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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   24065 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 3, 2026

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I was following with interest the recent discussion here on the degenerate nature of hardcore anime fandom and I find that there are aspects to this that nobody mentioned. In this comment I'd like to call attention to one of these. Namely:

I propose the argument that feminist ideology has reached a level of cultural influence in the West sometime around 2008-2012 where unironic* depictions of conventionally attractive, sexually alluring, non-girlboss female characters have become taboo in the eyes of normie women**.

*Unironic in the sense that it's by no means done for the purpose of ironically conveying some politicized message about the sad reality of the male gaze, societal sexism etc.

**That is, women that are either lipstick feminists or conform to the norms of the (surely present) lipstick feminist women in their social circle. In other words, the big majority of women, or at least of young urban women.

Since the Japanese anime industry does not abide by these cultural norms, the consequence of this is that anime as a whole is increasingly suspect in the eyes of normie/NPC women, which has at least two consequences of its own. One: the male partners and/or friends of these women, who are usually cucky and normie-oriented betas, evidently adopt the same view, which contribute to its spread. Two: this provides an incentive to notice, thematize and even embellish the off-putting manifestations of anime fandom.

I'd make two more related observations as potential food for thought from this very forum.

@urquan has made a somewhat similar point before: resolute (male) attempts to counter-signal against the taboo on sexual display in a workplace setting are intensely off-putting to normie women. (The difference here is between intensely off-putting and, well, merely off-putting.)

This comment by @WhiningCoil also caught my attention:

I managed to successfully drag my poor wife through Berserk, Last Exile, Akira and a handful of others. But the look she gives me in Evangelion when Shinji gets tangled up in a fresh out of the shower Rei and "accidentally" gropes her, it's hard to defend why that's in there. The sexposition in Game of Thrones was gratuitous (and kind of fun sometimes), but at least they were adults.

Considering that the Berserk franchise contains excessive amounts of brutal violence, horror and gore, and as does Game of Thrones, plus not only "sexposition" but also explicit sex, rape, incest etc., I find it telling that it was a groping scene (which, it should be mentioned, was unironically accidental) that finally crossed the line in her eyes.

And finally a general point: this entire phenomenon has no female counterpart. That is, we see no similar widespread disapproval of (more or less) goonerbait cultural material directed at women. In fact, it appears to me that there is a general push to normalize it.

I hope someone here can answer this for me.

What are some good anime shows for someone who likes Dragonball Z, Death Note, YuYu Hakusho, JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, etc.? When I was in high school I was into anime like that but was never a complete die hard fanatic. Also, is there anime that leans on the somewhat conservative end of things?

Specifically for the issues you cite is why I could never get into anime as a subject in its totality.

The sub-genre you seem to like most is called Shonen. Some recommendations are here: https://gamerant.com/best-shonen-anime-to-watch/

Personally I highly recommend Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood. I thought it had a fairly conservative message all around, but not obnoxiously so. I mean, it does follow the law of conservation at least, (haha).

Dragonball Z had a lot of sexual stuff in it, but it might have gone over your head if you were a child. There were dramatic nosebleeds, an old man who was a pervert, etc.

Dragonball Z was instrumental in teaching kids how the real world works. The guy who beat everyone up gets best girl, the autist is stuck with his childhood sweetheart, the short guy has to marry a robot, and the old guy that owns his own island is a giant perv.

Your girl will happily monkeybranch to and get knocked up by a stronger, more powerful man—even though he and his buddy just brutally assaulted and murdered you and a bunch of her lifelong friends, from which you were revived shortly thereafter through supernatural means. And that perhaps “even though” in the previous sentence can be replaced by “especially if.”

Thank you for this. Your link hits the mark pretty well. Hell’s Paradise sounds like an awesome anime they describe. Full Metal Alchemist seems so-so. I tend to like linear plots that focus less on character development (Death Note did this well, though I found myself bored of the dialogue at times and liked the exchange of trickery between the characters) and more-so interesting ideas or power interactions between people or systems.

I fully got the references and innuendo in DBZ when I was younger, but it was nowhere near as extreme as much of the other anime you could find.

Fullmetal Alchemist had some really cool ideas. The story begins with a difficult problem and as the plot continues the problem seems to get more and more impossible and maybe not as important as some other things, but then main characters get out of the problem at the very end. The way they get out of the problem seems "correct" in hindsight but was also very cathartic and hard to guess ahead of time. There's one big magic system that everyone uses differently, along with some competent muggles who make things interesting.

I wouldn't write it off based on a blurb. I persist in recommending it, if only because it's fairly short for a shonen and you can probably figure out if you like it or not by the 5th episode or so.

I second the recommendation. FMA:B is one of the best anime series I've ever seen, bar none.

No Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann?

Gurren Lagann is my favorite counter to feminist complaints about media. Most pieces of media I hear their complaints about don't really fit the bill. Gurren Lagann, on the other hand, fully embraces a masculine worldview and is full of blatant examples of the "male gaze", thinly veiled phallic references, etc. And it shows you that all that stuff is actually totally super awesome and not the horrific evil feminists claim it is.

In fact if anything, feminism kind of maps on to the anti-spirals in the series decently well. And the ending of the series basically amounts to "Yeah maybe our capacity to continually grow and improve through our masculine strength and efforts is destined to inevitably destroy the entire universe, but we're going to make it not-inevitable through sheer force of masculine will".

Demon Slayer is a good one that I would highly recommend. Despite some of the extreme violence in the series, it is wholesome in a way that is hard to describe without watching it. And even though the main character often sympathizes with the plights of the various demons he is fighting, he never lets that blind him to the fact that they are horrifically monstrous creatures that need to be put down in order to protect the innocent.

Edit: Frieren is also a great one, and one that many people would consider "conservative". There was a moderate amount of screeching from the usual suspects on the left about how the demons in Frieren are portrayed.

I guess Gunsmith Cats has aspects that appeal to Red Tribe men.

Try Hunter x Hunter. Kurapika's arc is a minor masterpiece. Gets very dark later on.

anime that leans on the somewhat conservative end

The early episodes of The Irregular at Magic High School do this very well.

Sounds like you enjoy shonens, mostly. It means "young man" but is often used more broadly to describe shows where fighting is the main appeal. You should look into One Punch Man, Jujutsu Kaisen (not conservative but it's similar to the ones you mentioned), Chainsaw Man, Attack on Titan (this one is pretty conservative, at least for the first three seasons). I'll also second Frieren and Demon Slayer.

Shonen is a demographic, not a genre. There are plenty of shonens that aren't about fighting, from sportsball shows like Haikyu!! to romcoms like Don't Toy with Me, Miss Nagatoro. The specific subset of shonen that focuses on combat is properly called battle shonen.

The five demographics of anime are shonen (young men), shoujo (young women), seinen (adult men), josei (adult women), and kodomomuke (little kids). "Young" here is used in the same sense that "Young Adult" is used for novels in the West; middle and high schoolers.

Legend of the Galactic Heroes, besides being the greatest anime ever made, is explicitly about conservative-inflected questions of political philosophy. If you like Death Note and Jojo the space battles (plenty of just as keikaku) should entice you enough to fall in love with the rest of it.

I've been meaning to write an effortpost reviewing LotGH for years now, still haven't gotten around to it. But I would highly recommend the original anime adaptation over the remake. The remake was fine (only watched the first season) but the original is a masterpiece.

Ah yes, I tend to forget the remake exists. Testament to the uglification of modern animation.

It should be added though that the two main heroic characters are decidedly anti-conservative in their temperament and actions.

Dragon Ball Z and YuYu Hakusho are standard battle shonen shows (men beating the tar out of each other, training to become stronger, tournament arcs, etc.). If you liked them, you will probably enjoy similar titles like Naruto and My Hero Academia. MHA in particular has two notable advantages over older works; modern animation techniques (the fight scenes are gorgeous) and a seasonal episode structure (meaning less filler), so I'd start with that one.

Death Note is a very unique show; there is nothing else quite like it. Still, if you enjoy watching characters solve their problems by thinking, I'd recommend The Promised Neverland. Season 1 only; the second season is legendary for how bad it was, and the first season stops at a nice spot and gives enough closure. I wrote a longer review on /r/rational.

You don't have to worry about looking for specifically conservative anime, because anime as a whole is inherently conservative, especially compared with woke Hollywood; there is a reason why men fall in love with anime girls and Demon Slayer can outsell the entire American comic book industry. As AntiDem put it:

The appeal of anime is simple: It depicts a world with intact families, high trust, feminine women, politeness and good manners, public order, low crime, and a sense of mutual obligation between neighbors in a community - a world not slathered in gratuitous degeneracy and consumerism, peopled by unmarriageable women and increasingly angry men, which is in the process of careening toward disaster because a corrupt, ineffectual government is helpless in containing an uprising by violent lunatics hopped up on a fanatical ideology.

In the 20th century, people longed for a galaxy full of advanced technology which would take us to unknown worlds beyond the stars, and were inspired by television which showed it to us. In the 21st century, people long only for home and family, for peace and stability, for connection and friendship. To hell with the stars - just give us back the hearth and the dinner table. That is all we dream of now.

I encountered anime in the first year of my adulthood. It taught me that there was another path available - that people could behave differently than they had in my shattered family and the cold, brutal place where I grew up. That there were other ways to go through life than being selfish and angry all the time. That not every love between a man and a woman was doomed to end in bitterness and hatred. That people could be your friend for reasons other than wanting something out of you. That behaving honorably and sacrificing for the good of people around you isn’t just a thing that suckers do for ingrates. That not everybody breaks promises whenever they become inconvenient. That there are other approaches to the world than cynicism and irony. That not everything is a scam, and not everybody is out to hustle you.

Nothing in my life up to then had taught me any of that.

Still, if you are looking for something pastoral, try Princess Mononoke or Frieren: Beyond Journey's End.

The appeal of anime is simple: It depicts a world with intact families, high trust, feminine women, politeness and good manners, public order, low crime, and a sense of mutual obligation between neighbors in a community

This reminds me of how—to the extent Japan is Wakanda for white people—it’s because Japan is generally free of people who look like Wakandans.

It taught me that there was another path available

Taught, or gave hope for?

That behaving honorably and sacrificing for the good of people around you isn’t just a thing that suckers do for ingrates.

If only he knew how bad things really were/are.

If you’re a white male or an East Asian male in a non-Asian country (sometimes South Asian male too, depending on country), there’s a staunch contingent of people who insist that you should not only sacrifice yourself for ingrates around you, but also ingrates far away from you. A semblance of both of these is reflected non-consensually through taxes and transfers.

This reminds me of how—to the extent Japan is Wakanda for white people—it’s because Japan is generally free of people who look like Wakandans.

Japan is generally free of white people too.

Whites aren’t the ones whose increasing numbers make a place quickly unWakanda like with regard to “politeness and good manners, public order, low crime,” or at least not nearly at the same rate.

Hugely appreciate your contribution. Thank you.

anime as a whole is inherently conservative, especially compared with woke Hollywood

That link is anti-Jew and anti-black, and justifies itself using Hitler positively.

Also, black people actually like anime a lot.

Woke Hollywood is very jewish and black, and hates on Hitler.

Perhaps the emergence of anime as an alternate mainstream media is helping pacify the 20th century hostile proclivities of the urban blacks. It wouldn't be surprising if depicting your media antagonists as space monsters or goblins got better results on impressionable, young minds than literally the pillars of your society. As an added bonus literally any story is better than "there is nothing you can do, society is controlled by hostile forces that cannot be overwhelmed, all of these successful people you could look up to are actually oppressed and your only acceptable role in life is to forever complain".

And uh do you know who was allied with Hitler in WW2?

Well Dragonball Super is somewhat new to you. HunterxHunter, Naruto (make sure to look up and skip filler episodes), and Demonslayer are all adventure battle shonen as well. One Piece has too many episodes, and they stretched a lot of the content out too much for me to recommend the anime.

Not mentioned yet is Black Clover. It has a really rough slow and boring start, but is good once it gets going. This is one of the few fighting animes my wife also enjoys, unlike Demon Slayer which is too bloody for her.

The Seven Deadly Sins is also a good action/comedy/sprinkle of romance with minimal blood and gore. Despite the name the setting is medieval european fantasy with arthurian flavor.

it was a groping scene (which, it should be mentioned, was unironically accidental)

Yeah, "accidentally" put in there by the creators. That's the point; it's about as unironic as the porn clichés of "oops, my hot neighbour came out of the shower in only a towel and somehow got locked out of her apartment".

Why is there a groping scene in the show? For the male viewers to get their thrills. Which is fine, that's what these shows are about, but expecting women to watch it and go "nope, nothing to see here" is a bit much. I don't know if guys would be "this is unironic and accidental" about shows where the trope is that the hot male lead constantly ends up in nothing but a towel with some groping by the second male lead, but it's the distaff parallel (it would seem for cdramas the trope is "hot male lead in bath tub, some very light BDSM choking ensues"). This is unabashedly for the female gaze.

Nah, he’s right about this specific example. The “groping” is part of a claustrophobic, unsettling segment where the protagonist finds his crush/teammate/mother figure living in a genuinely disgusting apartment. You’re supposed to ask what kind of human would live like this.

There’s plenty of shameless fanservice in the show, but this ain’t it.

