site banner
PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   29222 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 6, 2025

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

10
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Twitter saw Elon go full alt-lite on the British government after the Rotherham incident where he has been tweeting about it for the past week and it is glorious to see it. Leftists of course do not care about those girls getting raped and deflect the accusations outright by denying that the rapes happened in the first place.

Keir Starmer, the British prime Minister, made a statement on this going after Musk. In an interesting turn of events, Andrew Tate started a political party named Bruv with the intent of becoming prime minister of the UK while still not having had approval from the Romanian government to leave Romania.

Musk's talking points are positive for anyone who likes the truth, He pointed out the inflated numbers of sex offenders being Muslim migrants in other parts of Europe and has shown support for AfD in the past which is a centre-right party in Germany. The tech right seems to be bending the knee to the traditional right, in a way musk fighting for the h1b made others on it stick with him and similar people like Joe Lindsdale are now posting similar things.

This is very surface-level info, I post this because we are currently in the midst of what one may call a thermidor of sorts where people stopped using pronouns in their bios online and saw a rise of post-censorship worldview, the slop by James Lindsay which got him recognition gets him trashed whilst Musk posts Keith Woods on his timeline. The attempts by the online right got derailed badly post Charlottesville and Jan 6, the latter happening exactly 4 years ago. My main aim here is to get some perspective as to how things were during these two incidents during 2017 and 2021.

Edit - forgot to add Moldbug came up with a new piece directed to alon against the H1B and the O1 that was surprisingly not passive, I quite agreed with most points in it. Elon also gave a meek nod to Tate's LARP of a political run and posted memes about feds on Jan 6 and even questioned the deaths of officers on that day, to the point where the llm embedded in twitter tells you that the people listed all died of natural causes. Interesting times on Twitter.

Edit 2 - Musk tweeted Could what happened to the Yazidi people one day happen to Europe? and the 13 52 for Europe, are we back in 2016? His tweets led to inbreeding advocate Mohammad Hijab to go full mask off and talk about outbreeding native brits

Dude is speedrunning the alt-lite pipeline to a much darker form of enlightenment hopefully.

What’s amazing about musk is his perhaps pathological need to double down at every opportunity.

He supported trump at great risk to himself in the event of a loss. Having won he’s now ratcheting things up further. He clearly thinks trump and the state department will give him cover (as they should) with European regulatory issues. He’s playing an all or nothing game. To what end. I don’t know.

Trump intends to appoint more than half his cabinet from tech-bros. So I'd say that the people doing the work for trump are naturally aligned with Elon.

Trump is going to be pro-tech and pro-space. The democrats and god forbid greens(non existent), would rather destroy Space-X and anything else Elon has touched out of spite. They would tell you its better to feed and clothed the random assemblage of voting constituency they have than to reach mars. They have made themselves the enemy of space exploration, so screw them, let them burn.

That's why I suspect that there will eventually be a public falling out. Eventually Elon will insist on something that Trump can't or won't deliver for political reasons and that will be the end of it. He used to be a darling among some on the left but fell out with them for incredibly stupid reasons, and there's no reason to think it won't happen here. The interests of the American public aren't always aligned with his interests, and he doesn't have the political tact to play the game the way the rest of corporate America does.

pathological need to double down at every opportunity.

Isn't there a classic stock trading scam where you send 2^N Boolean tips ("will go up or down today") for N days, then focus on the small-but-nonempty group that got N correct tips in a row to try to convince them to trust your judgement? It seems like given enough VCs (monkeys) and opportunities (typewriters), even random chance will give you a few coherent words of Shakespeare and a fawning audience expecting great wisdom.

Of course, I do think your average VC billionaire is much brighter than random chance, but there is a huge selection bias when you find the one (of an unknown size set) that has consistently doubled down and won and assume this to be representative generally.

I think it is similar to why Napoleon invaded Russia. He had everything, he had won (well, almost but he could have ignored Britain), but he was so driven being Emperor in Paris was boring and he needed the next challenge. So he did go to war until he got into a war he lost.

Leading a car company is a full time job. Building rockets is a full time job. But he finds normal day business boring and delegates so he can solve the next challenge. But you can’t “solve” politics, and sooner or later he will fly like Icarus to close to the sun and fall down.

What’s amazing about musk is his perhaps pathological need to double down at every opportunity.

It's the path to success if you can escape the orbit of normal man and afford to make big mistakes. Musk is unofficial Imperator now, and he's behaving like it.

That, and woke doubled down at every opportunity. Maybe that eventually failed, but only after achieving so much change that is never going away.

To be honest I dont think the tech right is bending the knee to the traditional right. I see the tech right as breathing free after more than a decade of incessant political correctness that permeated the professional managerial classes, a political correctness enforced by commissars emboldened by the fat of the land being creamed off for the commisars benefit as sinecures to maintain respectability. Remember, till Nov 2024 the popular vote was always Democratic, or Labour+SNP+Green, or whatever other permutation that proved that most people actually were not right wing.

The end of ZIRP means that tech has to pay attention to bottom lines more, conservative wins have shown the unpopularity of pretending political correctness serves a useful social goal, and finally Trumps victory has shattered the myth of minorities and young people being more receptive to equity outcome pandering. With the illusion cast aside, the tech bros, who are still largely anodyne liberal cowards, have firmer footing to raise up Inconvenient Issues at least for consistencies sake.

It used to be Bill Cosby, Thomas Sowell, Glenn Loury, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Hassan Yousef, maybe even Maajid Nawaz who were screaming into the void about irredentist minorities who were not obeying the presumed liberal playbook of inevitable assimilation. Instead the 2010s and 2020s were dominated by screeching feminist institutions and race baiters like Gawker, Jezebel, Slate, Salon Vice and Buzzfeed, before they were annihilated by market forces and leaving DiAngelo and Kendi to step in as thought leaders for socially cowardly professionals.

