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It’s funny to me that in real life, many a man will cop to being friends with various kinds of scumbags with the “yeah, I wouldn’t want him to marry my sister, but he never did anything to me” reasoning, but somehow when it comes to celebrity I’m expected to be scandalized that people stayed friends with Epstein even though he had a thing for 16 year old girls (whom they may well have believed were 18 anyway).
Even a thousand Epsteins wouldn’t be as bad as, say, the Rotherham scandal where 12 year olds were being sexually tortured and pimped to hundreds or thousands of strangers, sometimes dozens a day. Yes, what Epstein did (paying 16 year olds for sex and having them recruit their school friends for the same purpose) was cruel and wrong - and he deserved jail for it - but in the grand scheme of all sexual crimes it was far, far from the worst.
A surprising number of people just literally don't know that Eptstein's victims were adult-presenting teens who were mainly 16-17 and performed escort work. They think it's Rotherham, where elementary and middle school aged girls were used as brothel prostitutes.
Every society has distinguished between hetairia and porne. People are fine with the former as a vice other people engage in but furious at the latter involving citizen women.
You’re wrong. Epsteins schtick was to find young troubled girls as young as 11 or 12. He would even get them to find more girls for him:
https://www.npr.org/2020/01/16/797011139/u-s-virgin-islands-officials-epstein-trafficked-girls-on-private-island-until-20
No, he's not wrong. They were generally older. The youngest girl ever mentioned was 12, and seeing how they were generally older, she probably looked older than she actually was.
Girls start puberty, on average, around 11 in late 20th century America. So, odds are, while this was obviously very wrong that she was not, biologically, a child.
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Western society has been on a media diet of near-constant agitprop over at least the last 100 years equating 17 year olds with 7 year olds, and most people unironically believe it, including said 17 year olds.
Why on Earth would we start drawing the distinction now, especially when the delightful moral treat of getting to call public figures pedophiles presents itself (or at least, presents itself to a media who knows its audience has been sufficiently mindkilled to parrot it uncritically)?
These people mostly have nuanced-if-not positive views on grown men dating sixteen year olds. They are simply mistaken as to the actual ages of Epstein's victims.
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I think that most people who care about the Epstein matter, me included, care mainly because of the political implications, not out of empathy for the girls. I abstractly empathize with the girls, but I don't know them, so their woes don't really emotionally affect me any more than it emotionally affects me if I hear that, say, 3000 people died in a flood in Bangladesh. Which is to say, very little. Same with the Rotherham scandal. I abstractly care about the victims, but I don't really feel much emotion about it.
The point of the Epstein business is that I want to see rich, powerful people who seem like predators brought down from their high places, thrown into the mud, and trampled on. That's why I care more about the Epstein matter than about the Rotherham scandal. Because it seems to afford more opportunity to damage rich, powerful scumbags. Now that's something I do feel emotion about. Glee and a zestful desire to see mighty amoral people brought low. It's a very primal, atavistic, selfish emotion, to be clear, not some clean moral imperative that looks pretty on paper. No, it's like the glee that a villager feels when he sees that a lion that has been prowling around the outside of the village for days get shot through the heart with an arrow. I don't feel the glee because yesterday the lion ate some guy on the other side of the village whom I didn't know. I didn't know that guy so I felt little emotion when I heard that he got eaten. But that lion felt like a looming threat to me, prowling out there, powerful, enjoying his lion life in a very annoying way, enjoying it so much, sitting around licking his fangs out there with not a care in the world while I spend the day working, that lion clearly not giving a single shit about my desire to not get eaten or the fact that I have to work for a living. So when the lion went down, I celebrated in the same sort of ecstasy that communists might feel when they see that the rich people are fleeing the city. Will the rich people fleeing the city actually make my life better in the long run? Probably not, intellectually one understands that if the populists come to power they'll probably just make things much worse. But in the moment, one feels an atavistic glee.
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...Wut?
This is pushing whataboutism in new and interesting ways.
I stand by it. Epstein’s victims are victims - like Harvey Weinstein’s , to some extent - of the sexual revolution and the very negative consequences it had on many young women. My mother tells stories about half her friends at 14 years old (in the late 1970s) having 25-30 year old boyfriends who picked them up outside school. That is the way it was.
Few more than me have stood up more here to say this whole thing was a bad idea and a way for largely higher status men to maximize access to pussy (especially from previously respectable kinds of girls) without consideration for their wellbeing or that of society, but this specific case is just an illustration. Much of the most salacious theory (including Trump’s involvement) is implausible for a number of reasons. The rest is just a richer version of a sad, mundane story that occurs in countless places at countless times.
Is Donald Trump an inner city kid who got into trouble, the way you're blaming society for his crimes?
Seriously, bro, what are you doing here? You could have just ignored this thread if it didn't interest you, if you think the whole Epstein obsession is tinfoil-hat stuff. Instead you've jumped in to say "It doesn't matter that Donald Trump is lying about a bunch of stuff because, you know, there was this one thing that happened in a different country on the other side of the ocean, and as a result you're not allowed to care about anything else until I say you can" followed up with "actually Donald Trump didn't do anything wrong because it was society that was set up the wrong way or all this never would have happened."
