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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   24735 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 15, 2026

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Many moons ago, in the before times, in the waywayback a much younger and angrier JTarrou left his tiny cult in a tiny town in the midwest and went off to college. There was a lot of culture shock to go around, but mostly it was my first exposure to a primarily leftist environment. I knew more about politics than I did culture, and clashed repeatedly with professors and other students over these differences. Those who have spent time here will no doubt be shocked by this.

But it was an interesting time. The hectoring years of high-tide PC had ebbed in the late '90s, and by 1999 the pendulum was swinging the other way. A brand new show, low budget, seemingly intentionally poorly produced attempted to ride the zeitgeist on Comedy Central. The opening scene of the very first episode began like this:

Behold the Hoover Dam. 6.6 million tons of concrete, harnessing nearly a trillion gallons of water. 16,000 men spent half a decade building it. They lived in shacks and tents along its base without drinking water, toilets, or shelter from the desert heat. More than a hundred of these men gave their lives to this dam. Their bodies are paved over in its walls. Its 2 million kilowatt capacity powers the greatest city in the world, Las Vegas. And just as these heroic men did more than 60 years ago, we are building a dam. A dam to hold back the tidal wave of feminization that is flooding this country. A dam to stop the river of estrogen that is drowning us in political correctness. A dam to urinate off of when we're really drunk. We call this dam... The Man Show.

These words were spoken by an edgy young comedian in his first TV hosting gig. One Jimmy Kimmel. When you've lived long enough to see Jimmy go from an early-30s masculinist rebel against the politically correct orthodoxy to its most sold-out shill on late night, you have to take the culture war with a grain of salt. Take this little tale as a warning, if any of that sounds familiar.

Politics is a game for grifters. If you play long enough, you'll see the tides of lies rolling back and forth. Do not trust the people. Do not trust the parties. Do not trust the policies. It is all kabuki, and not even played for us.

hen you've lived long enough to see Jimmy go from an early-30s masculinist rebel against the politically correct orthodoxy to its most sold-out shill on late night, you have to take the culture war with a grain of salt.

As a side note, I've wondered more than once how Jimmy Kimmel was accepted by the Left given the Man Show. I remember that in most episodes, there was a segment called "Women on Trampolines" which showed women in skimpy outfits jumping on trampolines. The point was that their little skirts would flip up and give a nice view of what was underneath. Which I enjoyed watching as a young man but it's just hard to see how feminists (which are a significant part of the Left coalition) would forgive this.

Politics is a game for grifters.

I basically agree, I think it's a classic Moloch type situation where there is a big advantage (and therefore a selection effect) in favor of people willing and able to engage in sociopathic levels of lying, cheating, intellectual dishonesty, etc.

As another side note, though, I am pretty sure that Jimmy's former sidekick, Adam Carolla, is a conservative commentator now.

Women on Trampolines

Girls Jumping On Trampolines.

My mom saw me watching that once (I'd have been 17 probably) and got angry and demanded to know how I'd feel if it were my sister jumping on the trampoline.

I told her I wouldn't be interested in watching my sister, but these women were not my sister. We looked at each other for a bit and then she left.

My mom saw me watching that once (I'd have been 17 probably) and got angry and demanded to know how I'd feel if it were my sister jumping on the trampoline.

It's interesting to me how women get so upset (seemingly instinctively) about inexpensive male sexual gratification. I think all this talk about "objectification," "exploitation," etc. is for the most part a rationalization. The real issue (I strongly suspect) is that (1) throughout our evolutionary history and continuing to this day, women have depended on male services for their literal survival; (2) men gladly provide those services in exchange for female validation and sexual services; and (3) anything which threatens to undercut this relationship is therefore perceived as a mortal threat to women and provokes anger, outrage, etc.

It's interesting to me how women get so upset (seemingly instinctively) about inexpensive male sexual gratification.

Historically, not just women. Men were on board for the Victorian-era campaign against Onanism, for example. Feminism is now the only socially acceptable reason for people to be prudes, but I don't think it is the only (or even the main) reason why people were prudes historically.

Historically, not just women. Men were on board for the Victorian-era campaign against Onanism, for example.

Here's a thought experiment: Suppose that a Victorian-era father discovered that his son and some buddies had gone to a tableaux vivant show or sexy burlesque show. Would he be instinctively upset about the situation? I tend to doubt it.

I mean, one need only look at the highly religious today to see how fathers react to these sorts of things. I know that if I went to a burlesque (or the modern equivalent) and my dad found out, his reaction would be some mix of disappointment, disgust, and anger. And my reaction would be the same if I had a son do the same.

I mean, one need only look at the highly religious today to see how fathers react to these sorts of things

I tend to disagree with this. People who are highly religious have, generally speaking, been trained to adhere to certain values. Therefore, the reaction of a highly religious father is not necessarily representative of the reaction of fathers in general.

My hypothesis is that women instinctively get upset when men receive inexpensive sexual gratification. Therefore, it (arguably) doesn't matter if the woman is a progressive, religious, or whatever. Only if she has been trained to be sex positive will she stay calm. Even then, it won't take much to convince her that inexpensive sexual gratification for men is exploitative or otherwise destructive.

Admittedly, I don't have rigorous evidence to support this hypothesis, but it does seem to fit observable reality pretty well.

Yes, the reaction is equivalent to how the highly progressive mothers react to these sorts of things, because they're both in complete agreement that man bad, woman good. (One might even say that the highly religious father is the exact spear counterpart.)

It's really not any more complicated than that. You just get butthurt you can't control sex because that's what your primate brain tells you is important, so out come the rationalizations. Oh no, a female leg, so scandalous.

Yes, the reaction is equivalent to how the highly progressive mothers react to these sorts of things, because they're both in complete agreement that man bad, woman good.

I would say it depends on which sect and which religion. But I do agree that a lot of Christian churches in the West have gone in for gynocentrism. For gynocentrists, inexpensive male sexual gratification is a problem. Because everything is supposed to be about women. The purpose of men is to serve women and it's a problem if a man has independent desires and needs which get met without serving women.

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because they're both in complete agreement that man bad, woman good

My dad (and myself) don't agree with this though? We both would disapprove of both attending a burlesque show and performing in one. "Man and woman both bad, unless they turn to God and repent" would be our view.

You just get butthurt you can't control sex because that's what your primate brain tells you is important, so out come the rationalizations.

Oh wow, tell me more about what I actually believe and why using your mystical evo-psych bullshit powers, please!

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To be fair I've never seen any 'burlesque' that didn't consist entirely of glaringly-unattractive women, and that per se would be enough to have me disappointed and disgusted in my hypothetical son. Overlooking the lack of talent among the 'dancers' due to some kind of sick fascination with the aesthetic scans to me as similar to an extreme foot fetish or unhealthy obsession with The Rocky Horror Picture Show or something. Not something you want to see surface in your child.

Burlesque is a social activity at least, while locking yourself in your room alone with sexy paintings is not.

Also, if you're a mother, then in evolution terms you want your son to have baby-making sex, not watch porn.

Given how unaccessible porn was until less than a century ago, it seems rather doubtful that there was much evolutionary pressure for such an impulse during most of human existence (evolutionary psychology is always really hard, but I'd guess that, during most of human existence, a man observing nubile young women enthusiastically in states of undress was more correlated with them reproducing rather than less), and so I'd doubt that whatever evolutionary source for TitaniumButterfly's mother's behavior has anything to do with that explanation. I'd guess that the proximal cause of the mother's behavior had to do with cultural norms, which are downstream from evolutionary pressures of the type that omw_68 mentioned.

I reckon during most of human existence, nubile young women were in a state of undress as a regular thing and so did not particularly correlate with anything.

The majority of human beings that have ever lived have been peasant farmers, and this has heavily selected human cognition, dietary needs, appearance, etc. And we kinda know how peasant farmers lived- seeing naked members of the opposite sex, except perhaps immediate family, was not normal(the same sex on the other hand...). I would kinda expect moms getting upset at their son's porn use or whatever to be more about 'oh shit is he a threat to his sister' than anything about female solidarity.

'oh shit is he a threat to his sister' than anything about female solidarity.

They're the same picture, and I can assure you that this reaction happens even in porn-free households.

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Quite possibly! Again, evolutionary psychology is just inherently hard to get right. Though there's states of undress and states of undress, and the types of videos we're talking about is the latter, I'd say.

Women pride themselves on their kids behaving well. That's what it is. Grandma lives longer and is happier when her kids are well behaved(filial piety very much included). Being a mom also tends to make women more socially conservative, especially about sex.

Women pride themselves on their kids behaving well. That's what it is. Grandma lives longer and is happier when her kids are well behaved(filial piety very much included). Being a mom also tends to make women more socially conservative, especially about sex.

Here's a thought experiment: Suppose instead of catching her son watching the Man Show, mom catches her daughter watching some piece of media which features men. (Pro wrestling maybe?) Will she be similarly upset? Will she say "How would you feel if it were your brother who was being featured?" I tend to doubt it.

inexpensive male sexual gratification

Because it's not inexpensive. See the term "thots" being tossed about in the comments. Gratify male sexuality, be classed as degraded female only good for One Thing (and that's not marriage and children).

Surely his mother can't be concerned that those women gratifying his sexuality affects how he classifies his mother.

Why not? Mom doesn't have sex, we all know our parents never had sex and have no idea what that is all about but we are so modern and liberated and know what sex is all about. If he had to think of his mother in the context of a sexual being, that would be uncomfortable. The point about "but it's not my sister" is the same as "but I did have my breakfast this morning". He can't see the girls on the television as people, they're just there as the framework to which the things he is interested in - bouncing boobs, ass, maybe a hint of more private parts - is attached, they're not persons in their own right.

The idea that guys really were watching a show just for the segment of hoping to see a young woman flash her pudenda for a fraction of a moment is depressing in one way. I mean, it's nature, this is what drives us all, so of course it was marketed and monetised as much as the censors would let them get away with, but if the guy in question never matures out of that attitude, then yeah: gosh why aren't women getting married to men who think of them as a disparate collection of parts to jerk off to, what a puzzle.

