site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2842 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 7, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

1
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

  1. Smoking is genuinely really bad for you, but was used as scapegoat for cancers caused by numerous industrial chemicals. Cancer rates have not reduced as much as they should have given the massive decline in smoking.

  2. President Garfield’s assassination was part of a conspiracy to ram through significant changes to the structure of the federal government that allowed for the formation of an entrenched deep state

  3. Due to widespread corruption in the New York construction industry in the 1970s, the twin towers were not nearly as fire-resistant in reality as they were on paper.

  4. Bill Gates and other big tech entrepreneurs are simply front guys for the CIA, which actually founded their companies.

  5. DARPA and intelligence agencies have had access to AI since the late 1980s or early 1990s. The public internet was created to allow for the formation of massive training data sets for more advanced models.

  6. Tactical nuclear weapons have been used in various conflicts, and the various nations with detection capability have decided not to publicize this.

  7. The woke mania and economic decline of the United States is an intentional Boys from Brazil style attempt to recreate the social and economic conditions of Weimar Germany in order to provoke a future fascist backlash.

  8. The Apollo program was scotched because of a sharp increase in solar weather activity starting in early 1973 that made it too dangerous. In particular there was a large solar flare about two weeks after the Apollo 17 mission that scientists calculated would have killed the crew had it happened during the mission. This I actually have some confirmation for. That’s why you could go to the moon in a tin can in 1968 but now Elon Musk and NASA are now constantly talking about how there has to be multiple-foot thick shielding for any manned mission outside low earth orbit.

  9. Australia became a nuclear weapons state sometime in the past few years.

  10. American football is fixed like professional wrestling.

DARPA has had AI since at least 1969. I heard a presentation by a very senior (in both age and rank) DARPA scientist and he mentioned that his research program in machine learning started that year. He also mentioned that he was awarded his PhD in 1964 and I believe his doctoral work was also in ML, though I'm not 100% on that. In any case, his work was in ML speech detection. Incidentally, he was very bearish on AGI and called out nearly everything we hear about the topic as lies and marketing. This was a couple of years ago.

The woke mania and economic decline of the United States is an intentional Boys from Brazil style attempt to recreate the social and economic conditions of Weimar Germany in order to provoke a future fascist backlash.

Can you unpack this a bit? Who's doing it? How? Why?

I’m not sure who exactly would be doing it. I know there were influential families (the Fords, the Bushes) and titans of industry in the 30s and 40s that were fairly sympathetic to naziism. There was also a decent amount of contact between the OSS and German intelligence during the war. Allen Dulles, the later head of the CIA, was back-channeling with Heinrich Himmler to try and negotiate a separate peace between Nazi Germany and America so that the Nazi government could remain standing and be used by the west as a bulwark against Communism. Some Nazi intelligence divisions were basically rolled intact into the American intelligence apparatus after the war ended.

You could say that America resembles Weimar Germany just because there are certain characteristics that sick or declining societies all have, but some of it seems awfully specific.

