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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 30, 2025

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Anyone remember that whole "HBD" thing? You don't hear much about it anymore. It makes sense. The new narrative on the Online Right is that there's a huge mass of white men without jobs who have no choice but to inject fentanyl because of "the border" and free trade sending the factories to China. The unemployment rate is only low because these people are so dispirited that they've given up looking for work. We need to drastically remake our economy to help these unfortunates, who are incapable of helping themselves. This worldview would seem to conflict with HBD theories. Indeed, one would have to conclude that whites are an inferior race. Guatemalans in their "third-world s***hole" don't just sit around despairing, they cross multiple borders and look for work in a country where they can't even speak the language, while white men who got laid off in their rust-belt factory towns twiddle their thumbs and inject fentanyl, unable to compete with said Guatemalans. They see whites like people have long seen the American Indians, a "noble" race who ought to "own" the country but who are ill-equipped to deal with the evils of modernity that more advanced peoples have introduced like liquor or fentanyl.[1] But where this worldview makes some sense in the case of the Indians, it is utterly nonsensical to apply it to whites, who all the statistics show have higher incomes, higher IQs, higher educational attainment, and lower unemployment. Even opioid overdose deaths, initially a "white" issue, are now highest for blacks and American Indians, as with most social problems. (Whites do die at higher rates than Hispanics or Asians.) Labor force participation rates have indeed declined, mostly because there are more students and retirees. 89.2% of men aged 25-54 are in the labor force, a figure that is likely higher for whites, and the 11% who aren't include students, prisoners, stay-at-home dads, and those who can't work because of legit disabilities.

The Online Right has often been compared to the woke left. The woke black looks at his race, disproportionately poor, uneducated, and working low-skill jobs, and demands affirmative action so that more blacks can work in medicine, law, business, and politics. The "Woke Rightist" looks at his race, sees a mostly imaginary mass of helpless unemployed drug addicts and demands tariffs so that they can rise to the lofty heights of sewing bras, picking fruit, hauling equipment, and digging ditches in the rain. Is that really what you want your political ideology to be?

Now, you may be asking, "what about the real unemployed drug addicts?" For one, this is a disproportionately non-white group. One study found that blacks are 3.5 times more likely to ever be homeless in their lifetimes than whites, while Hispanics are 1.7 times more likely. Still, while not as common as some of you think, they do exist. Tariffs aren't going to help them. Law enforcement, drug treatment, mental health care, and legalizing SROs might, though the real issue is that these people need to help themselves. If I believed, as many of you profess to, that my race was at risk of going extinct, I wouldn't be centering my politics around helping the least capable members of said race who refuse to help themselves. Don't you have bigger problems? It's not like you should feel any "political" loyalty to them, Trump's working-class base work, homeless people rarely vote.

  1. The "heritage American" label reminds me of this. Like white people are Ford model-Ts, outmoded machines that nevertheless have aesthetic and historical significance.
  • -28

Congratulations! You’ve advanced from lazy, uncharitable snarling at your enemies to. Uh. Marginally higher-effort snarling at the same people.

It doesn’t look like you are arguing to understand anything. It looks more like you’re picking fights. This is an immense pain in the ass and against various rules.

One week ban.

Terrible ban. We get stuff posted here of a similar level of snarling, but pointed at the left, and it regularly doesn't catch these types of bans.

Which of his statements was actually even worthy of the ban here?

I answered you already downthread, but since you've spun into multiple sub-arguments with different people about your grievances with various posters, how we handled Darwin (unfairly, disproportionately, and with great bias, according to you), and alleged personal attacks against you that we have refused to mod, I have a few points to make in addition to those I made here.

First, regarding Darwin aka @guesswho.

Have you noticed, perchance, that @guesswho is not banned? During his last pass, he earned a bunch of warnings, one tempban, and an AAQC. Hardly indicative of unfair treatment, for all that many of our users (and, being honest, half the mods) hated him.

I didn't hate him. I found him annoying and disingenuous, but I agree with you that to some degree, the hatred of Darwin was excessive and ideologically motivated (he was one of the most persistent and antagonistic leftist posters willing to argue a leftist position down to the ground).

