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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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User ID: 896


					
					
					
				

			


					

						
					



		

	

 











			
			

			
			

			




	


		

			
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				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 22, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


It does not sound like he policed things such as gambling problems or household debt the same way he did affairs,




Every bank I have worked for has a policy on employee gambling. It is policed, but it doesn't need to be policed noisily off trading floors because the sort of person who is at risk for problem gambling doesn't make a good banker. On trading floors it is mostly self-policed because all traders are gamblers, but all traders also know that a problem gambler is a shitty trader. Banks are also all over their senior employees' (and their wives') personal finances - they aren't explicitly looking for consumer debt problems, but I suspect they would notice.




It does sound like he was using his position to enact a personal view, in firing executives based on his sentimentality toward marital fidelity and/or sense of personal loyalty toward him. Many would say this is unethical, unlawful even—in breaching a director's fiduciary duty toward shareholders when it comes to maximizing shareholder benefit. And this is on top of the aforementioned weird intrusiveness into his employees’ personal lives.




Boards of Directors (as a matter of corporate law) and the CEOs they delegate to get a lot of discretion in how to be long-term greedy - the legal term is the Business Judgement Rule. If Fuld and the Board thought that creating a culture where the execs and their wives were part of a Lehman "family" (which he did - that Fuld ran retreats for execs' wives attracted a lot of bemused coverage after the bankruptcy) was the best way to align incentives at the top of a bank, they were absolutely allowed to do that. And part of that culture is prohibiting affairs.




Ultimately, it's a "just-so" story. One could similarly argue that male executives who have extramarital affairs are more valuable employees, as they have a Demonstrated Track Record in Leveraging Core Competencies to Think Outside the Box for Alternative Growth Opportunities.




Your just-so story sounds entirely plausible and a Silicon Valley startup which regularly needs to break laws or act immorally would probably do well to preferentially hire rakes, with Uber being the proof of concept. A bank is a different type of organisation and needs to have a more small-c conservative corporate culture.


On the merits, execs having mistresses creates conflicts of interest (particularly if the mistress is employed by the bank or a client) and avoidable complexity. I understand why banks would want to discourage it. Managing conflicts of interest is part of the core competency of a bank (for both client trust and regulatory reasons) and the simplest way to manage them is to avoid the ones that don't come with a profit opportunity. Allegedly (I am not senior enough for this to be visible at my level) banks don't like exec spouses having careers that could create the impression of a conflict of interest, and mistresses are more trouble for multiple reasons.


Personally, I favour the mafia rule for mid-to-senior employees of high-trust organisations - you can shag your wife or a whore, but shagging respectable women you are not married to is verboten.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 22, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It's also reclamatory when used by Anglos  (like @ChickenOverlord?) in Japan - like rappers saying "nigger".


Racial slurs (and other slurs) cut differently when the context means that the possible meanings include "You are a member of my outgroup and I consider you sub-human" than when they don't.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 22, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Are the old men "monopolising" the prime-age women? I'm not sure I understand the mechanism if so. They all work in the same office building. The women are - I hope - permitted some choice in their mate.




Baxter is still single at 30, and the implication is that (as a reward for being an effective movie-plot protagonist - not by right) he ends up with Fran who is (a) used up and (b) from a lower social class than him. The women of Baxter's own class and age (within the context of the movie, this means the secretaries) are unmarriageable because they are busy fucking the bosses. From Baxter's perspective (and therefore the audience's), the women in his dating pool are being monopolised by the execs. The implication is that if things had gone the way the execs wanted, he would have remained unfucked until he was eventually promoted to the grade where he could have multiple women himself.


In real 1950's America, Baxter would be married to a woman of his own social class in his early twenties, and she would probably have been faithful to him.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 22, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


arguing over definitions.




Guilty as charged. Fundamental to my position on trans issues is that the concept of a "gender identity" as used by transactivists is probably incoherent, and if coherent does not describe a real thing. That requires trying to clarify the definition of a concept whose authors made it deliberately slippery in order to support motte-and-bailey arguments.


