I was on the West Coast, so this happened as I was preparing for my day. I glanced at the TV on my way out -- funny how we used to watch TV for news back then -- and was bummed to see what looked like some kind of terrible accident or relatively-minor terrorist attack on one of the towers.

As I traveled, the radio said it was both towers now, and it was planes, and I got to thinking.

I'd had an axe to grind against Islam for a long time. I grew up a conservative Christian and had been frustrated for quite a while with the average person's total lack of awareness about differences among religions. "But there are no real differences," the mainstream sentiment seemed to go. "They all just say, 'Don't be a dick.'"

I knew better. I knew Islam was bent on conquering the entire world; on taking sex slaves as it did so; on killing anyone who disagreed or wanted to leave its ranks. I knew it was an existential threat, and I was reasonably sure that people who would fly planes into buildings must be muslims.

The anecdote about ~~Chesterton~~ Muggeridge feeling relief when the bombing of London commenced, because finally everyone else was living in the same world as he'd been for so long, comes to mind. I knew that finally the West was going to wake up and realize the problem. And when the towers collapsed, I knew the lesson would stick.

Never Forget, we all said. Well, I was young. I believed it.

Then Bush got on TV and said Islam is peace. HR and media went into full swing insisting that the attacks had nothing to do with Islam. How could they have? All religions are equal. We're all very sure about that, and if you don't think so, you're creating a hostile workplace environment.

For a few years you could get away with suggesting it anyhow. I remember my family members being afraid to visit big cities, or even local shopping malls, because the next attack could happen at any moment. People generally seemed to get the idea that Islam was a problem and something needed to be done about it, even if it was considered gauche to mention so in polite company.

But the Bush administration squandered a lot of that will, and the Left took full advantage of it. Pretty soon I saw teenagers putting "No Enemy" stickers everywhere and when the Dixie Chicks said America had 9/11 coming I noticed that while some people were outraged a whole lot more were not.

By 2010 everyone seemed past it. It's been one of the biggest blackpilling events of my life.

Now, watching our countries flood themselves with overtly-hostile muslims, and Englishmen go to jail for suggesting this might be a problem, and essentially no politicians anywhere being willing to suggest that hey maybe Islam is intrinsically dangerous, I realize that I gave up hope in pretty much everything a long time ago. In my fellow man, in democracy, in politics, in elites, in academia... really, in the West in general.

It's not like 9/11 was the end, either. Muslim aggression continues apace, at large and micro scale. But somehow the West seems to have inoculated itself from noticing. At this point I'm not sure what, if anything, could happen to make people wake up.

When I remember 9/11, I remember the horror of the event. But what I dwell on is the much greater horror of how easily it has been forgotten.

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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 7, 2026

TitaniumButterfly Rivers in the wasteland 1mo ago

Oh, I was pretty careful to not suggest solutions. I don't think there are any.

The best I've ever come up with, which still isn't good enough, would be to offer large cash incentives and one-way tickets to other countries. Since the average black person costs the taxpayer something like $800k-$1.4m over their lifetime, and has a way of making more of themselves, it seems reasonable to me to offer, say, $500k over ten years to move to a receptive country. I can only imagine that many countries would be happy to set up a receiving program. They get a slice, the emigrant gets set up with citizenship and, in local terms, a small fortune, and the burden to the taxpayer works itself out over a few decades.

The best part of this solution is that it incentivizes exactly the right members of the underclass to take the deal. The ones with the ability to do better than that here, or with the foresight to realize that they'd rather be American in the long term, would stay, and that seems like a good thing to me.

Who could disagree? Totally voluntary, and it could even be dressed up in terms of reparations and helping them flee this evil and racist country.

But, I don't think it'll happen, and like I said before I think AI is about to disrupt the economy and politics so radically that I'm not even sure stuff like this will remain a major consideration.

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TitaniumButterfly Rivers in the wasteland 1mo ago

I think I generally understood you here but still find much of it impenetrable.

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TitaniumButterfly Rivers in the wasteland 1mo ago · Edited 1mo ago

As do I! But I have to admit that most of what I hate about cities is more or less optional, in that better policies (and demographics) could fix it.

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TitaniumButterfly Rivers in the wasteland 1mo ago · Edited 1mo ago

Given that you didn't address the object-level point at all, either you don't understand what's being proposed here or you're not interested in discussing it, so... Do give your veteran relatives my thanks, but I'm not sure I have much else to say.

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TitaniumButterfly Rivers in the wasteland 1mo ago

I'd be interested in an analysis to that effect, whether your own or someone else's. I know there was a major such movement at that time, and I don't think blacks had much to do with the Great Depression. I'd like to think some degree of American spirit would have warded off communism, but really don't know enough to guess.

To be clear it's not my contention that without blacks everything would have gone great. I'm not a believer in earthly Utopia. But this timeline is a specific kind of ugly and I wish I could even imagine what an alternative might look like.

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TitaniumButterfly Rivers in the wasteland 1mo ago

Thanks, that's pithy. I went into a bit more detail in other posts.

