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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 20, 2025

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Secondarily, I think also just that we excessively-online degens are projecting too much onto others. I think that the majority still don't actually post much or at all online (social media stats are largely around messaging services like WhatsApp) and so genuinely aren't afraid of having their standards turned against them.

Most people aren't afraid of standards being turned against them only if they haven't thought about it all that hard, or they already exist at such a tenuous level of socioeconomic acceptance that they can't get much lower on the scale anyway. But we're no longer in August, it's the Eternal September baby, and at this point everyone has done something bad online. It might be a group chat where they tell nigger or jew or Arab jokes, or one where they fantasize about killing their boss or joke about filing a fake lawsuit against him for sexual harassment. But it exists, for the vast majority of people.

So part of this is that I 100% can't see dick pics and posting on the Motte as being equivalently bad, even if they receive the same social opprobrium on net.

Understand that there are millions of people whose feelings on that are reversed. When baseball players are caught making offensive jokes they apologize, then their nudes leak they demand an apology from the world.

I apologize if you're the one guy who never says anything widely considered offensive here, but that would make you to theMotte what a guy whose "dick pic" is in an anatomy textbook would be to dick pics.

Understand that there are millions of people whose feelings on that are reversed.

I do, and intellectually I could be argued into some kind of non-aggression pact on pragmatic grounds. But you seemed to me to be expressing confusion or annoyance that people don’t instinctively feel sympathy / offer clemency for someone who has something embarrassing leak online, and this is my explanation as to why.

For the sake of clarity, I don’t feel particularly strongly about sending dick pics to people who are reasonably likely to enjoy getting them. My understanding is that there are a considerable number of recipients who don’t, however. More, I am someone who has a chip on my shoulder from following all the rules re: girls and not getting anywhere for it, and I get very irritated by the idea that the golden age of the internet involved horny lying chads strip-mining a generation of girls and ruining it for the rest of us.