But you know what? I also totally understand why he drove so many people absolutely bugfuck crazy. Because that was more or less his entire reason d'être. He had mastered the art of poking people in the eye until they'd rage back at him. I don't think he was a literal troll - i.e., someone engaging in a performance just to piss people off, without really believing the things he argued. I think he really believed the things he argued but I think he argued for the joy of it, the joy of "conquering" his enemies (i.e., driving them bugfuck crazy with his tactics) and he wasn't particularly interested in, you know, accuracy or sincerity or ingenuousness. "Owning the righties" was his game and he played it with prejudice.

You know who drove him away?

Me.

The thread you were already linked to, about J.K. fucking Rowling. Here you go again. The one where I finally lost it with him. But I "lost it," not by going bugfuck crazy, but by deciding I was going to nail his feet to the ground, pound on each and every one of his arguments, and drill him until he either stood and delivered or ran.

Guess what he did?

Been a year, and we're still waiting for him to get to it "in his queue."

But he's still not banned! He can starting posting again whenever he wants. And while I'm sure if he did, a lot of people (including me) might say "So, about that JK Rowling thread?" - most likely he'd waffle and dismiss it, and go back to his old ways forthwith.

Your thesis that "Darwin was ganged up on and mistreated just because he was a leftist" is mostly bullshit. Sorry.

(@Tree's claim that we bent and made up rules just to go after Darwin is thus 100% bullshit.)

Now about all these other threads you point to as examples of us "Letting righties be mean and not modding them."

@gattsuru has a ton of AAQCs. That gives him a very long leash. This is by design and it's not secret - people who generate a ton of quality comments get away with more. That said, every comment you've linked to as an example of personal attacks? Being aggressive in interrogating you is not a "personal attack." I say this as somone who has been the target of @gattsuru's interrogations more than once and who can hardly be considered a fan of him or his tactics. He's a dedicated hater and I'm on his hatelist. No bias here. Worth noting that at one point we pretty much did issue a "Stop using this particular tactic" rule regarding throwing walls of links to every single past conversation every time someone he hated posted something, because it was obnoxious and degrading to the discourse (and we got some flack and resentment over it). And I mention this, not to continue to persecute @gattsuru (hey buddy, at least I guess we can have civilized conversations about which SF authors suck) but because you think we make up or bend rules just to prosecute our ideological biases, when in fact, if we bend or make up rules at all, it's because someone is being particularly and uniquely obnoxious (a point I already made about @AlexanderTurok) and it's not ideological bias at all, we do it to people who are being particularly obnoxious.

You (and @Tree, and a couple of other people) hammer this argument that we are absolutely seeing for the very first time (that was sarcasm), that the Motte picks on leftists and they get unfairly dogpiled until they get banned, and meanwhile we let MAGAs get away with anything. We've been hearing it since the Motte began. You've all read my "if I had a nickel..." speech about a dozen times now. Because yes, kids, the righties, especially certain categories of righties (the ones who really like talking about Jews, bitches, and fucking children - that's a gerund, not an adjective) insist that we're all ZOG-converged tools or something. Or, from the saner but still angry right wing, that we let leftists in general get away with more. That we practice "leftist affirmative action" and the Darwins and the AlexanderTuroks (whether or not he claims/admits to being on the left) go way too long without being banned even as the mod queue is being flooded with people demanding we ban them. We especially hear it when we ban a rightie for, you know, being particularly and especially obnoxious, whatever his particular hobby horse (even if it's just "hating leftists").

The point of this long screed (besides letting me get some mod frustration off my chest - man, does it get annoying hearing the same tired accusations over and over and fucking over again)? Make a new argument. But not really- you don't have one. None of this is new. Instead- accept that this is how moderation works here, it's by design, and you can nudge us incrementally towards being harsher or laxer with the general feedback that is the overall pattern of complaints and reports, but playing "Why did you mod Johnny and not Suzy?" for the hundredth time is not going to move us. Insisting "You take sides (against my side)" for the hundredth time is not going to move us.

