putting American lives in danger by publishing
You are making that sound like a bad thing. If it is truthful reporting (and your verb "to publish" seems to indicate that you were not contesting that), then it is a good thing, not a bad thing.
I will grant you that there are some things which are net negative when published. For example, knowing what the nuclear launch codes are will not contribute to the readers having a more accurate map of the territory. Likewise, knowing which fetishes some celebrity is into will normally not update the world view of the readers to be worth the damage to the privacy.
Your sentence is really analogous to "When the teacher reported the dad who was fucking his kid to the police, she destroyed a happy family."
Our greatest ally
You sardonic phrasing makes it look like Israel and its inhabitants are pursuing a singular purpose. Please consider the possibility that not every Jew everywhere is following the master plan of the Elders of Zion all day long. If Bibi had published a press release where he praised the Americans for their support, that would indeed be a faux pas. But the utility function of reporters is different from the utility function of governments, both in Israel and elsewhere, for very good reasons.
They will be correct for the duration of Trump's term.
If the Democrats then take back the Presidency (and Trump's economic policy makes that likely), they might decide to keep the policy of deporting citizens to foreign prisons.
Sadly, I don't think they will have the balls to go for Trump himself, but all the J6 convicts which he pardoned would be prime candidates.
The thing about civility is that it might seem superfluous while you are in power, but you might not stay in power forever. And once a civilizational seal is broken, it is hard to reforge it. (Sure, it worked out well for the Nazis, who were given criminal trials by the Allies (and later very lenient West German judges), instead of the Allies simply rounding up everyone with a SS tattoo and gassing them (and their families, if you insist on evilness near-parity), but in general it does not.)
So I would very much prefer nobody getting deported to overcrowded foreign prisons (and especially not without a criminal trial!), as this seems to be the easiest boundary to defend.
In 1994, Ukraine, Russia, the UK and the US signed the Budapest Memorandum. The short version is that Ukraine destroyed its Soviet nukes, and in return, the signatories pledged to respect the territorial integrity of Ukraine and support actions in the Security Council if it should ever be threatened by nukes.
In 1994, this seemed like a good deal. The cold war was over, Ukraine likely did have more urgent spending priorities than a nuclear weapon program and the rest of the world, both the nuclear powers and the others were glad to keep the number of nuclear powers limited. Wars of conquest seemed a thing of the past. While the US engaged in some regime change operations (most of which turned out rather terrible, tbh), in the 1990s the idea to expand your territory through war seemed basically dead.
The rule-based world order was a higher, better equilibrium, just like most people would prefer to live in a country where weapons of war are controlled only by a small group of mostly decent people to living in some failed state where many people carry an assault weapon for the simple reason that many other people carry an assault weapon.
Putin's invasion made some serious cracks in that vision of a rule-based world order (which was always perceived to be strong in Europe), but Trump II basically broke it. Under Trump, the US can not be relied to punish defectors from the rule based system, and might not even relied to provide nuclear retaliation for nuclear attacks on NATO members.
The best time for Ukraine to restart their nuclear weapons program would have been when Russia defected from the Budapest Memorandum by annexing Crimea in 2014, before Russia was ready for a full scale invasion. I think it would have been technically feasible. An experienced Soviet nuclear weapons engineer who was 40 in 1990 would have been 64 in 2014. Ukraine also runs a lot of civilian nuclear reactor and has its own Uranium deposits (which would come in handy once they quit the NPT, because this might make acquiring fuel on the world market difficult). WP claims they even have enrichment plants.
In general, figuring out how to make nuclear weapons is something which took a good fraction of the world's geniuses in the 1940s, but has become much simpler since then. Getting an implosion device to work just right is something which would likely be helped a lot by high speed cameras and microelectronics, and a few decades of Moore's law likely makes a hell of a difference for simulations. Delivery systems might be a bit harder, but at the end of the day you don't need 100% reliability for deterrence to work. Even if your enemy is 50% confident that they can intercept the delivery, that still leaves the expected outcome of a nuclear exchange highly negative for them. Attacking a launch site -- conventionally or otherwise -- is forcing your enemy to either use or lose his nukes, and few think it wise to do so.