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TitaniumButterfly Rivers in the wasteland 1mo ago · Edited 1mo ago

Very fair. I'm badly underslept and overheated atm.

social catastrophe

The decline of our cities, communities, culture, educational system, academia, politics, etc. -- all ruined by black presence or poisoned in reaction to the horror experienced when black outcomes are observed. Thus, we cannot be ourselves.

Imagine a US where ~all the blacks had been sent back. Where the great cities of the East and Midwest are still glittering beacons of civilization. Where Academia never caved to blank slatism. Where young couples promenade in the town square in the evenings, unconcerned about violent crime. Where people still felt invested in their communities and the 'bowling alone' effect never kicked in. Where our schools pursue excellence instead of dumbing themselves and everyone else down in pursuit of equal outcomes. Where politics isn't influenced by a racial spoils system.

Can you imagine that? I can't, even. We never got to find out what America might have been.

We cannot be ourselves.

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TitaniumButterfly Rivers in the wasteland 1mo ago · Edited 1mo ago

That's pretty straightforward to me. The main point is that given a Northern victory in the civil war, America was overdetermined to become the cultural and economic pole of the Anglosphere and the West in general, simply due to geography.

America's institutions, however, were designed for Anglos. American schools, communities, politics, etc. simply go to pieces when blacks are admitted en masse as presumed equal members.

I think there were four options:

Send them back
Keep them separate and establish separate legal codes
Treat everyone equally under the law and be prepared for disparities. Like the Irish, I expect that within a few generations they'd have mostly failed to reproduce, and the few (plus hybrids) able to participate in our society would have remained but generally lost their separate identity.
Try so hard to hammer Western society into a shape that generates equal results that it breaks

I think 1 would have been best. 2 was tried, but long-term untenable due to inevitable social forces. 3 would have been my preference given the failure of 1 and 2, but also proved untenable due to social forces.

That leaves 4, and I think 4 is both unrecoverable and must inevitably metastasize given US cultural and economic hegemony.

Obviously the 'social forces' I'm talking about here are key to this, so I'll take a swing at what I mean.

Perhaps it starts with the strain of Puritan idealism that led to so much popular support for fighting the Civil War to 'end slavery' in the first place. Whatever the elites actually thought they were doing there, this was the popular justification for the war, and it didn't go away once the war was won. Blank slatism/egalitarianism became firmly embedded in polite American society. This continued to serve as a guiding principle throughout the decades and, once the US had won WW2, became a perennial casus belli for justifying intervention across the globe. Needless to say this was only massively amplified by setting Hitler up as the polar opposite of American values.

I just don't think it could have gone any other way.

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TitaniumButterfly Rivers in the wasteland 1mo ago

Oh, this is not a hobby horse of mine and I can barely remember.

Something to the effect that the damage to the side of the building was not consistent with a plane collision and that the wreckage on the lawn wasn't either; that it was all covered up (as with literal fabric covers) and disposed of immediately with almost no extant photos.

Something to the effect that the, uh, side of the pentagon that was hit was shut down and devoid of personnel, just by happy circumstance -- but also that it was being used to store records about large amounts of missing money; the records themselves also going missing in the event naturally enough.

I remember the government releasing some incredibly bad security camera footage that showed nothing at all. An unidentifiable blur in one part of one frame. I also remember news media loudly declaring that the evidence was in and the matter could be put to bed, and no one pushed back at all.

Stuff like that.

I don't know much about it because there's not much to know. As I said, it's rarely ever discussed. Building 7 gets much more play.

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TitaniumButterfly Rivers in the wasteland 1mo ago

What's more interesting is the trading activity on 9/10. Evidently it was investigated and the findings were classified. All they released was "We have determined it wasn't Al-Queda."

The pentagon situation has also bugged me ever since, but it's rarely discussed.

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TitaniumButterfly Rivers in the wasteland 1mo ago

Hoping for a lively 9/11 thread tomorrow but I'm not currently in position to host one.

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TitaniumButterfly Rivers in the wasteland 1mo ago · Edited 1mo ago

I really wish people were more capable of noticing, let alone publicly agreeing, that the presence of substantial numbers of blacks is just generally a social catastrophe. How many prominent men in American history had great compassion for the negro and despised slavery, but were straightforward in their belief that sending them back to Africa was best for everyone because an integrated society could not possibly work out? Have they not been thoroughly vindicated? And yet the position is so far outside the overton window that afact it's literally unimaginable to most whites. I'm not even sure I'm allowed to propound it here without any amount of pussyfooting. But in this case I think consensus is appropriate.

At some point we need to be prepared to call a spade a spade.

And the social damage whites inflict upon ourselves as we struggle to reconcile our high-minded optimism with reality is likely even worse. I'm in mind of Dan Carlin's point about how 9/11 was as a flea biting a dog, compared to the unbelievable amount of damage the dog then did to itself tearing at the itch.

I'm not sure the West was long-term viable after the decision was made to keep millions of blacks in the US. We simply cannot be ourselves with them here, and they're not going anywhere. I don't think segregation was long-term viable either but golly it sure did help!

What now? I guess at this point every thought experiment gets derailed by the AI wildcard, and bracketing that out for the sake of conversation seems masturbatory. It's just so unbelievably tragic, how this has all played out.

IDK, if you think I should be more nuanced about this by all means let me know.