  1. There is a giant coordinated push for Marxism in the early 2010s, both the old school kind and the new Bio-Leninist kind.
  2. There seems to have been a giant coordinated push to weaponize American black people as a Cossack class to oppress American white people. This doesn’t seem like it would work on its own, but it did an awfully good job of putting white Americans into a defensive crouch. This culminates in near-genocidal Hutu-style rhetoric against white people in 2020.
  3. There are suddenly suspiciously organized glowie-adjacent communist street fighters that took their name and logo from the communist street fighters in Weimar Germany. They generally seem to be trying to act as unsympathetic as possible.
  4. The controlled detonation of the American economy in 2020, inducing hyperinflation.
  5. The coordinated lockstep pushing of transgenderism and prostitution culture. This and Antifa is what really started to make me suspicious, because those were both phenomena that was specific to Weimar Germany.
  6. In 2022 there is a sudden, at least partially astroturfed push to associate Jews with the prior events I described in the last several paragraphs. There was definitely organic anti-semitism in the years before that, and some genuine bad behavior by prominent Jewish people in America. But 2022 is when you start seeing very consistent very intense anti-Jewish rhetoric on Reddit, which is very odd given that Reddit Turbo-jannies were and are such prudes about literally everything else. I have hung around on 4chan long enough to know what organic anti-semitism looks like, and what I started seeing in 2022 looked different, odd. It looked more like organized shill behavior that I had previously associated with left wing stuff like transgenderism and astroturfed pro-Ukraine sentiment on Reddit. Crucially, I started noticing this a full year before October 7 and the bombing of Gaza, which is usually marked as the beginning of wide scale public anti-semitism.
  7. October 7 happens in 2023 (which stinks to high hell but that’s an entire post on its own). The invasion of Gaza starts and now you suddenly have a left-right triangulation against Jewish people. The Israeli government seems to be working very hard through all this to act as unlikeable and shady as humanly possible.
  8. Ever since then there has been just a full-bore shill campaign against Jews on Reddit, Twitter, TikTok and 4chan. I used to hang out on 4chan when half the posters were literal Stormfront users, and it was never this intense. It definitely smacks of organized shilling and not just people who genuinely dislike Jews.
  9. Then a sudden coordinated push to rehabilitate Naziism. First for liberals with the glowie-affiliated Azov Battalion (“Shut up Chud, It’s just the Ukrainian skull and pinwheel of good fortune!”) and then for conservatives with Tucker Carlson and Darrell Cooper (who both have connections to CIA and the defense industrial complex).

So to me it looks like there was potentially a coordinated push to induce Weimar problems and then present Weimar solutions.

I agree with basically everything here, but my deduction is different.

There's strong signs that it's jews who are in charge of all this. Whoever is doing this is clearly powerful. The woke clearly hate everything they can relate to the holocaust, to the point that their hatred of nationalism led to an almost global consensus that borders are immoral. Whoever is behind this is also trying to destroy Christianity and its traditions. A lot of people who have warned against jews historically have been assassinated (e.g. JFK). The woke is also driven by the media - and jews are extremely over-represented in the media. If you've been on 4chan, you've seen the image I have in mind right now. It also happens that jews aren't at home in America, and they're therefore in a position in which they can harm America without harming themselves. Only globalists and those without strong roots can benefit from causing this much harm.

I've never been on 4chan, but even I know that a lot of users predicted our current events, warning that the jews would do these things. And historically, these issues have also been blamed on freemasons, FBI/NSA/CIA/GCHQ, "the system", satanism, feminism, communism, the illuminati, NWO, globalism and on elite families tied to banking (Goldman Sachs, the Rothschild family, Rockefellers, etc), and many other groups, and most of these claims aren't wrong, the question is just which group is in charge, if any.

While there might be some non-organic anti-semitism, the jews could be spreading that in order to legitimize their victimhood. And Trump said "America first", only to start sending billions of tax-dollars to Israel. Of course this results in a spike in anti-semitism, anything else would be strange. The reason that even Reddit has some anti-semitism is likely because jews overplayed their hand.

You know a lot of things, so you should have a clear picture, and yet you discard the most likely conclusion. Of course, you may have valid reasons for doing so. Have you heard the translated speeches of Hitler? They don't sound old, they contain things which are still relevant today, and Hitler blamed them on the jews. Given the jews strong representation in positions of power, and their high average IQs, I find it unlikely that there's somebody above the jews who is manipulating them.

You focus a lot on recent events, but most of these issues started decades ago.

Do you have specific conflicts in mind, in which nukes were deployed?

I have seen videos of bombings that the Saudi Air Force conducted in Yemen and that the IAF did in Lebanon with explosions that seem to be far, far beyond the size of anything that they have the capability to carry on the planes they have (to my knowledge neither have heavy bombers). Also there was a Ukrainian attack on a Russian facility in I believe Toretsk where it looks like the damage is consistent with around a 15 kiloton explosion. Also the documented fact that a hydrogen bomb went off in the middle of the Indian Ocean in 1979 and supposedly no one can figure out who did that (I’m guessing the US and USSR both knew and just didn’t say).