On a more personal note, I really hate nuclear weapons, and very much prefer the rule-based world order. I very much preferred the 2010s when Putin was mostly known for riding topless, as well as the odd murder of a journalist or dissident, the US was fine playing world police (which included some ill-advised military adventures, but also providing nuclear deterrence for NATO) and I was comfortably regarding nukes, NATO and large scale wars with the same distant horror I might have for medieval healthcare.
Even besides Ukraine, in the future Europe can not rely on the US for defense, and the UK and France arsenals might not be judged sufficient for deterrence, and some EU nuke might be called for. I am not sure how it would work. Classical EU commission manner, where 27 member states have to push the launch button and Orban can veto if he feels like it? Or give Mrs van-der-Leyen launch authority? Or simply have a common weapon program and distribute the spoils to 27 members?
Seldom have I heard a story where I had so little sympathy for any side. It makes the characters in the alligator river story seem like paragons of morality by comparison.
Like, if a kid tries to steal from your sons bag, perhaps don't call him a racial slur? Unless he is like 14, even calling him a "little shit" would probably be in bad taste.
And if you observe some Karen calling a kid a racial slur after he has just tried to steal from her kid's bag, perhaps leave it at a "shut the fuck up, you racist bitch", and don't escalate to social media?
And if you repeat racial slurs while someone is pointing a camera on you, and you are not already openly a KKK member, nor are Donald Trump, don't be surprised if the shitstorm hits you.
So that's now two onlyfans performers who determined that a substack is a good way to advertise to some potential clients. Aella and this one.
I find your ad hominem disgusting. While I do not have a paid subscription for either Aella's substack or OF, I read her free substack articles sometimes, and find them interesting in a way which does not make me want to subscribe to her OF.
If you really think Aella wrote Chattel Childhood because she thought "oh, my onlyfans subscriptions are stagnating, so I will just talk about child torture" then you are out of your fucking mind.
You can pretty much dismiss anything if you can gesture vaguely at a potential conflict of interest. When Scott wrote SSC, he was very much part of the medical establishment, so we can safely disregard all his articles on mental health medication. When NATO suggested that Putin might invade Ukraine, they were clearly in a partisan position, no need to pay attention to them. Whenever Anthropic produces AI alignment research, we should ignore this, because they are also building AI systems. When Ford claims that an engine has a certain displacement volume, they should not be trusted, because they just want to sell you the car.
The farhakhalidi article is not OF bait. If you want to attract men to your OnlyFans, the obvious thing would be to do is to put a hot but SFW picture of yourself into substack and mention that you are on OF. She does none of that.
Or you could say it is all part of a 5d-chess move: dissuade women from dating, so more men will end up not getting laid and going to OF, where they might subscribe to the author. This might make sense if you had a world with 10k people in it. She persuades five women to drop out of dating, which increases the number of sexually frustrated men by two, who will randomly subscribe to one of the two OF accounts which exist in the world, so she gets a new subscription, profit. It does not work in a world where there are millions of OF accounts, and a ton of alternative sources of porn besides. She is literally increase her OF subscriptions more by posting a picture of her elbow there than by trying to dissuade people from hookups.
Hot take: this does not really belong in the CW thread because it is not controversial. Nobody seems to be contesting that Trump has done most of the above. His defenders mostly claim that this is normal politician behavior.
Most congress critters are sponsored by big companies in their home state and certainly do their best to help these companies afterwards, sending the gravy train their way etc. Some go beyond that and do a bit of insider trading on the side. Only a few are open about taking money from foreign interests with an implied quid pro quo.
Allow me a metaphor. Except for a few (Bernie Sanders?), every politician farts in the whirlpool. There are certainly quite some who occasionally pee in the whirlpool too. But Donald Trump has just removed his trunks and taken a jumbo-sized shit in the whirlpool.
You -- like Putin -- seem to be under the impression that a countries right to exist is contingent on the worth of its culture as judged by you. You are wrong.
My position is that basically all international borders are accidents of history, but should be treated as sacrosanct, because having a pointless war is much worse than having a random border.
Also, most of your arguments could just as well applied to the US. I will spare you the stale jokes about US culture, but notice that the US -- while it labels itself a nation -- is just a federation of individual states. So why should not Canada annex Seattle instead?
But then again, you are likely just trolling.