Musks aggressive attack on Starmer may have some other reasons like a personal vendetta against the twitter ban or whatever, but the undeniable fact is that the illusion is shattered and the protected classes no longer enjoy the presumption of mass social acceptance for their Culture. The meta has finally changed. I fully expect a mass blackpilling among normies who finally realize that verbalizing coincidentally racist stereotypes that boomers correctly observed are no longer social suicide.

With the illusion cast aside, the tech bros, who are still largely anodyne liberal cowards, have firmer footing to raise up Inconvenient Issues at least for consistencies sake.

You could say that fairly about Zuckerberg. Not about Musk.

In an interesting turn of events, Andrew Tate started a political party named Bruv with the intent of becoming prime minister of the UK

A black Muslim pimp is surely best placed to captured nativist sentiment arising from Rotherham. Sometimes the absurdity of modern politics does make you laugh.

In any case, Labour has an extremely large ironclad majority until August 2029. They might conceivably replace Starmer, but it will not be with someone ideologically dissimilar. The worse they poll, the less incentive to call an election before then.

Only Nixon could go to China.

A black Muslim pimp

He's paler than the average Italian. If you're gonna bring up his ethnicity, at least call him Afro-European or mulatto or something. The man's about as black as Father Ted. And Europeans don't use the one-drop rule. If someone passes as European (like Andrew Tate or Meghan Markle) the fact that they may have mixed ancestry is just an interesting factoid for most people.

Although him converting to Islam so he can get religious cover for his promiscuity and saying mean things about women is pretty funny.

He's paler than the average Italian.

No he’s not. He’s pale enough to pass for Sicilian or Andalusian. The average Spaniard or Italian is much paler.

He's paler than the average Italian

He certainly isn’t and he certainly wouldn’t ‘pass’ as European the way eg. Markle does even in Sicily. I’m not hugely invested in weird race debates since I’m not a nativist, but yeah he looks black in the American sense which, given he is both American and this is a largely American board I think means it’s reasonable to describe him as such.

I was genuinely surprised to learn that Tate is half black when I learned it.

Half black a religious Muslim who wants the UK to stay a white Christian state whose brother wanted people to literally preach the bible during an onlyfans models sex marathon with 100 dudes in a day*

Leftists of course do not care about those girls getting raped and deflect the accusations outright by denying that the rapes happened in the first place.

They do care but only marginally. I was in a discussion just recently. A quasi steelman of their position (copperman?) is that yes, rapes may have happened and political correctness may have contributed to the police failing. HOWEVER, Elon Musk is just bringing up this against Keir for political reasons. The people who bring this up have an agenda, they're motivated and they won't give you the full context. If you have the full context you'd probably find it's a very murky situation and there are no clear goodies and baddies. By the way, you can't find the full context because there's nobody who's disinterested in this so don't even try (also I can't be bothered to look into this, it's not my problem). Every big prosecutor has 10 cases out of 3000 that look pretty bad, Elon is just singling out Keir because he can. What are you supposed to do, get it right every time?

Furthermore, judges frequently let out criminals they thought were truly guilty because that's how the law works (judge says 'I wouldn't say frequently' in reply). Anyway, it was a breakdown in communications, these things just slip through the cracks, it wouldn't be fair to hold anyone accountable for it. Police corruption and institutional failure does sometimes happen but we should be very wary of people who say the police are covering it up or that the authorities have failed us because that's what far-right people and schizos say. Most people who say this are schizos or liars. And there were all these times people were arrested for pedophilia despite not being pedophiles because the wrong people were listened to...

TLDR; rule of law > catching pedophiles and taking them out of circulation. Elon and the far-right are in the wrong here.

Perhaps you can tell from my tone that I don't really agree with this, I find the argument motivated to be maximally unfalsifiable. You could use this kind of reasoning to justify everything, there's a kind of meta-cherrypicking going on: "you can't just pick out bad things politicians have done in the past to attack them in the present when everyone makes mistakes" surely wouldn't be accepted for the wrongdoings of Donald Trump. My conclusion is that IQ once again isn't an unalloyed good. You can use intelligence to achieve any goal, good or ill.

The steelman case is surely far stronger than the above.

It's not that rapes may have happened and political correctness may have been a factor that got in the way.

It's that those things definitely happened and were revealed to be such by multiple both national and local inquiries, in particular the 2022 Jay report. This has been a major news story for a decade in the UK, it hasn't been suppressed at all.

Neither does the steelman case claim that Keir Starmer may have dropped the ball just this once as all prosecutors do.

For a start, he was director of public prosecutions (not a prosecutor but in charge of the entire national justice apparatus).

And he actually did take strong action on the problem, for example appointing a new chief prosecutor in the NW who overturned the previous flawed inquiry and created a model that enabled mass prosecutions to happen.

Neither is it the steelman position that taking paedophiles out of circulation sometimes comes second to the rule of law.

Rather, it's that a much more effective and rapid way to tackle this problem would be to implement the 400 recommendations of previous inquiries (which the Tories did not implement, claiming now that they spent their final two years in power preparing to implement them; Labour have committed to implement them)

The steelman case is that taking action now is better than another multi-year national inquiry (aka kicking the issue into the long grass). This is what the chair of the Kay enquiry and the victim groups are calling for by the way.

I don't exactly know what the response to this version of the steelman case is, because the most prominent people making the case for a new enquiry are not listening to or responding to any of it. I myself am open to the need for further national enquiries, by the way, but I don't think the main figures calling for one have even begun to make a reasoned case as to why one would help deliver justice.

I came to this thread today hoping to find a steelman somewhere, so thank you.

Is there any additional steelman for the cases themselves? The screenshots on twitter from official reports that show 13 year olds being gang raped multiple times by multiple groups in single days, being pulled out of police stations to be raped in cars, are all just.... insane.

What's the median rape case here? A troubled girl exchanging sex for alcohol and drugs? (I don't ask this to diminish that as a crime). I can't possibly believe examples like the above are anywhere close to average across 3,000 kids.

The steelman against taking harsh illiberal action towards any particular target over a rape panic is that one needs to talk about averages. What's the Value Over Replacement Rapist (VORR) that the Paki immigrants are bringing to the table here?