I have seen videos of bombings that the Saudi Air Force conducted in Yemen and that the IAF did in Lebanon with explosions that seem to be far, far beyond the size of anything that they have the capability to carry on the planes they have (to my knowledge neither have heavy bombers).

I am ignorant of that conflict. What would have motivated the use of such a weapon in that case?

Despite what wags online will tell you, nuclear weapons would actually be very useful in retail combat. The reason for their lack of usage is for political reasons to maintain the nuclear taboo, not because they aren’t useful.

I do know that the Houthis and Hezbollah both use very deep underground fortifications of the kind that would be hard to take out even with multiple 20,000 pound bunker busters dropped from a B-2. Much less trying to take those apart with fighter-bombers, which can carry a 2,500 pound munition.

The Vela incident was almost certainly an Israeli nuclear test.

Wasn’t the 1979 bomb South African?

I’m going to call BS on the Ukrainian nuke- if they had one, they’d hit Moscow.

@cablethrowaway @hydroacetylene

But notice that there was never any kind of official statement on who did it by any of the countries that were capable of investigating and verifying. They were content to leave the public in the dark.

I’m going to call BS on the Ukrainian nuke- if they had one, they’d hit Moscow.

It wouldn’t necessarily have been a Ukrainian nuke. But yes, that puzzles me too, I don’t know why you would drop one tactical nuke on some warehouse complex in Toretsk without elaboration or credit or apparently any further strikes, and apparently no response from the Russian government. Maybe it was a foward-deployed 380 KT Russian nuclear weapon that fizzled when it got hit by a conventional strike and produced a 15 KT yield.

I don’t buy the official explanation either, which is that an entire warehouse of S-400 interceptors were sitting in a warehouse five miles from the front line. And even accepting that, it seems like way too big of an explosion. Fire storms 12 kilometers wide, picked up on satellites for monitoring wildfires.

1979 was believed to be either South African with Israeli help or Israeli with South African help. The explosion appeared to be only a few kilotons-equivalent, though, so it could have been a fission bomb rather than a "hydrogen bomb", and if it was a fusion bomb then it was almost certainly a neutron bomb, designed for "low" explosive yield in favor of radiation.

I can't imagine Ukraine would invite nuclear reprisal by nuking Moscow, not unless the tanks were literally rolling into Kyiv at the time, but Toretsk would be an even less likely target.

Point 3. is a new one for me but makes a lot of sense.

My 9/11 conspiracy theories are: a) there was a systemic coverup of evidence that the government had heard and (understandably) brushed off warnings ahead of time, and evidence that the emergency response procedures did not function adequately and could have mitigated the impact of 9/11 after the first impact. b) immediately after the event, there was a fairly rushed and slipshod propaganda response to both tie al-Qaeda unquestionably to the attacks with public evidence (i.e. without revealing any sensitive intelligence) and to make them look bad that involved faking some stuff (e.g. the famous strip club Koran).

I also suspect AQ might have remained an unreliable but still associated CIA proxy even as they started escalating attacks against US forces and installations overseas. So I think there may have been some covering up of the fact that CIA personnel were communicating with and possibly providing aid to AQ potentially right up until the attack. They might have even been rooked into unwittingly providing some material aid for the attack itself. This could also explain some of the intelligence failure, since CIA might have been convinced that AQ were mostly-controllable good boys (even if they occasionally got rowdy) and not likely to do something that drastic against the mainland US.

Unlike a lot of 9/11 conspiracy theorists, I’m not particularly wedded to a single theory and I have contemplated a lot of different narratives.

On point 6, I've never been able to shake the suspicion that Aum Shinrikyo conducted a nuclear test in Australia back in the day.

I haven’t heard of this, can you elaborate?

Back in the early 90s, Aum shinrikyo bought a remote sheep farm in Australia. Not long after, a "seismic event" was recorded in the area, with a few truckers in the area reporting a massive explosion and fireball.

The official explanation was an earthquake. The official explanation ignored that Aum was interested in building a nuke at the time, seemed to be actively mining uranium, and might have actually had the capacity to do so, having recruited some nuclear engineers.

Good lord. Maybe that’s how they got caught, that would be detected by satellite. How long was this before the subway attack?

About two years

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