The parsimonious explanation is that Musk is using his voice to mold opinion, not to plainly tell the truth. This is “immoral” in the sense that punching someone is immoral, when they have been punching you for years.
Hard disagree. If your opponent burns down the epistemic commons, and you respond in kind, you have just ceded the moral high ground. See Scott Alexander's Guided By The Beauty Of Our Weapons:
Logical debate has one advantage over narrative, rhetoric, and violence: it’s an asymmetric weapon. That is, it’s a weapon which is stronger in the hands of the good guys than in the hands of the bad guys. In ideal conditions (which may or may not ever happen in real life) – the kind of conditions where everyone is charitable and intelligent and wise – the good guys will be able to present stronger evidence, cite more experts, and invoke more compelling moral principles.
If you abandon Simulacrum Level 1, you might win or lose, but to a proponent of the truth it will not matter more than it would matter to an atheist which religion won the memetic competition and established a theocracy.
Also, Hanania argues that Musk is worse than the liberals:
The worst offense here is the deboosting of links. Under the old regime, liberals wanted you to only rely on what they considered credible sources of information. Musk doesn’t want you to read anything at all that is not in meme or tweet form.
The woke left has obviously not been a steadfast ally of the Truth. They certainly pick the studies they cite as cannon fodder for their side, and this has skewed all of the social 'sciences'. The embrace blank-slatism to a degree that they are unable to even engage with HBD on its merits. But to their credit, they at least believe that their world view is correct. This opens up the -- theoretical -- possibility to engage with them over the factual state of the world and convert them.
By contrast, Trump (the guy who Musk is backing and sucking up to) has had a total disregard for Level 1 through his entire political career: birtherism, qanon, election denial to the migrants eating cats and dogs. He is not so much lying (which would mean knowing the object level truth, than subverting it) as much as bullshitting and presumably, the median Trump voter knows this.
I think that there are solid reasons why democracies have developed cultural antibodies against Nazi aesthetics.
Now, I get not leaving everything which has ever been used by Nazis barren. For example, there are only so many two-letter acronyms, not using SS for something useful seems a bit of a waste, so I am fine with you Americans abbreviating social security thus. Likewise, just because some Neonazis like 18 and 88, even the Germans will not go all tetraphobic (yes, I know) on these numbers.
On the other hand, if someone were to say that we should reclaim "Heil Hitler", because after all, what made the Nazis bad was not their greetings but their genocides, I would reply that this is a terrible idea. It would be like saying that glowing cigarette butts -- unlike wildfires -- are generally not dangerous to humans, and thus we can throw them away without a care.
Of course, Musk's salute is a lot more ambiguous than "Sieg Heil", but in general I think that the gesture should better stay in the cordon sanitaire for a few more centuries.
My theory is that Musk did this deliberately to troll people. I disapprove.
(Also, I re-read SSCs parable of talents from 2015 recently. Scott mentions Musk no less than nine times, as an example of someone who is clearly gifted and doing good on a scale most of us could never hope to do. With a decade of hindsight, this reads somewhat bizarre -- sure, Musk did some great stuff, like making electric cars cool and establishing reuseable first stages, but he also did quite a few things which do not seem worth emulating.)
Meta: I think this post is not appropriate as a top level post.
The content thematic would easily qualify it for the culture war thread.
I would still think it is a bit short for the CW top level post, little more than a link and a few lines of context.
Compare with that natural selection post. At least that post was articulate enough, even if I also disagree with its content (but much less vehemently).
Having top level posts like this (from the quotations from other comments, I am not reading the link) makes us appear like a bunch of internet racists. At least we could try to appear to be a bunch of eloquent internet racists.
Six members of the Milwaukee ICE ERO Task Force planned to take part in the arrest of Flores-Ruiz on April 18, 2025. This included ICE ERO Deportation Officer A, Customs and Border Protection Officer A, FBI Special Agents A and B, and Drug Enforcement Administration (“DEA”) Special Agents A and B. The agents were generally dressed in plain clothes and intended to effectuate the arrest in as low-key and safe of a manner as possible.
No ATF? No FEMA? Not even the Coast Guard or the Marshall service? How could a mere six agents from only four federal agencies possibly hope to prevail against an unarmed immigrant?