Frequent panics have been had on American college campuses about rape, and particularly about Fraternities, with the result that colleges have forced organizations dating back decades to close their doors, and that campuses set up kangaroo courts to persecute young men who were even vaguely accused of wrongdoing. Activists continue to beat the drums about Rape Culture, and accuse campuses of providing impunity to rapists, promoting disrespect of and aggression against women. But, inconveniently, the numbers show that girls in college are much less likely to be sexually assaulted than girls in the same age group not in college. Whatever bad things colleges and fraternities were accused of doing, they weren't delivering much VORR! It's tough to make the argument that colleges were particularly bad on sexual assault (at least not without making the kind of racist/classist arguments on demographics that campus feminists would sooner be raped than make out loud).

Similarly, as an American Catholic I've endured a thousand lazy pedo-priest jokes, and probably made quite a few myself though I think mine are clever and cutting rather than lazy. And while the abuses of the Catholic church are horrible, they've turned out not to be nearly unique. Rather, Catholics suffer for being the largest and most organized denomination in America, and as such the abuses are larger in scale, and are easily attributable to The Catholic Church, where stripmall startup Evangelicals and Megachurches only represent themselves. The Southern Babtist Convention, the second largest denomination, and Jehovah's Witnesses have turned up similar piles of cases. And the independent evangelical megachurches haven't done much better. This clown got caught in a sting operation soliciting a minor for sex and showing up to meet her at a motel, plead it out in some corrupt bullshit where he went to counseling, and now he's back in the pulpit every Sunday in Virginia Beach for a huge congregation. So, has the Catholic Church done wrong? Sure. But do they have much VORR over other denominations? That's a tougher question.

Rotterham can, of course, still shock the conscience for any number of other reasons. But those pushing us to outrage should state those reasons out loud. If they think it is genuinely worse when a Paki commits a crime than when a White does so, they should say so out loud.

Or it might be a case that genuinely delivers a great deal of VORR, I haven't actually read much about it in years and years as this case is so old at this point, and I have no idea where one would find an unbiased source.

Rotterham can, of course, still shock the conscience for any number of other reasons. But those pushing us to outrage should state those reasons out loud. If they think it is genuinely worse when a Paki commits a crime than when a White does so, they should say so out loud.

I don't believe that Rotherham is worse because the men were foreigners - I would be just as outraged if they were native Britons, Americans, Australians, Dutch or Israelis. What is actually responsible for my outrage is the total dereliction of duty on the part of the police, legal system and media... but that wouldn't happen, because the explicit reason for their dereliction of duty was to avoid inflaming racial tensions.

I don't believe that Rotherham is worse because the men were foreigners

It is, if they were native brits this wouldn't have happened. Those in power are not only cowardly the are also traitors.

It is, if they were native brits this wouldn't have happened. Those in power are not only cowardly the are also traitors.

There were numerous paedo scandals involving white perps which broke around the same time as Rotherham. Jimmy Savile was the most media-friendly, but in terms of numbers of victims the various scandals in children's homes were the biggest. But the number of different sex abuse scandals that broke after Savile died was so large that it two years just to define the remit of the enquiry into them.

Arguing about cold cases of child sex abuse was the current thing in the UK for most of the 2010's, and it eventually became clear that abuse of chav-tier teens had been de facto decriminalised regardless of the race of the abuser. (And this isn't UK-specific - this was going on during the height of the Epstein era).

and it eventually became clear that abuse of chav-tier teens had been de facto decriminalised regardless of the race of the abuser.

And fathers trying to rescue their kids from the abusers were also getting arrested, and social workers were arguing that "well ackshully that 14 year old gave consent"?

More comments

Seconded. I've tried not to comment on this topic, but my personal take is that this is a tragedy and a farce that so many were failed, and all the qualifications about how little could be done to not fail the victims can't overpower the tragedy-porn aspect of it for me.

The steelman against taking harsh illiberal action towards any particular target over a rape panic is that one needs to talk about averages. What's the Value Over Replacement Rapist (VORR) that the Paki immigrants are bringing to the table here?

Frequent panics have been had on American college campuses about rape, and particularly about Fraternities, with the result that colleges have forced organizations dating back decades to close their doors, and that campuses set up kangaroo courts to persecute young men who were even vaguely accused of wrongdoing.

This is not a steelman that is consistent with the opinions of people who actually complain about rape panics against immigrants.

I guess I'm not sure what the philosophical heart of steelmanning is, in my mind I'm extending absolutely maximal charity by assuming that they're lying, and are in reality thinking bad and mean but true things they won't say out loud. That may be outside the bounds of this conversation.

Uh, I kinda hope not to hear the answer, but can you find a case of a preteen girl outside of a war zone being gang raped by multiple groups of western men in the same day without any apparent coordination? I’ll reckon you can’t. You can find some who were gang raped by an equivalent number of perpetrators in a single instance, and some sex trafficking victims with strong coordination by a pimp.

This specific behavior is a Muslim thing.

Wait, are you missing context here? The grooming gangs were grooming the girls into prostitution using the tried and tested "boyfriend" method. Some of Muslim men in question WERE their pimps, while some were "johns". The "boyfriends" would then sell access to them to other men for drugs and money. Which is how the police often came in contact with the girls, and wrote them off as drug addicted prostitutes, undesirables, and habitual liars.

So strong coordination by a pimp is exactly what we had here. The "boyfriend" model (for grooming) and the so called "party" model for groups of men with coerced girls is common throughout the world, unfortunately. From Epstein to Diddy probably.

About 20% of members of these gangs in England are Asian (which is a strong over-representation compared to demographics, just to be clear) but simply due to numbers most grooming and prostitution gangs in England are mostly white, largely with the exact same MO. The actual methods used are not unusual at all within the CSE playbook.

