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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 8, 2025

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This is too dank to believe, and I don't believe it, but it is what my Twitter feed wants me to believe, and I'm sharing it on that basis.

The combination of the messages on the cartridges is best explained by Robinson being deep into gamer culture

  • The sequence of arrows is a reference to Helldivers 2
  • "Ciao Bella" can be a number of things, but one of them is a HoI4 meme.
  • "If you read this you are gay" is general chan culture
  • "Notices, bulges what's this" is an online furry culture meme which has also spread into general chan culture

Where does this end up? If Robinson was deep into HoI4 online culture, his browser history will be full of both Wehraboo and Antifa material. And if he got into the chans or the other online cesspools where large number of gamers hang out, then they are going to find all the bad stuff. So the people who want to believe that he was a leftist will find enough evidence to believe that, the people who want to believe he was a groyper will find enough evidence to believe that, and the people (like me) who want to believe that he was just a Thomas Crooks-style very online loser who shot a politician because in the current year it is more memetically badass than shooting up a school will find enough evidence to believe that. So the assassination will become a super-scissor. And, to add insult to injury, a wholesome hobby that I and many other Motteposters enjoy a lot (namely Paradox grand strategy gaming) will become tied in the mind of normies to political violence.

While this wasn't a mass shooting, men are responsible for something like 97-98% of those apparently and they skew really young on average. Even violent crime in general is really male heavy. There's a racial skew but I'm pretty sure per capita white men still commit more crimes than any race of women.

Robinson seems to match this typical viral shooter type of demographic. Young, male, brain poisoned and on seven layers of "irony", amorphous views of society and politics that seem tended towards extremism/anarchy/radical change (the "need for chaos" as I've seen it called) of any kind rather than stable values that slot neatly into anything.

People keep talking about "the left" and "the right" but a single spectrum discussion is simply insufficient for covering how people operate and think. Even the slightly better political compass with the extra auth vs lib is still flattening the world far too much. These are often young men radicalized into chaos itself and we need a a way to find, intervene, and reach out to the boys before they get pulled in.

Strongly agree here. In general there's a sort of chaotic mindset where nothing is real or serious and everything becomes increasingly abstracted, as @CrispyFriedBarnacles said above. I think disembodiment is the real problem.