a party which has sought to eject the people who allowed Biden to assume office. The goons sent to the Capitol got out of hand and the resulting riot meant that 2020 was only the 2nd election since the Founding when the votes of the electors could not be counted on the appointed day*. He has just ordered federal law enforcement to seize Georgia's voting records based on (if you take his public statements literally) an obviously false theory that Italian satellites were used to alter the results or (if you take his public statements seriously but not literally) a gish gallop of fraud allegations that were adjudicated false at the time. His supporters online are currently boasting about how he is going to get a kidnapped foreign head of state to falsely confess to rigging the 2020 election.


People think Trump is uniquely dangerous to American democracy because Trump speaks and acts like a man who is uniquely dangerous to American democracy.




A liberal candidate will win




For the usual thermostatic reasons, I think a mainstream Democrat will be on the ballot in 2028 and will probably get more valid votes than the Republican in states representing a majority of the electoral college. But to shut down the "this is 1933" memeplex they would have to be allowed to assume office without a 2020-style attempt to prevent certification of the result. Given that Trump has, with the co-operation of the MAGA movement in the country, successfully turned "2020 was rigged and Democrats routinely rig elections" into a loyalty test for Republicans, the chance of this happening is minimal.


* The other case being Hayes-Tilden in 1876. The 1800 election didn't elect a President in a timely fashion, but the delay was in the House after the electoral college vote was tied.


				

				

						

							

								
    
									
									
									
									
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				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


3 of those diners are Waffle House.




Is Waffle House safe for dinergoths to hang out in? As a somewhat-too-online Brit I have mostly heard of the chain in two contexts:


    

  • FEMA won't risk going into a disaster area until Waffle House reopen
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  • It's a good place to watch late-night brawls
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				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It is possible that it began that way, but I doubt it. The overlap between people who drank lager in the UK in the 1990s (the respectable working class still drank bitter, and the middle class drank wine) and the people who were familiar with vintage Marlon Brando movies, let alone Tennessee Williams plays, was not large. When I was introduced to the saying, there was no suggestion that the reference to wife beating was other than literal.


There was a straight-to-VHS remake of A Streetcar named Desire in 1995 starring Alec Baldwin, that might also be the source if it has the same scene in it.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Your relation to your clan (gens) was paramount to your identity even as a client of such a powerful clan. Again, if you want some parallel it would be that of huge Scottish clans.




This is an interesting analogy. The Scottish clan was a weird kind of mannerbund-family hybrid. There was a lot of fictive kinship involved - the clan included all male-line descendants of the founding chief plus their wives and daughters, but it also included a bunch of people living under the chief's protection who accepted him as a symbolic father-figure. But, significantly, the fictive fatherhood of the chief was primary, not the fictive brotherhood of the warband. Some "septs" (originally recognised families within a clan with their own chieftains in fealty to the clan chief, now just surnames that are entitled to wear the clan tartan) are cadet branches of the chiefly family, others are just semi-prominent families living on the clan lands who swore fealty to the chief. There are even families from contested territory which are recognised as septs of two different clans.  But the functioning military clan that made the chief powerful was a mannerbund focussed on livestock rustling and defending against livestock rustling. I think this type of society is normal in mountainous pastoral societies.


Unlike Appalachia, the Scottish Highlands don't feel like they are full of mountain men any more. I think we must have bred the mountain-man tendencies out by sending every violent Highlander out to colonialise some dangerous part of the world - the ones who didn't get killed mostly didn't come back either because living in the Highlands ceased to be fun once cattle rustling was illegal.


Snark: If classical civilisation was based on mannerbunds and not families, we would use a Latin word to refer to the mannerbund. We use a German word because we modern Romans see the mannerbund as barbaric and so use the language of the barbarians to describe it. You can imagine a man called Hermann leading his bros into battle in a manly way, but it is much harder with a man called Arminius.


Not snark: While the Highland clans were a functional social system, there was no doubt that they were barbarians. The romanticisation of Highland tradition by lowland Scots and Scottish-Americans happens 100 years after the real culture had been suppressed by the British authorities. When Ambrose Bierce wrote the Devil's Dictionary in 1906, he correctly described the kilt as "worn by Scots in America and Americans in Scotland"


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
My reaction is "This is what a Barista of Arts looks like with 15 fewer IQ points".


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


But 20 years ago, everyone would have commented on an engineer with hair like that, and it would have impacted his credibility in that room.




More than 20 years, I think. Lee Kwan Yew called out long hair on PMC men as a sign of western degeneracy in the 1990's. I had teachers with man-buns in a posh UK private school at that time.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				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).