I’m at most an ambivalent Trump supporter, it’s disingenuous to imply I haven’t criticized him and his more naive fans countless times on this board over the last decade.
This person was always a liar and a scumbag. I remember writing about what he did to the priceless Bonwit Teller sculptures, rare examples of good art deco (along with the rest of the building), his treatment of his business partners, lenders, investors and so on. His treatment of his wives, cheating on pregnant Melania with prostitutes etc.
But when in Stephen Miller and to some extent Homan the US has its best in 30 years and probably final chance to do even a small amount (which will have big effects down the line) about large scale illegal migration from Central and South America I can’t countenance the wasting of that singular political moment and energy on the irrelevant sexual proclivities of a disgusting but dead man decades ago.
I want my children to inherit a functioning country inhabited by civilized people with public services that function and with the smallest possible violent and dysfunctional criminal underclass. Until mass immigration is solved, this is the absolute political issue, above anything else, beyond everything else. The same is true about other irrelevancies, like Iran, Ukraine, tariffs.
It's worth noting that Latin American immigration is not universally non-white, has a long history of assimilating pretty well- and generally not to the criminally inclined underclass, the Hispanics and blacks hate each other and the Hispanic underclass is probably not, proportionately, much higher than the white one- and that Hispanic fertility in the US holds up much worse than native white TFR.
There are criticisms of Latin immigration- they're terrible drivers who raise premiums for everyone, they drive down wages for the native lower-working class, etc. But America's underclass is, mostly, black. The non-black underclass has plenty of whites in it, and I wouldn't claim those whites are any better than the blacks. The median Hispanic in the US works as a cook or a mechanic or construction worker, pushes his kids to move up the social ladder but doesn't complain when it's only one rung, and uses no drugs worse than pot. His daughter is likely to marry a white man, give birth to European looking and acting children, and have higher fertility than her peers who marry other Mexicans. His son likely has a better chance of stable and productive employment than his white peers. The developed parts of Latin America with lots of whites are, by the standards of high income inequality middle income countries, the best in the world- much nicer places to live than former soviet countries, South Africa, etc. It's unlikely that Hispanic immigration will raise income inequality or suppress economic growth by enough to reach, say, Chilean levels. Hispanic migration is simply not a crisis to US ability to maintain its functioning civilization.
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Then don't comment on these threads, or just comment one sentence that you don't care about anything more than you care about Blanqueamiento, and move on.
The motte is for truth seeking, not petty dishonest political persuasion. It probably won't work for the latter anyway, and even if it did the US voting population of the forum might be 50 on a good day, of which I'm not sure you yourself are included.
How am I supposed to trust anything you say about the matter after you tell me that nothing else matters except deporting brown people? Your top level post the other day, do you actually believe that Epstein was just a particularly hot gay hustler, a Gold Digging Hall of Famer, or is that what you determined was the best thing to say to protect Stephen Miller's political project? Is everything you say about all the issues you just told me don't matter to be ignored, just a weather-vane tested method of finding the right piece of whataboutism to get everyone to shut up and give ICE more money?
I just don't understand how one goes on the motte and says "stop talking about X, it doesn't matter compared to Y." Because nothing we talk about on the motte matters; thus the truth is all that matters. And I'm disappointed that you've disavowed it.
I don’t think we should stop talking about it. I find Epstein fascinating enough that I’ve read almost everything (possibly everything) ever written on him. I think he was a real life example of extraordinarily high verbal intelligence, which is rarer even than the spatial equivalent. I’m talking about political attention. Apologies if that wasn’t clear, I don’t think the discussions we have matter politically, obviously.
We discuss a lot of things ere that aren’t the most important thing in the country, we discuss architecture, obesity drugs, video games, history, whatever.
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Were normal, middle/upper class girls screwed up by stuff like this? All I know is I like my hippy aunts better than the tightasses. And I don‘t really see much regret or complaining from that generation compared to younger ones.
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Good point for sure re: far from the worst. At face value, I believe this story is totally overdone, paying 16 year olds for sex is bad, he deserved jail, but they did “consent” and it’s not like they were 10 or even 12. Majorly different classes to that sort of crime IMO.
BUT, I think there’s much deeper undercurrents here. Trumps base absolutely fucking hates that he’s “covering up” and trying to bury this story (or blame it on a dem hoax which just doesn’t make sense). He is the conspiracy candidate and he went hard on this in the campaign trail. It’s more about the fact that “releasing the Epstein tapes” means “exposing and prosecuting the Washington swamp” rather than anything specific to do with child porn/prostitution.
It also seems like Epstein had plausible connections to intelligence and Israeli intelligence specifically. Tucker Carlson is doing a huge expose on this today (yesterday?) and that’s a big deal. Tucker is the #2 pod behind Rogan AND he just spoke at the RNC like a few months ago??
While the actual facts of the story is kinda meh, this is going to be a massive problem for Trump. I wish the first major scandal was something else, like not stopping any of these wars he promised to, but ofc this is what catches on with normies & his base…
Epstein was raping 11 year olds (allegedly): https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2020/1/15/lawsuit-alleges-epstein-trafficked-girls-as-young-as-11
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“Heap more evils upon them O Lord, heap more evils upon those who are glorious upon earth.”