There is a much saner argument you can have about trans issues if you conduct the argument in terms of generally accepted concepts. Some men want to live as women (and vice versa), and potentially take drugs and have cosmetic surgeries to allow them to do so more effectively. Should adults be allowed to do this? (Default answer given the basic assumptions of Western liberal society is "yes" on the usual liberal grounds) Should children? (Head exploding issue in western society - there is a vast class of issues about how the State as parens patriae and the actual parents share authority over and responsibility for children who are too young to effectively exercise their own freedom and we don't have satisfactory answers.) Should people who do this be protected by anti-discrimination laws? (marginal - it's about as strong a case for the T as for the LGB)


But that isn't the argument that the trans movement want to have. I'm not the one who made this about the meaning of words - it started when a powerful political movement tried to make the meaning of the word "woman" a central political issue.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 21, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Tesla and Space X (both have more than 80% of the value creation inhouse) , Amazon (especially with the rise of Amazon Essentials), Apple, Netflix, BYD, Xiaomi, ect.




I don't think this list particularly works apart from the Musk companies. Amazon is a retailer - Amazon Essentials exist, but is <1% of my family's Amazon spend and I don't think I am an outlier. Apple use contract manufacturers. Most of what I streamed on Netflix when I had a subscription was not Netflix original content, which mostly sucks. I can't comment about BYD and Xiaomi specifically, but one thing everyone who writes about the Chinese manufacturing ecosystem says is how much of its edge comes from the ability to buy intermediate inputs in a friction-free way because someone else is making them just down the road, and is happy to take on a rush order.


That said, "big companies are internal planned economies and their existence partially refutes the socialist calculation argument" is old hat - Coase wrote The Nature of the Firm in 1937 and Galbraith wrote The New Industrial State in 1967.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 22, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The point of "cis-by-default" is that most people don't have a "gender identity" in the sense that transactivists use the term. (Google AI provides the definition "Gender identity is a person's internal, deeply felt sense of being a man, woman, both, neither, or another gender..." which I think is consistent with transactivist use). I don't have an internal, deeply felt sense of being a man - I just am one. The question of "how would you feel if you woke up in a female body?" doesn't make sense - I am my body as well as my brain, and the person who had a female body (complete with different musculature, menstruation, gonads that secrete oestrogen etc.) would be a different person.


I think the concept of gender identity is incoherent and nobody has a gender identity - some people have preferred gender roles that don't match their biological sex, and some people have fetishes which mean they can get off by performing a gender role that doesn't match their biological sex. But if tomboys and femme queens think they "really are" the other sex it is because transactivists tell them to, not because they have an "internal, deeply felt sense of being..."


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 22, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The official languages of Hong Kong per the Basic Law agreed between Margaret Thatcher and Deng Xiaoping are English and "Chinese" with no version specified. Government documents are issued bilingually in English and standard written Chinese. This is supposed to be equally legible to speakers of any Chinese language because written Chinese is non-alphabetic, and is similar but different to the "written Cantonese" used by Hong Kongers for ordinary written communication or the Putonghua (written Mandarin) now taught in mainland schools. The government will conduct spoken business in English, Mandarin or Cantonese and all three spoken languages are taught in schools, although "written Cantonese" is not.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 22, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Interesting piece of movie anthropology, although almost certainly inaccurate as anthropology of the real PMC of that era - everything I have read says that graduate-class men of that era mostly married a college sweetheart and stayed married.


The mating system being described here is gerontocratic polygamy - young men can't get laid because old men (the combination of seniority-based promotion and up-or-out meant that the age-based and rank-based meanings of senior and junior were very highly correlated among men on the management track in the same company) are monopolising the prime-age women, and then they get to have multiple prime-age women when they are old enough.


This can be stable if younger generations are larger than older generations (due to population growth or a high young-adult death rate) so there are enough women to go round. I remember reading an economics paper which pointed out that the highest positive bride-prices in the world (dowry is a negative bride-price) were in African cultures which practiced gerontocratic polygamy, and provided a model justifying this. Of course in the hypothetical sarariman/Moral Mazes example of the system the men don't die, they either fail out or get reassigned to the Peoria office and marry a local.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 15, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
If I had to give a tl;dr answer to "Why are women not getting married and therefore (unless chavettes who are happy to reproduce while single) not having children they want?" it would be a lack of marriageable men. Below-average men are in a much worse state than they used to be, and in a worse state than below-average women - the women who are being asked to lower their standards and settle really are being asked to make (and largely refusing to make) compromises on e.g. employability that their mothers didn't have to.