The endless kvetching about men perceiving women as sex objects when they choose to present themselves as sex objects is always quite amusing. The idea that one should be taking umbrage on behalf of the women even when objectification was their goal is downright incomprehensible to me. People appear to believe that when a woman dresses skimpily and gives everyone involuntary panty shots it should somehow have no effect on how anyone thinks of her, no matter how shamelessly she is advertising her services, and woe betide the man who dares to notice since it's clearly just a failure on his part to Appreciate Her Personhood enough.

And it is only male attraction that is to be judged in this way, of course. That doesn't apply to a woman rubbing one out to a picture of David Beckham.

but if the guy in question never matures out of that attitude, then yeah: gosh why aren't women getting married to men who think of them as a disparate collection of parts to jerk off to, what a puzzle.

If you have created lewd content of yourself and disseminated it into the commons for money or other gain, you are advertising yourself as being willing and able to fulfil a certain need, and people who stumble upon that will view you in that context. Seriously the quoted statement above is about as intellectually sound as saying that I don't view bus drivers as Fully Realised People because I'm not interested in the minutiae of my bus driver's internal life and see him as a tool whose purpose is primarily to take me from point A to point B. People interact with others differently in different contexts. Yes, in a context where someone is advertising or providing services to me I am seeing them primarily instrumentally through the lens of what they are offering me, that doesn't mean I would not be capable of viewing and approaching them in any other manner with a different goal in mind if I were to encounter them in other contexts (say, in a social setting). That’s normal human psychology, not a pathology, but if women want to opt out of relationships for that reason then that is their choice.

Oh, I'm not saying the girls weren't foolish to do that. But the people benefiting from that were the men running the show and the TV network, not the girls themselves. And they got themselves the reputation among the men watching them as nothing more than wank fodder. Now maybe "My angel is a centerfold" is a true representation of a man's view of such women, that he would be delighted to date her and not think less of her and would still treat her with respect as wife material instead of "woo-hoo, I get to bang the thot".

And maybe not.

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The point about "but it's not my sister" is the same as "but I did have my breakfast this morning". He can't see the girls on the television as people, they're just there as the framework to which the things he is interested in - bouncing boobs, ass, maybe a hint of more private parts - is attached, they're not persons in their own right.

I never cease to be amazed at how sure you are of your kneejerk imaginings, while also refusing to listen to anyone who tries to help correct you. Once again I'll just say openly that I don't even know why you're here, except that you seem to get a lot of sick enjoyment out of hysterically, but inappropriately, reacting to people who aren't even saying what you'd love to hate them to be saying.

Here you've pattern-matched to a meme that is not applicable (I considered and answered the hypothetical before pointing out it wasn't pertinent) and completely ass-pulled the part about not seeing attractive women as 'persons in their own right'. In fact I do see attractive women as people, and also enjoy looking at them sexually. You're consistently straightforward in admitting that you don't understand this experience at all, so it's just wild to me that you're willing to baselessly impute the worst possible motive to others without any leg to stand on whatsoever.

I award you a downvote and may God have mercy on your soul.

Your mother left the room because she realised that to you, "girls not my sister = collection of parts for my sexual gratification" and not persons. You didn't think of them as someone's daughter or sister or a classmate or work colleague, you thought of the girls on the trampoline as things to get your bits aroused.

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Gratify male sexuality, be classed as degraded female only good for One Thing (and that's not marriage and children).

Surely his mother can't be concerned that those women gratifying his sexuality affects how he classifies his mother.

Why not?

Because boys don't see their mothers as only good for One Thing, even if they do realize that their parents have, or at least had, sex. It would be difficult I'm confused why this isn't obvious.

If he had to think of his mother in the context of a sexual being, that would be uncomfortable.

Well, yes.

Don't forget rake in lots of cash.

Mom mad (x24).

Impressive poise by teenaged @TitaniumButterfly (TitaniumChrysalis?) under duress, to calmly swat away the attempt at getting blamed for the female love of being sex objects.

Angry mother: “How would you feel if that were your sister jumping on the trampoline?”

Chad son: “But that wasn’t my sister.”

*Defeated mother leaves*

For all the people on here laughing about the low IQ types who can't figure out the question "How would you feel if you didn't eat breakfast this morning/But I did eat breakfast", you don't seem to recognise Butterfly was failing the exact same way.

Mom was not defeated, just disappointed. "The female love of being sex objects"? And didn't our Butterfly go on about how this was "inexpensive" gratification of male sexuality? This must mean that the guy doesn't incur any expense, the girls do in reputational harm and comments about how they're all thots, look how they love being sex objects.

Were these different than the juggies?

Yeah the juggies were part of the main show shot before a studio audience, whereas the girls jumping on trampolines were filmed separately and then just spliced in as a segment. Though for all I know there was substantial overlap between the two groups.

And did you also have your breakfast that morning? 🤣 Some seem to think this was a killer retort to frumpy old Mom who had to retreat defeated, but I don't think so.

You'll note that I answered her hypothetical before pointing out that it wasn't relevant.

Yeah, Adam never really worked in hollywood again after that, and Jimmy got a late night slot. Adam was a very early podcaster, I believe, and has always been conservative in a centrist blue collar way.

I rewatched the first episode of the Man Show recently, which is why I posted this. What surprised me in retrospect was how not-skimpy most of the trampoline outfits were. Some were in bikinis, and there were plenty of panty shots, but the actual clothing was stuff that you could see in church, more or less. Schoolgirl outfits with knee-length skirts. Long-sleeve sweater combos. It seems like a very old concept of "skimpy".

What surprised me in retrospect was how not-skimpy most of the trampoline outfits were. Some were in bikinis, and there were plenty of panty shots, but the actual clothing was stuff that you could see in church, more or less. Schoolgirl outfits with knee-length skirts. Long-sleeve sweater combos. It seems like a very old concept of "skimpy".

Therein lies hoeflation. Female outfits have generally gotten thottier over time.

The canonical example is Julia Roberts's outfit in Pretty Woman, where she plays a literal prostitute. Her outfit looks downright chaste compared to the modern thot.

There has to be a hard physical limit to hoeflation eventually, right? Thongs as casualwear? The human body can't go above 100% exposed, surely.

Unless the inside of mouths, noses, and other bodily cavities become parts of sexual interest. If 100% outside nakedness becomes the norm, then it stands to reason that women's dental gumlines become hidden fetish zones.

I tend to find lingerie to be much more sexualising than just complete nudity. A body is in the end just a body. But with the right clothes you signal that it is a sex object.

So I would oppose your statement and assert that 100% nudity is not the end point. Clothes and makeup that deliberately try to show off and sexualise are, and we still have a long way to go on that front.

Hoeflation doesn’t necessarily have to be conducted only through revealing the body but can also be achieved through augmentations of the body itself. On the extreme end of this, think of the women who utilise surgeries and fillers and gaudy makeup to accentuate everything to the point that they look terrifying and emotionless and I’m not sure any man finds them even remotely attractive.

Though now that you’ve mentioned it, it would be very funny to see some episode of some adult TV show take this idea and just run with it, where the thotting goes so far that it becomes downright grotesque and your average woman 100 years in the future aspires to being a Cronenbergian body horror.

aspires to being a Cronenbergian body horror.

We're already there. Dodgy illegal buttimplants because (and this is mostly black women doing it for some reason) you can never have enough butt volume apparently. And some of them do that ugly lip filler thing that makes them look like blow up dolls, I still can't fathom who actually likes looking at that.

Ah, I forgot about body augmentation. It's just a matter of time before we have the triple breast augmentations, Total Recall style.

Well, in Total Recall, it was genetic mutations due to living on Mars (no idea what the actual mechanism was - the UV rays or the limited oxygen or both?)? That woman was just intelligent enough to make use of her genetic luck. Though perhaps if Elon has his way, we'll be able to run the actual experiment of human colonists on Mars, to see if we get such positive results soon enough. Everyone was joking about Elon Musk making catgirls real (which I could also see as a future body augmentation for similar purposes), but his true contribution to humanity may end up being making triple-breasted whores real.

I will build this man a real life shrine complete with tripple breasted bronze statues if this happened within my lifetime.

There has to be a hard physical limit to hoeflation eventually, right? Thongs as casualwear? The human body can't go above 100% exposed, surely.

Well there could be a sort of asymptotic hoeflation. I mean, if a woman goes from 95% exposed to 97% exposed, the difference is very noticeable to men.

People actually have less sex than ever and the younger generations of neurotic women probably dress less revealingly than they used to as it's become a status symbol to be in a relationship even if you try not to be appealing (I believe that is what a "Pick-Me" or whatever is)

A "pick me" is what people used to derisively refer to as "the cool girl," where her personality revolves around what she thinks will be appealing to men. Basically you're allowed to look feminine or you're allowed to hang out with the boys playing video games, but doing both makes you a pick-me traitor to womanhood. The female equivalent to the male feminist reading Andrea Dworkin to get laid.

but the actual clothing was stuff that you could see in church, more or less. Schoolgirl outfits with knee-length skirts. Long-sleeve sweater combos. It seems like a very old concept of "skimpy".

Perhaps I am not remembering accurately, and perhaps "skimpy" isn't the right word, but I'm pretty confident that (1) you (meaning the viewer) would see a lot more than you would ordinarily see in a church; (2) that was kind of the point; and (3) feminists generally object (so to speak) to this sort of material.

Some were in bikinis, and there were plenty of panty shots, but the actual clothing was stuff that you could see in church, more or less. Schoolgirl outfits with knee-length skirts. Long-sleeve sweater combos. It seems like a very old concept of "skimpy".

I mean, those are all sexualized, is the thing. It's something for every taste.

"Women walk the streets, their curves accentuated by their dresses," Superintendent of Police Harvey J. Scott said. "But our real problem is with bobby soxers. They are the sweater girls—just kids showing off their curves and apparently liking it. What kind of mothers and wives are they going to be?"

I'm not hip to what the modern version would be.

The point was that their little skirts would flip up and give a nice view of what was underneath.

That was not my primary focal point while viewing, but YMMV

That was not my primary focal point while viewing, but YMMV

I guess they had something for everyone.

Flip. Flop. Flip. Flop.

As long as the flip flop stays, it all works out for everyone in the end.