And no, I checked, the badge of the "ERO Task Force" features a DHS seal with an eagle, not a scantly clad manga girl. Missed opportunity there. Sad!
Around me free public institutions are risking it all, to make sure kids can keep viewing cock sucking.
By internet standards, this feels like extremely tame. In fact, it is tame enough that the very article which is whining about it felt safe enough to include it in the very post without any pixelation on their presumably otherwise SFW website.
From the link:
Left-wing activists have sought to ban Lee's “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Salinger's “A Catcher in the Rye” and Twain's “Huckleberry Finn” for using language they say is "offensive" to Blacks and women. None of the three books includes any pornographic cartoon illustrations depicting gay sex.
Now, if the Genoa City Public Library has pulled these other books because some wokes were whining about it, then by all means call them hypocrites. But if they have not, I don't see the fucking problem of having a book with that picture in a library.
If it was required reading, then that would be bad, sure. If it was required reading for six-year-olds, very bad, even. But if it is just sitting in the youth or YA section of a public library, I am okay with it. The odd 8yo who will pick it up looking for more brutal comics will just go "eeew, gross!", not be traumatized for life. From the text, it does not even try to be jerk-off material. Not that there is not a lot of stuff which is borderline pornographic in literature, either.
A good library has someone to offend everyone. I think trying to get people to question their gender identity is generally bad, but I also think trying to push for "abstinence until marriage" is bad. So if that library also carries Twilight, that is already two ideas on offer which I don't agree with -- which is of course the purpose of a marketplace of ideas.
In most civilized countries, "if you deport me I will face a lengthy prison sentence without a court trial which would vaguely meet Western standards" would be reason enough to grant asylum.
From my understanding, El Salvador is not planning on making the people Trump sends them into upstanding citizens of their society. Instead, they will simply lock them up indefinitely.
Given the harmfulness of being locked up indefinitely in a country with a spotty human rights record, I would argue that this demands due process on the scale of a capital crime trial. In consequence, it is closer to executing someone than to deporting a Canadian whose work visa expired back to Canada.
While Marx thought nationalism was a ruse by the international bourgeoisie to keep the global proletariat divided.
Exactly. "Proletarians of all countries, unite" and all that. Blaming Marx for nationalism is about as sensible as blaming him for capitalism. But don't distract @TequilaMockingbird with facts while he is going on about how the evil Jews destroyed the dominant Christian world view.
If rampant sexual degeneracy ruins most young people as spouses, the remainder is about as 'free' to behave traditionally as they would be in solitary confinement.
I do not think that the ungendered version of the argument works. In high density areas (where your "sexual degeneracy" is more frequent), it does not matter if 99% of your generation do not qualify as a partner, the remaining 1% is still a decent-sized pool. If Jehova's witnesses can manage to find another JW to marry, then traditionalists should likewise be fine.
Now, I could be wrong and you could be lamenting how hard it is for 20 year old tradwives-to-be to find a virgin man who is making enough money to provide for a family, and how all the men have been "ruined" through either unmarried sex or porn.
Given traditionalist double standards, I think it is more likely that you are lamenting that there is a dearth of virgin women wanting to marry and start a family, and how all the 20 yo's want to go to college, will likely go through multiple boyfriends, perhaps suck a few cocks at parties, experiment with lesbianism or try anal sex, at which point you would consider them ruined.
As someone who himself gets laid less than I would likely have before the sexual revolution, let me say I have about zero sympathies.
All these arguments against the sexual liberation (mostly of women) could as well be made about the liberation of slaves in the US, which removed a lot of liberties previously enjoyed by the plantation owners. White families who had for generations enjoyed stable jobs as overseers were suddenly without employment. Today, a white guy can not hope to find blacks to work on his plantation for housing and basic food even if he promises not to whip or rape them. Instead, he is expected to pay them. The indignity!
I am always skeptical of claiming that we should not give one group the freedom to chose what to do with their lives because it will have downstream indirect effects which will harm other groups. (The exception is when the effects are obvious and heavily infringing that other group's freedoms. For example, legalizing anti-tank weapons would lead to a lot of people being blown up, or legalizing violent rape would unduly infringe on the liberties of the victims.)
We did not stop freeing the slaves because we were unsure on how this would affect the social order in the South or the price of tobacco. We went ahead and dealt with the indirect consequences as they appeared (badly, often).