Why 90-100 IQ men are worse husbands in 2025 than they were in 1955 is a more complex question, which involves some or all of changes in education, blue-collar job markets, working-class male institutions, and gender roles.


But the key point is that this is a problem that lives in the interface between men and women - the problem is that respectable working class and marginal working class women are unwilling to settle for the actually available men. In a sense it doesn't matter if the men got culpably worse, the men were damaged by bad public policy, or the women got pickier - the point is that (given the continued existence of monogamy norms and the unwillingness of the political right or the median voter to subsidise bastardy more than we do already) the first step in raising fertility is to unf*ck the marriage market in a way which changes both sexes' behaviour.


There is a separate problem with middle-class and above women marrying too late to complete their desired family size, and ending up with 1 kid instead of 2 or 2 instead of 3 because of age-related infertility. Again, fixing this - i.e. getting professionals to marry earlier - is about changing social norms in a way which changes both sexes behaviour, not about blame placing.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 21, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Although anecdote from people who work in the for-profit fertility industry is that they select on height a lot more strongly than on IQ or other potentially eugenic qualities.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 22, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The experience of foreign companies doing business in China is not this. China absolutely uses threats to Apple's supply chain in China as a tool to influence the output of Apple TV in the US, as an example.


Or to put it another way, "Openly provoking China" sometimes includes saying things which are patriotic boilerplate in your home country.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 15, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
If a woman planning to get married and have children eventually ends up with fewer children than she wants because she marries late and ages out of her fertility window, then the ultimate cause of having too few children is failure to marry younger. In other words she was unable or unwilling to secure the necessary male investment at a time when it would have made more difference.


The point I am making is that, assuming you accept that women are at least directionally truthful about how many children they actually want and why they didn't have that many, is that the problem lies in the relationship between men and women, not the behaviour of women in isolation. While true as a matter of biology, @Tintin's point that women don't need anything valuable from men (sperm is cheap) to reproduce is irrelevant in practice given that respectable working class and above women don't reproduce without male investment, and society doesn't want them to.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 15, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
FLDS violate a lot of federal (and state) laws about polygamy, rape, statutory rape etc. The outside world considers this victimful crimes against their own women, and is appropriately (given our own moral standards) outraged. So FLDS largely have to live sub rosa.


The only victimful crime Haredim commit is rorting the public fisc*, which a lot of Americans wrongly consider victimless when done by someone sympathetic. They can do this openly as long as their political machines can provide them with cover.


*Not just welfare fraud - Haredi-controlled municipalities like Kiryas Joel and the Haredi political machine in NYC commit a much larger range of rorts, many of which are technically criminal.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 15, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Isn't this just a matter of sex ratio? The denominator in TFR is the number of women and ignores men. Societies as a whole have a 1:1 effective sex ratio, so this doesn't normally matter when comparing. But individual communities which don't reproduce biologically can have unbalanced sex ratios. Oil towns and military base communities have a lot of surplus men, so if the limiting reagent for family formation is mostly rather than entirely female, then they will naturally have more kids per woman.


In Western culture, polygyny and bastardy are (very) low status, and the main reason women give for having fewer children than they claim to want is a lack of quality men to have them with. If this is even partly true, then it is obvious how "have enough spare men around that all women who want kids can get a man who wants kids, and a crappy woman can nail down a mediocre man and a mediocre woman can nail down a decent man" increases births-per-woman.


I suspect something similar is going on in the other direction with collapsing Mormon fertility. Monogamy norms are even stronger in post-1904 Mormonism than in the wider society, and the Church has a problem with male defection meaning that the sex ratio is female-heavy. Anecdotally, babies-per-marriageable-couple is still high among Mormons, but babies-per-woman is falling off a cliff as not every woman can get married.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 15, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Not many career violent and property criminals nowadays - in a world where TVs are cheap, stolen phones get bricked remotely, and people don't carry large amounts of cash it isn't lucrative enough, particularly compared to drug dealing or online scams and fraud. In addition, sentences for repeat offenders are still harsher than they were in the Hippie Era such that you can't just write an occasional week in jail off as a cost of doing business.