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Epstein molested a few hundred girls. Rotherham was about 1400 victims, and the total across all known British Pakistani gangs is about 5000. So Rotherham is say 5x worse on scale, or 20x if you treat "Rotherham" as a synecdoche for the whole scandal. I can imagine it being 10x worse on severity, but not 100x worse, so I think 1000x is exaggerated. "It was just men paying underage chavettes for sex, nothing serious" is a pathetic excuse that would cover most (but clearly not all) of the UK grooming gang victims in the same way it does Epstein's.
The fact that nobody who mattered cold-shouldered Epstein before his first conviction, and almost nobody did so even after it, indicates that either Epstein was concealing the more egregious behaviour (i.e. he only pimped out the 17-year-olds) or that elites don't consider sexual exploitation of underage chavettes a big deal (which is worryingly plausible - unlike the sports coach cases, there is no way your daughter could have ended up a Rotherham or Epstein victim if you are a functional normie, let alone an actual elite).
People in general are OK with lower class girls from the same tribe becoming courtesans(which is basically what Epstein's victims were) as a form of social mobility as long as it's quiet. Very few people are OK with ingroup women of any description working as brothel prostitutes/streetwalkers(which is what the Rotherham victims were). It's reasonable to see these as different kinds of sex work and I'm not sure 100x worse is that far off.
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Pearson’s extrapolation method estimated based on the rates in Rotherham more than 350,000 victims nationwide. Sarah Champion, the Labour MP who blew the whistle on the scandal said there were hundreds of thousands, up to a million victims nationwide (over the 65 year period of mass immigration from Pakistan).
Most of the other gangs that have been busted were an order of magnitude smaller than Rotherham. The coverup ended a decade ago - we have a pretty good handle on the size of the problem, and we now know that Rotherham and Telford were unusually bad. This wasn't known at the time Sarah Champion took up the issue - so she was making a reasonable guess at the time.
Another dubious extrapolation - the scale of the gangs we know about increased a lot after 1997 when Blair legalised fetching marriage. Apart from a few places with powerful local ethnic-Pakistani political machines (Bradford/Halifax is the only one of the local grooming gangs where this is a plausible factor) the police would not have gone soft on Pakistani sex offenders until well into the 1990's.
Do you read j’accuse on substack? While I find him histrionic and extremist much of the time (and wouldn’t endorse his politics), he tracked down an extensive list of old newspaper articles about criminal cases that made very clear this was going on in a major way since the mid-1950s, single-digit years or even months after any non-negligible immigration from Pakistan began. Even I was quite surprised at that. There are quotes in many of them from police and others that suggest this was already a widely-known about issue among local police and councils by the mid-1960s at the latest, when pressure began on the left to take action to reduce the chance of race riots in the wake of Powell’s peak popularity.
I don't think anything in that article is inconsistent with my claim that things got an order of magnitude worse after 1997. J'accuse identifies a lot of cases with single-figure numbers of victims going back to the 1950's, but nothing on the scale of Rotherham or Telford.
I don’t see why 1997 would be the turning point. Mass immigration from Pakistan was relatively unrelated to the Blairwave (which actually began in the last year or two of Major’s premiership), the Mirpuri community was already large, well-settled and very fecund (much moreso than now) at that time and many of the perpetrators were second generation (this is sometimes hard to tell because the press today uses their current ages when discussing historic cases, but many if not most were 18-30 year old, born in Britain at the time of their offenses).
I don’t think so. I suppose the prevailing narrative is that the British police may have been ‘institutionally racist’ until at least Stephen Lawrence (which if anything would make 1993 the turning point). I have my doubts about that, but in any case widespread overall racial prejudice among some white cops doesn’t mean that they would have been deliberately tough on Pakistani grooming gangs, whose victims were predominantly the (native) underclass for which most police officers would have had some degree of contempt given that they are the population they most frequently interact with (or would have interacted with, at least at that time).
Some of the articles he links to also feature local police in court saying or implying the issue was already widespread and a well known feature of local life.
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This is Sarah Champion's method to arrive at 1 million victims: “I extrapolated that Rotherham is a town [of] 200,000 and had 1,400 known victims of CSE [child sexual exploitation] between 1997-2013 and 15% of women report their rape - so scaled up,”
I really don't want to lessen a large number of very serious crimes, but to say that method is seriously flawed would be an understatement.
Pearson’s method extrapolated from both Rotherham’s population and the rate there and the relatively population and distribution of the Mirpuri/Pakistani community in England.
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How many of those scumbag men are accused of being ringleaders of international sex trafficking schemes (allegedly) providing for rich elites from across the world like royalty and party leaders? That seems a lot different to me than just "he had a thing for 16 year olds"
Also not just 16 year olds, one of the lawsuits alleged as young as 12
Yeah the Rotherham scandal is bad but is it hard to understand why people tend to care more about international elites more than they do gang members? People have always been interested in the drama of the powerful upper class and celebrities more than they are of the peasants.
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