So there was coordination here, that is in fact the whole point. If there wasn't they wouldn't be grooming gangs. The pimp would bring a girl to one "party", then the next and so on.

https://www.salon.com/2009/10/27/gang_rape/

https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna41514602

https://www.marquette.edu/cgi-bin/cuap/db.cgi?uid=default&ID=5350&view=Search&mh=1

Just a couple random cases. I've worked on a few similar cases that I'd prefer not to share anything about.

The world on its margins is so much grimmer than imaginable.

There was a fairly infamous case in Cleveland, TX in 2010. Some might debate "Western men" here, but those charged were American citizens as far as I know, not MENA immigrants. Maybe some of them were Muslim, but probably not all.

the girl who was raped was placed by the Child Protective Services in the care of the Girls' Haven in Beaumont, Texas. In December 2011, she ran away from the residential facility and was "on the streets for about a week," as the Jefferson County prosecutor stated. He revealed that, at some point, she met a 30-year-old male with a prior conviction as a drug dealer in Fort Bend County, who subsequently assaulted her at his apartment in Beaumont. The assailant was arrested and pleaded guilty in September 2012 to aggravated sexual assault of a child in exchange for deferred probation. In 2013, the girl revealed she was pregnant, allegedly from her "15-year-old boyfriend," and that they would keep the baby.

Holy shit dude.

Fair enough, although I’ll note that authorities just pressed ahead with charges despite all the perpetrators being African American(which is definitely western even if it isn’t white), and it was taken seriously by the powers that be.

Uh, I kinda hope not to hear the answer, but can you find a case of a preteen girl outside of a war zone being gang raped by multiple groups of western men in the same day without any apparent coordination?

So - this is not the exact same thing, but a reasonably popular song by TI (ft. Kendrick Lamar and Kris Stevens) reminiscing about childhood opens with TI talking about gangbanging someone with mental disabilities:

Aye, in my apartment a long time ago
I knew a bad bitch, but she was kind of slow
Still gave it up when it's a few of us
She let me finger fuck her on the school bus
We used to cut school with her and run train
She want to hang with us, we want one thing
Just penetrating her throat, dawg
She choke on it like smoke, dawg

These, of course, weren't men, more kids of the same age, but consent-wise, it probably balances out with her being a simpleton. Multiple dudes fucking underage girls happens in the west too.

Well, people writing songs about multiple dudes fucking underage girls.

If they think it is genuinely worse when a Paki commits a crime than when a White does so, they should say so out loud

Isn't it worse because law enforcement and media are highly motivated to scrutinize i.e. the Catholic Church but those same institutions circle the wagons to protect Pakistanis from just legal and reputational punishment, all on the altar of Liberal Values?

Isn't it worse because law enforcement and media are highly motivated to scrutinize i.e. the Catholic Church

Well the whole point was they weren't highly motivated for quite some time right? There were cover ups and priests were allowed just to be moved around rather than arrested etc. I heard jokes about "pedo" priests in the 70's after all, and it didn't start coming to a head until the 2000's. And indeed the reports go back through the 50's and before. With: .."government, police, and church had colluded in an attempt to cover up the allegations"

So back in the 80's to 90's the media and law enforcement weren't really highly motivated to scrutinize the Catholic Church either. Despite some stories throughout the 80's, Sinead O'Connor raising it on SNL in 92, it wasn't really until a decade later anything much came of it, with the Boston Globe story in 2002.

The grooming gang story broke in a big way just 9 years later in 2011. The very earliest the media at least could have been on the grooming gang story was maybe 2001, more likely ,through 2006 with Heal's study. Before that the main issue preventing discovery of the activity was the cops treating the victims as drug addicted, lying prostitutes rather than victims (as very evident in some of the note's taken at the time, even when they had no idea who the pimps and so on were).

If anything the consensus broke much faster with the Pakistani gangs than it did with the Church.

It's been the subject of huge media coverage, jokes, movies, TV shows, everything for decades now. Comparing timelines seems nonsensical to me. The story hasn't really "broken" as much as non-institutional actors are making the story go viral, forcing the issue on a media and legal apparatus that wants to sweep it under the rug. There's no basis to say the Catholic Church has gotten less scrutiny than this story related to the Pakistani gangs.

he story hasn't really "broken" as much as non-institutional actors are making the story go viral, forcing the issue on a media and legal apparatus that wants to sweep it under the rug.

The story was broken in 2011 in a big way by a standard journalist in a newspaper. That journalist won a national award for his work and is working for The Times. There is no way to frame him as a non-institutional actor. Jayne Senior the social worker who attempted to raise the issue with police was working for the local government, and was awarded an MBE in 2016 for her efforts. Convictions even started in 2010.

The story going viral now is a decade late, so it certainly cannot be said that non-institutional actors were the ones who broke it. It was broken already. They are rehashing it sure, making it go viral internationally absolutely. But it was exposed years ago.

None of that is to say it shouldn't have been broken earlier, but it was traditional media which broke the story into the UK public consciousness, 14 years ago. Just like with the Catholic abuse scandal with the Boston Globe in 2002.

Probably. But at least in an American context I'm unconvinced that the cops have started throwing the book at people like John Blanchard.

Most of the perpetrators followed the "boyfriend" model. They ply vulnerable girls with alcohol, drugs, and attention (for why that is important consider the idea that strippers often have Daddy issues), and pretend to be their boyfriends, before pushing them into more and more extreme acts, initially with themselves. Then they use that, the "relationship" and threats against the girls and/or their family to pimp them out. Remember these are first and foremost prostitution gangs.

To the police jaded with contact with the underclass, contact with these girls makes them look like prostitutes. Ones with drug addictions, who sneak out to go to bars underage, and who given their backgrounds likely have behavioral issues as well. To the police they were criminals and scum not victims.

It was the perfect intersection of left and right blind spots, suppress it due to the race of the perpetrators, ignore it due to the perceived immorality (and class) of the victims. Remember this started in the 80's into the 90's when police approaches to rape as a whole was pretty unsympathetic, particularly for those who were in theory in some kind of relationship with the rapist.

Beat cops in that time frame were not a beacon of racial harmony, so the race issue only came into play when things began to bubble up to higher (and therefore more political levels).