SCOTUS defied all its normal rules about procedural posture to protect the rights of an illegal immigrant in six hours on a holiday weekend.
While I do not know the specifics, based on priors I would guess that this involved a suspected gang member being at risk of imminent deportation to some El Salvador mega prison. As Trump's efforts to follow court orders to get people deported in such a way were sadly unsuccessful, it seems reasonable to treat these deportations as a permanent harm and prioritize these cases accordingly.
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I think the problem with the 2nd amendment is that the text allows for a wide range of interpretations. One could argue that the framers meant the small arms of the 1780s -- which were the only guns they knew about, and if a city-destroying laser gun had popped up in 1800 they might have felt different about everyone owning it. Or that they meant 'state of the art military firearms, in perpetuity', because surely nobody would beat any tyrant today with flintlock rifles. Or even that they meant weapon systems to wage war in general, from man-portable antitank weapons to stealth bombers and nukes.
Previous case law has extended 2A to cover cartridges, revolvers and semiautomatics, but not automatics or explosive weapons. As far as the original purpose of the second (to enable the population to resist a tyrant like the US did during the revolutionary war) is concerned, it is very much moot. If the tyrant fields a tank, then the Americans owning what is currently legal for them to own, AR15s or no AR15s, will lose very badly in a direct confrontation. To give them the firepower to even have a fighting chance against tanks or airplanes would also give them the power to effortlessly take out school busses or jumbo jets, and this is a trade-off which few people will favor.
It should also be pointed out that the current SCOTUS has been otherwise quite Republican-friendly. They overturned Roe (which to be fair was always a stretch) and they gave Trump immunity for basically anything he did as a president. I can assure you, the disappointment the gun nuts feel with the SCOTUS for not affirming the legality of semi-automatic AR15s is tiny compared to the disappointment the liberals feel over Dobbs.
Who is Adam Unikowsky and why should anyone trust / care about their explanation / characterizations of a contemporary culture war topic filled with bad and bad-faith explanations / characterizations?
That is a fully general counterargument. Quite frankly, if you do not like to read opinions on culture war topics by people who may in fact not be 100% neutral observers, The Motte might not be for you.
If you bother to click on the substack link, you will find that Unikowsky did for example link the court document detailing the procedure.
Sure, not every claim is backed up by evidence of that level. But if your suspicion is that detainees were generally verbally advised to get their lawyer to file a habeas petition and inform ICE of their intend to file, it is up to you to write or link an effort-post detailing how in the time period in question, tons of immigrants served with AEA 21-B filed a habeas petition, with links to their cases and everything.
From my own priors, I think that the story as presented -- the Trump administration engaging in malicious compliance to get a few more immigrants out of the country before the courts stop them -- would not be very surprising.
The threat is existential.
No, it is not. If the Taliban party had just gotten a majority of the votes in New Mexico, then I might be inclined to agree that your country faces an existential threat. But this does not happen. The only religious nutjobs getting elected to Congress are self-identifying as Christian, and even they do not pose an existential threat.
Sure, given current demographic trends, at some point in the future the non-hispanic whites will be a minority. But this is not the end of the world. I mean, plenty of Asians preferred living in the US (where they were a minority) to living in Asia, because by and large, being an ethnic minority is not that bad a deal in the US.
Since you beat the Brits, you had perhaps two conflicts which might be called existential: the civil war (in retrospect, the outcome was over-determined, if not in the 1860s, then in the 1900s) and the cold war (which was more of a threat to the world as a whole than to the US specifically).
Anyone who wants to tell you that any current political thing, be it Dobbs, immigration, Trump, Social Justice or whatever poses an existential threat to the US is very likely wrong. (The AI doomers at least have a plausible pathway in mind, though.)
Need to look into sending the kids to catholic (or other reasonable religious) school, especially in these hyper-woke areas.
If you are worried about "pedophile/groomer men", you might want to think twice about a system which is run by men who voluntarily opted out of the church-sanctioned way to have sex.
Most of the stuff you mention is entirely orthogonal to ignoring the court system. Police getting deployed is a political decision, and the safeguard against politicians failing to stop violent protests is to vote them out of office. Law fare -- while problematic -- is explicitly using the court system.