There are specific niches where you see career property criminals, like shoplifting in San Francisco and fencing it on Facebook Marketplace, or pickpocketing tourists almost everywhere, but nothing like the situation in the 1990's where you could make a career as a burglar or mugger. Ask a beat cop or a local politician in a high-crime area and they will say that most property crime nowadays is committed by junkies who need cash fast for their next fix.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 15, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Given that my wife is 45, was subfertile, and is now properly infertile after a botched IVF cycle when we tried for a third child that way, there would be loud rejoicing, expressing thanks for a miracle.


I do not think I am particularly unusual in thinking this way among older parents.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 15, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Western concerns about China's treatment of Falun Gong predates the Epoch Times - in PMC liberal circles in the UK existence of the Epoch Times has probably weakened the Falun Gong cause by making it vaguely right-coded.


When I was a student in Cambridge in the noughties the Red Chinese government was broadly unpopular for a constellation of reasons, the local student Amnesty group made persecution of Falun Gong one of their key campaigns several years running, and there was a large Falun Dafa mediation/exercise group that existed largely to troll the Red Chinese.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Transnational Thursday for December 18, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The boats are carrying cocaine. Assuming that the maps and accompanying discussion in glossy reports produced by various anti-drug orgs (pre-2025 US, UN and NGO-produced reports broadly agree) are correct, most of the cocaine on these specific boats is not ultimately heading for the US.


Some cocaine enters the US by boat after island-hopping across the Caribbean, but most cocaine landed in Trinidad, Suriname, or the Dominican Republic is going to be smuggled in air passenger baggage into the relevant European country with historical links, at which point in can then move freely within the EU (and in practice almost freely to the UK or Switzerland). European street prices for cocaine are currently more than double US ones, so that is more lucrative for the smugglers.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 15, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Why do we keep getting teams of trans lesbians of color then?




Because there are lots of all-male teams by default, and the ones which self-define as trans lesbians don't get cancelled for being all-male?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 15, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Was "retarded" or "retard" ever used as a specific technical term allowing fine distinctions in the way "moron", "imbecile" and "idiot" (in increasing order of retardation) were? I am not an expert, but I think "retarded" was the first turn of the euphemism treadmill after idiot/imbecile/moron became un-PC, and "retard" has never been anything except a schoolboy insult derived from "retarded".


I don't think the euphemism treadmill applies to warrior/soldier though - the people talking about "warriors" think that both "warrior" and "soldier" are both strongly positive descriptions that you wouldn't want to euphemise.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 15, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think "forcing a conflation" and "erasing a distinction" are synonyms. The whole point that @quiet_NaN is making, and which I endorse, is that "warrior" and "soldier" are different words with different meanings, and that the US Army and US Marine Corps are, and should be, soldiers, and mostly are not, and should not be, warriors.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Wellness Wednesday for December 17, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


The obstacle course was predictable: her parents had just moved into her brother's place, trading their retirement for the privilege of asking pointed questions every time their daughter wanted to leave the house looking nice. They're not tyrants. They're just Indian parents, which means they're constitutionally incapable of letting their adult children exist unobserved.




For all the educated girls from non-WEIRD cultures I knew, "he's a doctor - and no he's not married, you know I'm not that kind of girl" would have made this problem 90% less troublesome than you are making it out to be, or in some cases 110% (as in her mother would have become an actual ally). Was this true in her parents' corner of Indian culture?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 15, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Erasing the warrior-soldier distinction is bad because it makes it harder to talk accurately and precisely about violence professionals, and in particular to call out certain failure modes in civil-military relations.


Erasing the warrior-curmudgeon distinction is bad for the same reasons.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 15, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
My read is that systematic abuse of disability programs (i.e. everyone in the system knows and does not care that the people getting the bennies are not as disabled as they are claiming to be) by white men between 50 and retirement age, particularly in poorer areas, is widespread and unofficially tolerated in many countries, including the US. In the UK this has been the case since the mid-1980's - despite multiple ineffective government crackdowns.


I agree that social welfare programs are not for able-bodied young males.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 15, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
By social stereotype of the era, the fathers of the bastards were high-status men (whether or not married yet), not men who were too poor to marry.