Sure, but there are still the insane cases which are not even close to that. There is the girl who went to a police station complaining about a CSA, then got kidnapped within the station and raped, then dropped off on the street, kidnapped again and raped again. All in a row.

I am not aware of anyone today defending or minimising what actually happened so I cannot really suggest a steelman of that kind – it seems to have been extremely bad. The police (I think in the early 2000s or late 90s?) claimed the victims were unreliable, and some of them (not the DPP) chose to turn a blind eye because they saw the girls as consenting.

To some extent the stuff about community cohesion may have been a cover to disguise the sheer laziness of the police, though community relations were obviously in the simple minds of the police as something they were 'supposed' to protect.

Yes the girls were very troubled and vulnerable, often in state care. I couldn't describe exactly how 'consensual' the median case was (obviously that word is quite wrong as they could not consent but to your question).

Leftists of course do not care about those girls getting raped and deflect the accusations outright by denying that the rapes happened in the first place.

I sort of have a theory (if we can call it that) regarding this.

There are feminists who unironically, earnestly believe that it's nothing but misogynistic drivel in any case to argue that it's possible for women to lie about rape or that it's legitimate to openly advise women to avoid behaviors that are likely to provoke rape or harassment. They are a scarcely significant minority even among feminists and have close to zero cultural influence on society. However, in a society where feminism is more or less the norm and anti-feminism is marginalized, the difference between such hardliner feminists, the rest of feminists and normies who are merely feminists' hangers-on becomes invisible. This applies to an even larger extent whenever another round of anti-rightists culture warring is on, and some evil patriarchal individual or group is targeted in a concentrated campaign. Normies by definition always adapt to social norms, so in a feminized society they'll behave as feminists, parroting the narrative of hardliner feminists (who tend to be the loudest culture warriors for obvious reasons) whenever they feel that it's expected of them. However, normies are still nothing but normies, and have corresponding views on female sexuality; these include the belief that yes, some women do sometimes lie about rape, and sometimes behave in such ways that elicit sexual advances, harassment, rape etc. and that this is normally calculated and intended, at least in the case of mundane sexual advances; that pubescent girls below the age of 18 are still sexual beings and actors despite being underage etc. When the feminist consensus fractures for whatever reason and the culture war isn't progressing according to the feminist advantage, these differences are on public display, such as in the case of these leftist commenters.

posted memes about feds on Jan 6 and even questioned the deaths of officers on that day

Precisely zero officers present at the Capitol on January 6th died on that day. Brian Sicknick died the next day. We can't completely rule out that it was caused by the events of the previous day, but the conclusion of the autopsy was that he died of natural causes. The other four deaths were suicides. Possibly one of them, Jeffrey Smith, was caused by a TBI sustained in the attack, but I don't know how strong the evidence is there. Two of the suicides were six months later.

It's crazy Charlottesville was only 4 8 years ago, many on the "Dissident Right" were blaming Richard Spencer for forever tarnishing right-wing politics for that disastrous event. But that movement has evolved and frankly is ascendent in the meme-sphere in a way nobody expected in their most optimistic projections.

Isn't this such a validation for Elite Theory, or the High-low vs. middle dynamic? You really do just need a few, true elites on your side to turn the tables of a culture. Marching on the streets in protest, bad idea. Influencing a billionaire with memes- good idea. The people saying "we just need to use memes to get a couple billionaires on our side" are vindicated. Elon is speedrunning the 2016 Alt-Right progression.

Charlottesville was 99% a hoax story, so it required the old media system to keep up the facade.

Musk is just trying to cover for his extremely pro-H1B views by coming out as performatively against low-skill subcontinental immigration.

There's more to that going on, Bari Weiss posted this yesterday for example:

What’s happening in Canadian politics is not happening in a vacuum. It is a symptom of a much broader phenomenon. Call it the great crack-up of the old consensus.

The old consensus held that immigration was an absolute good, with multiculturalism the end goal. Arguments contrary to progressive social attitudes was “disinformation” that must be combated by robust online censorship. People would quickly adjust to massive changes in social attitudes around sex and gender because objections would be seen as bigoted. And anyone who said anything that questioned the consensus would become a pariah.

This consensus is being rejected across the West...

Wow, that sounds familiar! It sounds word-for-word what the Alt-Right said a decade ago. What are we to make of Weiss now assimilating these talking points? Obviously I think her angle is different from the Alt-Right, and more self-serving than pro-white. But it's not Musk trying to stay in good graces, although that's part of it. There seems to be an actual realignment towards the DR in some capacity.

Weiss also signalboosting the Paki grooming gang story, again another decade-old talking point recycled word-for-word from the Alt Right:

Britain now stands shamed before the world. The public’s suppressed wrath is bubbling to the surface in petitions, calls for a public inquiry, and demands for accountability.

The scandal is already reshaping British politics. It’s not just about the heinous nature of the crimes. It’s that every level of the British system is implicated in the cover-up.

Social workers were intimidated into silence. Local police ignored, excused, and even abetted pedophile rapists across dozens of cities. Senior police and Home Office officials deliberately avoided action in the name of maintaining what they called “community relations.” Local councilors and Members of Parliament rejected pleas for help from the parents of raped children. Charities, NGOs, and Labour MPs accused those who discussed the scandal of racism and Islamophobia. The media mostly ignored or downplayed the biggest story of their lifetimes. Zealous in their incuriosity, much of Britain’s media elite remained barnacled to the bubble of Westminster politics and its self-serving priorities.

They did this to defend a failed model of multiculturalism, and to avoid asking hard questions about failures of immigration policy and assimilation. They did this because they were afraid of being called racist or Islamophobic. They did this because Britain’s traditional class snobbery had fused with the new snobbery of political correctness.

All of which is why no one knows precisely how many thousands of young girls were raped in how many towns across Britain since the 1970s

And I don't think Bari Weiss can be said to using this as a distraction from H1B issue.