You're wrong. You are observably, factually, and empirically wrong. I say this because I see the mod queue. I say this because I have a pretty good memory of the Motte and its moderation going all the way back to before I became a mod (I wonder if even @naraburns remembers that I was once on the "You're cruising for a banning" list). I say this because I am part of the mod discussions we have. I say this because I have a pretty good mental model of my fellow mods, and of our most prominent posters. Not flawless, I am not perfect and I can sometimes misunderstand people (and I am saying nothing here about the quality of my own arguments - there's a reason my handful of AAQCs are mostly for writing about hobbydrama-type posts), but I have a reputation for having the best spidey sense when it comes to alts and trolls. I could tell you stories, many more stories. A lot of the misapprehension people have about modding is because you really don't see... the stuff you never see. Not your fault.

But a lot of it is because you're just wrong.

@AlexanderTurok got banned because he has been regularly and intentionally obnoxious for weeks now and he's already been warned. Not because we hate his opinions. Not because he's a leftist. (Or a rightist or a whatever-he-calls-himself playing the part of a leftist who claims not to be one.) The one-week ban, specifically, was @netstack's call. I might have only warned him. Or I might have given him three days. Another mod might have actually let it go. We didn't actually discuss this one internally (we do not discuss every ban). But it didn't happen because of ideological biases or unfairness or the Motte hating lefty posters. (A particularly ironic accusation to throw at @netstack, who is the only mod arguably more lefty than me.) It happened because Turok likes to rattle cages and frame arguments in a maximally uncharitable and inflammatory way calculated to be ragebait. He thinks this is entertaining, and if he keeps it up, his next ban will be longer.

That we practice "leftist affirmative action" and the Darwins and the AlexanderTuroks (whether or not he claims/admits to being on the left) go way too long without being banned

To be fair, I don't think Alexander is particularly left or right (I think he's probably somewhere in the spectrum of liberal to centre-right). What he is, is extremely hung up on class and status. He's obsessed with what he deems to be low-class/underclass behaviour (especially around women's sexuality as baby mamas) and hence why he always brings it back to abortion as the social climbing panacea (keep the underclass from breeding more underclass, keep aspirant working class to lower middle class types from falling back down the ladder by not letting them become single teen moms). He wants marriage and family and the rest of it, but on the proper timeline of "get educated, get a job, get married and have the appropriate number of kids, avoid sleeping around as a teen, avoid sleeping around like a ho in general, and if you do get pregnant without planning it, get an abortion so you don't ruin your life and more importantly your social status as nascent middle class". Thus his grudge with the pro-life right, because we want the sluts to keep their bastards who will then leech off the state for life (putting words into his mouth there, but that's the impression I strongly get of how he feels about it). If we were truly responsible right-wingers holding conservative values, we'd be all for discreet abortion to maintain decorum and enforce social conformity around correct behaviour.

I believe that he wants everyone, eventually, to end up as what we currently regard as the peak of society: high-ranking engineers, accountants, screenwriters, what have you. In short, he wants everybody, or at least as many people as possible, to climb the ladder and become Elite Human Capital (in his eyes). He would like the entirety of America to one day look like Manhattan, and feels that his political enemies want the entirety of America to one day look like Bumfuck, Alabama (or Brazil).

Where he and I differ is probably that I don't think this is possible or desirable - lots of non-EHC jobs need to be done, it's best for them to be done locally, and you cannot convert non-borderline-EHC into EHC, although you can certainly wreck EHC with drugs or bad political systems.

I certainly get that impression from him, and I also (where I may well be doing him a disservice since I know Sweet Fanny Adams about his background) get the impression that he's on a lower rung of the ladder, aspiring to a higher rung, and resenting the hell out of the fact that he may be confused with the low-lifes one rung below him.

That's the reason I made the Hyacinth Bucket comparison: Hyacinth plainly comes from a background that is working class/teetering on the edge of lower middle class. She made it firmly into lower middle class territory, then clawed her way by sheer force of will into middle middle class land (and is dragging Richard along with her) and aspires, rather pathetically, to the upper middle class reaches that will always be barred to her. She's terrified of her lower middle class roots being discovered and held against her, in the company she now aspires to, or even worse - to be identified by them as such after all her work to climb out of that level.