If you have a story about someone who was imprisoned for a gun regulations charge, and the courts ordered their release and then the democrats said "haha" and kept them imprisoned indefinitely, please share it.
Good news, with your attitude, you are not alone.
- Jehova's Witnesses believe are opposed to blood transfusion for reasons which are orthogonal to the experimental method.
- Many religions are opposed to most forms of sexuality and/or contraception without any evidence that it leads to bad outcomes.
- Likewise, dietary restrictions.
- Some people believe that various forms of genital mutilation are beneficial or required not as a matter of empirical evidence, but for inscrutable cultural reasons.
Of course, if you want to convince the grey tribe specifically, just stating that obviously blood is sacred or puberty blockers are evil or pigs should not be eaten is not going to convince anyone.
Edit: I wrote that taking "gender transitioning prepubescent children" as a straw man for puberty blockers, but on further reflection I think that I would even cover gender affirming surgery. Sure, I think that operating on the genitals of ten-year-olds is a terrible idea, but that is contingent on empirical observations about the state of medicine, and if our tech level was higher, I would be open to evidence that it is beneficial for kids to change their gender a few time, or that placing a brain in a robot body increases QALYs for that matter.
Even if your claims of anti-white racism were true (the FAA hiring scandal is clearly an instance, and affirmative action can reasonably be described as both anti-Asian and anti-White, but that does not clear the "all levels of society" bar for me), I do not see how segregation would be the natural consequence.
The Black's response to facing racial discrimination was the civil rights movement, which was way more effective than any attempt to build a black-only community in the US or elsewhere would have been.
Even if you could convince the PMC that they were getting a Bad Deal wrt race in the coastal cities and that they should build their own White-only coastal cities in the middle of Arkansas with blackjack and hookers, I am not holding my breath for these cities to decide national elections. I would rather embark on a campaign of meritocracy and how racial discrimination is not cool even if it targets Whites or Asians.
At the moment, most people openly advocating for racial segregation are Neo-Nazis. I think I speak for the vast majority of Whites, HBD-pilled or otherwise, when I say I would much rather have a randomly selected Black person as a neighbor than a Neo-Nazi for purely selfish Bayesian reasons.
From my understanding of the ruling, it bans trans women from single sex women spaces. So de jure, even a fully passing trans-woman is banned. Obviously, defying that ban would be a infraction which is hard to detect.
At what point in any trans person's life will they be through the transition process so well that they "pass", and also still sharing showers with sex-segregated people?
Is your argument that any use of a communal shower is voluntary, and that a trans-person can simply opt not to go to the swimming pool to avoid gender-segregated spaces? Just as she can stay at home to avoid using gender-segregated bathrooms?
I will grant you that from what I know, many trans women who did not have surgery will try their uttermost to avoid situations like communal showers, because unlike what J.K. Rowling is thinking, they do not really get off on the idea of showering with a bunch of random women who can see their dick. (I think the solution is to have some single-stall, unisex cabins and showers, btw.)
But to deny people who can pass while naked their preferred gender showers seems silly.
While removing an illegal who has not been convicted of any crime on a vague suspicion that he might be a gang member, with the full knowledge that he will face a life in prison on your dime under atrocious circumstances is utterly despicable, that is not the full extend of their misconduct.
In his case specifically, they violated a court order to do that. "Accidentally".
This scales much beyond this case. "Oh, we are sorry your honor, we honestly thought that you had authorized that no-knock raid against that (suspected) Tesla-burning terrorist. Anyhow, now he is dead, so there is nothing we can do about that misunderstanding. All's well that ends well, I guess."
Of course, we don't have to worry if Trump would also deport US citizens to the mega prisons, because he has just announced that he would.
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Okay, let me try too.
Dangers and downsides to having the US air force firebomb Kansas City:
Economic benefits of the USAF firebombing Kansas City:
Ideological benefits (for various ideologies):
In general, firebombing is much more acceptable than nuking because of (a) the lack of nuclear fallout and (b) it does not contribute to the normalization of nuclear weapon use.
In conclusion, there are good economic and ideological arguments both for and against firebombing random cities, and experts in law, strategy and economy disagree if it is net beneficial or not. The fact that every administration before president Harris has refrained from burning down KC does not mean that she is wrong to do so.
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