It's perhaps uncharitable, but one of Bari Weiss's motives is likely out of her pro-zionism stances. She has throughout her career framed Israel's flagging US approval as a PR issue and become increasingly defense over even the most anodyne or factual criticism of Israeli actions in MENA. There is a large surge of Islamophobic writing on the right currently due to the NOLA attack and this is a convenient way to try to continue splitting Muslims from the liberal coalitions in the US and UK.

The timing of this surge in interest, when we've known many of the facts about the rape gangs for a decade, suggests to me that both Bari and Elon are using this opportunity to deflect. That doesn't mean they're deflecting for the same reasons though.

I certainly believe that's the case, I said it was self-serving rather than pro-white. It still represents a realignment on the issue towards the old Alt Right talking points about the failures of multiculturalism, etc. Ditto for Eric Weinstein coming out with a passioned defense of the European tribe (!).

I do think the adoption by these figures of 10-year old Alt Right talking points is self-serving and a reaction to anti-Zionism from MENA in the West. But I also think it's an actual realignment that will have real-world political consequences.

Sure, but I think it remains to be seen how much will change off the internet. Migrant numbers will fall under Poilievre, but they’ll remain high in historic terms, and there are unlikely to be any major deportations. Labour is in power in the UK until 2029. Miller will do some good things for immigration under Trump, but nowhere near what some people will suggest, and I think H1Bs will continue to be issued and renewed at rates similar to today and that major illegal immigration across the southern border will continue, albeit at a moderately lower pace.

In the first Trump admin, H1B rates fell. It’s reasonable to think that might happen again.

Sure, that remains to be seen. But I think we should move past the "oh it's just an internet thing" at this point, I remember everyone saying that about proto-Woke stuff on Tumblr. And it became real very fast. My guess is that Musk and Weiss and many others actually do represent a realignment on these issues. Not giving the DR 100% of everything, but a big movement in that direction.

Isn't this such a validation for Elite Theory,

I disagree. The competing theory (at least how I understand it) is that changes in material conditions have continued to get worse. The extremes of both sides of politics generally recruit from disaffected and suffering people, losers in the race for prestige/elite positions. The Biden administration went all-in on the policies of the pre-Trump consensus (vast amounts of illegal immigration, encouraging outsourcing, etc) and their policies made those material conditions get substantially worse. The established left in America is hopelessly compromised and wedded to the same "elite" worldview - look at how happy they were to get Dick Cheney's endorsement, and how they believed that would actually support their cause. People just stopped giving a shit about Charlottesville and January 6 because it doesn't matter how much the people on CNN talk about decorum or about how great the stock market is going when your own material conditions continue to deteriorate - and the idea that you have to support your continued immiseration because the other guy is rude and says mean things just isn't viable anymore. I highly doubt a majority of Trump voters would support Charlottesville, but what's the alternative?

As for the tech right, I think recent events have actually demonstrated their lack of power. Elon tried to talk down to the base about how they need to accept infinity Indians, and as far as I can tell he's only damaged his relationship with Trump and his base. Furthermore, I don't think Elon seeing a bunch of memes was enough to make him switch - it was the Biden administration's deliberate efforts to destroy the tech industry. Elon was facing lots of politically motivated prosecution and persecution, and Pmarca directly stated that the reason he supported Trump was the Biden admin coming in and letting him know that they were going to crush the startup economy and just pick their own winners while using regulation to strangle competition.

As for the tech right, I think recent events have actually demonstrated their lack of power.

Nerds never wield power unless it is justification for the regime, thermidor was fast approaching and South Asian abuse of migration is a Schelling point most would agree on, may not be for Hindus (H1B) but Afghans and Pakistanis are people with terrible reputations, you can go after them and get easy wins. It gets hard to defend things like bachhabaazi, cousin marriage alongside rape gangs.

I highly doubt a majority of Trump voters would support Charlottesville

Peter Thiel was not publicly tweeting about mass migration, crime stats and deportations on the heels of Trump's victory on his own social media platform, Musk is. He is revered by millions as a literal hero and his defence of the tech right means that the tech right would now defend him too, in many ways what he did with the h1b was quite helpful. He basically got the tech right to stick together, conceded his point later and the tech right now has to stick with him.

Elon tried to talk down to the base about how they need to accept infinity Indians, and as far as I can tell he's only damaged his relationship with Trump and his base

He conceded the points later, Trump publicly was more charitable to h1bs than Elon was by the end of last week, even rebuking Richard Hannania for it, btw, Moldbug did write a good piece on it.

I don't think Elon seeing a bunch of memes was enough to make him switch - it was the Biden administration's deliberate efforts to destroy the tech industry

Having your son become trans did. Biden got more donations than Trump from techies btw.

Pmarca directly stated that the reason he supported Trump was the Biden admin coming in and letting him know that they were going to crush the startup economy and just pick their own winners while using regulation to strangle competition.

He also tweets about Sam Hyde and follows 1488 posters on Twitter alongside yours truly. Quite obviously all of tech elites have obvious intelligence agency tie-ups, god-tier PR and marketing where they are made to look extremely favorable so it would be hard to take anything he says at face value for now.

People just stopped giving a shit about Charlottesville and January 6

Untrue, had you had anything violent happen as Kulak suggested both of these would have been brought up as potential signs of failed regime change or terrorist attacks from the past, now they are not relevant as the same energy is being dissipated in attempts to redpill elite normies. It seems to not be going bad unless you are named Charles Johnson or Groyper, you can post anything you want on Twitter, period.

Most people to be honest don’t actually care about either one. The people who care, for the most part care for the reason that the prosecution on 1/6 is overboard and despite the whining from the status quo elites probably did almost no damage to the public at all.

What has done damage to the median American is the status quo. They’re paying a lot more for goods, having to tighten their belts. Often their city is less safe than in years past, and they’re more concerned with the education their kids are getting in their schools. I think even had the 1/6 event resulted in 4 more years of Trump, the general public would be much more concerned about mundane concerns like gas/food prices, indoctrination in schools, the money shipped to Ukraine, Ashville and the hurricane relief, and dozens of other real world concerns.