I think your model of these “coalitions” is wrong.

Single-issue voters join a coalition to buy support for their issue. In exchange, they’ve got to provide their support to other issues when those ones are relevant.

Yes, debating what qualifies as “relevant” makes up a substantial portion of internal politics. No, feminism does not automatically dominate every such debate within left-leaning organizations. Your outgroup is not homogenous.

Kimmel’s history on this particular show hasn’t been relevant. If it were, I’m sure people would come out of the woodwork to share unflattering clips and say how they always knew he was a boor, or whatever. Up until that point, they’re supposed to evaluate stuff on the more relevant issues, like “does he joke about the right people?” and “do people recognize the name?”

A digression: are you familiar with Texas AG Ken Paxton? Wife divorced him for repeated cheating. Just won the GOP primary for U.S. Senate against a 24-year incumbent.

Do you find it hard to see how evangelicals, a significant part of the Texas Republican coalition, could forgive him?

In a vacuum, I expect evangelicals would rather have had Paxton-but-faithful over Paxton-the-dirty-cheater. But they assessed his marriage status wasn’t the relevant bit, so they deferred to the name recognition and the Trump endorsement. This is business as usual in the awkward, messy process of forming a coalition.

Cornyn lost hard because he's an old fucker who's been in congress too long and voted for gun control. Not the Trump endorsement(which wasn't offered to Paxton before it was a sure thing).

No, feminism does not automatically dominate every such debate within left-leaning organizations.

Agreed, every coalition represents a compromise among competing interests. And I'm not surprised at all that feminists chose to disbelieve the early accusations of sexual misconduct against Bill Clinton. Nor am I surprised that feminists (largely) choose to ignore alleged rapes by Hamas militants in the October 7 attacks. Or alleged mistreatment of women by the government of Iran.

What's interesting to me about Kimmel, though, is that it doesn't seem like he is a particularly vital part of the Left. It's not like he is a longstanding Democratic congressman with lots of seniority and a key vote on some divisive issue. He's just a hack comedian.

A digression: are you familiar with Texas AG Ken Paxton?

No I am not.

Do you find it hard to see how evangelicals, a significant part of the Texas Republican coalition, could forgive him?

Not at all. And that's even assuming that evangelicals are just as intolerant of alleged marital infidelity as feminists are of "objectification."

In the early nineties, I used to listen to Howard Stern (back then he was only on 92.3 K-Rock, WYSP, WJFK!) I eventually got tired of the frequent 10-minute ad breaks and lost track of the show, but I read an article a few years ago that implied, without actually saying it, that he had dropped his funny material and gone woke in his old age. Pity. I used to love hearing him go off on other DJs.

It brings warmth to my heart to see people under the spell of the culture war pretend that Kimmel is funny because it deflates credibility and makes the whole premise so lame.

Although I have distaste for the "mediocre White guy with unearned success" rhetoric in most of its uses, he is kind of a good example of it which makes the fact that that side of the culture war is rallying behind him funnier.

Also he wore blackface, for whatever that means to anyone.

In the interest of balance I would say a similarly tasteless outgrowth of the culture war on the other side of the comedic divide is anything and everything surrounding KillTony

The gradual death of the open internet and ideological capture and where this all leads

One interesting thing you get to do when you get older is to take stock of your predictions, observe trends over a longer timespan and see if your mental models were actually worth their salt.

When I was growing up, I was at the very tail end of the people who still grew up with what I'd like to call a relatively "open" internet. Open in the sense that there was no Reddit, no walled gardens, the iPhone was young, Facebook was beginning to be a thing when I was in school.

Internet norms were very libertarian in most "serious" places, much more male, much more autistic. People thought that we'd have this open space forever where there are no central authoritarian rulers, censorship was mocked as technically impossible even with the Great Chinese Firewall having been a thing, the Arab spring was heralded as a prototype of internet-enabled uprising against authoritarian rulers, the whole thing was very much end-of-history-like. Things like the EFF and Richard Stallmann were relevant, nerds cared about open source, etc.

Then it all came crashing down. People began to concentrate on social media, on sites like Reddit. Network effects did their thing and centralised power and moderation. Eternal September became truly eternal. The word "echo chamber" became a thing. Smartphones meant tech literacy was no longer a prerequisite. The whole thing became politicised, with Trump, Cambridge Analytica, etc. Now everyone is a Russian, Chinese, Israeli shill. Nobody ultimately cares about privacy, censorship, speech norms, etc. that much. Stallmann got cancelled, I think the EFF and the various open source orgs are now all either into AI grifting or grievance stuff. It's gone or going away. I won't look at wrongthink when I have secure-boot enabled TPM-secured age verification built into my OS and sending all my wrongthink to the government.

It was fun while it was closed up. I am sure none of this is novel.

But the interesting thing is the further direction of travel.

  • Censorship is steadily moving further and further into the Overton window

Australia and Britain now have age-verification laws which require everyone to submit ID. I think some more authoritarian Asian countries (like South Korea) already have this for things like video games. It is also talked about to make things like VPNs illegal or harder to access in the UK (with the usual suspects pointing out that this puts the UK in company with countries like Russia and NK), the other non-US Anglosphere countries usually follow (seriously Australia/UK/Canada/NZ have a weird thing for paternalism). The sad thing is that this is bipartisan and nobody really opposes this. The evidence base for social media bans is actually quite thin so this will probably not even make the kids not miserable while entrenching ideological control

You can picture children being fed state-backed news from a young age now too, which I guess is Lindy in a way. Will probably entrench and accelerate existing biases and trends even further though. I don't expect "peak woke" to have been passed.

  • Censorship is very unevenly applied

The big boogy-men of the Internet are incels, right wingers and Andrew Tate. Incel discourse is a personal bugbear of mine because it is completely detached from reality in the sense that even though even right-wingers come up with plenty of theories about supposed resentful incel violence, the people most likely to rape and murder women are actually the sex havers. But I digress.

So the governments come up with weird dystopian schemes of censoring and tracking this stuff while other kinds of probably actually harmful stuff (neurotic and mentally ill women amplifying their neuroses about men and society, viz. the "Angry Young Woman", race-grievance amplification, various untrue "tax the rich stuff" verging into blood libel and calls for assassinations) is left untouched, amplified or even supported. Moral panics are nothing new I suppose.

  • LLMs are the ultimate frontier

I am a very heavy user of LLMs. I talk to them basically all day at work at this point. Not everyone does, there are still plenty of people who don't use LLMs but younger people use them more than others. I imagine usership heavily skews intellectually as well, as a lot of the general population hates interacting with textual media. I imagine that in the coming years the censors and nudgers will also try to get a front-row seat to this as well, so when you ask for certain things you not only get a Reddit Markov Chain but one where all the "wrong" opinions have been RLFH'd out.

In the future when everyone outsources their thought processes to LLMs that presents a level of ideological centralisation Stalin could have only dreamt of. Should Amanda Askell et al. get to decide how everyone thinks? Maybe not in my opinion, but who knows what'll this stuff do to the kids.

  • The US being a holdout or not?

This stuff is particularly pernicious in the non-US anglosphere. I think the EU is also thinking about OS/device-level censorship but in Germany a court struck down the social media ban idea for kids for now (with the argument being something like "kids are people", which is very Kantian and German-idealist in a way). I think California or something tried to force the Linux kernel to put this stuff in and right-wingers will jump on this just as left-wingers would, with different bugbears (porn for right-wingers, wrongthink for left-wingers). Not sure if the US will be a holdout or not. At least speech norms are a thing.

As someone who skews Libertarian, this is all a great disappointment, especially because I like being able to argue with smart people, even if they have viewpoints many consider despicable. I personally mostly just want to be left alone and not have goons sent to people's houses because of wrongthink. Do they still make the kids read Orwell? But I guess not only has the experiment of giving everyone a seat at the table to talk to each other failed spectacularly, it has also manifested a vector of ideological state control hitherto unparalleled that governments are now starting to seriously use. Who knows, maybe complaining about having to pay 50+% of my paycheck to Boomer UBI will be criminalised in 20 years. At least the Chinese are honest about this stuff and don't pretend to be into free speech.

IMO I feel like age verification is a motte. I 100% support young people having limited internet. Especially now that access is in your pocket and isn’t the family computer with lack of privacy.

The issue with age-verification is the linkage to adults real identities and societies broader desire for political control through thought control. You can’t do the good thing (8 year olds not able to watch bukkake) without also making it very easy for society to do the bad thing (universal thought police).

This seems to be a universal issue with modern technology. Nuclear energy having bombs or Self-Driving enabling government to control your cars.

Freedom over safety 100%. Don't 8 year olds have parents? How about their parents just not buy them a smart phone? Easy. Age verification is a complete abomination, it's not even a trojan horse, it's a trojan warship. It looks bad on the outside and everyone can tell what's inside.

How about their parents just not buy them a smart phone?

Peer pressure is a thing, as is "other kids may not have parents as wary, or they may have older siblings able to circumvent restrictions for them". There was a piece in the advice column a while back, in a national newspaper, about "my pre-teen son watched porn at a friend's house, what the heck do I do? how do I talk to him about this?"

It's a thorny problem. There is so much out there now that wasn't there when we were starting to use the Internet, and pretending (if we all weren't already 18 or older) that yep indeedy I am of legal age in my country to read this, now give me the Legomance, or trying to work out what this story ranked as on the citrus scale.

I care about strange children about as much as they and their parents care about my freedom, which is apparently 0.

Unlimited freedom is a hellish dystopian society. You could say it’s freedom for alcohol companies to target customers by identifying alcoholics by having mobile alcohol trucks setting up outside someone’s house offering the first drink for free at 9 am and ratcheting up temptation. Mobile phones can be like that.

Young children often don’t have great temptation control. I don’t think having shitty parents means that children should be offered vices at 8 year olds. There is always a temptation between freedom and security.

Unlimited freedom is a frontier society, which certainly isn't always safe, but I wouldn't describe it as hellish and dystopian.

It's dystopian to have the police knock on your door for complaining about being stabbed by a foreigner. It's just a violent death to be scalped by an Indian, and it's just normal exposure to die of hunger or cold.