Yeah, Evangelion is in part a story about the horrible inner experience of male teenage sexuality - it's unsurprising that a woman viewing it either wouldn't notice it at all and just see fanservice, or be disgusted enough to just look away and not think about it.

I suspect a show with an equivalent treatment of female sexuality would disgust most men, probably far more so given that they don't have "ugh, men" as an easily available response. Which makes me wonder, now that I think about it, because I can't think of a work like that (to be fair, my reading list is pretty male and not very teenage). If we were to do a 2x2, where you have Evangelion as male/negative and, say, Twilight as female/positive, what's the female/negative?

True crime?

Not really "about the horrible inner experience of [female] teenage sexuality", except, uh, maybe some true crime narratives I'd prefer not to read. Given the general higher cultural discomfort involved (as I typed that sentence with male/female I half-expected some jackass will call me a creep just for that), I'm guessing not a show, but a book by a woman author, maybe an Anna Kavan type. Maybe an arthouse film.

Wait, what’s the male/positive fantasy? Cause I think Eva is completely distinct from Twilight in ways which don’t fit on either of those axes.

Someone has definitely written grim, psychosexual coming-of-age stories for teen girls, but I’m not really sure what. Gone Girl and Lovely Bones are pretty different. Carrie? Any one of the interchangeable angsty pregnancy dramas? There’s got to be some shoujo out there which fits the bill.

Honestly don't have an obvious candidate to mind, it's not the sort of fiction/movies I go for. The South African novel series Spud would be a good example, though it's aimed at kids of that age and very much not high art - Spud suffers through all the angst and pimples, but he ends up in a loving relationship and on course to as normal a life as one can live in SA. Generally the sort of people who do more artsy things tend to be older, and more focused on the negative, or at least the aporeic aspects of the psyche.

Stephen King is one of the absolute last people I'd go to for an accurate portrayal of that kind of interiority. I think insofar as a man can write this, the obvious go-to is Twin Peaks - except that Laura Palmer has to be this cipher, that we only learn about from others, precisely because Lynch can't be in that part of her head (note the extremely strong parallels between the EoE hospital scene and the scene of Laura putting on her stockings in FWWM, both beating you around the head with "I KNOW YOU'RE TURNED ON BY THIS CHARACTER AND YOU SHOULD FEEL BAD ABOUT IT").

There’s got to be some shoujo out there which fits the bill.

Dear Brother, which was, interestingly, a significant influence on Evangelion.

Wait, what’s the male/positive fantasy?

Every mecha anime that predates NGE? "I didn't do anything special to deserve it, but I suddenly got a massive new body that can perform feats I never thought were possible, and now everyone looks up to me and treats me as the humanity's only hope."

My wife is always showing me young adult fantasy books for women, ones that she loves because she grew up reading them. I'm like, for God's sake, why does every one of these books have to feature the protagonist getting her period? Almost no books about male protagonists feature them ejaculating for the first time.

It doesn't disgust me though, but I'm more irritated by the fact that women are so obsessed with their periods.

Why is there a groping scene in the show? For the male viewers to get their thrills.

I'm guessing the intent was to inject light humor into an otherwise heavy scene that depicts the reality of depression.

Why is there a groping scene in the show? For the male viewers to get their thrills. Which is fine, that's what these shows are about, but expecting women to watch it and go "nope, nothing to see here" is a bit much.

Okay, but... why?

Put it this way: you're entitled to dislike fan service. You're entitled to disdain the male gaze. You're entitled to not be interested in shows that exist to please men.

But you are arguing two contradictory things:

  1. "It's fine."
  2. "You shouldn't expect a woman to just sit there and not complain about it."

Like, if you genuinely believe that it's "fine" for some shows to featuring boobs and butts and groping and fan service, why is it "too much" to expect a woman to watch it without going off?

Now, if she was compelled/tricked/reluctantly dragged into watching it, or had no idea what sort of show it was and was enjoying it until the sudden fan service, okay, I can see some hard eye rolls, but I'm going to be honest, I don't think you (or most women) are "fine" with shows like that. You just sort of grudgingly tolerate their existence.

(FWIW, I have never seen Berserk and am not much into anime nowadays. Just sayin', as much as I dislike the seething hatred that sweats out of some of our He-Man Wimmin-Haters, they aren't completely wrong that a lot of media just gets outright snipped for the horrific crime of... being appealing to men.)

Maybe this is generalizing, but I suspect that the vast majority of women in committed relationships are turned off by their men showing sexual interest in other women.

Offended and insulted, rather than necessarily turned off.

Turned off by their men showing sexual interest in other women in a low-status way, definitely. And slow-mo replay of the shower scene in an anime is as low-status as it gets.

But slow-mo replay of shower scenes in kdramas are a-okay! A man being offended by his girlfriend ogling at another dude's abs is also low-status, apparently. I'll reiterate @Botond173 that goonerbait targeting the female gaze is freely celebrated, and the expectation that men should "suffer" through it to make their girlfriends happy seems to be norm in many, many relationships. At least, in the west.

And also in South Korea presumably.

I think South Korea is still a bit equitable, they don't get as upset over male targeted goonerbait as western women do as far as I'm aware. I don't recall a domestic backlash against Stellar Blade for instance. Meanwhile in mainstream western media there's been far less female nudity in recent years, and way more male nudity, even in presumably male targeted IPs.

Edit: Relatedly. My theory is that mainstream TV, gaming, cinema, etc are a shared cultural space, a public park of sorts. If EVE is allowed in this space, where millions of normies could see her casually and frequently, it's culturally "okay" to publicly cater to the male gaze. Hence the push to stigmatise it, so you realise that designs and body standards that appeal to you are culturally taboo, you should be ashamed of liking them and only find them in porn.

Disagree; dread game is a PUA staple.

That doesn't mean a woman likes it. A thing might make a woman behave temporarily in a way you like but that does not mean that she is content and happy, nor does she like the thing that triggered the change.

Or is everyone interpreting "turned off" as literal sexual arousal and not the general "I hate this and want to turn my head from this, not look at it, feel disgusted by this" way?

Dread game is the opposite of this actually - women dreading other women showing (elicited) sexual interest in their men.

But I doubt it explains the phenomenon I suspect is observable here, which I think is relatively recent.

The phenomenon I seek to explain is:

Why "It's fine" for a guy to like fanservice.

Why "You shouldn't expect a woman to just sit there and not complain about it."

Well, in that case, you are saying specifically that is not "fine" for someone with a female partner to like fan service.

Which, fair enough, if those are the boundaries you've established in your relationship. It's not unlike porn; some women are fine with their men watching porn, some are very much not.

But I'm talking about the phenomenon of women finding it objectionable for guys in general to watch it. @HereAndGone2 was not talking about her partner watching fan service, she's talking about being offended that she sees it.

Again, rather like porn: if you hate porn and wish it did not exist and wish men did not watch it, fine. But be honest about it, don't say "It's fine that it exists, I understand men like it, but also I will complain about it and try to shame men who enjoy it."

Women might be able to recognize that different people have different preferences. HereAndGone might not have a moral objection to fanservice in anime, which is indicated by "it's fine." But she and other women can dislike it. Some people might really like eating oysters and that's fine, no moral objection to eating oysters. But don't expect me to be comfortable sitting at a table with people slurping them down.

I don't know why people here see a contradiction here.

The shaming is the contradiction.

You might not like oysters, or want to watch people eating them, but presumably you won't make a point of letting oyster-enjoyers know how gross you think they are.

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I'm referring to the phenomenon I described i.e. unironic depictions of conventionally attractive, sexually alluring, non-girlboss female characters becoming taboo/unpalatable in the eyes of normie women. Women in committed relationships getting turned off by their men showing sexual interest in other women is a thing as old as time, so I doubt it explains the issue I mentioned which I think is relatively recent.

Then maybe women shouldn't let themselves go so much.

I jest, of course. Obviously it's impossible for a flesh and blood woman in the messy real world to compete with stylized 2D depictions of idealized, flawless women who exist in worlds specifically designed to appeal and entertain (yes I know this only partially applies to Evangelion).

But then again I don't really jest. Women in committed relationships often take that commitment as a signal to let themselves go. Go all the way to ugly shrew hell. Maybe the same is true the gender-flipped way around as well, but I genuinely don't see that happen. Do women just jump ship in that case?

Maybe the same is true the gender-flipped way around as well, but I genuinely don't see that happen.

It's called a Dad bod.

Okay, further explanation has demonstrated that that particular scene wasn't just about titillation. But it's the Battle Lingerie trope that is responsible for the eye-rolling. Some games etc. do put it in For The Guyz. And okay, we have to accept that. But it's not realistic, and it's not there for any reason other than "male sexuality is really easy to unlock, just boobs'n'butts". (The zeppelin boobs and impossibly chunky thighs are the turn off for women watching).

God bless Torchlight, lo these many years past now, where I played as a female character (can't remember if it was engineer or what) and mine eyes did widen and gaze aghast as I got a better piece of gear that was less coverage for my character. I remember swapping the gear on and off, and yep the stats for armour etc. got better and yep the battlekini got skimpier.

The corresponding male character was covered from goggles to bootsoles, so it was even sillier. So if I wanted to play the game, I played as a male character because yes, I know it's fantasy vidya games but there are some absurdities that just break immersion.

I'm not going to complain about guys liking the female characters in games to be zeppelin boobs running around the battlefield in high heels, but I'm also not going to pretend it's not what it is. Though let's hear it for gender-equitable armour!

I'd argue that if a female character has comically big boobs and/or a comically skimpy outfit then it's done for the comic effect.

I'd wager that there was almost no-one who found that scene titillating, given the dreary room, the blood, Rei's expression, Shinji's awkwardness, the utter destitution of every element and tone. Eroticism in art has its place, and this was a good use of it, given the youthful ignorance of the characters. And frankly, some writers are just more attuned to those kinds of things that others.

Men are not, generally speaking, complaining about the hot guys being shirtless a lot in popular movies and TV shows.

In general, it has been long Noticed that the stereotypical male reaction to a male physique in popular media superior to his own is to use it as inspo to Git Gud, whereas the stereotypical female reaction to a female physique in popular media superior to her own is to perceive it as a threat to her Wonderfulness.

All the while a hot male physique is much more difficult to achieve than a hot female physique.

Indeed

whereas the stereotypical female reaction to a female physique in popular media superior to her own is to perceive it as a threat to her Wonderfulness.

If only there was some popular story that served to make this common knowledge.

To be fair, a hot male physique* is generally thought to imply physical prowess, and something you can work on by improving your physical prowess.

So Git Gud is both possible and instrumentally useful beyond hotness, but a woman who is already in a healthy weight range can do much less, and it's unclear what purpose it would serve beyond attracting men.

  • Or what straight men consider to be one, in any case, I gather there are claims that women don't actually find the super muscular type that attractive.

The optimal physique for impressing other men (gay or straight - mutual admiration among male bodybuilders who get that far is pretty homoerotic) is more muscled than the optimal physique for attracting women, which is more muscled than the physique you get if you optimise for balanced athleticism*. Men in actually elite military units are a lot fitter than you or I, but they aren't obviously jacked, and they would be if it made them more combat-effective.

* Obviously there are some areas of strength-focussed sport, notoriously including baseball hitting, where being jacked and roided is optimal for performance if there is no drug testing regime in place.

I don't know; the Royal Marines look pretty good to me.

No one likes seeing how the sausage is made. This applies to both men and women. Men want "natural beauty" and then go buy bathwater from an egirl that has more stucco on her face that the whole Sistine Chapel. Women don't want a gym rat that takes PED's and then buy the romance book with the most developed, glistening abs and pecs on the cover.

In general, it has been long Noticed that the stereotypical male reaction to a male physique in popular media superior to his own is to use it as inspo to Git Gud

And yet so few men Git Gud after watching buff men on screen.

I said something similar last thread, but here goes again: Eva is in part a parody / deconstruction / reconstruction / modification / discussion of such cliches. The protagonist is an ordinary 14 year old who is suddenly asked to pilot a giant robot, and it's entirely unpleasant and terrifying. He's constantly around this extremely submissive girl who dresses in skintight latex, and then she walks out of the shower and he grabs her boob by accident like he's in a harem show, except it's awkward and disgusting and nothing comes of it, and then the girl dies and is replaced by her clone, which is part of a system of flesh puppets that a madman is using to melt the entire planet into a hive mind. Then a sexy assertive foreign girl shows up and constantly comes on to the main character, except he's too scared to respond and she's actually quite unpleasant to him and just acting out due to her psychological problems. There's also a hot irresponsible older lady who is a chronic alcoholic who hates herself and doesn't know how to interact with other people except through sex. And a hot scientist who is sleeping with the same man her dead mother used to in order to feel any kind of connection to another human being.

If you wanted an example of fanservice for its own sake, it would be hard to find a worse one than Evangelion. I could probably advance the argument that every single piece of fanservice in the show is both diagetic and serves some greater narrative purpose. Even if that's just "hey, remember what it was like to be a teenager?"

I propose the argument that feminist ideology has reached a level of cultural influence in the West sometime around 2008-2012 where unironic* depictions of conventionally attractive, sexually alluring, non-girlboss female characters have become taboo in the eyes of normie women**.

I don't watch much television or movie content, but what about the television show Landman? It seems like there are a lot of female characters who are basically there to be eye candy. For example:

  1. In an early episode, there is a scene where some of the characters order coffee from a coffee shop called "Babes 'n Brew." The girl working the counter is an impossibly attractive young woman wearing a bikini top. By "impossibly," I mean that in real life you would pretty much never see a woman this attractive, dressed like that, working a job like that, in that part of the country.