To be brutally honest, I think that very few people actually care what form of government they have or who runs it. What they want is peace, affordable living, safety, and freedom from too much intrusion into their private lives. If they could get that with democracy, they’d enjoy it, but if ending democracy made their material life better, they would not care.

I agree Elon was mostly looking for a nearby weapon to bash the Dem establishment's head with, and he has grabbed essentially Dissident Right rhetoric. Alt-Lite at least, recycling many talking points directly from 2016. His son becoming trans seems to have radicalized him as well.

But it does speak to the utility of having a presence and continuing "useless online discussion", or being someone like Jared Taylor and spending decades repeating the same arguments. Point being, the people who were saying "no, we don't need to IRL organize like Charlottesville debacle, let the memes flow and hopefully they get picked up by powerful people and then the ball gets rolling" turned out to be correct.

His son becoming trans seems to have radicalized him as well.

I agree with this too. That definitely had an impact.

Point being, the people who were saying "no, we don't need to IRL organize like Charlottesville debacle, let the memes flow and hopefully they get picked up by powerful people and then the ball gets rolling" turned out to be correct.

That was absolutely the right strategy, but I don't believe getting "elites" to look at those memes was the actual winning approach. What gave the right so much more power, in my opinion at least, was that they completely owned online culture. The left just gave up on gaming and online communities, and then the next generation grew up with right wing/4chan memes as just the general background noise of their culture. The language that used to be restricted to the darker and more forbidden corners of the internet (not talking about super secret hacker forums here, but places like Heartise, 4chan and MPC) is now the lingua franca of the youth. The reason that these memes and ideas reach the elite is that they are common knowledge among huge swathes of the population, and that's also where they get their power - I'd be willing to bet that in an alternate world where only Peter Thiel ever saw all these memes their impact on politics and culture would be substantially reduced.

I'm not sure on that -- it might well be more a symptom than a cause.

When Musk learned of his daughter's transition "he was generally sanguine," according to Isaacson, but after Jenna became a "fervent Marxist" she cut Musk out of her life.

When Jenna filed a request to change her name so that it would better reflect her gender identity, she wrote that she was also requesting a name change because "I no longer live with or wish to be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form."

Musk claims, according to Isaacson, that when his daughter "went beyond socialism to being a full communist and thinking that anyone rich is evil" she severed all communication and relations with him. Isaacson says the "rift pained" Musk "more than anything in his life since the infant death of his first child, Nevada."

Maybe that's the sanitized and self-deluding version, and it's not the frame Wilson takes -- putting cutting ties as a culmination of a distant parent -- but I think it's a little more plausible than most expect. I've seen more than a fair share of techie people where trans (or LGB) stuff will get a kid kicked out of the house, but there's also a lot of this story that I've also seen where individual stuff was just awkward until Everything Leftism put friction into everything.

The left just gave up on gaming and online communities

I'm sorry, what? The left as a whole has been hammering and pushing for great and great control and censorship in online spaces and gaming for years now, both by forum admin takeover(both on reddit and elsewhere) and worming their way via DEI hiring into actually developing the games themselves.

I'm not going to argue against the rest of your point, but if it happened, it happened in opposition explicitly because of the rampant takeover of leftist ideology in a lot of online spaces.

The left just gave up on gaming and online communities

I don't know if this is the right way to describe it. Certain kinds of leftists sure wanted to make those kinds of communities their own, but they irrevocably cleaved them apart.

Agreed on the rest, though. Musk at least sure made it seem like he was encountering DR talking points for the first time well after everyone else, after he bought Twitter.

That's a good point. My understanding was that those certain kinds of leftists tried to stop this, but were hamstrung by the problems in their own ideology and personal lives. They preferred keeping in step with the largely unpopular ideology of the then-elite (social justice) to actually reaching people, and they chose to give up those communities rather than give up their own ideology. I don't think those communities have really been cleaved apart either - I'm in a bunch of them and I can see people from all over the ideological spectrum in most.

Spencer is not the best of people or best of activists but he tried to do what he thought was right even at the vost of being made into a complete lolcow for life. He is a decent pop intellectual and his substack is worth reading or listening to.

I have always been in favor of the NRx sphere, I do still think Musk is not what he is made to be but he is still plenty fucking rich, competent and super important. His antics right now have allowed someone like me to feel optimistic about nudging the overton window, the guy who people thought was him, Adrian Ditman was speaking with me yesterday where I suggested him the Neoreactinary cannon in his DMs. I could not have done this back in 2021 when this all peaked and Trump got booted off Twitter post jan 6.

Influencing a billionaire with memes- good idea. The people saying "we just need to use memes to get a couple billionaires on our side" are vindicated. Elon is speedrunning the 2016 Alt-Right progression.

Very true, if Musk were to become an identitarian in a hypothetical scenario and got some of his pals on the train, the antiversity would rise. He has already tried his best to puncture the media, the next front should ideally be universities and then finally the government itself, because Rotherham did have a bunch of public enquiries that all led to nothing, the moment people lose all faith in these arms, cthulu will meet a roadblock. Retvrn to 2016!

Elon is attempting to re-establish Right Wing bonafides and embarassing Starmer and the UK establishment is risk-free. Everyone knows Britain ultimately follows the American direction and Trump doesn't give a shit about UK-US relations: not after Labor sent staffers to campaign against him.

Is it possible that Musk simply finds the quiet acceptance of Rotherham rape gangs abominable? I find it so strange that even here people posit some grander scheme at play whereby criticism of children being raped en masse by foreigners is viewed as part of a grand right wing scheme against political opponents. Yes, the left in its utter cowardice and contempt for white people has seen fit to allow thousands of children to be raped and murdered in the name of multiculturalism votes and thus the left should be annihilated, but the moral outrage of foreign criminals on welfare sexually torturing kiss is itself a point of enragement. People hate Swedes prowling for children in Bangkok, why can't here people simply hate Pakistanis for systematically raping white children for the sake of it.