Unlimited freedom is a frontier society, which certainly isn't always safe, but I wouldn't describe it as hellish and dystopian.

Frontier societies are functional because there isn't enough concentrated wealth to attract predators. Unlimited freedom in an affluent society where the administrative cost of running a complex scam is Nigerian minimum wage plus a smartphone is more like a frontier society subject to constant Indian raids.

At the end of the day, there are only two positions -- "You can just do things" and "We live in a society". Each person has one or the other orientation (with most being the latter), and this determines their position on almost any regulation that doesn't go directly to their self-interest. It does not matter where on the freedom-to-tyranny scale society is at the moment.

by identifying alcoholics

Okay. Alcoholism is a genetic disease. I would rather they filter themselves out than make fit people live under tyranny. Although I would support keyhole solutions out of charity, I can't stand the parasitism of ruining everything for most people so that a sickly minority gets catered to.

Young children often don’t have great temptation control. I don’t think having shitty parents means that children should be offered vices at 8 year olds. There is always a temptation between freedom and security.

Same logic here. Kids with bad parents have parents with bad genes. But they get their genes from their parents. No more taking from beautiful ones to provide protection from selection for the hässlich. I would support keyhole solutions out of noblesse oblige, but everyone showing their identity card to every website so neglectful people don't see a nude body when they are young is not that.

To be clear you support like genociding 99% of Americans? Everyone genes have something like alcoholism in them. And with modern technology targeting human fault points becomes increasingly easy. Gambling on your phone. 2-clicks drone delivered alcohol and drugs.

And a lot of things people do that are bad also have socially desirable attributes. With alcohol it’s only a slight difference between being life of the party socially talented guy and a life ruined by alcoholism. Some could even say that’s just the difference between Joe and Hunter Biden. Gambling is also very similar. Degenerate gambler and hedge fund manager is a fairly similar personality trait.

There is no way freedom would genocide anywhere near 99% of Americans. Given it's supposed to be the land of the free, that would be quite ironic, anyway.

IMO founding fathers didn’t deal with the modern advertising and marketing state or dopamine drips from phones. And in this thread we are specific talking about smartphones and children. Maybe 99% is too high but the ability to get addicted is much higher now. A few years ago lifetimes risks of dying from a fentanyl OD was running 2-3%.

And 2-3% is acceptable. That's close to the bottom 2-3%, and they do it to themselves. It's terrible dysgenics to save them from themselves.

More comments

Sure, I think young people should not have open access to the internet, but I'm also not willing to do what it takes to accomplish that.

It's the realm of progressives to ignore these kinds of trade-offs, and to focus obstinately on the thing they want while ignoring what it takes to get there.

Children's internet access can be mitigated without really invading privacy.

Better parental controls, phone bans in schools, and propaganda "the free internet is bad for children". I think those would get the most young people off the free internet for most of their youth, which is enough for significant improvement to society, even with a few (with negligent parents and/or ambition) still online.

Maybe it can be mitigated without invading privacy, but that's not the world we live in, and that's not what people are proposing, is it? What we're getting is full online ID for everyone.

Yes, the proposals are bad.

But I think it's easier to persuade with "age verification is fine, but this proposal is bad because it unnecessarily hurts privacy (and won't even work), here's a better one" than "age verification is bad".

If you think bot accusations are bad now, imagine if the great firewall fell and 1 billion Chinese internet users suddenly inundated socials.

You mention how the barrier to entry corresponds to the degradation of the internet and I am reminded that someone pointed out that the popularization of "Dead Internet Theory" perfectly corresponds with the adoption of the internet by a huge number of Africans and Indians.

Part of the nature of libertarian wild west ethos is that it gravitates to places where there is no establishment yet. So don't waste your time in an established domain pining for the old days. Focus on new domains instead.

The US is obviously not a hold-out for freedom of information, as the USG would happily enforce IP law upon the world if it could (as orchestrated by the mouse). AI is a bit of a miracle in this regard because it came into existence faster than IP law could contain it.

Ironically the most "authoritarian" governements are some of the last bastions of hope for freedom in various fundamental domains: I'm thinking about the pricipled stand that Putin made with Snowden when a weaker country may have extradicted him (remember how few countries actually offered asylum to him (none in Europe btw)?), and China is really a darling when it comes to ignoring US ip law (ip law essentially being state-enforced artificial-scarcity on an inherently abundant medium), and it is former soviet territories that allow for true freedom of information via Anna's archive, Sci-hub, LibGen, etc.

The real libertarian frontier of AI is local open-weight models/paradigms(Hermes, OpenCode) which China is much more culturally-aligned with at the moment, at least for base models (I was about to say "GLM not withstanding" here until I checked and found out that Z.ai is indeed also a chinese company)

Many of these authoritarian policies emerging in California/Europe are partly an emulation of China. I have heard it said that China is the only government that took the internet seriously from its inception as a governed entity.

Even being somewhat libertatian-minded, I greatly admire the fact that Xi can label OnlyFans as socially-damaging "Western degeneracy" and wipe it in an instant from infecting China.

I tend to prefer using a decent LLM guide me through various textual analyses of literature that I have pulled from LibGen than have reddit-level arguments online. I think many young people are realizing that interactions with LLMs can often be more meaningful and healthier than an average interaction with strangers on any established forum in the World Wide Web.

I don't think Africans and Indians ruined the mainstream internet, I think it was "normies". The internet used to be dominated by autistic nerds like us, so it appealed to us; now we're the minority (like in real life), so it appeals to the majority.

You can still find communities which cater to autistic nerds, like this one. I think the answer is not censorship but gatekeeping. If California polices the internet, they won't police it how nerds want, they'll police it how (Californian) politicians and lobbyists want. Instead, on the free internet, one can create a community that excludes "normies" through culture, moderation, and as last resort invite-only.

The two problems I'm aware of are DDoS, but in practice CDNs like Cloudflare or Epik and bot-detectors like Anubis have defended so far; and doxxing, but most people want privacy for themselves, and many have worse skeletons in their closet than whatever you said, so that may be transient.

Africans, Indians, etc. are to normies what normies are to tech-nerds.

When people say "normie", they approximately mean "the masses of regular people in the Anglosphere" which is a global minority and techliterate (especially in English-first tech ecosystems) compared to the masses of people elsewhere.

The internet has formalized equality, so if a similar percentage of people in Africa and India join the internet as the US, then there will be many times more African and Indian users than native-English users.

But English communities have decayed, including ones I doubt have many English-speaking third-worlders. And language barriers keep non-English-speakers in separate communities.

I always wonder what’s going on in non-Anglo social media, like African and Indian Facebook(?) Maybe they’re similar, but then I expect the cause is mass-media exported from Anglo countries, not vice versa.

As an example from my own experience, there is a niche of Youtube electrical engineering instruction that is largely dominated by English-speaking Indians.

I agree that since the Anglosphere has more of a culture of media-creation/video-creation, most of the well-produced, viral content will continue from here in the near-future.

Don't discount the effects of a changing passive audience: they determine what gets popular.

India currently has the largest YouTube Userbase with 518 million compared to the US's 259 million.

You're vastly overstating how strong the great firewall is and how hard it's policed. I spent a decent amount of time in China and plenty of upper-middle class Chinese have Instagram accounts and the like. They just tend to prefer their domestic equivalents since it interfaces better with their technology and how they see the world. If Chinese English literacy were higher you'd likely see more crossover, but the Firewall is less of a singular cause of divided internet than the language gap and China's internet having evolved into its own different shape during the period when the Firewall was more rigorously enforced.

Hell, there's jokes amongst a lot of Chinese netizens that Twitter is a porn app since that's 98% of what they use it for

I have never been there but I always got the impression that the Chinese government doesn't really care that much what the relatively affluent and educated can access think or do, but cares greatly that it can control algorithmic feeds of the "masses". Is this accurate? It honestly sounds like a better and more acceptable solution to me as European/Anglo governments come nearer every day to the total VPN ban and ID verification model of the internet.

So the governments come up with weird dystopian schemes of censoring and tracking this stuff while other kinds of probably actually harmful stuff (neurotic and mentally ill women amplifying their neuroses about men and society, viz. the "Angry Young Woman", race-grievance amplification, various untrue "tax the rich stuff" verging into blood libel and calls for assassinations) is left untouched, amplified or even supported. Moral panics are nothing new I suppose.

One fairly-recent thing is how obviously fake a lot of this is. There are a ton of accounts on X which will make inflammatory comments on US culture war stuff or wanting to tax wealth, often implying a personal stake... and said accounts turn out to be located in South Asia or Africa. I presume this is paid shit-stirring. Probably the shit-stirrers will smarten up and use apparently-American accounts, but for now the fakery is on display.

They're engagement farmers trying to use toxoplasmosis to get elonbucks. I thought that was consensus?

Did we ever find out if Double D Geopolitics was actually American?

Paid shit-stirring has been a thing since the Ancient Greeks. Back in those days, at least your drachma stayed in the local economy!

I think obviousness is the point, similar to obvious scams. Smart people already filter them, the vast majority who'd be influenced as intended are too stupid to notice or care. Then the less obvious trolls are harder to detect.

I would be more motivated to fight against this if bot-infestation was not such a massive issue on social media.

You say that many are accused of being "foreign shills" on social media, but is that really wrong? We already know how lopsided posting on reddit is (with 1% of users generating 40% of posts), and if you throw in some well funded astroturf campaign, you have basically replaced all intersting common dialogue with something entirely else.

I increasingly find social media so exhausting, there is so little room for actually exchanging ideas. Post are usually pushing an agenda, or increasingly just bots arguing with each other. Of course I dont actively support censorship or online ID-laws, but also do have less fucks to give.

How come you’re posting under a pseudonym and not your real name? This forum would not exist if all social medial had to be tied to real human users.

Given the number of people here who think this place exists to pump their substack numbers, it might still exist anyway.

substance

I assume this is a typo for "Substack".

Thanks. Fixed

I would be more motivated to fight against this if bot-infestation was not such a massive issue on social media.

You think digital ID will actually help to solve the issue? I don't really see how that would happen.

If every user is tied to a real-person ID, then that would be true for bots as well. Since there is a finite amount of ID's, it would be impossible to just spin up a new bot once one gets banned; At some point you run out of ID's to use.

Platforms will require europeans to do id verification where legally required, meanwhile bots based overseas will be unaffected.

That, I suppose, is an issue I did not consider.

I don't see much point if age verification is only implemented on a country by country basis. That way we still get the foreign interference and inflammatory trolls that just spin up a new account. The worst of both worlds really.

Although if the argument for it is mainly "we need to protect the children against Andrew Tate", then I could maybe see European governments doing it this way regardless.

The push for ID verification does seem to be happening in every western country at basically the same time though. So if it does go through, I have some hope that it will at least be a global thing.

At the cost of the chilling effect of the government being able to correlate your posts better. Mind you they already can probably for the vast majority of unsophisticated users so who knows, maybe it doesn't matter.

Sure, I agree that the surveillance aspect is a major point against ID verification, but the poster I responded to was asking how this would help combat bots.

Why do you think they'll snip bots though? They're pretty useful to the establishment.

Last I checked, most moderators were volunteers. Even Reddit, huge as it is, is still largely community driven. If a moderation team has an anti-bot stance, then I would expect the place run by that team to contain significantly less bots once ID-bans become available.

So you think the digital ID will be public for all to see, so volunteer moderators will be able to make decisions like thar? I doubt it, such a solution would cause massive chaos.

Moderators don't need to see the ID to ban it. Only the website does. Assuming ID is mandatory, then the website would have to be able to see it in order to verify the user is old enough. The moderators would send a request for the website to ban the ID of the user. The rest is automated.

And in any case the information on the ID isn't legally sensitive, so BigTechCorp could give itself permission to share with volunteer moderators, and immunise itself against accidental breaches by rogue volunteer moderators, with a one-paragraph change to a clickwrap ToU (in the US) or $20,000 worth of GDPR paperwork (in the EU).

It may not be wrong but it's also a bit of a thought-terminating cliché. Anyone who you disagree with is a pernicious putinbot or whatever. It's people discovering the island of quokkas that was the open internet and then poisoning the commons for marginal geopolitical gains. I am not saying this is to be fought, just observing.

The problem is that even the people who are agreeing with me are bots! And now I cant even get any meaningful insight from them. I have tried to find out how significant the opposition to data centers are in Michigan for example (not just polling, but actual hard opposition that would make people change their support for a candidate). Obviously the anger is real, but how widespread, does it go beyond leftist for example? Will Whitmer support tank due to this (she is very pro data centers)

But it all drowns out in the bot wars between supporters of the 3 candidates in the senate dem primary who accuse each other of being jihadist or zionist shills. The governors race is obviously more important for this issue, but since that race has a clear front runner, there is much less discourse.

I do feel like people overstate the Putinbot issue insofar as mainstream politics is concerned. I do feel like there's a lot more engagement farming than expected, though, or atleast the Karmelo Anthony trial is like the only time I've felt that Karmelo supporters can't really actually exist in sufficient population and ignorance as Twitter seems to indicate.

Australia and Britain now have age-verification laws which require everyone to submit ID.

A quibble, but most of the big US websites have implemented schemes where you can age-verify an account by logging on from a phone with an obviously-adult (as detected by AI) FaceID. Only babyfaces and newly-minted 18-year-olds need to submit ID.

Rupert Lowe has published on twitter, The rape gang inquiry report

A quick introduction is that for decades in the UK, Pakistani Muslims have been systematically raping young white girls. The police have ignored this at best or helped cover it up at worst because this highlights an inconvenient-to-the-narrative reality about this group of people.

The claims from this report are not some of the most horrific things I have ever read, but by far the most horrific things I have ever read. It's not close. Imagine the worst, most fucked up things you can imagine seeing in "2 girls 1 cup" adjacent abuse porn (I don't know if there is a name for this, but like...where the point seems to be the humiliation and degradation, and often physical harm of the women involved), and then imagine that this was being done at scale to young white (specifically white) girls in the UK for decades by Muslims men from Pakistan.

The report estimates approximately 250,000 young white girls (again, specifically white, they were specifically targeting young white girls) were raped by these men.

Here are my questions/thoughts on this:

  1. Are the men of the UK the most absolutely cucked human beings to ever exist on planet earth ever in the history of time? Is there another time in history where this would have even been remotely tolerated? You allowed a foreign rape-brigade to rape an entire generation of your children, and the response has been essentially nothing.

  2. Is this actually true? I admit I don't know who Rupert Lowe is. Is this a serious person?

  3. What will happen as a result of this? I can't honestly believe that it's nothing, is it?

  4. What should happen? How do you even begin to prosecute something of this scale in a way that doesn't resemble some of the darkest times in human history?

  5. To that point: is this the darkest point in the history of the UK? What would be worse than this?

Most of the stories were previously reported, the new reports are actually quite limited although I appreciated their collation. The report is horrific, although barely more so than many of those published over the last 12 (!) years since the scandal broke. Over that period, of course, net immigration from beyond Europe effectively quintupled, only recently (in the last year) beginning a slow fall, but still far higher than it was in 2014. There is outrage and there is action. Nothing will happen.

Rupert Lowe quit Nigel Farage’s political bloc out of personal disagreement and has now positioned himself to his right. His main effect is that if he can continue to draw 5-7% polling support, then in combination with Farage’s group (~24%), and the Tories who continue to hover around 20-22%, they will split the conservative vote (probably an absolute majority of the voting public) and hand Labour another 5 years in absolute power in 2029.

So we have that to look forward to, which is nice.

Farage seemingly still supports Muslims in the UK as a class. He is okay with a multi cultural society as long as it remains slightly British slightly longer.

Rupert Lowe quit Nigel Farage’s political bloc out of personal disagreement

Um...I thought Farage defenestrated him and literally called the cops on him? Did I miss something?

At that point, it's war. If you're gonna screw people over, make sure they'll stay that way. Seems like Farage's miscalculation as much as anything.

Lowe did an interview where he called Farage a cult leader, said he didn’t have what it took to be PM. Farage discovered or invented depending on your view some bullying rumors and used them as pretext to remove him. It was during that growing spat that the police were called.

But that only starts at the middle of the story. They’re both big egos and Farage has always been a solo leader.

You can still criticise Lowe, surely, for taking actions that make it more likely that people he opposes will be elected and will govern his country. If he thinks Reform would be better in government than Labour, and his actions increase the odds of Labour winning, then isn't he undermining what he himself believes is best for the country out of a personal grudge? It seems reasonable to criticise that.

This is all downstream of Britain having an awful FPTP multi-party electoral system, of course.

Labour is unpopular and it's a long wait till an election. No one knows what'll happen or what pacts will be made.

I think what Lowe would say is that Farage chucked him for being too radical (serious about his positions in his view) and that he's trying to do what Labour did and slide into power off the back of an unpopular party without having to make any concrete but unpopular promises.

Given they've already had one set of Tory politicians promise one thing and then perform a total betrayal it's not insane to be distrustful. Why not pull a Farage and attack him from the right and prevent him from just taking his base for granted and becoming the new Tories?

Well, 2rafa said why but I can see why he wouldn't just slink off into ignominy and trust the competence and good will of someone he think smeared him to cut off any potential challenge to just betraying the base again.

they will split the conservative vote (probably an absolute majority of the voting public)

The only general election since WW2 where right-wing parties got a majority of the popular vote was 2015. (They might have done in the 1951 election if every seat in Northern Ireland had been contested). The estimated national vote shares from the 2025 and 2026 local elections don't show a right-wing popular vote majority. (I haven't checked further back). Of the major UK pollsters, only More in Common shows a right-wing polling majority.

So it looks like there is a narrow left-wing majority (split between Labour, the Lib Dems, the Greens, the Scottish and Welsh nationalists and various minor far-left parties). Not that this matters under FPTP, of course.

Are the men of the UK the most absolutely cucked human beings to ever exist on planet earth ever in the history of time? Is there another time in history where this would have even been remotely tolerated? You allowed a foreign rape-brigade to rape an entire generation of your children, and the response has been essentially nothing.

The mistake here is to assume there's widespread ethnic consciousness among native Brits. I don't think that someone like Keir Starmer and most of the men who vote for him consider the victims to be their children in any meaningful sense - it probably registers for them in the same way that hearing about children being abused in Afghanistan does. As for the men who did want to do something about it, a large part of the scandal was that the authorities blocked them from doing so.

Is this actually true?

My gut instinct is that the figure of 250 000 sounds higher than I would have thought credible, although this might be wishful thinking. I admit I haven't read the report (this whole matter is so grim that I generally try to steer clear of the details). The fact that this seems to have been going on for decades though does make it more believable.

I admit I don't know who Rupert Lowe is. Is this a serious person?

Leader of Restore UK, the party who think Reform are too soft on immigration and would rather implement large-scale remigration. I think he's serious enough that this report will add some fuel to the continued migration of normies away from labour/conservative and towards Reform.

What will happen as a result of this? I can't honestly believe that it's nothing, is it?

I don't think there'll be rioting and/or mayhem. The people who would want to are too diffuse, and the authorities would come down like a ton of bricks. Any real impact will likely only be felt at the next election.

What should happen? How do you even begin to prosecute something of this scale in a way that doesn't resemble some of the darkest times in human history?

In an ideal world, all the people involved are appropriately punished and the victims and their families are offered restitution in whatever form is possible. As for how that could happen, well, it can't, because it's not really compatible with how the UK functions as a political entity. The UK is a multi-ethnic administrative and economic zone* with Muslims as the most favoured tribe and where inter-ethnic conflict is a perpetual issue to be managed (maybe this is true of most western nations these days, idk). Addressing these crimes in any way that someone like me or you would presumably see as just would require a complete insutitional re-orientation away from this model at every level. This is probably what the main political fight over the next few decades in the UK is going to be.

*I should mention here that I come from a family of migrants to the UK, although I like to think you wouldn't guess it if you met me IRL.

The mistake here is to assume there's widespread ethnic consciousness among native Brits.

From my (American) perspective, this seems like half the problem: the race/immigration elements are obvious, but the intra-Anglo class elements seem just as insidious, and less commented on. These complaints were, in part it seems, discarded because the girls in question were lower-class and "that's just how they are".

It feels at least a bit like how the opioid epidemic in the US was ignored as long as it stayed in rural areas and effected poors: "that's just how they are". Even today, it's not hard to find comments from Coastal Elites (tm) expressing indifference to outcomes in "flyover states" or "MAGA country".

he people involved are appropriately punished and the victims and their families are offered restitution in whatever form is possible. As for how that could happen, well, it can't, because it's not really compatible with how the UK functions as a political entity. The UK is a multi-ethnic administrative and economic zone* with Muslims as the most favoured tribe and where inter-ethnic conflict is a perpetual issue to be managed (maybe this is true of most western nations these days, idk). Addressing these crimes in any way that someone like me or you would presumably see as just would require a complete insutitional re-orientation away from this model at every level. This is probably what the main political fight over the next few decades in the UK is going to be.

This. They were broadly treated like child prostitutes and the social workers and NHS staff patched them up and sent them back about their business.

I'm sure most of the right would be all on board rounding up all the junkies off the streets and sending them to "rehab.". But you're right that if it's out of sight, most people couldn't care less.

My gut instinct is that the figure of 250 000 sounds higher than I would have thought credible, although this might be wishful thinking. I admit I haven't read the report (this whole matter is so grim that I generally try to steer clear of the details). The fact that this seems to have been going on for decades though does make it more believable.

The figure of 250,000 victims is not credible. The report says it was calculated by extrapolating the victim counts of the Rotherham and Telford gangs to a national scale, but neither the report nor the Reform peer who originally came up with the number shows their working. A more serious problem is that Rotherham was the first Pakistani rape gang to be busted precisely because they were exceptionally prolific - there have now been thorough local investigations into Pakistani grooming gangs in about a dozen towns, and Rotherham and Telford are an order of magnitude worse than the typical case. My back of the envelope estimate is that if you extrapolate from the whole sample of properly investigated cases rather than just the worst two you get a number around 100,000. And if you assume that the convenience sample of "gangs who have been busted" skews more prolific than average (which I think it probably does), then you get an even lower number.

None of this matters to the politics, of course. The median voter is innumerate, the median Reform-curious voter is even less numerate, and caring about factor-of-two errors in political messaging is considered autistic even by numerate people.

That's more precise than anything we get out of Ukraine and Gaza. Good enough for government work, I believe is the phrase.

People even feeling bold enough to 'fact check' this kinda stuff under their own names whilst even relatively marginal pushback on Gaza would get you deplatformed

Very good points. Extrapolating like that is very sloppy.

And still, it speaks volumes that anyone having had to do with these gangs have not been either gorily lynched or swiftly executed. I find it hard to contradict those who call the UK 'cucked' or dooomed, and similar countries with similar issues. It really does seem like the peoples of Europe are going very gently into that dark night.

A few thoughts:

  1. It is assumed that Rotherham is the most prolific. The report talks about London and how the mayor there has denied any such problem in London while more evidence is coming out. Is it possible that other areas were simply more tight lipped than Rotherham?

  2. It seems with larger populations, it would be easier to “hide.” Not sure how this cuts (ie maybe larger amount but smaller per capita or larger amounts and larger per capita because the police have other things to worry about like people tweeting).

  3. Who did the investigation I. Those other towns? Was it “I investigated myself and turns out I did okay?”

How is even 100,000 acceptable? I'm sorry this community has tacitly supported this behaviour and activity. They have no right to exist in the UK. If I was in power I would be telling everyone of Pakistani origin they have six months to fuck off, before I force them to fuck off.

Anyone on the left who opposes can fucking join them. It's absurd they are more worried about minorities than they are against people of lower class. It's long past time to bring back the death penalty, and honestly it needs to be used liberally. Its time to stop being a nanny state and time to give freedom, but also actually enforce consequences for bad actions.

The way this number was calculated and is being bandied about makes me actually wonder if it was placed as fact-checking bait. It gives the anti-rape-gang people the grounds to ostentatiously complain about splitting hairs, e.g. "Oh OK, so it's probably not literally a quarter million. Maybe it's off by 10 and it's only 25k. How many underage victims of rape gangs do YOU find to be okay?" It's somewhat akin to the utterly absurd claim that 1/5 - 1/3 of women going college in the USA would be raped, which fortunately seems to have mostly disappeared.

I think this is one of the most important problems our civilization is facing, but I'd really like to get better backing for the 250k stat if we're going to use it; I think it might be true, but it's such an extraordinary claim that extraordinary evidence is merited to make it unimpeachable rather than merely shocking. That's approaching one percent of the current population of white British women, and easily far larger than a percent if we even begin to control for age cohort and affected region.

Bear in mind that the 250k figure includes victims from the 1970s up to the present. I'd be a lot more suspicious if it was e.g. 250k victims in the space of a year.

UPDATE: A closer reading suggests I was mistaken. Mea culpa.

Also funny that people who were extraordinarily credulous for claims like the Canadian Indigenous Reservation School genocide or acting like Black Deaths in Custody were about 100x higher than they actually are can suddenly do basic mathematics and modeling to contradict this particular issue.

Likewise "hundreds of thousands of Gazan children are going to starve to death in the next 48 hours!"

'DOGE instantly killed 30 Million people via cutting funding' and whatnot

Is it that funny? Most people require nothing to believe something that confirms their biases but require iron-clad evidence to believe something which contradicts their worldview. Liberals and progressives included.

I loathe immigration. When I first heard 250k, my reaction was “is that number real.” Why would someone’s first reaction be “Catholic schools murdered a bunch of native Americans?”

Substitute “political bias” for “scientific understanding”. If I point a scanner gun at a metallic box and it says “aluminum” I’d assume it’s correct, if it says “xenon” (gas except at extremely cold temperatures) I’d assume the gun is broken and run further tests.

The main difference is that politics is based less on solid evidence, and much less on reason from first principles.

If I point a scanner gun at a metallic box and it says “aluminum” I’d assume it’s correct, if it says “xenon” (gas except at extremely cold temperatures) I’d assume the gun is broken and run further tests.

I saw Project Hail May too.

I'd argue most conservative factchecker types tended to be more motivated by autistic desires for accuracy rather than necessarily choosing to go along with their side's narrative on other things.

That's still an average of a small classroom full of new victims every day for fifty years, and I'm guessing it wasn't at a constant rate over those fifty years. (A regular-sized classroom if you're accounting for it just being the girls.)

Rephrasing: this is numerically roughly equivalent to if the UK had established a formal policy in the 1970s that every day, a random class would be selected by lottery and all of its white girls would be sold into sex slavery overseas, and that policy had continued ever since. Maybe it's an alternate timeline where the Ottomans won the World Wars. I don't know.

Its not just the girls.

Oh, I'm sure, but that stat was about the girls. And I was already taking for granted that abusing the girls to that degree is going to indirectly fuck up the boys too; even if we unrealistically assume that you happen to be subjected to no violent crime yourself, what's it going to do to you to grow up as a boy in a community where the majority of your female peers are compelled into sex slavery by foreign invaders?

I continue to be baffled by the "foreign invaders" line as if being compelled to sex slavery to locals is totally lindy.

What's so baffling? An intra-ingroup crime is an individual matter, a cross-group crime is a collective matter, everyone knows this deep down, including the perpetrators.

Even progressives acknowledge this in an inverted way. The drama over Harvey Weinstein was a lot bigger than the fallout from the rape gang, and it's because they know these two things are not the same.

If I recall the reports of Rotherham correctly, the typical victim was from the underclass. You might as well ask why the men of Victorian Britain allowed the conditions described in Oliver Twist and the like.

The difference being that, as far as I know, poor people in Victorian Britain were not subject to such levels of police state anarcho-tyranny as modern Britain. Being left to your own devices and ending up victimized by people stronger than you is one thing. Being actively and racially profiled by the police such that if you defend yourselves against people weaker than you, or even speak out against them, you get arrested is an entirely new level of victimization.

I do somewhat agree that the cuck label doesn't apply here due to class distinctions.

The men of Victorian Britain were straightforward in their class bias and sincerely believed the lower classes were fundamentally-distinct in terms of inclination and potential, and talked about this openly.

Obviously everyone still understands this on some level but in the current context it must be denied at least publicly, and I'm surprised to find that such attitudes persist to such a degree as to result in the lack of outrage we see today.

And yet the same logic isn't applied to immigrants? I'm not trying to be cute when I say that this confuses me.

Like, I can throw cynical epicycles at the problem (something something signaling) but at some point I'm just speculating and every answer seems to raise further questions.

It probably is correct to say, though, that the British upper class considers itself distinct from the rest of the population, which it does not care about the welfare of that much, and that class does not track neatly to race or ethnicity. Rishi Sunak is upper class - he went to Winchester, and has a first from Oxford. He's in the club. The people in the club care about other people in the club, you know, the right sorts of people, made not only by descent but also by education, lifestyle, and even accent.

In this case, both the perpetrators and the victims are lower class, and therefore unimportant. Class solidarity is much stronger than ethnic solidarity. British uppers do not consider themselves 'one people' with British lowers.

It probably is correct to say, though, that the British upper class considers itself distinct from the rest of the population, which it does not care about the welfare of that much,

Part of what happened is that this is true, fractally. Under normal consequences, the white British respectable working/lower-middle class - critically, including the police - hate white British chavs at least as much us toffs do. (All bets are off in the face of a foreign-coded common enemy, or a tabloid-driven moral panic about sex crime) It took two things going wrong to create this crisis - one was a decision to tolerate crime by ethnic Pakistanis to avoid being called racist, and the other was a culture were sexual offences against underage chavettes had been effectively decriminalised regardless of the race of the perpetrators. On an initial skim of the Lowe report, my first reaction was shock at just how many of the girls had been raped by (presumptively white British) family members or "stepfathers" before the Pakistani gangs got to them. Nobody involved with either the official or the Lowe enquiries found those rapes, or the non-prosecution of the perps, surprising or worrying.

If I recall the reports of Rotherham correctly, the typical victim was from the underclass.

This leads us to the deeper origin of the atrocity in question: the belief that humanity can be divided into Lives That Matter and Lives That Don't Matter. Some of the Muslamic Ray Guns made the division at 'Muslims' v. 'infidels'; some of them, the ones who victimised children of Pakistani extraction, drew the line at 'members of my clan' v. 'everyone else'; the police who ignored the issue saw it as 'respectable people' v. 'chavs'. But if your solution is to concede that pernicious belief, and merely to move the boundary to 'white Anglo-Saxons' v. 'brown foreigners', you are not just letting in the proverbial camel's nose, you are admitting almost the entire animal and trying to exclude the tip of its tail.

The correct solution is to put all the progeny of Adam and Eve into the 'Lives That Matter' category; if you need an outgroup to define yourselves against, let it be the Nature which wants half of all children, the white just as much as the brown, black, yellow, and red, to die before they are grown.

State capacity. This is the sort of thing that used to be dealt with by vigilante action, or even by revolution. Neither is possible any more; the state is too good at self-preservation. So if the state wants Pakistani rape gangs to go unpunished, by and large they will... and any vigilantes will be vigorously prosecuted if not accidentally killed awaiting trial.

Sometimes the partial toleration of native criminal gangs can reduce the influence of foreign criminal gangs, like the way probiotic bacteria outcompete dangerous bacteria for nutrients.

The Japanese seem to have long tolerated the presence of their native yakuza until very recently. The yakuza would probably not tolerate the existence of Pakistani rape gangs in Japan. I believe the yakuza do engage in human trafficking, but that seems more focused on foreign southeast asian women serving a primarily Japanese clientele.

Separately, it seems that only some white, western democracies are susceptible to this particular problem. It doesn't seem to happen anywhere else. So yes, the current generation of white UK men might be the most cucked men ever, so far. At least with colonialism the subject people's women were coerced by some type of force, the white UK men have no such excuse.

Sometimes the partial toleration of native criminal gangs can reduce the influence of foreign criminal gangs, like the way probiotic bacteria outcompete dangerous bacteria for nutrients.

The British example would be organised football hooliganism. Steven Yaxley-Lemmon isn't a football hooligan, but he chose "Tommy Robinson" as a nom-de-guerre because he wanted people to think he was. There have been multiple cases where have-a-go heroes who took down stabby Muslims in London turned out to have learned to fight with the Millwall Bushwhackers, who also organised a defence of Eltham High Street during the 2011 London riots.

"Why didn't the Millwall Bushwhackers pogrom a Muslim rape gang operating on their turf?" is a question nobody is asking, and possibly should be. In the case of of Millwall specifically, I assume part of the answer is that the the Bangladeshi Muslims in our part of London are an order of magnitude less rapey than the Pakistani Muslims who dominate the cases identified by both the official and Lowe inquiries.

If we leave the natives out of it, tolerating criminal gangs of better-behaved immigrants as a tool against worse-behaved immigrants is something that did happen - Sikh vigilante groups effectively defended their turf against both the 2011 rioters and the Muslim rape gangs, with the authorities being apparently unbothered. (This attitude is part of why much of the British right waited to see which way the political winds were blowing before coming out against kirpans after the Nowak murder).

Millwall Bushwhackers

Huh, fun to have context on why Bernard chooses Millwall supporters to punch him out on Black Books.

Sometimes the partial toleration of native criminal gangs can reduce the influence of foreign criminal gangs, like the way probiotic bacteria outcompete dangerous bacteria for nutrients.

Indeed, there's actually an even bigger native gang in Japan than the Yakuza that runs a protection racket over the entire home islands.

AFAIK the London crime scene has had a colorful series of ethnic upheavals on major drug trafficking markets in which the 'Roadmen' class tend to only be involved in relatively petty and antisocial crime since the Albanians have come in whilst way more organized and capable of escalating force on anything that's actually durable and worth doing longterm as a criminal enterprise.

Apparently this kinda thing is basically how the Mafia got started.

That's the whole basis of a protection racket, right? Sure, you're paying for "protection" from the mafia, but it's bad for their business if someone paying for said protection does get harmed by a different gang.

Recent years in the US have made me mourn the death of organized crime and its replacement with disorganized crime.

Allegedly, the origins of Cosa Nostra (though almost certainly untrue) was when a French sergeant tried to rape a young married Sicilian woman. Her husband killed the French and then the mafia protected the husband from the occupying French.

The police in the UK have a very bad track record of caring of what happens to the UK's poor and vulnerable. This is more about class than anything else.

As a comparison there's the case of Fred West and his wife Rose West. They raped, tortured and killed and dismembered their victims. It is the most heinous criminal case I know about, that I stopped listening to true crime after hearing this one. One victim went straight to the police after being raped, but because she didn't want to press charges the Fred West was fined 50 pounds. The police failed not just once, not only several dozen times, but more than a hundreds of times to do their due diligence.

I don't recommend reading the details of what they did.

The women that Fred West and his wife killed came from the same crop as Rotherham case.

With how global the world is it can be easy to forget that there's a lot of people being forgotten right here, and what's being done to them.

The police in the UK have a very bad track record of caring of what happens to the UK's poor and vulnerable. This is more about class than anything else.

If it was a class issue where are the white british rape gangs? Why are they all pakistanis? Why are the victims all white?

Here is a quote directly telling you that the police covered this up because they were worried about race relations:

"In Rotherham, a senior police officer told a distressed father that the town “would erupt” if the routine abuse of white children by Pakistani heritage men became public knowledge"

A girl is raped by an "Asian" man, she escapes, flags down a taxi driven by another "Asian", who then rapes her again.

Does this seem like a class issue to you? Do you think that a white taxi driver would have raped this girl?

Its a class issue that when a pakistani calls up his pakistani friends and with the promise of gang raping a british child his pakistani friends don't immediately report him to the police?

Its a class issue certain not white demographics commit rape at rates orders of magnitudes higher than the native brit population?

As a comparison there's the case of Fred West and his wife Rose West.

Did Fred West call up all his friends to join in? Did a bunch of Fred West's friends join in when offered? Do you think that the typical lower class brit would join in on gang raping a child if offered the chance? Did the police cover up Fred West's crimes because they were scared of race riots?

Fred West's count topped out just over a dozen, and he was a native son of the land. Meanwhile the Muslims victimize 20,000x the number of girls as Fred, and they have no reason to be there in the first place.

There's a scale here that you have chosen to pretend doesn't exist. And then there's the point that we tolerate from family what we don't from neighbors or strangers.

And then there's the point that we tolerate from family what we don't from neighbors or strangers.

And my point is that we need to stop doing that.

If everyone follows an ethic of 'lenient rules for Us, strict rules for Them', humanity falls into the abyss of endless conflict. It is only with a universalist ethical system, in which the permissibility of an action does not depend on race, religion, or rank, that we stand any chance of reaching the stars.

And if everyone but whites follow that ethic, and whites are the only ones that don't, then what happens?

I do not live in the world we ought to have. I live in the world as it is. And as it is right now, there are literal hordes of foreigners who will gladly swarm over my homeland and have no compunctions about protecting their own and exploiting the outsiders.

Nobody else thinks this way, and if you're the only one that does, then it's suicide.

And if everyone but whites follow that ethic, and whites are the only ones that don't, then what happens?

By setting a good example, you convince everyone else to follow, bringing us to a world where people of every colour and creed work together for mankindish goodgain.

That may seem like a long shot to you, but the odds are a damn sight better than they would be given the eternal existential zero-sum racial warfare advocated for by the failed painter.

By setting a good example, you convince everyone else to follow,

This is fantasy. It is simply not true, and you have no reason to believe it's true beyond faith and hope.

I'm not saying you can't change people's behavior, but it isn't going to be be example alone. It must include punishment and consequences for failure. You will never convince everyone, and so you must, eventually coerce.

I don't know how you can look at the world, see what's happening in Australia and Ireland and France and every other white country, and then repeat this dreck. It's willful ignorance, it's head in the sand. It's a long shot, so long as to be impossible, which is why I'm not betting on it, and certainly not relying on it for the future of my children and grandchildren and descendants.

I'm not saying it's guaranteed to work; I'm saying it has a possibility of working, whereas the chances of a good outcome from a constant battle between racial groups are as near as makes no difference to zero.

If you go into a casino and bet on a single spin of a roulette wheel, you probably won't win if you bet on any of the numbers from 0-36, but you'll definitely lose if you bet on 93.

And my point is that we need to stop doing that.

Then why not start by telling all the feminists and progressives of various stripes, that they should be at least as outraged about this as they were about Harvey Weinstein and George Floyd (arguably as much as both combined)?

I have. I have never supported cultural relativism, and have long argued against the pernicious notion that a vile act done by a white man somehow becomes excusable when done by a Person Of Colour.

I stand against anyone, alt-right or ctrl-left, who claims that a thing forbidden one person ought be permitted another, solely on the grounds of their respective race, class, gender, religious affiliation, &c., or that blame for the misdeeds of one person ought fall on others sharing the aforementioned characteristics.

Sure. That’s all well and good. But importantly most of the grooming gangs weren’t full of white people. And yes, white people act terrible. But the rape gangs were specifically racially and religiously homogenous. We shouldn’t bury our heads to this.

We shouldn’t bury our heads to this.

If Fulan al-Fulani commits numerous acts of of sexual assault and grievous bodily harm, we shouldn't bury our heads to it, and Mr al-Fulani should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law; I do not disagree with you on this.

However, if Dhuhath al-Dhuhathi has not committed any such crimes, he does not deserve to be treated as bearing responsibility for the actions of Mr al-Fulani.

I would not want to be held accountable for things I didn't do, merely because the people who did them all looked like me; therefore, the Golden Rule precludes subjecting Mr al-Dhuhathi to the same fate.

So let’s say you are designing an immigration system. Let’s say you want some small amount of immigration but a lot of people are coming to your country.

Are you going to make decisions based on limited info and discriminate against the group who commit crimes at massive rates or will you “treat everyone like an individual?”

I have

Where? I haven't seen you trying to convince progressives that they should be as upset about this as they were about #MeToo, and what you describe in the following sentences changes the subject completely.

Are the men of the UK the most absolutely cucked human beings to ever exist on planet earth ever in the history of time? Is there another time in history where this would have even been remotely tolerated? You allowed a foreign rape-brigade to rape an entire generation of your children, and the response has been essentially nothing.

Are these women meaningfully their women at this point? Would you ruin your life for someone who considers you despicable? I am sure fathers (if present at all, this is all lower-class people) should have done more but the people in those gangs probably knew how to pick out the vulnerable ones. You can't kill chivalry and then expect no consequenes.

In a particularly lurid case the police were summoned and arrested a father for trying to "liberate"/get his girl back from a gang's hideout several times. How the father didn't murder everyone involved, I do not know. In some cases the local police were also involved on the side of the rape gangs.

Rupert Lowe

He's an admirable man, but his decision to found a splinter anti-immigration party to split the Reform vote in order to spite Nigel means that he, individually, could well end up contributing to the rape of thousands of more girls if our next government ends up as a Labour/Green/Islamist coalition.

Farage will welch. When push comes to shove, Nigel won’t do what’s necessary to re migrate the population. He is mOre cowardly (if possible) than Trump. I think Lowe actually would, notwithstanding media howling, affect real re migration. Hell a couple of Nigel’s key members are the architects of the migration replacement. Nigel is offended by people like Tommy Robinson. He backed off his rage comment re Henry Novak.

I’m hoping that restore beats out reform somehow in the Makersfield election at which point there would be preference cascade.

I think Lowe actually would, notwithstanding media howling, affect real re migration

And how exactly is he going to do that with 3% of the vote the 1 seat in parliament?

Obviously I’m saying if he won (ie if reform support went to restore)

I have made the mistake of habitually mentioning the rape gangs to an average social media lib British woman and I think she would call the police on me if she could. The reaction was quite similar to if I tried to grope her on the spot, gross disbelief, anger and disgust. Unfortunately not in a position to ask further what was the exact source of her reaction since this led to hard social/internet blocks from her. But my point is, this is by no means an event one can talk openly in Anglo polite society.

Something something "believe all women."

Unless those women are 250,000 little British girls, I guess.

Essentially the issue is that the Tony Blair government set out to permanently change the UK using immigration policies and the political class in London were dead set on covering up any problems. Pakistan took the opportunity to rid itself of some of it's worst behaved ethnic groups.

There's too much complicity for important people. The Crown Prosecution Service is a key figure in covering up the crimes and it was run by now PM Keir Starmer.

I actually think they only way to fix things at this point is for a judge in an ICC signatory country to indict Starmer.

Europe already agrees that the ICC can ignore the parts of its charter against indicting heads of government, so I think it's the only way to force the issue. There must be a Canadian judge wild enough to do it.

The Right doesn’t understand how political convictions are formed. Political convictions are reflexive emotional responses developed through repeated conditioning with powerful stimuli, and are also vicariously learned through socially-modeling attractive activists (using the primitive heuristic of “imitate the high status”), and similar things. Facts do nothing. Facts do something for 2% of the population who have a particular temperament. For everyone else, their views are the result of multimedia conditioning. This entire report is less persuasive than one popular singer at a concert making a ten second remark, or one short segment in their favorite TV show. So to answer your [3], nothing will happen. If the UK wants something to happen, they need to put out multimedia about this event which successfully conditions an emotional response. Essentially they need to produce the reverse of the Adolescence Netflix show. And then they need to find beautiful women with personality disorders to cry sympathetically about the event, while receiving positive attention and praise afterward, so that others will model this behavior.

Are the men of the UK the most absolutely cucked human beings to ever exist on planet earth ever in the history of time? Is there another time in history where this would have even been remotely tolerated? You allowed a foreign rape-brigade to rape an entire generation of your children, and the response has been essentially nothing.

I guess I'll jump on this one as well. In the US if one is selective one could get away with horrible things against underclass girls on any given day. If most of the males she knows are junkies they're probably willing to sell her, or abuse her themselves. But rapists - any large group of criminals - are not known for low time preferences and careful planning at scale, nor at scale do you completely avoid girls who only marginally underclass with non-underclass connections. It does seem like you will eventually run into a beloved niece of a hard ass willing to do something.

Are the men of the UK the most absolutely cucked human beings to ever exist on planet earth ever in the history of time?

This is US, French, and Ukrainian men erasure, in not at least considering them as contenders:

  • US (white) men, with their simping and water-carrying for blacks, and going along with LatAm illegal immigration.

  • French men, something similar but with MENA migrants instead of LatAm illegal immigrants.

  • Ukrainian men, getting bombed and shot at in trenches while their countrywomen are riding the carousel through nightclubs and Tinder dates in Germany, Poland, Czech Republic.

All of these are quite bad but I think they are a far cry from the mass rape of hundreds of thousands of literal children by foreign gangs.

I want all of the latam illegals gone, and they certainly rape more than the locals, but by and large they marry fat latina chicks and seem content with that.

Ukrainian men, getting bombed and shot at in trenches while their countrywomen are riding the carousel through nightclubs and Tinder dates in Germany, Poland, Czech Republic.

Only you Sloot, could hate women so much to conclude that Ukrainian men dying to defend their homeland from foreign invaders makes them cucks because their women-folk might be having sex. What are Ukrainian women living in Poland meant to do, live out their lives as chaste old maids waiting for dead men?

... yes? That seems like a very reasonable minimum expectation. This is insanely dystopian, imagine being forcibly conscripted, then your gf just goes away and gets a new bf somewhere else, and everyone you talk about this to just goes "Well, what should she do, have no sex?". And it happens at scale.

This is complete insanity to me, men are expected to literally sacrifice their life for their country if needed, and having even the most tepid minimum expectation for young women is considered unacceptable. And then people are surprised that many modern men refuse military service.

From what I have seen there is in fact expectation for Ukrainian women to be loyal to their men (sometimes that backfires against the war effort because they help their men escape the conscription officers). I'd assume that most women who emigrate to be prostitutes are unattached (or that prostitutes in general are unattached, for that matter).

If I were Ukrainian I would be much more concerned about being forcibly bussed to the frontline where I might very likely die to a drone than the behaviour of any women back home, some of which may or may not be my partner.

I don't think we're talking about prostitutes, more like party girls. They're probably also unattached, but this is a collective question, which makes it so icky to the liberals, but I don't think it's easily dismissible. War is inherently a collective endeavor, and the men that get conscripted have every right to ask "What am I fighting for? What will I be coming home to, if I somehow manage to get through this?".

I'm afraid the men who get conscripted don't, by definition, have a right.

The kind of war fought in Ukraine is not so much a collective endeavor as it is a negotiation between Putin and Zelensky (Putin and NATO, as it is usually seen) about who gets to wield the influence and land. Negotiation that happens to consume lives in the process. The "collective" is not getting shit out of it other than stopping the war if they win.

If I were Ukrainian I would be much more concerned about being forcibly bussed to the frontline where I might very likely die to a drone

Any system that wants to survive will occasionally need to defend itself. Doing that entirely through voluntary service has extremely bad incentives & selection effects - you sacrifice your strongest supporters, who die for the benefit of precisely those people not willing to defend the system. Conscription for everyone solves this issue. It's ugly, but makes sense. The only workable alternative I can see is highly prestigious and well-paid elite military service, but that is not nearly enough in an existential crisis.

Maybe if conscription was truly for everyone.

It makes sense from the perspective of a system to throw the least loyal to the meatgrinder to maintain itself, but frankly, I'm profoundly unsympathetic to the perspective of a system.

Sloot wasn't complaining about adultery, he was complaining about Ukrainian refugee women having sex at all.

This is just such a willful sidestepping of the obvious context of the issue. @Sloot's comment was very clearly about Ukrainian women who left when the war started and are now going to bed with EuroBros elsewhere.

Your comment isn't in bad faith, per se, but it's an intellectual dodge. You're better than that.

Genderslop aside, he's pointing at a real problem. What "country" are they fighting for, if one half of the population gets thrown into the meatgrinder, and the other half leaves and starts a new life with foreigners? What's going to be left of the nation after all is said and done? Is it really "woman hating" to expect that they wait for the boys to come home any more than it's "man hating" to conscript them to begin with?

That would seem somewhat appropriate, until they can return and rebuild with the men. Chastity shows a level of seriousness and an awareness of the sacrifices others are making.

What are Ukrainian women living in Poland meant to do, live out their lives as chaste old maids waiting for dead men?

They shouldn't be in Poland in the first place. They should be staying in Ukraine working in a drone factory or on a farm or in some way that materially contributes to the same war effort their male countrymen are literally sacrificing life and limb for. Or literally making more Ukrainian babies with a Ukrainian spouse so that their country can have any sort of future after the war.

What are Ukrainian women living in Poland meant to do

Live in Ukraine, of course. Go find a Ukrainian husband instead of abandoning her countrymen to go secure a foreign husband.

What are Ukrainian women living in Poland meant to do, live out their lives as chaste old maids waiting for dead men?

Yeah, kind of? Have you seen what these people have to go through to defend their "homeland"? What does "country" even mean at that point.

Nothing, which is why you have press gangs, anyone who could already fled the country.

What exactly are the underlying assumptions here? That adultery is good, actually, or that the women who leave the Ukraine are not the wives of the soldiers fighting to defend the Ukraine?

Sloot wasn't complaining about adultery, he was complaining about (single, presumably) Ukrainian women going on dates while living as refugees abroad.

I know a young Ukrainian woman living in the UK. I don't know if she has a boyfriend, but it would be absurd to demand that she avoid getting one because her male peers are fighting. Nobody benefits from that.

Were Ukrainian women encouraged by the government to flee for their oen safety? If not, why are they refugees at all? Ukraine hasn't been conquered. They should be back home assisting the war effort and maintaining some semblance of a domestic economy while the men are at the front. Living it up fucking hot europeans on an extended vacation while your nation burns and your men die screaming in the fields is, at the very least, in very poor taste. If the men are being forced to fight and die, it's not too much to ask that the women help put drones together or work as nurses or something .

She's abroad in the UK, and might have a boyfriend there. Which would then imply that she is very likely going to stay in the UK permanently, since I assume very few Britons would elect to move to the Ukraine.

In what sense is she peer to the men risking their lives in the eastern Ukraine?


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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.


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