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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   29370 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 6, 2025

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(Don't) Burn This Fucker Down!

A guy's been arrested for the Palisades fire. Note: link to an article from the Guardian, which I know is goofy, but the details are better in that article than in a few others that I pulled.

Of note:

After dropping off a passenger, according to the investigators, Rinderknecht parked his car and walked up a nearby trail, taking iPhone videos at a hilltop location while listening to a rap song whose music video included objects being set alight. He had reportedly listened to the song and watched its video repeatedly in the days before the fire.

First, I'm pretty stoked that the government went to what seems like a lot of trouble to find this guy. In fact, I can't remember if there was much reporting, at the time, on this being an intentional / negligent fire. This is tempered by the fact that this arrest was obviously only possible by employing the surveillance state to its fullest extent. People get squeamish about facial recognition technology, but using cellphone location data is both less "emotionally" invasive as well as more durable as a tracking mechanism. Maybe carrying around constant location trackers in our pockets is a bad idea?

Second, culture war angle (of course) - Odd and lonely uber driver dude sets something on fire while listening to rap music. Was it truly intentional? Maybe, maybe not. Negligent, yes. What's truly frightening however is that this is literally an almost literary manifestation of alienated male nihilism. Rinderknecht didn't shoot up a school / church/ political figure. He didn't disappear into drugs / porn / 4chan. He didn't commit suicide. He just kind of got pissed off one night and started a fire that deleted a whole section of a city.

We need to give the boys something to do. I've written about this before on the Motte. One of the primary tasks of human civilization has always been to manage, curtail, and, when necessary, punish the violent impulses of young men. War and famine did a lot of the heavy lifting for a while, and "frontierism" helped out towards the end (i.e. the idea that listless young men could at least try to find fortune in physically difficult locations. Not just "The West" but think also whaling ships, mining, etc.) But the world is fully mapped now, more or less. If you pack up your shit and hit the road, YouTube is going to be the same wherever you go. You can't get it away from it all when it's all in your pocket.

The necessity is in developing better pathways for young men to enter adulthood and develop a sense of self paired with durable external meaning. Some sort of religious or, at least, high-minded civic metaphysics is a necessary part of this. Young men, on their own in a truly atomized sense, turn into their own kind of decentralized stochastic terrorism. Stochastic chaos might be the more accurate term.

But this won't be accomplished by TikTok ads (lol) encouraging the boys to man up and / or talk to a therapist on BetterHelp (thank you for sponsoring this podcast, BTW). I think it requires the sincere confrontation of a modern liberalism that prizes the autonomy of the individual above the stability of society. I can see a good argument to be made that liberalism should be about the tension between those two things. But I don't believe we're living in that world. We're in a world where individuals demand acknowledgement, recognition, and validation from all of society all of the time regardless of any conflict between an individual's value system and societies. This is "live your truth" in a nutshell. And when that nut cracks open, it burns down everything it touches - like, literally.

The year is 2010. The Los Angeles Department of Water & Power (LADWP) publishes its initial environmental study on a large power infrastructure maintenance project. A portion of the project involves replacing about 200 wooden power poles that run through Pacific Palisades. The California State Lands Commission reviewed the initial study and requested that LADWP provide a Native American Ground Monitor during any digging to ensure that cultural resources are not inadvertently damaged or destroyed. By the final EIR in 2016 LADWP decided that replacing the all of those +70 year old power poles was no longer necessary.

The year is 2018. The Camp Fire ignites in northern California. It's cause was the failure of a 100 year old power line. By early 2019 LADWP decides to replace those 70 year old powerlines running through Pacific Palisades, they're in a now deemed high fire threat area. The California Public Utilities Commission has recommended they be replaced as soon as possible. Work is to start in 2019.

July 7th, 2019. LADWP has started work to replace the power lines, as well as leveling and grading new fire roads. Amateur botanist and avid hiker David Pluenneke is hiking in the area. David is a member of the California Native Plant Society. He sees that LADWP has trampled the endangered Braunton’s milkvetch. In all, 183 milkvetches were murdered. He is livid:

"It’s hard not to think that if there had been blue whales and panda bears up there, they would have bulldozed them, too"

(What exactly would happen to a blue whale in this scenario David? What other than a bulldozer could get that whale off the mountain David?)

Our hero David reports LADWP to the California Coastal Commission. The CCC is not happy with unpermitted work done within their fiefdom. In order to get a CCC approved permit to replace the wooden poles LADWP must:

  • Submit a detailed pre and post construction vegetation survey for the entire 2.5 mile stretch. The surveys need to identify the type and location of any and all sensitive species (all birds, shrubs, milkvetches), and it needs to show their location on a detailed map.
  • Any work must be supervised by an on site project biologist, or biologists if the worksite is large. These observers will make daily surveys of sensitive wildlife species and they have the authority to stop any work that could result in their harm.
  • LADWP agrees to excavate the new powerline poles by hand, with shovels. Workers will walk to the site. Helicopters will bring in the new poles and remove the old.
  • No construction activities that generate noise above 60 dBA (loudness of an average conversation) may take place during bird nesting season, which runs from mid February to mid September. Of course this requires another observer biologist, a bird biologist, to verify.
  • Pay $1.9 million in fines.
  • All newly constructed fire roads must be unconstructed and returned to their original condition. Milkvetch and all.
  • Etc.

I wasn't able to find if / when this particular project was completed by LADWP. Checking Google Street View, as of August 2023 these poles were not replaced. But overall there are 300,000+ power poles in LA. As of 2019, 65% of them were older than the average lifespan of 50 years old. In 2024, LADWP replaced just 2743 poles. Their average cost to replace a pole in the same year was $69,300. At their 2024 rates it will take LADWP over 70 years and $14 billion to replace all past lifespan poles.

To relook at the culture war angle - why was their a fire in Pacific Palisades? Maybe Jonathan Rinderknecht will be found guilty, maybe he won't be. But Jonathan didn't create a massive tinderbox in the LA hills for ideological reasons. Jonathan didn't let firehoses go without water while they sat a mile away from an empty 100 million gallon revisor. Jonathan didn't empower a council of retards at the California Coastal Commission to nuke every project from orbit at the behest of any and every nature activist. LA burned with or without Jonathan, the parallel Eaton fire was just as destructive and (as to current knowledge) not caused by him.

There will always be Jonathan Rinderknechts. We won't fix them by grasping for the very abstract universal meaning, or high-minded civic metaphysics, or better pathways, or whatever. If we need to have a confrontation with modern liberalism, it shouldn't be because it "prizes the autonomy of the individual above the stability of society". It should be because it fucking sucks. It empowers tiny little bean counter despots to make sure your critical infrastructure construction isn't too loud for the little fishes. It sets environmentalists as legally prescribed tattletales against those that produce and build. It fails to build and maintain basic infrastructure, and housing, and anything that isn't a patronage network. We should ask "Why was there a massive tinderbox outside our second largest city", instead of "What can we do to make sure every young man feels special."

Reminds me of when Monsanto's anti-competitive, environment-harming practices directly led to one farmer murdering another. The person put on trial was the murderer, while nothing happened to Monsanto, even though they were so controversial that the jury instructions explicitly prohibited mentioning Monsanto.

It also took me too long to realize that Monsanto being enabled shows how useful all those heckler's veto environmentalist regulations were: Not very.

He sees that LADWP has trampled the endangered Braunton’s milkvetch.

As opposed to wildfires, which apparently pose no danger at all to the apparently fireproof plant....

What exactly would happen to a blue whale in this scenario...?

And what would happen to the pot of petunias?

As opposed to wildfires, which apparently pose no danger at all to the apparently fireproof plant....

It's funny, because Braunton's milkvetch relies on wildfires to reproduce. "The beanlike seeds require scarification from fire or mechanical disturbance to break down their tough seed coats before they can germinate."

This is a better take on the Palisades fire than my take.

And my general point still stands.

I read the first half of this thinking it was about the Judge Goodstein fire mentioned downthread. I was like “of course they went to a lot of trouble! It’s too close to home!” Whoops.

What struck me about this case wasn't the male ennui angle, but rather that the subject of the story had horrid opsec. Calling 911? Querying ChatGPT? Keeping his phone on him at all? Retaining the lighter he (probably) used? (source: https://apnews.com/article/california-wildfires-palisades-los-angeles-deb1c78c1d83d233cf3b540644814ea2)

If this man had practiced even rudimentary opsec he could have become a serial firestarter.

If you asked me before this news article "could you commit an act of terror?" my off-the-cuff answer would be to scoff and say "yes - once." The news is full of mass shootings, stabbings, vehicular violence, not so widespread as to materially impact me but memetically virulent enough that I realize it's colored my impression of nihilistic terrorism as inherently incriminating - try anonymously mass-shooting and you won't stay anonymous for long. Yet here's a case where the inherency I'd presumed disintegrates, and now I'm left wondering how much harm could be done by a lone man with a grudge against the world and no interest in taking credit for it: if all you care about is maximum damage then there must be a subset of terrorist strategies that'd indirectly cause mass death without inherently presenting yourself as a target of investigation.

I've had similar thoughts about the sorts of opsec blunders reported in cases like this. (I'm reminded of /u/KulakRevolt's Substack piece on Mangione's many mistakes and how to avoid them.) And like some here note, I find it understandable that these men make such trivially-avoided mistakes, given that we aren't talking about the most rational, sober-minded people here.

But there's one simple phrase that makes me doubt that "causing mass death without inherently presenting yourself as a target of investigation" is simply as easy as "practicing even rudimentary opsec" — and that's "parallel construction."

Sure, in this, or any other particular case, the media narrative we're given for how the cops found them is probably true, and they probably did make the blunders described (again, not sane, rational sorts). But if "a lone man with a grudge against the world" was instead caught through some Three-Letter Agency's massive Fourth-Amendment-violating secret domestic surveillance program, that's not what we'd be told. No, we'll be given an alternative narrative of how this individual was found through perfectly-legal police methods, which would probably look something like, well, what we see in news reports in cases like this.

So, maybe your initial "try anonymously mass-shooting and you won't stay anonymous for long" position might still be true after all, just not for the same reason.

But there's one simple phrase that makes me doubt that "causing mass death without inherently presenting yourself as a target of investigation" is simply as easy as "practicing even rudimentary opsec" — and that's "parallel construction."

There are parts of the Mangione story that I doubt for this reason.

I see parallel construction on a semi-regular basis in mundane drug stops. Boy, it's remarkably convenient that a local cop happened to stop this particular 18-wheeler for a traffic violation, had a drug dog ready and got a positive alert, and immediately measured the inside length of the trailer that revealed the hidden compartment in the front of the fully-loaded trailer. Incredible odds on that one.

So there is zero question in my mind it's happening on a much larger basis, and the only question is just how much of it is going on.

It also makes it quite remarkable that the person who planted the pipe bombs on Jan 5 has never been caught. So remarkable that it some might say it glows.

Might I suggest that rational planning is not the best model for what these people are thinking?

Perhaps it's not a good model for the average terrorist, but it worries me that if this kind of violence becomes popular, the uncommon clever terrorist could commit this sort of violence serially; think of an indirect attack with a lethality similar to the 2017 Las Vegas shooting or worse, executed by someone who was justifiably confident they could get away with it multiple times.

I'm left wondering how much harm could be done by a lone man with a grudge against the world and no interest in taking credit for it

Yeah this is stressful.

Tangentially related, and this will probably result in me being put on a list, but I'm always mystified when I read/hear/whatever about a mass shooter who kills like 5 people and then kills themselves/gets shot in a Walmart in their town or whatever.

If you're planning on dying, and hate the world and want to extract revenge on it. Why not go to your nearest sporting event/concert and wait for it to let out? Or rent a car, drive to New York, and unload in a PACKED subway station at 8:30am on a Tuesday.

It seems like so many of them leave so much carnage on the table (which is their goal?), but I guess this is likely mostly answered by the fact that people who try to commit mass shootings aren't highly competent utility maximizers.

If you're planning on dying, and hate the world and want to extract revenge on it. Why not go to your nearest sporting event/concert and wait for it to let out? Or rent a car, drive to New York, and unload in a PACKED subway station at 8:30am on a Tuesday.

Who says they hate the world equally? Maybe they hate the people nearer to them more? Also, as a more practical matter, shooting up a local Walmart is easy to plan; you've probably been there a bunch of times. And there's no waiting where someone can notice you standing around and possibly question you.

Hitting the NYC subway is even less likely; even if they only care about body count, what do they know about the subway? I mean, I know two stations where that would work well (if you didn't mind getting killed or caught), but I use the subway regularly. Somebody from suburbia or flyoverville has no idea what the subway is like. As with "write what you know", "kill where you know" is probably "good" advice.

This is what was so concerning about Islamic terror attacks in the early 2000's. It was a group of people willing to think rationally about killing and causing a bunch of damage. They used box cutters and a few flying lessons to kill thousands of people in a day and cause massive damage in New York City.

I do remember people trying to war game potential avenues for future terrorist attacks where there might be low hanging fruit. It quickly got depressing. The Western world mostly functions and operates on the assumption that everyone is not trying to cause massive damage and death to those around them. The water supply, electric grids, transportation infrastructure, etc are all vulnerable to determined saboteurs. Massive crowds of people in unsecured areas are common in every city every day. Explosives materials are monitored, but anyone can walk up to a gas station and buy a fire accelerant with cash.

It's always surprised me that there are so few mass casualty events; I could name two or three attacks that would kill a thousand plus. I don't know if those targets are non-obviously hardened in a way that would prevent a successful attack, or if my estimate of the number of extremely violent/insane people in society is off by an order of magnitude.

Yeah the brief rash of van/car attacks into city crowds concerned me a lot. I usually have a pretty rational assessment of gun crime/terrorism (I'm not involved in the drug trade, so my likelihood of being shot is very low, and terrorism is in general so rare it's not worth stressing over especially as I'm not American).

But the van attacks were genuinely scary to me. Canada may not have much gun violence, but we have a LOT of cars. And random acts of sidewalk violence with a car was all of a sudden a quite plausible threat in my life. I stopped wearing headphones when walking around as a result of this, which while I am no longer worried about getting van'd, I still do as the additional situational awareness is never a bad thing.

That's also what got me thinking about terrorism optimization, even the van attack guy in Toronto could have probably increased his kill count by a factor of 10x if he did it down Bay Street at 8:45am, versus somewhere way out of the core of Toronto where he actually did it.

The necessity is in developing better pathways for young men to enter adulthood and develop a sense of self paired with durable external meaning. Some sort of religious or, at least, high-minded civic metaphysics is a necessary part of this

Historically, a decent number of those pathways ended up with the young man dead at the bottom of the ocean or under the hangman's axe or in a monastery somewhere.

Young men can't be given a pathway to manhood with no uncertainty in it. Some of them have to fail, otherwise success doesn't mean fuck all.

Totally agree with this. And young men taking risks is, frankly, how society moves forwards with new discovery.

Right now, however, young men are being told to take zero risk, to artificially castrate themselves, and to enjoy doing it.

It's been going on for 2 generations now, and I would argue a hallmark of gerontocracies in general.

This is tempered by the fact that this arrest was obviously only possible by employing the surveillance state to its fullest extent. People get squeamish about facial recognition technology, but using cellphone location data is both less "emotionally" invasive as well as more durable as a tracking mechanism. Maybe carrying around constant location trackers in our pockets is a bad idea?

I'm all for limiting government surveillance, but the cell phone location of part of story does not seem to have anything to do with that. From the article:

However, geolocation data from his 911 call showed he was standing above the fire in a clearing merely 30ft from the blaze as it rapidly grew, prosecutors said.

If you don't want the authorities to know your location, consider not using the "tell-the-authorities-your-location" service.

My biggest fear is that people will notice this. It will become a Thing...and more will do it.

It may be better that he wasn't found.

Re-upping the one piece of advice I have on this.

It has to be effortful, uncomfortable, and entail (friendly) conflict.

Videogames sublimate this urge easily, especially in PVP modes, but lack the physical strain.

Men have to learn to fight. They have to have something to capture, some opponent to beat, and some promise of reward for taking risks.

Otherwise, they flail around without purpose, the urges get released in distinctly destructive ways, they fall in with anti-social crowds who will use them as a weapon, and they start taking really ill-advised risks on the promise of spurious rewards. Crypto-gambling is arguably the best case scenario there.

Not a cure-all, in the least, but its a START, which is more than a lot of guys get. Coach knew.

Just make America enough of a soccer country to start having real soccer ultras/hooligans (from what I've seen, the American ones seem to be considered quite larpy). Of course soccer firms tend to be recruitment grounds for actual political extremism, as well, but that's the sort of thing where you "learn to fight. They have to have something to capture, some opponent to beat, and some promise of reward for taking risks" (the last one being social ingroup approval).

Just make America enough of a soccer country to start having real soccer ultras/hooligans (from what I've seen, the American ones seem to be considered quite larpy)

For our domestic national league you are more likely to get punched by "ultras" for not being suitably anti-racist than be punched by a racist. The Hispanic population could probably lay the foundation for a proper hooligan culture, but I don't think it'd be tolerated. Soccer is not the working class sport of choice in the US and the fandom for professional soccer came of age after the suits figured out how to fully commodify sports. Riots and fist fights are considered bad for business here unless you're from Philadelphia.

Well, yes, those are indeed symptoms of the US not being a soccer country, and the situation would thus change if it was one.

Way too dangerous in a country with more guns than people.

I’m not convinced it needs to be literal fighting. As a species, we’re rapidly retreating from the real world into very different cyber-simulacra of various aspects of our former life. We probably do at least half of our human contact through screens. We play games rather than going outside for real activities. And I think the simulacra, while they give the a bit more of happy brain chemicals as the real thing, they’re not the same. An online friend is not a real friend. An online game is not the same as playing outdoors. Watching videos of places is not the same as visiting those places.

I think a lot of this stuff ends up being a hyperstimulous. They’re releasing more of those happy brain chemicals than the real life version because they’ve removed most of the slower more boring but actually meaningful bits of those things. Your online friends are always there, just whip out the phone and scroll. And they don’t make demands like an offline friend might, nor do they get in bad moods or get mad at you. An offline walk is mostly quiet maybe interesting flowers or birds or a deer or something. Walk around in a video game and you’ll have constant adventures. So the online world wins, and people don’t do as much offline.

I think just about any real world experience that comes along will help. The kids who seem the most mentally stable are athletes who are spending lots of time playing a sport with their actual body, seeing the gradual improvement as they practice and work out, growing into social relationships as they make real world friends on their team and gain tge confidence to talk to people outside of that group. Sports of any type but especially team sports is really good for kids and especially boys.

I sometimes wonder whether a low skill floor version of Eve would be a good outlet for NEETs who end up on some sort of UBI.

Simpsons Curtis Yarvin did it.

Note that this is an extension from a previous idea in Patchwork where he proposed it as an "alternative to genocide".

But this won't be accomplished by TikTok ads (lol) encouraging the boys to man up and / or talk to a therapist on BetterHelp (thank you for sponsoring this podcast, BTW). I think it requires the sincere confrontation of a modern liberalism that prizes the autonomy of the individual above the stability of society. I can see a good argument to be made that liberalism should be about the tension between those two things. But I don't believe we're living in that world. We're in a world where individuals demand acknowledgement, recognition, and validation from all of society all of the time regardless of any conflict between an individual's value system and societies. This is "live your truth" in a nutshell. And when that nut cracks open, it burns down everything it touches - like, literally.

Yeah and a huge problem with modern "liberalism" is that it isn't even liberal, as folks here know. There are certain values and taboos that still very much exist, and there always will be.

The idea that we can just fully liberate and allow anything and everything to go with no values whatsoever has always been a completely illogical thing. I do think a coherent underlying metaphysics (like Christianity?) is absolutely required for liberalism to thrive.

My personal vote for the young men is:

  1. Major works projects, building giant monuments, perhaps building a bunch of flop house camps for homeless people in rural areas to get them working/productive, repairing bridges/roads, basically New Deal stuff.
  2. Space!!! Send these mfers to the moon or mars, once we get the tech. Which will be soon. Though ofc this would be more for the higher IQ ones, at least at first.
  3. Martial arts and sports and fight clubs. Make these more common and available and high status. Lifting is good but lacks the social component.

Lifting is good but lacks the social component.

Lifting absolutely has a social component. You hit the gym on a schedule, get to know the other guys, how their lifts are doing, etc. Even an antisocial guy like me found it easy to develop a "group" of guys I expect to see at the gym.

Very much depends on the gym, your schedule, and person. Literally orders of magnitude worse for social connection than these other options I mentioned. I have lifted for years and have met, as in exchanged names with, 0 people.

I can imagine a 24 hour fitness type situation is not great for this but all of the smaller gyms I went to that focused on some sport (i.e. wl or pl) obviously had a decent amount of community in them.

I wonder to what extent just decriminalizing minor physical violence would help. Like you look back to the 30s/40s and it seems like a low level of pervasive physical violence was normal. Guys get mad at eachother, fight it out, all is well (unless someone suffers a horrible permanent injury, which did happen).

Commonplace martial arts etc might do it well enough but I do feel part of the desire/need is the need to be unconstrained by a boss/teacher/parent/state/wife. Those adventures were vital for my own development and I think if I grew up where I live now (generic mid-sized US city) then I would never have gotten that taste of freedom. That unsupervised part is just as important as the physicality I think

I wonder to what extent just decriminalizing minor physical violence would help. Like you look back to the 30s/40s and it seems like a low level of pervasive physical violence was normal.

In that period, about 56% of the US lived in urban areas. Now, the equivalent figure is about 81%. If two guys working on a farm get into a fistfight, it's unlikely to result in anything worse than a black eye. If two guys get into a fistfight outside a bar, a single punch can easily result in one of them falling over, hitting his head on the concrete and being killed instantly. This is such a big problem in Australia that various states passed so-called "one punch" laws.

Guys get mad at eachother, fight it out, all is well (unless someone suffers a horrible permanent injury, which did happen).

Still happens, a lot. It's just a lower-class marker.

Don’t the lower classes have the lowest rate of suicide? Suicide is correlated with income if I remember correctly. Seems like that supports the idea.

I think omnipresent surveillance has pushed it even lower class than is otherwise natural, as it’s never been easier to get into legal trouble for brawling due to the ease of recording and the social & psychological incentive to do so.

Likelihood of facing consequences is higher and the penalty is more severe.

It’s why I think every teenage and adult man should engage in some sort of combat sport and / or semi risky and preferably outdoor endurance sport like mountain biking, trail running, rock climbing, etc.

Danger is to the male brain like salt is to the diet; no intake is extremely harmful, moderate amounts are beneficial, and too much is inevitably fatal over the long run.

I wonder to what extent just decriminalizing minor physical violence would help. Like you look back to the 30s/40s and it seems like a low level of pervasive physical violence was normal. Guys get mad at eachother, fight it out, all is well (unless someone suffers a horrible permanent injury, which did happen).

Mutual combat is legal in Washington. Despite this, it's not exactly a shining city on a hill.

In Chicago, it goes beyond "minor physical violence"

https://abc7chicago.com/post/kim-foxx-lightfoot-mutual-combatants-combat/11100664/

You deeply underestimate the prevalence of destructive behavior in the past.

Agreed. Plenty of societies that had/have very clear pathways for boys to become part of society nonetheless had/have horrific levels of violence. Generally against their outgroups, but that's bad enough.

Nazi Germany had such pathways, and they were very clear.

Gangbangers in south Chicago have such pathways too. They do in a sense prize the stability of society above the autonomy of the individual, it's just that in their case their society consists of their gang.

Plenty of societies that had/have very clear pathways for boys to become part of society nonetheless had/have horrific levels of violence.

Hell of a stawman!

Do you truly believe I'm advocating for pathways to manhood to include the active cultivation of violence against others (in a non military, State governed sort of way, of course). You immediately jump from my "the boys need purpose" to "YOU MEAN LIKE NAZIs?!" This is a bad faith argument.

The Nazis did not advocate for non-state violence; their atrocities were carried out by state backed military/paramilitary forces.

Depends on the date. The SA was the Nazi militia before Hitler took power, and engaged in a lot of non-state political violence. After Hitler consolidated power it had become an embarrassment (it was also a hotbed of Nazis who took the "Socialist" part of "National Socialist" more seriously than Hitler's new industrialist buddies were comfortable with) so it was dealt with in the Night of the Long Knives.

I'm not claiming that "the boys need purpose" leads to Nazism. I'm just not sure that giving boys clear pathways to become part of society necessarily reduces violence.

Is physical violence in society able to be decreased at all?

Yes, it's happened many times in history. In the US, most recently in the 1990s. Probably in large part due to better policing.

I am trying to propose a grassroots way of continuing that decline in violence. I would rather not simply have cops on every corner, even though I am a cringe level of "back the blue" pro-police. Thus, I am suggesting what I am suggesting for young male development.

When you say that providing a pathway for young men into adulthood doesn't reduce violence I am, first, skeptical to the point of doubt and second, curious about what your solution for reducing violence would be (short of cops on every corner).

Remember, the context of my original post was that this seemingly wayward fellow in California burnt down part of a city out of nothing more than a moment of spastic nihilistic rage.

I think providing a pathway for young men into adulthood can reduce violence, as long as it's a pathway into a healthy adulthood. However, history shows that often such pathways even if they work well to reduce intra-tribe violence, can either not affect or possibly even increase inter-tribe violence.

I'm actually ok with more cops patrolling the streets in violent neighborhoods. However, it has to be well-behaved police. In other words, you can't just open up the police force to hiring any random goon who wants to join. You have to actually expand the police force in a way that ensures that they retain decent standards of interacting with non-police and that there is strong oversight.

I agree with your desire to develop grassroots ways of helping troubled young men who might otherwise turn to violence.

The biggest problems with American-on-American violence come from young men in communities where criminality has become a way of life. Think, the stereotypical black inner city gangbanger or the stereotypical white or Hispanic roughneck, possibly a meth addict. I don't know how to reach these kinds of people when they're young, so that they choose different paths of life, but I'm open to suggestion. When men are very young and poor and find it almost impossible to conceive of ever getting anywhere decent in life, osmosis effects and peer pressure from their local criminal community can be very strong.

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I am trying to propose a grassroots way of continuing that decline in violence. I would rather not simply have cops on every corner, even though I am a cringe level of "back the blue" pro-police.

Cops who patrol corners often need to be fit, strong, and willing and capable of inflicting violence on unwilling individuals, for the purpose of protecting their community, right? Perhaps having cops on every corner is the way to provide a pathway for young males to adulthood in a way that reduces violence?

Are you sure that you're not trying to slip collectivism and religion into your proposed solution to the problems caused by some young men's woes in the same kind of way that some climate change activists try to slip communism in with their proposed climate change solutions?

I'm sure that that is exactly what I'm trying to do. I'm not trying to slip it in. To quote the original post:

Some sort of religious or, at least, high-minded civic metaphysics is a necessary part of this.

I'm not even sure what kind of argumentation you're using here. It's like mini-maxing what I explicitly said as I kind of snide way of cultivating doubt? It's strange, that's for sure.

If you want to get into a discussion about proposed solutions and their cost / benefit profile, I'm all for it! But, cards on the table first - do you see the current "liberal order" of things to be all well and good?

Got it. Sorry for misreading your post.

But, cards on the table first - do you see the current "liberal order" of things to be all well and good?

No. Given the current different political groups that we have in the West, I think that the current liberal order is better on the whole than any new order that is actually likely to take power if the current liberal order is replaced. However, I believe that the current liberal order needs some modifications, as long as they're done in a way that doesn't destroy the core liberalness of it.

Thanks.

I believe that the current liberal order will, inevitably, destroy itself and fall into fundamental illiberalism - actually, something quite close to tyranny or at least a kind of state-corporate oligarch - regardless of any "modifications."

I think that the current liberal order is better on the whole than any new order that is actually likely to take power.

We can quibble about the "actually likely" phrase, but, generally, I disagree with this. I think there are alternatives to the current liberal order - that have existed in the past - that are fundamentally better. No, I am not talking about returning to pre-Westphalian Europe or something. I believe the "Old Right" conservatism that existed in some form or another from roughly the end of World War One to the Civil Rights Act (So, let's call it 1920 - 1965 to use round numbers) was the best political philosophy. It was hugely disrupted by FDR - first King of America - and then eradicated entirely by the 1964 CRA. The Warren Court of the 1970s salted its grave.

That "Old Right" conservatism was largely liberal by my standards. To the extent that some of them supported segregation based on race rather than more individual characteristics, I think they were illiberal. But liberalism, at least in my sense of the word, does not require that a country allow huge amounts of unvetted or barely-vetted foreigners to enter. Liberalism can be pragmatic, it just has to be fundamentally based on and strive for the ethos of judging people on their individual characteristics, and on meritocracy.

On a side note, this is where I disagree with the more right-libertarian interpretations of liberalism as being best served by hyper-capitalism. I appreciate capitalism, but capitalism as it exists, because of inheritance, is not a meritocracy.

Maybe carrying around constant location trackers in our pockets is a bad idea?

It is a terrible idea if one wishes to commit crimes. Like the guy arrested for the fire, my clients learn this fact to their detriment on a regular basis. For many of them, they will not truly absorb the lesson and will continue to commit crimes while carrying a location tracker, using said location tracker to arrange the crimes, or even using the tracker to record them committing the crimes.

A few months ago, @ymeskhout shared a video of a 23-year-old American woman who happened across a diner decorated with what she thought were Israeli flags, and began tearing them off the diner while chanting various pro-Palestine slogans and condemning the diner for being complicit in genocide. The proprietor came out of the diner to ask her what on earth she was doing, and pointed out to her that (I'm sure you've guessed the punchline) it was a Greek diner decorated with Greek flags. Shortly afterwards, the woman was arrested for destruction of property.

Leaving aside what this farcical incident says about the typical pro-Palestine activist and how well-informed they are, what really jumped out at me was that the perpetrator recorded the video herself, and even after her mistake was pointed out to her while recording the video, she still uploaded it to TikTok under her personal account. Now, if it had been an Israeli diner, I can imagine a sufficiently committed activist publishing a video of themselves damaging it in order to make a political statement, fully cognizant of the fact that doing so would make it easier for the authorities to arrest and convict her. But this woman attempted to commit a crime in order to make a political statement, failed due to mistaken identity of her victims, and even after realising her mistake, still distributed the video of her committing the crime. Not only did she commit a crime for no discernible personal or political benefit, she made a complete unforced error in distributing evidence of her committing this crime under her personal TikTok account, again for literally no benefit that I can fathom (except maybe the fleeting dopamine hit of racking up some views of her making a fool of herself).

It's a level of idiocy I simply cannot fathom. As I said last month: attempts to practise law enforcement by appealing to the rationality and common sense of criminals are doomed to failure by virtue of the fact that criminals are a group heavily selected for lacking rationality or common sense.

Re: unfathomable idiocy

It demonstrates willingness to fuck shit up for Palestine, even if it makes no sense whatsoever. It's signalling her tribal affiliation and commitment.

I think this is stupid but I get it, I suppose.

I was about to ask how, exactly, destroying a Greek diner's exterior could possibly hope to advance the interests of the Palestinian cause.

... but then it occurred to me that "pointlessly destructive behaviour which could not possibly hope to advance the interests of the Palestinian cause even in principle" actually describes a great deal of pro-Palestine activism, and activism for a number of other omnicause issues. So, yeah, good point.

This reminds me of a scene in one of the later seasons of Game of Thrones, where Tyrion, a dwarf with a scar across his face, is wanted for escaping after patricide, and some men are caught bringing the head of another dwarf that they marked with a scar. When Cersei (the queen and Tyrion's sister) notes this, the guards are about to send the men to the dungeons, but Cersei stops them, telling them that she doesn't want to discourage people from finding and bringing in the real one.

So it seems that Greece-associated things being damaged is a worthy cost to pay for maximizing the number of Israel-related things being damaged. Or, perhaps, "The optimal number of Greek things destroyed in the process of destroying Israeli things is not zero."

I got a chuckle out of this. On one hand, is a cell phone enough to win a criminal case? No. But when it is stacked up with the rest of the evidence, often yes. I recently got sent one from my friends at the state police where 2 guys, wearing the same disguises, robbed 3 places in about 4 hours. Both with cell phones in the pocket placing them at every site. Then they got caught with the car a few days later (which was stolen). Good work fellas.

This reads like a passage from an updated Bonfire of the Vanities. Someone needs to write that novel.

I'll certainly take the compliment, but sadly my writing skills are limited to the occasional high-quality sentence.

I am begging you for an effortpost on cell phones and criminals.

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