Musk, like the rest of the American establishment, demonstrated by his response to the Epstein scandal that he does not find industrialised sex abuse of chav-tier teenage girls abominable when the perps are rich white men like him. He just spent a nine-figure sum of money putting one of Epstein's best buddies in the White House - you don't do that by accident, you do it because you think that condoning Epstein is no big deal.

Musk's attitude to poor women is the same as the vast majority of rich, powerful men who aren't required to be sexually continent by genuinely-held religious belief.

He just spent a nine-figure sum of money putting one of Epstein's best buddies in the White House.

Oh give me a break. Everybody's talking about how the other team's guy was best buddies with Esptien, and simultaneously deploying "well just because they were associated doesn't mean he actually went to Pedo Island" argument when it comes to their guy.

I think of Epstein as a variation of Godwins Law: once an argument invokes Epstein to shut down criticism of a practice it is clear that the practice in question has no defense at all. Especially since tying people to Epstein is so easy yet the details are so scarce. You'd think there'd be more dirt by associating with Palfrey, the DC Madam who trafficked children across state lines into Washington DC itself, but no one seems to give a shit. No Clinton, Trump or Windsor, no news.

That may indeed be possible but I try and keep personal motivations out of analysis as much as I can. Not that he can't be morally disgusted (and indeed, most people should be) but since it is impossible to debate the personal beliefs of someone I do not personally know, I don't usually comment on it.

I am aware that assigning political motivations to things that public figures do can come off as conspiratorial and uncharitable at times. I didn't mean to imply that he was some sort of Machiavellian figure. I'm just attempting to analyze it through a realpolitik lens - which, indeed, diminishes the personal.

If we want to apply a realpolitik lens to this framing, then go full sociopolitical grand theory of the world state. Such a grand theory can be all encompassing to the point of uselessness, but perhaps lets drill down specifically to the aspect directly at play: a pattern of repeated horrific criminality has been committed by the same communities over a long period of time and a wide geographic range. There are more and more instances of this happening, despite nearly a decade of awareness. Why?

The repeated calls for inquiries and fact finding is because all that has been done so far is inadequate to address the civilizationally destructive truth poisoning this global experiment of a unified borderless world we are unwillingly thrust into: people are in fact different , and some people have vastly different decision making heuristics due to inherently different values.

People doing bad things because they have bad information is technically a solvable problem, because they can be rehabilitated or informed enough to remap their payoff matrix to be in line with functioning society. Increase probability of being incarcerated for crime, crime is no longer a payoff. That is technically speaking a solvable social problem.

The problem here is that there is a group of people that keep coming up as a distinct category that explicitly demonstrates a totally different value matrix. The golden path of economic liberalism and maximal freedoms for women is not a paradise to be admired, but a bounty to be plundered. Western society in the 1990s and 2000s was high off winning the cold war, fat on wealth and weak in will, surrendering its children to foreign rapists on the twin altars of multiculturalism and contempt. Sexually libertine children were not viewed as free agents exercising their will in an era of peace, but easy targets for cultures that decidedly calculated the payoff for raping children was so high when the consequences were so insignificant.

These value matrices are not set in stone. But what we have seen is that whatever the western response has been to islamic terrorism and rape, it has been effectively surrender. The borders remain open, the streets remain uncivil, the rapists remain free. These foreigners took advantage of temporary weakness to raid a peaceful community that opened its gates and turned a blind eye to the ongoing pillaging.

The westerners still insist that the rights of the rapists must be protected, that the ECHR is a sacrosanct document, that imprisoning vile rapists is too costly, that denying the continued mass importation of the family of rapists and murderers on the grounds of human rights is impossible to stop because of some document written 70 years ago. The invaders have raided the peaceful village, raping freely and taking their spoils. In response the village has opened its hidden coffers to invite the invaders to change their ways, unbarred its doors to make the invaders feel welcome, castigate its own people for complaining about the predators of the invaders.

The decision making matrix of people are not static, they evolve in response to changing circumstances, and the matrix presented by the west thus far has been to increase its total surrender to invading islamists. In the face of this heuristic, is it not inevitable that the islamists will see fit to continue, if not intensify, what they have done with no expectation of consequence?

To depersonalize Musks own theoretical antipathy to islamic rapists and posit a grander theory of mind would come closer to the above analysis, that there is a civilizational rot occurring and that Musk is leveraging his massive influence to bring attention to and indeed influence a change in the decision matrix. A change not of the islamists, who Musk cares not about because tribal mirpuris are worthless even after multiple generations living in the west, but of the west that opens its gates. Musk may not be able to muster the militia and bar the gates of the village, but he can at least say that continuing to pretend the invaders have the same values is madness. If an inquiry reveals that the invaders fundamentally hold the values of the west in eternal contempt precisely because it is a foreign value irrespective of its theoretical merit and that the west is simply a prize to be plundered repeatedly with such little effort, then it definitively annihilates nearly 50 years of universalist values, and reveals an intransigent terrorist group within the midst of a population. The UK still hasn't addressed the traveler issue, so I don't imagine solving the Tower Hamlets and Birmingham islamist enclaves will be an easier task. But at least exiling them to their own territories and not pretending they're Just Like Us will be a step in the right direction.

I’m noting that I AAQC’d this, but I also want to say- Elon has a small, and unfortunately-named, child who accompanies him much of the time. It’s not unreasonable that organized pedophile gangs hit him harder than non-parents of small children.

You are optimistic about a lot, Musk would basically have to get everyone left of him purged in a political sense for the UK to have a chance. People want comfort, they will let you fuck over and not even protest, anracho tyranny and bioleninism go hand in hand, a strong centralised police state needs to give way for more community policing unironically for things like Rotherham to never happen again.

not after Labor sent staffers to campaign against him

Musk publicly tweeted about it 10 times, why would you do this, the regime wanted Trump, the writing was on the wall. If I were Musk, I would not stop talking about England until mass deportations began, sending over staffers to work on an election for a different nation whilst you donate hundreds of millions to the opposition is you asking for a fight.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats