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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   5686 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 11, 2026

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Hey, do me now. I know I can do this myself but I'm feeling too lazy right now.

Sigh. Okay. I hope you're happy to know that the result of this exercise gave a me a stroke on top of my migraine:

Using https://www.themotte.org/post/704/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/147725?context=8#context

Which is probably one of the better things you've written on the site or at least has an uvpote from me:

Primary guess: self_made_human on The Motte (and Reddit/Substack). Confidence: roughly 30-35%.

Reasoning, in order of how much each piece of evidence is pulling:

  1. The themotte.org self-link with "There was a comment here a few weeks ago" essentially confirms this is a Motte top-level post or AAQC-tier comment, not a Substack or blog crosspost from outside that ecosystem. That narrows the candidate pool enormously.
  2. The author lives in the UK but is from somewhere with cheap servants, OTC pharmacy access, lax driving rules, and a low tax/regulation burden, and describes co-ethnics who want to migrate west. That fits South Asia far better than anywhere else, and the cultural register (sympathetic but unsentimental treatment of an Alawite sultan, ease with Arabic-derived names, the al-Nasiri citation) tilts me toward a Muslim or Muslim-adjacent South Asian background, though a Hindu Indian who reads a lot of Islamic history is also possible.
  3. self_made_human is the most prominent regular I can think of who fits "Indian subcontinent origin, now in the UK, writes very long Motte effortposts, has a basically consequentialist/realist worldview, and is comfortable defending Israel in HBD-flavored terms." He also occasionally drops finance-y examples like the Alphabet A/C share-class spread, which fits.
  4. Stylistic tells consistent with him: fluent but non-native English (the/a slips, "the are hardly able," "it's" for "its"), a fondness for long expository wind-ups before the actual thesis, willingness to be openly contrarian, and a recurring "let me work through this from the outside view, then sanity check empirically" structure. The closing move (vote-price arbitrage as a revealed-preference argument that political rights are cheap) is exactly the kind of cute econ-flavored kicker he uses.

Other candidates I considered and where I'd put them:

  • 2rafa / @2rafa: 8%. Writes long, confident, often pro-Israel pieces in this register, but I associate her with a more polished British prose style and less of the article-dropping non-native cadence. The "back home" passage doesn't fit her as well.
  • DaseindustriesLtd ("Dase"): 5%. Has the historical breadth and the willingness to defend "competent but nasty" rulers, but he's Russian/Central Asian, not South Asian, and his prose has a very different baroque texture, more Slavic-philosophical than this functional reportage.
  • Hoffmeister25: 3%. Right ideological neighborhood, wrong biography (American, not a UK immigrant from a developing country).
  • A Pakistani Motte regular I'm not naming specifically (possibilities like Tomato or one of the rotating cast): 10%. Genuinely possible this is someone who posts less often than the names above. The Moulay Ismail topic choice plus the Muslim-history fluency plus the gun-ownership-as-freedom-back-home line is more Pakistani-coded than Indian-coded to me, which slightly weakens the self_made_human guess.
  • A non-Motte writer cross-posting: 5%. The internal Motte link argues against this, but it's not impossible the link is a citation rather than a self-reference.

Residual uncertainty (25-30%) goes to "a specific Motte regular I'm just not pulling from memory, who fits the South-Asian-in-UK profile." If forced to pick one name, I'm sticking with self_made_human.

Well fuck me. No, I'm not you. You're definitely not me.

I chalk this error down to you not really writing outside this forum, or having the same degree of semi-fame I've accrued through posting elsewhere. But you've definitely helped me accrue psychic damage. Good for you. Bad for you. No cookies.

No cookies for either of us then, the model has revealed that we're splitting the same biscuit.

Is it a soggy biscuit? In that case, all yours, Count my good sir.

Also, go write something of merit so that LLMs don't assume "oh, South Asian guy living in the UK writing on... must be self_made_human!" In other words, go touch grass instead of getting the robots all tangled up.

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