  2. One of the main characters, played by Billy Bob Thornton, has a college-aged daughter who is highly attractive and spends a lot of time parading around in a bikini.

  3. In another scene, there is a drug smuggler type who is shown taking a call from Billy Bob Thornton's character while sitting in a strip club; in the background there are various unrealistically attractive women dancing around while wearing very little.

I do concede that the culture has become more hostile to this sort of fan service. For example, I remember the movie "The Fifth Element" from about 30 years ago. The movie has numerous attractive, sexily dressed female characters working in roles such as stewardess, receptionist, and fast food clerk. I think it would be hard to make a movie with roles like that today, in part due to the influence of feminism. But I also think there's another possible factor, which is that pornography has become so easily available that it's not as much of a selling point to include this sort of stuff in a movie.

In an early episode, there is a scene where some of the characters order coffee from a coffee shop called "Babes 'n Brew." The girl working the counter is an impossibly attractive young woman wearing a bikini top. By "impossible," I mean that in real life you would pretty much never see a woman this attractive, dressed like that, working a job like that, in that part of the country.

... oddly enough, I was reading an article on Bikini Baristas just within the past week or two, and have no idea how I stumbled upon the link. Mught have been here, even. Or might have been in a discussion on submarines/sailors/shipbuilders. Who knows?

I disagree with your last point. Sometimes I get so tired of porn because it's so fake. I don't want to really see trashy sluts getting banged all the time, just sometimes. But I settle for that because that's the closest alternative. But I often want to see cute girls going through the early stages of romance, blushing, being cute and awkward, wrestling with really feelings. Sometimes I'll see a movie that features that and it grabs me.

But I often want to see cute girls going through the early stages of romance, blushing, being cute and awkward, wrestling with really feelings.

Perhaps my point was more narrow than it should have been. I was talking about the practice of putting sexy women, typically in sexy clothing (or no clothing at all), into television and movies where from the context it seems that the main point (or a large part of the point) is to titillate viewers. For this type of stipulation, it seems like online pornography would be a pretty good substitute.

I don't want to really see trashy sluts getting banged all the time, just sometimes

I think it's worth pointing out that online pornography (or at least what I would call online pornography) is a lot broader than this. For example, a website which is devoted to showing pictures of women in short dresses and skirts. So defined, it's easy to see that there is a lot of overlap between online pornography and the sort of fan service I am talking about.

Sometimes I'll see a movie that features that and it grabs me.

Well would you say that what you have described (cute girls going through the early stages of romance) has become (to some extent) taboo due to the influence of feminism?

I was talking about the practice of putting sexy women, typically in sexy clothing (or no clothing at all), into television and movies where from the context it seems that the main point (or a large part of the point) is to titillate viewers.

I mean you have a point. But maybe my point was too narrow, too. I like seeing sexy women in sexy clothes in situations that don't involve them just banging. Actually, when I really feel bored with porn, anime porn is a good substitute, because the characters seem less like they're doing it for a paycheck, in part because they're not real, but also there's story involved. My definition of "normal" porn may be too narrow, but it basically always involves no story. But maybe my experience is not universal.

For example, a website which is devoted to showing pictures of women in short dresses and skirts

I can't really speak to that because I don't get it. Is there a parasocial effect where the intended audience are commenters that feel like they have a relationship with these girls posting the pictures? Like a cam girl?

Well would you say that what you have described (cute girls going through the early stages of romance) has become (to some extent) taboo due to the influence of feminism?

To some extent, inasmuch as they love to police anything that men like. I wouldn't really say taboo, at least not in 2026. Maybe in 2017 it was.

Adding to what @haroldbkny already said, the principle is still worth defending.

I rarely watch mainstream media that features black people anymore, even when their presence is technically plausible within the setting. Not because I harbour some pathological hatred of blacks (I don't), but because experience has taught me that “plausibility” is almost entirely incidental.

Beyond a certain budget, an all white, all straight, gender conforming cast with traditional sex roles is effectively forbidden. The industry treats demographic representation and progressive tropes as non-negotiables first and a storytelling choice second. I oppose that cultural settlement on principle.

Now regarding male gaze, I'm all for flat justice, and cannon-boobs aren't exactly my first preference. Nor do I need to see hot naked women to enjoy something. But I know why that is stigmatised. This is not some aesthetic evolution that emerged "neutrally". It is the product of constant feminist cultural policing of traditionally male spaces. And the same environment that treats the male gaze as something to be ashamed of and confined to privately consumed vices like porn, simultaneously celebrates male nudity and the female gaze in those same mainstream venues, see Thor Love and Thunder.

The messaging is that male desire is low-status and must be disavowed in public, female desire (and its equivalents) is high-status and may be displayed openly.

And you as a man should internalise this hierarchy and join the choir in calling out the "weirdos" who refuse to comply. You see this specimen of man everywhere, it's obvious as hell that he doesn't actually believe this, but performs it anyway purely for social approval. I've even seen it in games like Black Myth Wukong. The female characters are not at all sexualised in costume or behaviour. But the complaint still persists merely because females in the game were facially feminine and pretty. It's transparent from the language, "have you SEEN an ACTUAL woman?" Pure status signaling through and through.

I rarely watch mainstream media that features black people anymore, even when their presence is technically plausible within the setting. Not because I harbour some pathological hatred of blacks (I don't), but because experience has taught me that “plausibility” is almost entirely incidental.

Well I think that once a black person has been cast, there is a lot of pressure on the show runners, directors, producers, etc. to follow certain rules about how that black person must be portrayed. And if they follow those rules, it makes the wokeness of the content that much more prominent and obvious.

  • But I know why that is stigmatised. This is not some aesthetic evolution that emerged "neutrally". It is the product of constant feminist cultural policing of traditionally male spaces

As I mentioned above, while I think that there is a taboo against this kind of fan service, it's nowhere near as strong as, for example, the taboo against portraying a black character as being unintelligent. For example, as mentioned above, in Landman there is plenty of male gaze type content.

Also as mentioned above, it seems to me there may be another factor in play, which is the easy availability of sexually stimulating material online.

Here's another example of what I mean: In the 1980s, there were a few very popular movies which featured a lot of female nudity. For example, Stripes. At the time, if you wanted to see a movie of naked women taking a shower together, going to see Stripes was the only practical way of doing so, apart from going to an extremely seedy movie theater or adult book store.

So it seems to me that there is less incentive for filmmakers to include this kind of content. Because there is not as much demand for it.

The messaging is that male desire is low-status and must be disavowed in public, female desire (and its equivalents) is high-status and may be displayed openly.

I agree, but I think that in the absence of internet porn (broadly defined), plenty of content creators (including big budget films and television shows) would make lots of male gaze type stuff. And even with the internet (and with feminism) there still is a decent amount.

Well I think that once a black person has been cast, there is a lot of pressure on the show runners, directors, producers, etc. to follow certain rules about how that black person must be portrayed.

But this is downstream of the first mandate though, the non-negotiable racial inclusion. LOTR is objectively not made any better by including blacks, no matter how stellar their performances purportedly are.

As I mentioned above, while I think that there is a taboo against this kind of fan service, it's nowhere near as strong as, for example, the taboo against portraying a black character as being unintelligent.

Okay, so the grievance hierarchy places black representation above male gaze and penalises it harder. So what? Exceptions like Landman may exist (I haven't seen it, so I'll take your word for it) but the direction of the pressure is still the same. Do you think Stripes would be made today?

Sure, access to online porn may reduce the pure commercial incentive to include softcore fanservice, but it does not explain the active moralisation of female sex appeal. If this were merely demand adjusting to free alternatives, we would expect quiet reduction. What we actually get is reduction plus public scolding. Attractive female characters are not simply less common, they are frequently treated as ideologically suspect. And there's a corresponding rise in male nudity even in male media, like Thor. What is the commercial incentive here?

But this shift is especially obvious in video games. Female character designs are frequently unrealistically ugly and androgynous, look at Abby in TLOU2 vs the live action TV show. Ironic, the graphics get prettier while female models get uglier. And the stated reasons are explicitly "diversity" and "subverting the male gaze". That is not the market spontaneously deciding that gamers (majority straight male) no longer like looking at pretty women. It is a cultural and professional status hierarchy asserting itself inside studios, marketing departments, and critical institutions, independent of any commercial incentives.

That is why I brought up Black Myth Wukong. There's literally zero wank material there, but the complaints still arrived because the female designs were conventionally feminine and attractive, despite being non-sexual. Not as loud as Stellar Blade, but they were still there.

But this is downstream of the first mandate though, the non-negotiable racial inclusion. LOTR is objectively not made any better by including blacks, no matter how stellar their performances purportedly are.

For the most part, I agree. But here's an example of what I mean: The Northman (which came out in 2022) did not have any blacks as best I can recall. There wasn't really a freakout about it. (Although it didn't receive any Oscar nominations -- possibly if the director had shoehorned in a black character, it would have done better.) Similarly, Ford versus Ferrari had basically no black characters but received a few Oscar nominations.

By contrast, imagine what would have happened if these movies had included black characters but presented them as unintelligent, or incompetent, or lazy, or otherwise contemptible.

The point is that failing to include blacks is a misdemeanor; including blacks but portraying them in a way which is politically incorrect is a felony.

Okay, so the grievance hierarchy places black representation above male gaze and penalises it harder. So what?

So nothing. You brought up the issue of casting of blacks, I think it was interesting enough to respond to but that's about it.

Sure, access to online porn may reduce the pure commercial incentive to include softcore fanservice, but it does not explain the active moralisation of female sex appeal.

Not directly, anyway. Here's a thought experiment:

Suppose that the Internet didn't exist so there was no way to conveniently access pornography. Would movie directors include more fan service knowing that it would improve their bottom line, notwithstanding the complaints of feminists? And if so, how would feminists react?

Here's an analogy: As you know, during the American Civil War, for the most part the northern states were against slavery and the southern states were in favor. Was this because liberalism was more prevalent in the north (just like it's still more prevalent today) or because the northern economy was far less dependent on slavery than that of the south? One can certainly argue that both were factors. And that economic considerations have a lot of influence (but not necessarily decisive influence) over peoples' views of morality.

And there's a corresponding rise in male nudity even in male media, like Thor. What is the commercial incentive here?

Very little, I would guess. In fact, a lot of female viewers would prefer to look at female bodies over male bodies. Just look at the covers of women's magazines. I would guess that a bigger factor in that kind of male nudity is just woke flag-planting, as opposed to appealing to the female gaze, so to speak.

Seconded. I’ll add that as a lover of European-style fantasy, the only game in town (outside of mediums with zero or near-zero production costs like webfic) is anime and JRPGs and their Korean/Chinese equivalents. What are your options for modern fantasy in the west these days? The Rings of Power or the Wheel of Time show (is this the worst time in history to see something you like get an adaptation announced?)? Dragon Age Veilguard? If you are fine with out of place diversity, progressive axe grinding, and the host of modern western neuroses on race, gender, and sexuality and the inherent storytelling compromises they demand, I guess you are not wanting for content.

We don’t have to live like this, though. One of my favorite newer shows is Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End, which I’d recommend to anyone from the last thread who was skeptical or worried about fanservice. It is a heartfelt, understated story with lovable characters and beautiful animation. Spy x Family is another good entry anime, a lighthearted story about a young family set in Cold War-era not-Berlin. Jobless Reincarnation (this one is NOT wife/gf-safe and the main character does some things I won’t defend in the start of the story) is a thoughtful, inspiring story of self-actualization and second chances. Most people into anime already know this, but I saw overlap between people who often complain about modern western media and people calling anime degenerate in that last thread.

There exists a media ecosystem where you don’t have to be lectured about progressive ideals, masculinity and whiteness being problematic isn’t the story’s metaphysical assumption, and yes — as Botund said, sex appeal that exists for the eyes of straight men is allowed to exist. I used to have a hangup about that last category in a rather Scott Aaronson manner and saw it as immoral, but I’ve come around on it and now see the male gaze, in moderation, as a good thing. Women enjoy media meant to appeal to their tastes and don’t question it or wring their hands about it; you should too.

We don’t have to live like this, though. One of my favorite newer shows is Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End, which I’d recommend to anyone from the last thread who was skeptical or worried about fanservice. It is a heartfelt, understated story with lovable characters and beautiful animation.

I wholeheartedly second Frieren. It is a beautiful story, and is well-suited to non-anime-watching normies. (In a similar class to things like Death Note or Fullmetal Alchemist.) The dub is also fairly well done, for people who don't want to read while watching something.

There exists a media ecosystem where you don’t have to be lectured about progressive ideals, masculinity and whiteness being problematic isn’t the story’s metaphysical assumption, and yes — as Botund said, sex appeal that exists for the eyes of straight men is allowed to exist. I used to have a hangup about that last category in a rather Scott Aaronson manner and saw it as immoral, but I’ve come around on it and now see the male gaze, in moderation, as a good thing. Women enjoy media meant to appeal to their tastes and don’t question it or wring their hands about it; you should too.

I mean, I would argue there's a few media ecosystems like that around the world. I've enjoyed the occasions where I've dipped my toes into Indian cinema (Bollywood and South Indian cinema) as well. While there's less overt sex appeal in most Indian cinema than in anime, it is still a media ecosystem where they often allow unapologetic stories of badass men doing cool things and getting the girl.

It might rub some of the most pro-Western members of the Motte here the wrong way, but I consider RRR to be one of the best action films of the last 10 years. I've sometimes joked about making it a part of a "British Empire Cinematic Universe" movie marathon, alongside The Patriot, and The Wind that Shakes the Barley.

And where Indian cinema does go quasi-woke, it is most commonly focusing on things like caste discrimination, which I suspect are easier for most anti-woke people to stomach. For example, I really enjoyed the film Karnan (2021), and it was probably inspired by 1995 caste riots (while not referencing them directly.)

Spy x Family is an interesting one, to me, because I think its fundamental conviction is that families are great. It's a show that places ordinary domestic life, like going to school or making dinner or getting a pet, alongside dramatic super-spy nonsense that involves terrorists and blowing up buildings and leaping over cars and acrobatic assassins dispatching their targets, and it thinks that both are equally important. It almost thinks that domestic life is more important than spycraft. We expect Twilight to catch the bad guys and retrieve the microfilm and so on, but we are cheering for Loid to show tenderness and care toward his daughter. Yor is simultaneously an ultra-competent and deadly assassin and a well-meaning klutz of a wife, and it's the latter role where she faces the greatest challenges, not only in terms of skill and experience, but in terms of emotional readiness. From the first moment of the show, the contrast, and the comedy deriving therefrom, is obviously at its heart. Yes, yes, there's all the silly James Bond stuff, but all that stuff is important because it defends families.

It's very sweet, and I am tempted to argue the kind of quiet pro-family propaganda that we could do with a bit more of.

Spy x Family has got to be some kind of pro-natalist psyop. Shinzo Abe would be proud.

Seconded. I’ll add that as a lover of European-style fantasy, the only game in town (outside of mediums with zero or near-zero production costs like webfic) is anime and JRPGs and their Korean/Chinese equivalents. What are your options for modern fantasy in the west these days? The Rings of Power or the Wheel of Time show (is this the worst time in history to see something you like get an adaptation announced?)? Dragon Age Veilguard? If you are fine with out of place diversity, progressive axe grinding, and the host of modern western neuroses on race, gender, and sexuality and the inherent storytelling compromises they demand, I guess you are not wanting for content.

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023) was pretty good. There are a couple of black characters and a female barbarian, but it's done in a very 90's way; colorblind, gender neutral, never drawing attention to itself. But that's only one movie, and it was horribly screwed over by marketing which implied that it was a woke film, so point taken.

These days, I get most of my fantasy fix from glowfic, which is a kind of web novel written collaboratively by two or more authors taking turns roleplaying as their characters; near-zero production costs, indeed. I strongly recommend Project Lawful, the epic co-authored by Iarwain (Eliezer Yudkowsky/Less Wrong) and lintamande (Kelsey Piper/The Unit of Caring). The ending made me cry; I never thought I would respect Cayden Cailean like that, but Eliezer was right; every character has the potential to be awesome.

I like that the barbarian was outcast for violating her tribe's understanding of racial purity. Because she married a halfling.

Spoiler warnings! I've tried to read Project Lawful a few times now, and although I keep failing (IMHO it would be awesome with a skilled and bloodthirsty editor, but it'll never get one) I make it another 20+% through each time, and I'm still hoping to finish it someday without cracking and asking an LLM to take that editing job first.

I strongly recommend Project Lawful

That mirror seems to return a lot of internal server errors, so you may want to instead link to the main website in the future.Never mind, the main site returns a lot of these errors as well.

That is, we see no similar widespread disapproval of (more or less) goonerbait cultural material directed at women.

That depends a bit on where you put the marker for "widespread disapproval". Twilight was popular, but it was also heavily disliked and mocked in mainstream, fandom, and even feminist spaces. Morning Glory Milking Farm's better-known for the manly men mocking it than among the actual goonettes.

There's not an industry built to disapprove of it, in the way that there is an industry around performative disgust about male sexuality. But that's more a comment on business practices than on culture.

Everyone from the late 2000s owes Stephanie Meyer and Twilight an apology for how they treated them. It is a wholesome romance, too pure for this world, and IMO applying the gooner label to such a chaste story stretches that word to the breaking point.

I agree with you that the cow story is held up as an example to decry women's romance far more than it is actually read.

That said, romantasy is probably the hottest genre in publishing right now, and Sarah J. Maas, author of the Court of Thorns and Roses series, is the one of the biggest and best-selling modern authors. Walk into any Barnes & Nobles and the stuff is all over the place. Femgooning is extremely normalized and celebrated, backed by big publishing houses and deemed fit to be stocked on the shelves of mainstream retailers.

I'm fine with this, I don't begrudge women their preferences, but it is undeniable to me that a lot of them like enjoy this state of affairs and take it for granted, while sharply policing anything that appeals to men in the same way wherever it appears.

Twilight is probably not, like, good literature. I've never heard it seriously defended as anything more than the appeal to a woman's inner sixteen year old fantasies... but I've also never heard it seriously criticized as anything worse than that, either. It definitely isn't porn- it's about a teenager being special and chosen by a much older man who keeps his hands to himself before marriage and having babies quickly. Not the most likely sequence of events, but fantasia, not pornography.

Fair. Better example?

No, there were definitely people criticizing Twilight on a moral panic level and not just a cringe level. Fifty Shades Of Grey, too. These strains of commentary were still notably muted, though, and likely fading out.

I’ve never heard twilight criticized as porn. There was criticism of twilight as dangerous for adolescent girls on the basis that much older men are bad news, but I don’t remember a moral panic about OMG all the sex and violence. 50 shades, yes, it definitely had that.

I think there's an important difference of kind here: "goonerbait cultural material directed at women" is mocked as being immature and shallow, at worst it is seen as an understandable form of escapism for women too unattractive (not necessarily physically) to find a decent guy. On the other hand, "goonerbait cultural material directed at men" is treated as dangerous material that teaches men to harm women. It is regularly banned or censored by large corporations and governments. The UN has multiple outstanding demands to Japan to legally constrain the media in order to fight "violence against women".

Yeah, that's a more readily distinguished comparison.

From inside the Feminist Nexus - and I speak here from personal experience - even worse than the unironic femininity of anime girls is that they enjoy it, and the shows around them clearly state that this is the norm. It's not just that one of the girls is more sensitive and gentle and people-oriented and physically weak than her male counterparts, but all of them! Even the warrior girls have their feminine sides, where they go "[protagonist name]!" and cling to the guy. And everyone around them expects this! That's what the author, the medium, the whole culture surrounding the medium, believes about women, how they believe women should be. Anime is a form of art that is not only bigoted, but pushes its opinions through the mouths of the groups it's bigoted against.

Once the detector trips, everything else confirms it. The short skirts and large breasts, the useless female characters, the perverted old masters, the Class S stories, the relative popularity of shonen and shoujo manga, the relative popularity of M/M and M/F ships on Archive Of Our Own. So you retreat to a Certified Feminist anime, or you fight over the ones that were feminist enough that you got invested before they betrayed you. This is why Revolutionary Girl Utena and Madoka Magica have a certain valance now, and why all internet discussion of Oniisama e... is about how the story is gross for not going the way the watcher needed it to go so she could uncritically enjoy it.

Many, many years ago, I watched Macross: Do You Remember Love? And it took my brain apart and put it back together, because I had been raised to basically be a male chauvinist by way of feminism. You mean I'm supposed to enjoy and celebrate that there are differences between men and women? You mean a woman crying for a reason she can't explain can be a symbol of maturity? You mean I'm supposed to treat women differently than men not just because I'm romantically interested in them but also simply because of their sex? What's next, all the men are fighter pilots and all the girls love a song titled "My Boyfriend Is A Pilot"? "Feminine" was not something a man was allowed to like about women, in a way that actually implied anything about them.

I had been raised to basically be a male chauvinist by way of feminism. [...] "Feminine" was not something a man was allowed to like about women, in a way that actually implied anything about them.

The feminists were right. Of course a woman crying at the drop of a pin is immature; the ubiquity of such behavior is a mark against women as a class. The descriptor of "feminine" implies lameness: feminine professions are low-status, feminine interests are shallow, feminine virtues are ancillary. There is value in sweetness and sensitivity, yes, but the whole is undoubtedly lesser than. The feminists were wrong to think that femininity is societally induced, but there is no shame in lamenting one's lot.

Personally, I am unconvinced that the agreeable parts of femininity must be so tightly intertwined with the lame parts. Do you think otherwise?

the relative popularity of M/M and M/F ships on Archive Of Our Own.

I would be willing to bet my left nut that 90%+ of M/M ships are written by women

They are. Yaoi and the writen forms are the domain of women for some reason. What's hotter than a naked guy? Two guys at the same time I guess.

An extreme example of this comes from omegaverse fiction, which in itself is just "what if men and women were both men so that we could write gay fanfic that was straight"... but over time, alpha/alpha pairings apparently came to predominate in many places, because that's "what if men and women were both men, and we took the men (men) and wrote gay (still straight) fanfic about them".

I'd caution that "many places" might be overselling it: AO3 as a whole has 320k fics tagged 'alpha/beta/omega dynamics', and 38.6k tagged 'non-traditional alpha/beta/omega dynamics' (technically a broader category, but both futa and lesbian works are basically rounding errors).

A good point! I remember reading of a specific community in which the specific alpha/alpha form had completely taken over, but can no longer find the source, so it may well have been a fever dream.

Fair. I'm not aware of any specific ones off-hand, but a lot of the more fem-writer focused esoterica tends to be RPF that I stay away from.

And I will second the "gay (still straight)" bit. There's a handful of fujoshi that can write credible gay characters, and a couple who can even get the 'straight' guy tone plausibly right, but most don't manage to hit femmy gay guy.

I would bet your left nut on that too.

That's absolutely the case. If you point this out the people advancing the argument will just cover their eyes and ears, though. It's the same for everything they claim about anime. (If I wasn't clear above, I long ago escaped from the Feminism Nexus). The training you receive through social osmosis while in feminist spaces doesn't allow for anything else. You evaluate everything for sexism while you read or watch, and the smallest things trigger the alarm.

I wonder if you're familiar with the Cross Ange series.

I have never seen it, but am aware of its reputation as a sort of post-Geass cash-in / proto-Valrave / trash to treasure attempt.

unironic* depictions of conventionally attractive, sexually alluring, non-girlboss female characters have become taboo in the eyes of normie women**

I'm just scrolling through the recent female contestants on female-coded shows like Love Island, The Bachelor, Too Hot To Handle, Love is Blind, etc. and I'm not sure what kind of normie women TV you are watching.

I suppose that's a fair point, although I'd suggest treating the genre of reality TV, of which I scarcely know anything, as a wholly different matter. I'm assuming this sort of stuff is usually consumed by Boomer or GenX women and is, as you said, female-coded to begin with. On the other hand, my argument concerns younger women and products that are mainly male-oriented.

Younger Woman

  1. Love Island demographic as of May 2026 is 77% female, age distribution is that 54% are 16-19 and 23% are 20-29 (so 67% between 16-29).
  2. Too Hot To Handle demographic as of May 2026 is 55% female, age distribution is that 31% are 16-19 and 19% are 20-29 (so 50% between 16-29).
  3. Love is Blind demographic as of May 2026 is 55% female, age distribution is that 33% are 16-19 and 19% are 20-29 (so 52% between 16-29).
  4. The Bachelor demographic as of May 2026 is 76% female, age distribution is that 29% are 16-19 and 23% are 20-29 (so 52% between 16-29).

Take these numbers with grain of salt though, the median numbers don't make sense with the age distribution as presented.

Anyway, I only hear about these shows because the normie and liberal women I know (30 and below) talk about them and so I can assure you these are not consumed just by Boomer/GenX women.

products that are mainly male-oriented

I'm not really sure what you're saying, are you saying that recent Western/US male-oriented products are made with less "conventionally attractive, sexually alluring, non-girlboss female characters"? I think this is going to depend on your definition of "non-girlboss" and "male-oriented products". Maybe can you present an example that you can think of? I can, on the top of my head, think of Penelope (Anne Hathaway) in The Odyssey, Aunt May (Marisa Tomei) in the Spiderman movies, Nikki (Inde Navarrette) in Obsession from the movies just this year.

I'd argue that recent Western/US male-oriented products (mainstream movies, TV series and video games that are marketed mostly to men) are made with fewer "conventionally attractive, sexually alluring, non-girlboss female characters" than before (before 2010 or so), as a reaction to the preferences of feminist-adjacent normie women, who find the presence of such content off-putting, repellent and cringe, and who want to police the cultural consumption of men (especially young single men) accordingly, similarly to the antics of the church ladies of the old days.

I would like to point out that maybe the only aspect of female representation in Western/US male-oriented products that went down in numbers would be the "non-girlboss" part. Most female representation in Western/US male-oriented products are still "conventionally attractive" and "sexually alluring". Sex sells after all.

Which kinda begs the question as what is "non-girlboss" in your eyes?

Most female representation in Western/US male-oriented products are still "conventionally attractive" and "sexually alluring". Sex sells after all.

I think this is only true in the most vapid of ways, where we can say that someone being selected to feature in a major media product at all is almost definitely in the top 50% of attractiveness (probably top 20%), male or female. But this doesn't really touch on the phenomenon, where stars who headlined major works would often be in the top 5% of attractiveness, and this has expanded to something closer to top 20%, if not top 50%, and the gap between 95th and 80th - to say nothing of 50th - is absolutely ginormous.

And there's the phenomenon in video games, where, technologically, there's no technological reason why every female character can't have attractiveness that matches that of Eve from Stellar Blade or 2B from Nier: Automata, and yet devs insist on modeling many major ones after real-life actresses and capturing their looks in a rugged, gritty, realistic way like in recent God of War or Halo games, instead of sexifying them like with Eve and her (IIRC) 3 human models in Stellar Blade. Or just overtly choosing norm-defying types of characters like many of the woman characters from Sony's $100MM+ failure (as you write, sex sells; and some devs sometimes seem to have decided that not selling is worth the not sex) Concord or one of the protagonists of The Last of Us 2.

I think this is only true in the most vapid of ways, where we can say that someone being selected to feature in a major media product at all is almost definitely in the top 50% of attractiveness (probably top 20%), male or female. But this doesn't really touch on the phenomenon, where stars who headlined major works would often be in the top 5% of attractiveness, and this has expanded to something closer to top 20%, if not top 50%, and the gap between 95th and 80th - to say nothing of 50th - is absolutely ginormous.

I think @Botond173 is going beyond that, I think they're arguing that "feminist-adjacent normie women" is policing US/Western media output so that the top 5% in attractiveness can't headline major works in fear of triggering "antics of the church ladies of the old days". I posit this is untrue because sex sells. Or maybe all the top 5% are having a great time being OnlyFans and influencers and don't need to slave themselves to the media industry.

Your argument of expansion of attractiveness representation is fair and I understand that, though I don't see that really being a problem that normie woman exercise their preferences. With enough economic cycles, an equilibrium will be found and like you summed it, I'm sure "someone being selected to feature in a major media product" will still land north of the median attractive person for the rest of time.

And there's the phenomenon in video games, where, technologically, there's no technological reason why every female character can't have attractiveness that matches that of Eve from Stellar Blade or 2B from Nier: Automata, and yet devs insist on modeling many major ones after real-life actresses and capturing their looks in a rugged, gritty, realistic way like in recent God of War or Halo games, instead of sexifying them like with Eve and her (IIRC) 3 human models in Stellar Blade. Or just overtly choosing norm-defying types of characters like many of the woman characters from Sony's $100MM+ failure (as you write, sex sells; and some devs sometimes seem to have decided that not selling is worth the not sex) Concord or one of the protagonists of The Last of Us 2.

I will concede on this one. I do think that economic pressures (maybe it's cheaper to just take the real life mocap actresses and don't touch them up? idk) or economic demands (female audience don't get jealous, female audience sees more representation of their level of attractiveness, etc. means more people buy the game or at least don't disparage it) leads to video games having an expansion in allowable female character attractiveness.

But then is it really that bad? it's not "man walking into traffic while distracted by woman" level of beauty but only "man would be down to bed her no alcohol required" level of beauty. Is this some danger to society?

I think @Botond173 is going beyond that, I think they're arguing that "feminist-adjacent normie women" is policing US/Western media output so that the top 5% in attractiveness can't headline major works in fear of triggering "antics of the church ladies of the old days".

This doesn't match my perception of their argument, but they can speak for themselves.

Your argument of expansion of attractiveness representation is fair and I understand that, though I don't see that really being a problem that normie woman exercise their preferences. With enough economic cycles, an equilibrium will be found and like you summed it, I'm sure "someone being selected to feature in a major media product" will still land north of the median attractive person for the rest of time.

It's not that normie women are exercising their preferences, though. It's creators who overtly admit to buying into a particular ideology overtly designing women in a certain way that fits their ideology.

I do think that economic pressures (maybe it's cheaper to just take the real life mocap actresses and don't touch them up? idk)

Mocap is something else, having to do with animation, rather than scanning the person's likeness in. Mocap actors often don't look like the characters they're portraying. In terms of scanning real people in, I'm pretty sure it's more expensive to do that than just to create a model from scratch, especially the work involved in getting the specific details to match the actor just right. And certainly, the caliber of actors they're hiring (Hollywood-level actors, mostly B-list, but the occasional A-listers like Keanu Reeves or Idris Elba) are not known for being cheap - a cost that wouldn't exist at all from scratch. In the case of Stellar Blade, IIRC Shift Up hired some models who have some celebrity stature but are certainly far from Hollywood-level.

economic demands (female audience don't get jealous, female audience sees more representation of their level of attractiveness, etc. means more people buy the game or at least don't disparage it) leads to video games having an expansion in allowable female character attractiveness.

This was an argument made regularly 10-20 years ago about changing gaming. The argument was... questionable then, and today, after games have changed, it just doesn't hold any water, given the way the market has responded. Jealousy by female audiences or liking more representation or whatever simply aren't significant factors in the market for video games, particularly the mainstream AAA titles that people are mostly concerned with. Someone who believes that, by doing this, they can make their mainstream gamer-targeting game more economically successful is someone whose beliefs are defined by ideology, not by reality.

But then is it really that bad? it's not "man walking into traffic while distracted by woman" level of beauty but only "man would be down to bed her no alcohol required" level of beauty. Is this some danger to society?

It's only a danger to society like any other media like OnlyFans or Andrew Tate are: i.e. in some crazy Six-Degrees-of-Seven-Bacon way about various downstream effects with very questionable veracity. But in terms of it being really that bad, yes, it's really that bad. Denying the creation and dissemination of greater beauty when it would cost nothing more than less, just to feed some ideological commitments, is a travesty.

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I managed to successfully drag my poor wife through Berserk, Last Exile, Akira and a handful of others. But the look she gives me in Evangelion when Shinji gets tangled up in a fresh out of the shower Rei and "accidentally" gropes her, it's hard to defend why that's in there.

I think the error here is dragging one's wife through these shows.

Women don't need to defend why there's all this endless talking and nothing happens in some period-history romance show... That's their thing I guess. I'm not into it. I want to see some conflict and preferably some violence.

Holding male stories to female standards is no good. Berserk is for men, Eva too I think. It's possible for shows or books to cater to the interests of men and women but not all fiction needs to be like this. Underlying interests are different. I naturally think that certain things I like have Universal Self-Evident Value but they're not, they're just for me and maybe a subset of men like me.

I'm sure I'm not appreciating all the nuances of whatever they're talking about in Big Dresses and Bigger Stagecoaches, I just don't care to since it's boring. Much the same with women and Big Pauldrons and Bigger Bombs. See also my comment: https://www.themotte.org/post/877/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/187490?context=8#context

Previous discussion regarding whether it is possible/probable/desirable for men and women to share interests: 1 2

Long ago, I thought interesting women were women who were interested in the same things I was interested in. Which meant all the interesting girls were lesbians.

I think geeky guys often make the mistake of looking for women who are essentially men—and, yeah, there aren’t many of them. Men generally enjoy machines, systems, engineering, to a degree and in a way that women don’t, and likewise women generally enjoy creatures, cute things, fashion, social issues, learning about the dark side of the world, to a degree and in a way that men don’t. You’re unlikely to meet a woman whose personality and interests line up with men’s, or with yours.

That's interesting. For my wife, she's totally fine with that sort of sex fantasy being in shows. She's like "whatever, it's totally normal and wish fulfillment. Nbd". However, she gives me the look of disgust when I specifically make comments, or too many comments, that are sex fantasy-related. I have no clue why this is.

I've asked her many times and she can't explain it. Like for example, if I make sexual jokes to her about Anna from Frozen, she gives me the look. But when the actress in the Frozen Broadway musical takes the character in a totally sexual direction, and makes throaty murmers and feels up a suit of armor while singing "The First Time in Forever" (yes this actually happens in the taped produced movie of the Frozen musical that is currently on Disney+, go see for yourself), she gets annoyed if I think it's a little weird for a kids production to feature that.

I've asked her many times and she can't explain it. Like for example, if I make sexual jokes to her about Anna from Frozen, she gives me the look. But when the actress in the Frozen Broadway musical takes the character in a totally sexual direction, and makes throaty murmers and feels up a suit of armor while singing "The First Time in Forever" (yes this actually happens in the taped produced movie of the Frozen musical that is currently on Disney+, go see for yourself), she gets annoyed if I think it's a little weird for a kids production to feature that.

It makes sense if you acknowledge the late-stage feminism main normie message: feminism is whatever women do. The idea is that women cannot be judged for almost anything, if women do it then it is expression of their feminism and empowerment. There exist a huge carveout out of this if women do adopt more conservative stances especially if there is any suggestion that women should be held to some standard or perform any duty. So if women are against abortion, then of course it is not feminism, but false consciousness and internal misogyny and we do not talk about it maybe except that they are victims of their for sure terrible and abusive husbands. But in general any degenerate thing that women do should not be judged, it is just expression of their feminist empowerment. At worst they had to be forced to do it by men.

So sorry to break it to you, but you sexualizing Disney princess is disgusting, your wife sexualizing the same princess is feminism. And do not dare to judge her or ask her to maintain any level of moral consistency or ask her to fulfill any moral duty. It is as simple as that.

Define ‘right’.

You are indeed correct that white majoritarian politics does not have a future as a strongly pursued ideological policy. There are only a few vaguely right-ish groups who can produce thé sorts of people who design state policy and none of them care whether whites are 60% or 40% of a given country. White majoritarianism does probably have a robust future as a crude populist weapon- even many brown people would rather live in white majority societies. But as the ideological backbone of right wing governments it’s not going to happen.

My definition of right is: A political view where hierarchies are created to give more power, responsabilities and rights to an "ingroup" in detriment of an "outgroup" the more ingroup bias and hierarchies exist, the further right it goes and vice-versa.

That would make socialism and communism right-wing.

I feel like the political compass has pretty elegant terminology for this. Anarcho-communism and that milieu is libertarian-left, Marxist-Leninism and its ilk is authoritarian-left. In that same way, anarcho-capitalism is the pole of the libertarian-right, while something like Integralism would be an example of the authoritarian-right. Something like theoretical fascism, with genuine corporatism and not just crony capitalism as was the case in practice, would be authoritarian-center.

The left across the western world is ideologically unable and prevented from addressing this issue, which is why they decry anyone who ventures near it as a fascist who harbors xenophobic thoughts. Ironically if anyone who has a sensible take on immigration is a fascist, then it’s only a fascist who’ll end up doing the job. This historically is how true extremists have gotten elected to power. And then the more these different populations incorporate into your country they see it increasingly to their benefit to pass and promote legislation to handcuff the native population and arrest their capability to do something about it. We’re at the bottom half of this cycle as I see it and violence is going to continue to escalate because of it.

Is there any hope for a proper right in the west?

No, and according to your definition, nowhere else. If your only measure of "right wing" is zero tolerance of furiners, then the most "right wing" place in the world is North Korea (setting aside worst shitholes where no one wants to go, Zimbabwe has no immigration problem).

1/Being openly racist/xenophobic and accepting no foreigners

2/Being totally closed to immigration

3/Allowing tourism only

4/Allowing tourism and temporary residence/work visas

5/Allowing permanent residency without citizenship/voting rights

6/Allowing citizenship with a through background assimilation check aswell as having at least a certain number of years living in the country.

7/Allowing citizenship for third generation migrants married to a native.

And even the Best Korea now promotes tourism and is somewhere around tier 3 on your scale.

The biggest win in terms of institutions that the right has gotten in the west was

Nothing with abortion, it was rolling back of gun control in US. See this infographic how gun nuts won.

Remember, even Texas was no carry zone. US gun culture is not something inherited from pioneer and cowboy times, it was created in living memory by hard work and hard fight of millions.

Lesson: it is easier to rally people to fight to defend something they have (even pew pew fun toys) than to take something from other people for no benefits for themselves (why should I care about Shaniqua's unborn bebe when even Shaniqua herself DNGAF).

Anti-abortion movement is the most severe case of pathological altruism in the world, more true than pro immigration activism (with more immigrants, you get cheaper Doordash and Uber, with less abortions, you personally win only more poverty and crime).

Unlike the other topics discussed, though, the gun control thing doesn't even parse as particularly right-wing outside of the American context (except insofar as we're all living in amerika). Generally, on the balance, right-wing means authoritarian means more rights for narrower groups and less rights for the masses.

Remember, even Texas was no carry zone. US gun culture is not something inherited from pioneer and cowboy times, it was created in living memory by hard work and hard fight of millions.

This is not true.

Texas was never a "no carry zone" it was a no concealed carry zone. Ditto Arizona along with most of the Midwest and Mountain States. Likewise by starting the clock at the peak of popular support for Gun-control you obfuscate the broader trend. If that map had started in 1966 in instead of '86 there would've been a lot more green and blue on it, and what we would see, would be gun control getting pushed on the nation in response to the chaos and lawlessness of the 60s and 70s only for the nation to spend the 90s and 00s pushing back.

Now, Trump, i don't have a good understanding of how American politics work to comment much, but it seems that his policies are more of the same, executive orders to deport a lot of people, no real effort to bring down legal immigration. Things that can be very much undone in a future democratic government.

Trump deported a few million people in the last year and is ramping up the machinery to deport more. Legal immigration is also down as many of the pathways for fraud and abuse are being shut down. The population of the US overall became less foreign for the first time in 50 years.

Calling it "more of the same" and just "executive orders" I think undersells the achievement. There is nothing you can do that cannot be "undone in a future democratic government". There is no imagined superlaw that Congress could pass but isn't that would deport millions, in a way that a Democrat couldn't just ignore if he so chose. The law as it is is actually fairly robust already in giving the President lots of powers to deport. The laws that Congress could write, but so far have not, are necessary to go further than this, but this is already the most far anyone has achieved in a long time.

I say this because I think Trump is an important rebuttal. The world doesn't only swim left. Trump has been the most effective anti-left politician basically anywhere in the world in a generation. I hope that instead of dismissing him Europe thinks about him seriously and learns what they can, even if Europe has to adopt different postures or tactics as befits their own situation.

From Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, chapter 111:

Slowly, Harry's mind tried to recover itself a final time. Very possibly final, if he was right about the Dark Lord killing him after this... though the Dark Lord had said that he would resurrect Hermione, which seemed pointless if that was true... was that simply the Dark Lord following through on a promise he would not otherwise have been able to make in Parseltongue... why had he not just shot Harry on the spot...

Seriously, some last functioning part of his brain said to all the other parts, this would be a good time to think of something, something that the Dark Lord has not already thought of, something we can do without our pouch or our wand or our Time-Turner, something that Professor Quirrell has not imagined we can do... think, think, pretty pretty please think of something? Don't shut down now, even if you're scared, even if we've never really really faced death before in the sense of being about to die in the next hour, THIS IS NOT THE TIME TO SHUT DOWN -

Harry's mind stayed blank.

Suppose, said that last remaining part, suppose we try to condition on the fact that we win this, or at least get out of this alive. If someone TOLD YOU AS A FACT that you had survived, or even won, somehow made everything turn out okay, what would you think had happened -

Not legitimate procedure, whispered Ravenclaw, the universe doesn't work like that, we're just going to die.

Someone realises we're missing, thought Hufflepuff, and Mad-Eye Moody shows up with a squad of Aurors and rescues us. I think the time has come to admit we're not more competent than the standard authorities.

The saving factor does have to be something we do somehow, said the last voice. Otherwise there's no point in our thinking about it.

Suppose a time traveler came back from the year 2100 and told you that, in his time, Britain (or Germany, or France) was 99% white and 94% Christian, the way it was in 1951. Unfortunately, before he could explain how such a thing came to pass, he gets hit by a lorry, dying instantly.

What would you think had happened?

Well, first, I would have been shocked that the singularity didn't happen, and that there were still biological humans walking around in 75 years' time. But leaving that aside...

I would not think that the remaining white population of Britain had woken up, voted harder, elected a right-wing government, and peacefully fixed their problems.

I would think that a far-right coup had overthrown the government, enacted martial law, and physically removed the Muslims, or something along those lines.

We are not voting our way out of this.

Suppose a time traveler came back from the year 2100 and told you that, in his time, Britain (or Germany, or France) was 99.6% white and 94% Christian, the way it was in 1951. Unfortunately, before he could explain how such a thing came to pass, he gets hit by a lorry, dying instantly.

What would you think had happened?

Timeline 1:

Second Cold War heated up, all sides built massive WMD stockpiles (nuclear, chemical, biological, AI) as they used to be at the peak or the previous round, kept them on hair trigger and then someone banged on the big red button with his shoe.

The (tiny numbers) of dwellers in the wastelands that used to be Europe are descendants of inhabitants of few rather remote villages, and they are praying really hard.

The Malevil future.

Timeline 2:

AI assisted bio and genetic technology delivers all science fictional promises and more. Human DNA is mapped and completely resolved, genetic engineering becomes as available and affordable as cell phones are now.

Everyone can now select their offsprings genes, and everyone excepting few weirdos selects white genes. Everyone always wanted to be white, and science and technology now made the dream possible. Just like viagra replaced rhinoceros horns, DNA editing will replace all existing skin lightening treatments.

In unrelated development, Christian religious revival powered by breakthrough in missionary AI sweeps the lands that used to be Europe, and everyone is now Christian (at least until Muslim, Buddhist and Hindu religious AI developers step up their efforts and close the gap).

Timeline 3: (doesn't quite work fast enough to get to 99.6% by 2100, but the overall mechanism is plausible and can be delivered by voting harder)

  • A right-populist government ends illegal and low-quality legal immigration, restricts legal high-quality immigration in ways which make the UK an unattractive destination for high-quality immigrants with options, and ends the bullshit which makes it advantageous to self-identify as non-white.
  • Non-Irish immigration drops to negligible levels
  • There is already no taboo on interracial dating in the UK, everyone is doing it except Pakistanis, and Pakistani parents are breaking the law in order to stop their children dating interracially. Laws against child abuse and forced marriage would probably be enforced by a right-populist government.
  • After a century or so everyone is mixed-race, and most people are mostly white given the starting demographics.
  • All the mixed-race people tick the "white" box on the census because there is no gain from identifying as anything else.

Is “White” really an important social division in Britain? It was useful in the colonization of the Americas since it was contrasted against Native Americans and Africans, but once the legal and practical realities of the colonization era ended racial identities tend to collapse with it. In almost all of modern Latin America you have a mestizaje identity that includes whites and your various mixed race people integrated with the national culture contrasted with small native and occasionally African diaspora subcultures as recognized minorities. You are even seeing this delayed process happening in the US right now.

If the right populists get their way, I can see Western European nations potentially going the way of a titular “mestizaje” ethnicity plus a few minority subcultures.

Is “White” really an important social division in Britain?

No. The ethnic cleavages that matter are "British and Irish vs wogs, who begin at Calais", "Muslims vs everyone else" and, in Wales, "Welsh-speakers vs English-speakers". But the British race relations industry is reading from an American script, so "white" is an important category for them. And of course also for intermeddling Yanks like Elon Musk or @erwgv3g34

Suppose a time traveler came back from the year 2100 and told you that, in his time, Britain (or Germany, or France) was 99% white and 94% Christian, the way it was in 1951. Unfortunately, before he could explain how such a thing came to pass, he gets hit by a lorry, dying instantly.

Suppose a time traveler comes to 1920 and tells people that in 1944, there are hardly any Jews left in Poland. What do you think had happened? Do you think the gentile Poles (or even the Germans) thrived?

Generally, societies which are willing to enact ethnic purges are also shitty in a lot of other ways. You do not get to 99% white simply by removing the recent immigrants, you would need to round up Asians whose ancestors have lived here since 1970.

Likewise, unless Jesus starts granting his followers spell slots, I do not think that 94% Christianity would happen by organically. My read on the 94% is that in 1951, parishes filled important social functions and most people who had doubts about theism found it wiser to stay in the closet. It is hard to make parishes great again, but easy enough to drive the non-theists back into the closet, Cromwell could do that.

Repressive regimes do not go away simply because they have arrived at an ethnically homogeneous society. Any Britain which will go back to 99% white and 94% Christian will be orders of magnitude more terrible than 1951 was.

Also, one might wonder how a country would become more Christian while deporting or otherwise doing away with a substantial portion of the populace.

I don't think the proposals that would result in this outcome would be very Christ-like.

A large part of the decrease in the "Christian" share of the British population mostly comes from culturally Christian non-believers changing which box they tick on the census. It is not the case that 94% of British people believed in Jesus Christ in 1951 - in fact I would be mildly surprised if 94% of Anglican priests did. (It is also not the case that 54% of British people believe in Jesus Christ now - I don't, and I tick the CoE box on the census because it helps causes I like for the number to be higher.)

But there is a whole treaty there preventing such things, the ECHR. Which is from 1950's and that makes me think, if those sort of treaties existed at that time, it wouldn't be unreasonable to say, since we are further left now than in the 50s, that we are now full blown communists, or at least, the policymakers are.

I do not get this argument. The ECHR prevents you from directly deporting someone who makes a claim of asylum. Or summarily executing them for entering your country illegally. When the UK signed that treaty, they were very much not "full blown communists". How does the continued adherence to that treaty make them commie today?

Practically, the ECHR does not say you can not deport anyone ever. Even us Germans are deporting people ... to fucking Taliban Afghanistan no less.

--

Of course, mid-2026, being worried about immigration feels like being worried about palace intrigues in Constantinople in 1453. I am a software developer, so I am first in line for getting replaced by the machines, but I certainly will not be the last. All white collar work is up for grabs. Blue collar work might still be around for a decade (present rate, no singularity and all that), but even before demand might crash. Unlike the PMC, the data centers will not need a lot of people to fix their cars.

Against this background of "the economic value of the median citizen will be marginal to nil in the near future", sprinkled with x-risk and visions of God Emperor Altman to taste, "OMG whites will become a minority" does not sound like an urgent issue, to put it lightly. Frankly, I observe that the people who get elected on anti-immigration platforms are mostly buffoons and grifters and rarely wise statesmen. History might not judge Trump by the spectacles he holds on the lawn of the White House or in Iran, and more on how he dealt with AI.

(I realize that this is a fully general counterargument. "How can you care about $X when literally $Y is happening right now.")

You've posted a reply to a post that was removed. I didn't get to read it, does anyone have a summary of it, or at least a reason why it and a handful of comments below were removed by @Amadan?

I am not a fan of censorship/posts being removed especially without any context, but I'm assuming it was done because the post had some call to violence or something.

I don't recall any calls to violence and thought the post was appropriate, though I only skimmed it.

Short summary: OP asked whether there is any hope of 'the right' (which he defined in detail, though questionably; really I think he meant something more like 'ethno-nationalism') has any hope of organizing and asserting itself anywhere in the West before it's 'too late' and demographic change makes it impossible to achieve its ends through democratic means.

Certainly an interesting and timely question.

I concur that I did not anticipate someone getting banned, much less deleted for the top level post.

The top level comment reads:

Removed by @FCfromSSC

I don't think @FCfromSSC is an admin, so it might be that he/she/they just deleted their own comment?

The other posts were indeed removed by @Amadan, which is a bit strange. Normal admin MO (from my observations) would be to just ban the poster (and be transparent about it, writing a reply with admin-hat on). I think removal would mostly happen when required by law (e.g. copyright) or excessive spamming.

In theory, it could also be that @Amadan wrote the removed posts and later deleted them, but this also seems unlikely.

@FCfromSSC is an admin. As for the removed posts, the poster is a ban evader who slipped through.

Banning him is fine; removing the posts is not.

Agreed. That makes it harder to understand modding decisions, and also turns potentially valuable comments downthread into incomprehensible orphans.

There were some other things going on, but yes, we don't normally remove posts like that. Mea culpa, I will take the blame for messing up the threads.

It would greatly reduce confusion if in future mods drop a modhat comment saying "banned and removed for ban evasion".

It was saved on the Wayback Machine:

Is there any hope for a proper right in the west? I don't think so, yet, and there is little time remaining.

Cthulhu only swims left because he has nowhere else to go -- Where will hope come from?

The mainstream right

I've been following UK politics developments of right wing parties and saw that Reform UK is leading the parliament polls though by a meager margin and also with only 24%. This party is led by the (In)famous Nigel Farage.

Now, as a right party, the primary concern of voters are immigration policies, what do they offer?

Illegal immigration is out of control because politicians choose not to enforce the law, and let foreign courts rob British citizens of a border.

A Reform government will stop the boats by immediately leaving the ECHR, restoring full control of our borders, intercepting and detaining all illegal arrivals, and deporting them.

Reform UK will implement a five-year emergency programme to identify, detain, and deport illegal migrants in the UK. We will leave the European Convention on Human Rights, repeal the Human Rights Act and pass the Illegal Migration (Mass Deportation) Bill to ensure that anyone who enters the country illegally will be ineligible for asylum.

Let us assume they're not lying in here, that's all fine... but this isn't exactly what one would consider necessarily a conservative policy. I can see how far left we've gone such that deporting illegals is seen as right wing. Deporting illegals should be a mainstream view. Border control likewise.

But there is a whole treaty there preventing such things, the ECHR. Which is from 1950's and that makes me think, if those sort of treaties existed at that time, it wouldn't be unreasonable to say, since we are further left now than in the 50s, that we are now full blown communists, or at least, the policymakers are.

The far-right

Well, regardless, reform isn't the only alternative for conservatives, there is a further right party, Restore Britain, which is seen as the "far right" party of Britain. Recently, their leader, Rupert Lowe, made a proposal/Ultimatum, offering support for reform IF they agreed to 5 basic principles of policy. You can watch the video to see him talk about it, but in another tweet, he wrote it down in short.

Our five conditions are principles the overwhelming majority of the Reform membership, and the wider country, believe in.

Mass deportations of illegals, and deporting millions of foreigners who are a drain on our society.

Securing our country’s demographic security, reversing the Islamification of Britain and implementing the recommendations of our Rape Gang Inquiry - this includes deporting foreign national accomplices of the rapists - my backing of that was the very reason Farage removed me to begin with.

Giving the British people a referendum on the death penalty.

Restoring a self-sufficient Britain through the difficult decisions that will require delivering a country that can feed, power and defend itself.

No failed Conservative ministers, who are responsible for the destruction of Britain, in any future cabinet. Not sack them, or remove them, just not hand them the same power they previously abused to demographically vandalise Britain.

These principles are essential to the restoration of the country we all love.

Now, this looks similar to what is proposed by reform, but goes deeper, addressing the demographic and islamic issue. This position is the "far right" position. And again, a centrist could easily accept these terms, well, if we go back in time, even some communists would be fine with these.

Now, will Farage accept? I don't know, but i don't think he will, because he has said in interviews that alienating islamic voters is not possible anymore, because they will become a huge portion of the voting base in the future: "If we alienate islam, we lose"

I am not against pragmatism, but i don't think that being pragmatic is accepting a slow death where each concession you make chops off a part of your body, until the point where you actually die and just join the status quo you're fighting against. It's quite baffling that "far right" is "mass deportation of illegals" or "opposing islam", i can make a very quick list of right wing thoughts on immigration from most extreme to most moderate

  1. Being openly racist/xenophobic and accepting no foreigners
  2. Being totally closed to immigration
  3. Allowing tourism only
  4. Allowing tourism and temporary residence/work visas
  5. Allowing permanent residency without citizenship/voting rights
  6. Allowing citizenship with a through background assimilation check aswell as having at least a certain number of years living in the country.
  7. Allowing citizenship for third generation migrants married to a native.

I didn't reach the actual part of deporting illegals yet... and so far, at points 6 and 7, we are in Switzerland

Ordinary naturalisation is the option for foreign citizens who have lived for at least 10 years in Switzerland, three of which must be in the five years before they file their application for citizenship, and who hold a permanent residence permit (C permit); Simplified naturalisation is the option primarily for persons who:

  • are married to a Swiss citizen;
  • were born in Switzerland and belong to the third generation of a family of foreign citizens living in Switzerland.

How far right is Switzerland? A lot apparently. Well, to drive the point home, when farage responded to Lowe today, he said that he wished to form a center-right alliance

The Reform UK chief said he would “do whatever I could for us to have a sane center-right alliance to beat Labour at the next general election”

So... even the proeminent right wing party does not consider itself right wing... because indeed they aren't. One could argue that they are playing around the overton window and in time the discourse goes further right, but there's little time for this. Britain's population will be minority white by 2060, and probably even earlier if we consider White and british, as they're already a minority in London. Soon the foreign descent citizens will be big enough to essentially block any sort of nationalist move.

Without enduring policies, things are not going to work out

With only a few decades to spare, the right still has to

  1. Crack down illegal arrivals
  2. Crack down illegal immigrants within the country
  3. Deal with poorly integrated migrants
  4. Adress the islam issue
  5. Adress the race and ancestry issue.

Which means, effectively, that the right does not exist. And it's very difficult to believe it will in any meaningful form, because it would need unprecedent political domination in order to sustain enough mandates to bring all of those things to light. Enduring policies are needed, coming in like Trump, deporting millions, but then losing the next election and have all the progress undone, is effectively worthless. Thus, i think it's quite Hopeless that, even with a near political victory, to be able to sustain long enough and put policies that will last through the center-left/left governments. There needs to be treaties, laws and a colaborative judiciary branch to prevent everything from being undone and be yet again, be a kind of conservatism that is just begging for progressivism to just "stop right here".

And, back to the ECHR, this thing is from the 1950's and is strong enough to cause conservative nightmares, how much political power it is required to, in a time where everything is orders of magnitude more liberal and progressive than the 50s, to create a "counter" ECHR? We might aswell just join the ones that still believe in a communist revolution.

Other "far-right" and conclusions

Afd in Germany is also leading polls, but it's very much similar to what Reform UK presents, tighten citizenship, asylum, modify the human rights agreements. I have a hard time believing parties within the EU can actually move torwards a Hungary-like immigration policy, which is in open defiance to EU legislation, but, given Germany's economic dominance in the EU, maybe the Afd could be the one party needed to tip the scales, though this is just a coping mechanism.

Giorgia Meloni in Italy has come a few steps on cracking down illegal immigration, but is still having net immigration on the hundreds of thousands via worker visas, adding to the doubts that it will ever be possible to do more than the bare minimum.

Now, Trump, i don't have a good understanding of how American politics work to comment much, but it seems that his policies are more of the same, executive orders to deport a lot of people, no real effort to bring down legal immigration. Things that can be very much undone in a future democratic government.

The biggest win in terms of institutions that the right has gotten in the west was... The overturn of roe v wade, which was merely something allowing the states to make their own laws. So, trade a full left-wing/liberal law forced upon all states to not forcing it, but not doing anything else to further push conservative policies forward, a softening of the chokehold, not a reversal. Meanwhile, birthright citizenship was maintained in the broad interpretation, again, showing that mass changes in legislation and institutions are needed, and Trump either has no power or doesn't want to press much.

All in all, it's hard to be hopeful anything will change until it's too late, if changing legislation is already hard enough, if not done in time, there's no legislating against demographics. In the end, the right isn't in the west yet, and it's probably too late already.

Cool, thank you for posting.

The ECHR prevents you from directly deporting someone who makes a claim of asylum.

The term "suicide pact" comes to mind. Strange they couldn't forsee malicious false claims of asylum overwhelming them. The American equivalent being 5.8 million under Biden. Google tells me nearly a million per year in Europe. So almost as bad as the very worst of American Democratic governance.

There are some reasons to worry about AI and demographics. What if, during turbulent economic times whilst people are losing jobs and the existing system is losing its legitimacy, a large migrant population votes for a populist race-socialist party that then orders for the AIs to be aligned 'to the will of the global majority'?

'Mamdani but with actual power'

Anti-immigration politicians may not be terribly capable but there is some reason to think that, on average, they are more patriotic than a pro-migration politician.

Of course, mid-2026, being worried about immigration feels like being worried about palace intrigues in Constantinople in 1453. I am a software developer, so I am first in line for getting replaced by the machines, but I certainly will not be the last. All white collar work is up for grabs. Blue collar work might still be around for a decade (present rate, no singularity and all that), but even before demand might crash. Unlike the PMC, the data centers will not need a lot of people to fix their cars.

Massively increasing the scale of the welfare state for random refugees who could become a significant voting bloc/force preferential treatment for the scarce jobs left might not be a great idea even if automation is ripping along?

I do not get this argument. The ECHR prevents you from directly deporting someone who makes a claim of asylum.

The ECHR doesn't even say that. ECHR caselaw says that you can't deport someone to a country where they will be mistreated in certain ways. It is completely legal (and most ECHR countries have done so) to state, correctly, that a certain country does not mistreat people in the relevant ways and that you will not entertain asylum claims from its citizens and legal residents, and start summarily deporting people who fit that description. Spain does it with Moroccans, for example. The Refugee Convention works the same way, but in practice the list of relevant ways you can be mistreated is strictly broader under the ECHR than under the Convention, so the Convention is de facto irrelevant to European refugee law.

Neither the ECHR nor the Refugee Convention prescribes the process for asylum claims - both were written at a time when people thought it was obvious who was and was not a refugee - also when people weren't as afraid of genuine refugees illegally crossing from one safe country to another, which is what drives most toxic immigration politics nowadays.

The problem is that the ECHR does not require courts to believe blatant lies by the executive, so this trick doesn't work with evil countries like Taliban-ruled Afghanistan or countries with ongoing civil wars. The most common nationalities among small boat migrants to the UK are Eritrea, Afghanistan, Sudan, Iran and Somalia. Almost everyone from those countries has a colourable asylum claim, and apart from the Iraqis most of them are genuine refugees under the Refugee Convention. (You don't cease to be a Convention refugee until you become a citizen or permanent resident of a safe country.) The problem is that the UK wants them to stay in France and seek protection from the French authorities, and the French want them to leave France and become someone else's problem. (France is not required by international law to take back people who illegally transitted through France en route to the UK, and doesn't.)

Grand Theft Crypto, Episode LXXVI

New week is here, time for new culture war happening is here. Maybe it belongs to finance thread, but both cryptocurrency and cryptocrime are now inseparable part of our culture.

Coldcard Hardware Wallet Flaw Linked to $70 Million Bitcoin Theft in 41 Minutes

An attacker drained 1,196 Bitcoin addresses in 41 minutes on July 30, taking 1,082.65 BTC worth about $70.2 million at the time.

Yes, safe crypto technology had proven to be unsafe once again. Follow the links in the article for more nerd details.

Why is this important? This time, this not due any fault or slip at the user side - their only mistake was trusting the professionals of Coinkite business operating since 2013 and considered one of the best by everyone in crypto.

Bitcoin is not to blame, Bitcoin worked as intended. The random numbers generated by Coldcard were not random.

Little parable for non nerds to grok what is it all about:

You have big pot of gold, and are very afraid you will lose it. Where to hide your treasure? You want to stay anonymous, you do not want anyone ever know that you are a rich man.

Fortunately, your bank provides deposit boxes, fully anonymous where anyone with key can come and withdraw the deposit, no questions asked.

Now, you have problem where to hide the key, so you do not lose or misplace it. No worry, you buy safe, made by trustworthy long established manufacturer that is 100% secure from crackers. You put your key inside, and feel relieved.

Until one day, you find the safe empty, the key vanished. You hurry to bank in panic, and your greatest fears come true. Someone was there, and emptied your deposit box. Your treasure is gone.

What happened? The super secure safe was unsafe. There was manufacturing fault that enabled anyone to open it if he knew about it. Some criminal mastermind learned about the vulnerability (For more mastermind points, he worked in the safe manufacturing company and put the fault there himself. For maximal mastermind points, he founded and operated the company himself, in a proper long con.) sneaked to your safe and squirreled away the key.

If your rage is pointed at bank, it is misplaced. Rightful target of your rage is the thief (good luck finding him, the chap can be now in Uruguay, Uganda or Uzbekistan, the world is big) and the safe company (good luck recovering anything from them). Just say farewell to your wealth and learn to love the hobo life.

Now, what are lessons of the episode?

1/ Another proof that crypto hadn't brought world peace and harmony as some more devoted fans promised, but crypto made crime cool again. Grisly, retarded and boring ordinary everyday crime stays, but evil genius was conjured from pages of pulp novels to reality.

2/ Trust no one. If you want to make you crypto stash really secure, you need to make your own random number generator, this means using the gold standard of physics, radioactive decay. No randomer random events can be found in this universe.

Too much work? Say good bye to crypto and invest in white powder. What you put in your nose, no one can take away from you ever again.

edit: links

Here is a linkedin-free writeup. Low entropy key generation is an oldie but a goodie -- I recall when ssh keys generated with Debian had this problem.

For this particular story, I think that the morale is that rather than worrying about increasingly far-fetched modes of attack ("yes, you can keep your key on an airgapped encrypted OpenBSD laptop, but what if someone steals that laptop and manages to brute force the passphrase, would you not prefer some hardware encryption where the chip clears itself after three wrong passphrase entries?"), you should worry about "what if my niche crypto implementation is not as secure as anticipated?"

Also, if you make hardware wallets, auditing that the crypto is implemented correctly seems to be (not to put too fine a point to it) THE ONE JOB YOU HAD? Most failing cryptography fails not because the math is unsound, nor because someone has a quantum computer with sufficient memory, but simply because implementations are hard and people write buggy code. I know enough about crypto to not try to roll out my own implementations. "Key generated from low entropy PRNG" is a failure mode we had before. I recall Truecrypt simply prompting you to type a lot of noise simply because they did not wholly trust their supposed hardware randomness sources.

The #ifndef vs #if thing is likewise fun -- sure, usually it is not that harmful.

I will go out on a limb and say that this seems exactly the kind of bug an enterprising cybercriminal would discover with the help of an unfettered LLM these days. Being a hardware wallet where all the paranoid people park their coins makes it a juicy target, of course.

Someone did point out this vulnerability was discovered shortly after one frontier model or another was released. But then again, there are new models every day, so who knows.

Key generated from low entropy PRNG" is a failure mode we had before.

The rather infamous Debian SSH key generation vulnerability was like this, and was way back in 2008. Ironically, that one was introduced by following the guidance of an automated security checking tool, and impacted Debian and related distributions.

you should worry about "what if my niche crypto implementation is not as secure as anticipated?"

Or in this case, "What if the person writing it is a blind idiot monkey?"

Getting true random noise is trivially easy in microcontrollers and only a complete idiot would use something like micropython in such security critical application.

Genuine question - why can't they implement some kind of two factor authentication? So that using your analogy, there are two keys to your vault. Stealing one key is not enough. Wouldn't that make it exponentially more difficult to steal peoples' money?

Maybe it's not a good analogy, but getting into my bank account requires both a password and a code number which is sent to my mobile phone. Obviously this is not perfect security, but it seems like it makes things much harder to break in.

Or here is another question: Why can't crypto currency be stored in the equivalent of a "checking account" and a "savings account." Most of the money is in the "savings account," and money can be moved from the "savings account" only to the "checking account" with a 48 hour delay. So that the user can check his account every day and if he sees an unauthorized transfer, he can lock the account down before any of the money makes it to the outside world.

You can, it’s called a multi-sig wallet. It’s a pain but people do it.

1/ Another proof that crypto hadn't brought world peace and harmony as some more devoted fans promised, but crypto made crime cool again.

I disagree with both extremes. Crypto is just a tool, one that can be used for good or evil depending on the people who interact with it. The first bank robbery probably happened 15 minutes after the first bank opened. The first bank also brought immense benefits to society. Crypto is no different.

2/ Trust no one. If you want to make you crypto stash really secure, you need to make your own random number generator, this means using the gold standard of physics, radioactive decay. No randomer random events can be found in this universe.

You still have to trust that you or the code you run didn't mishandle the numbers or cause them to lose entropy somewhere. You still have to trust something, on some level. Trusting nothing is impossible. However, I do agree with the principle that you should trust the least amount of things possible. Generating your own numbers (if done correctly) may be such a solution if you suspect the built-in RNG is dodgy.

And using radioactive decay is excessive and unnecessary. The real problem is that they rolled their own crypto.

And using radioactive decay is excessive and unnecessary.

There are very real concerns about even seemingly-good sources of hardware randomness. There remain reasons why Linux maintains CONFIG_RANDOM_TRUST_CPU: if your concern is nation-state level actors, you might not trust Intel's pinky swear that the random bits it generated have nothing up its sleeve (see DUAL_EC_DRBG for the sorts of concerns you'd want to be aware of).

Radioactive decay is at least something you can build relatively easily that has no obvious metaphorical sleeves to hide weaknesses. But you're probably right it's overkill for most users.

I disagree with both extremes. Crypto is just a tool, one that can be used for good or evil depending on the people who interact with it. The first bank robbery probably happened 15 minutes after the first bank opened.

Not the same thing, bank robberies today tend to be rather primitive affairs, rarely successful (with rare exceptions).

And robbing bank from the inside requires decades of grind and hard work (and good connections) before you are promoted to position where you can squirrel away the dough.

Crypto crime is career open to anyone in the world with internet access, the ultimate meritocracy.

I fear that you may have sampling bias with regards to crypto. You don't hear about the failed crypto thefts, only the successful ones. Successful theft of crypto requires some degree of intelligence and hard work, much like successful theft from bank. Not just anybody with Internet access can do it.

(I should be clear that by successful, I am also including getting away with it without being caught or facing significant punishment. I will grant that crypto theft in certain respects is easier than, for example, breaking into a bank, but unless you have perfect ironclad opsec you can't just steal money and get away with it.)

Also laundering large sums of crypto is a gigantic pain in the ass compared to most other assets since it's all public on the blockchain. North Korea isn't bad at it since they've got a very long time horizon to slowly drip the money out through certain protocols, but if you're the average hacker on the block and you manage to grab 200M off an exploit you're going to struggle to get much of that into spending money.

Using a passphrase ("13th word", or 19th or 25th etc) in addition to the shitty random number would have kept them safe, right?

Using a passphrase ("13th word", or 19th or 25th etc) in addition to the shitty random number would have kept them safe, right?

I don't know, but I was thinking of something similar. If (1) in addition to your lengthy crypto passkey consisting of a long random number, you also need to enter a simple one word password; and (2) you get only one try every 5 minutes, it seems like it would be far harder for people to steal your money.

It's a similar principle at work with ATM cards. A thief needs both the card itself and a simple 4 or 5 digit code. Neither of these is an insurmountable barrier, but combining them makes it exponentially harder to get into the person's bank account.

Anyway, I'm not an expert on computer security so I wouldn't be surprised if there were something important I were missing. But that's how it seems to me as a layman: That it's preferable to condition access to the account on two reasonably challenging obstacles as opposed to one obstacle which you believe to be super-duper challenging.

That's been possible for a long time. Choosing a pass phrase is optional when setting up these hardware wallets

But... Reportedly, even someone who had chosen a pass phrase for their buggy Coldcard got their account emptied. Hmm. Maybe the hackers ran some simple brute forcing on the accounts they couldn't get straight into?

That's been possible for a long time. Choosing a pass phrase is optional when setting up these hardware wallets

That's good to hear.

But... Reportedly, even someone who had chosen a pass phrase for their buggy Coldcard got their account emptied. Hmm. Maybe the hackers ran some simple brute forcing on the accounts they couldn't get straight into?

I have very little knowledge about computer security in general or this situation in particular, but it seems to me that the solution is to have a delay on password attempts. e.g. if you get your password wrong, you have to wait a minute to try again. After the second failed attempt, you have to wait 5 minutes. After that, 10 minutes. After that, an hour. It seems to me that this would make brute force attacks extremely time consuming.

Also, after a couple failed pass phrase attempts, the account holder could be texted and emailed so that he has an opportunity to lock down his account.

Yes, I agree. Though I'm not sure it's implementable if the "login attempts" are being made towards the Blockchain itself? I don't know how this stuff works, maybe the Blockchain could be updated to include that login delay, but I'm pretty sure that the hw wallets and their softwares are just "interfaces."

The cryptocurrency is protected by a random number - it is a property of the crypto algorithm (not the wallet) that anyone who knows this number can steal it.

You can store the number en clair on a hardware wallet, so anyone with the wallet can spend the crypto (and someone who steals the wallet has stolen the crypto), or you can store the random number encrypted on the wallet (so you need the wallet and the key to spend the crypto). The passphrase is the key used to (symmetrically) encrypt the random number.

But if the underlying random number that goes into the crypto algorithm is not random and someone manages to guess it, then no amount of secrecy protecting your copy of the number will stop the guesser stealing your crypto.

You seem to have misunderstood what a passphrase is. The passphrase is not the PIN used on the hardware wallet to do transfers. The passphrase is an extra, optional part of the address key.

My technical expertise is limited for BTC, and non-existent for other cryptos - but wouldn't you need a separate passphrase for every key in the wallet to do that?

Best practice for BTC is to use each address and associated keys once only, which would make that impractical for a working wallet and pretty annoying for a cold storage wallet - you would need to memorise a new passphrase after each deposit or withdrawal.

“ but both cryptocurrency and cryptocrime are now inseparable part of our culture.”

  • Let’s not overstate crypto. There are likely more people paying attention to the Pittsburgh Pirates in America than paying attention to crypto. This might be a little overstatement but it’s still fairly niche.

This is...not true. CNBC reports Crypto prices far more prominently than ESPN reports on the Pirates.

That obviously wouldn’t be the right metric. Conversely Pittsburgh’s local news station reports on crypto like 3 days a year but the Pittsburgh Pirates probably 200-220 times a year (162 games plus less in off-season).

CNBC itself is a fairly niche channel. Certain communities watch CNBC 100% of the time everyday. Basically any trading desks has it on mute everyday. The average American watches it never. The wealthy watch it occasionally. I ran this thru AI. CNBC has 114,000 average viewers. ESPN has 850,000 average viewers. Obviously ESPN has a lot more viewers. Being a smaller amount of a big channel can be the same as a small part of a small channel. And then the Pirates are a large part of a small channel (local TV).

Mostly just wanted to point out that the average guy working as an electrician in Topeka doesn’t pay much attention to crypto and there are a lot more of those guys than highly educated, wealthy, and tech or tech adjacent that follow crypto a lot more

I might grant you the Dodgers or Red Sox, but probably not the Pirates, who generally only draw national attention when they have a star that's on the trade speculation stage.

At this point crypto is a known, if poorly understood, thing. The Crypto.com arena in Los Angeles is mentioned on national sports coverage more than the Pirates. Any financial investment news covers crypto at least in part, WSJ local business section CNBC etc. Most (substantial) Americans are involved in investing in some way. They're all aware of crypto, and at least peripherally involved in it but the way it correlates with other assets.

I'd say that more people follow the Pirates than invest heavily in or understand crypto (not a perfectly overlapping Venn diagram). But people are aware of crypto and know it impacts the world.

Coldcard Hardware Wallet Flaw Linked to $70 Million Bitcoin Theft in 41 Minutes

An attacker drained 1,196 Bitcoin addresses in 41 minutes on July 30, taking 1,082.65 BTC worth about $70.2 million at the time.

AI slop, sadly. If someone would kindly provide some original human reporting, that would be great. I don't want to read some grifter's hallucination-riddled sloppification of the original source.

Edit: Original writeup by the security researchers who discovered the vuln: https://engineering.block.xyz/blog/predictable-rng-fallback-and-32-bit-reseed-in-coldcard-firmware

Sadly, also written by ai, but I would like to think there's a distinction between a sloppified primary source a slop grift article about it.

Respectfully, what are you talking about?

How are the two linked sentences AI slop ?

As an embedded systems/electrical engineer, it's kind of astounding to me that a hardware wallet would rely on a software PRNG to generate cryptographic secrets in the first place.

  • Many embedded microcontrollers have hardware TRNGs built in.
  • If you don't trust that, most embedded microcontrollers have ADCs in them, which you can hook up to something noisy like a reverse-biased PN junction to generate entropy (or even just leave the thing connected to nothing and use the noise in the least significant bits)
  • If you don't trust that, there are many open source hardware TRNG designs available that you can strap into your device. I'm a big fan of this one.

There's really no valid reason I can think of to use a PRNG to generate cryptographic secrets.

this means using the gold standard of physics, radioactive decay

Every day at work I battle the great and undefeated enemy: thermal noise. I recommend a thermal noise source.

Hardware wallets are constantly getting compromised, people should just use metamask. It's not 'secure' because you have a physical widget as opposed to a browser extension!

In the Small-Scale Sunday of June 21, 2026, there was this thread talking about the possibility of vandals being the cause of the debacle with the Reflecting Pool and its 2026 renovations. To summarize the various positions of mottizens:

  1. Some think there was vandalism by people who are against the Trump administration.
  2. Some thinks this isn’t vandalism but just the typical problem that would already typically plagues the Reflecting Pool
    1. I assume the implication is that public media is just having TDS
  3. Some thinks this is incompetence at preventing vandalism
  4. I personally thought it was incompetence driven by corruption though concede there are other clear cut case of vandalism (“8647” on the National Mall).

The only person that was ever indicted is former olympian David Hearn, with the grand jury indictment announced by Jeanine Pirro on July 2:

Today, a grand jury has returned a felony indictment against a defendant, David Hearn, for felony destruction of property for which he faces 10 years in prison. The indictment is in response to an incident that occurred on June 19th of 2026 in which the defendant Hearn ripped a piece of recently installed sealant on the bottom of the reflecting pool at the Lincoln Memorial. The evidence shows will prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Hearn willfully destroyed property at the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool. This was a deliberate act to damage the reflecting pool at the National Mall that members of the National Park Service actually have worked hard to restore and have witnessed. By Hearn's own admission on June 19th, he reached down into the pool. Our evidence further shows that the National Park Service employees observed Hearn actually forcefully and violently pulling up and removing the bottom liner with both hands. According to witnesses, Hearn damaged approximately two square feet of sealant from the bottom of the pool. A parks employee actually told Hearn to stop to stop his behavior and stop what he was doing. Hearn reacted by shouting at that park's employee, saying that she cared too much about the reflecting pool. And why did she even care since it wasn't her pool? Now, Mr. Hearn's behavior was characterized by witnesses as belligerent, rude, and disrespectful according to National Park Service employees that witnessed the event.

In the same press conference Pirro had this to say when pressed:

Question: Was this part of the pool, you know, there has been some damage. Was this part of the pool specifically if some of the was the uhsealant already partially removed? Can you [garbled] it back and just describe in detail? Because he [garbled] that it looks the same as it did before he arrived. That's his position.

Pirro: You know, I'm not going to get into the evidence, but what I told you is what our witnesses saw and experienced. There was an effort, a violent effort to rip up the sealant from the bottom of the pool. And irrespective of whether or not you know we think that you know there there is some situation needed it we can state and prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he caused damage and that damage is over $1,000.

Well, on Friday, DOJ has moved to dismissed the indictment:

Based upon the initial reports provided by the Department of the Interior (“DOI”) and the USS. Park Police (“USPP”), the United States Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia (“USAO-DC’) presented the grand jury with evidence that damage to the Reflecting Pool was caused by vandals, including the defendant in this case, David Hearn. However, it was not until after the return of the indictment, that the DOI provided additional documents to the USAO-DC indicating that damage to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in June 2026 was the result of flawed installation by the contractor, Atlantic Industrial Coatings (“AIC”), and the rush to complete the project prior to events associated with the America 250 celebration in the weeks surrounding Independence Day 2026. It was not until after these documents were produced that USAO-DC first became aware of information showing that the damage was the result of a botched installation and not vandalism as initially represented by DOI. Indeed, USAO-DC could only rely (on the information provided by DOI that the damage was entirely caused by vandals, including the defendant in this case, David Hearn. Because these recently-produced materials significantly undermine the evidentiary basis for the indictment initially supplied by the DOI and U.S. Park Police, the USAO-DC respectfully moves to dismiss the indictment without prejudice.

I highly recommend reading the motion to dismiss, it’s hilarious to see how Pirro’s office is trying to cover their ass by repeatedly pointing fingers at Doug Burgum’s DOI for giving them incomplete information.

My takeaway from this is that my position is correct regarding incompetence. Incompetence at planning the renovations. Incompetence by the contractor and overspraying. Incompetence by DOI officials and personnel in protecting the Reflecting Pool (or at the very least chase down the vandals if they exist). Incompetence by DOI officials in not giving Pirro’s attorney office complete evidentiary information. In fact, I give points to Pirro and her office for approving this dismissal, she must have known that Trump wouldn’t like it:

I disagree 100% with Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, on the Reflecting Pool. I don’t know what she was thinking? To me, it was a pure case of VANDALISM, that included the grass, which had a big 86 47 emblazoned in giant letters on it, and other elements of the surrounding area. There may have been some contractor difficulty, but the major damage was caused by VANDALS! President DJT

[attached image of the 8647 on the national mall]

As for corruption, well I think it’s very likely but it’s also unlikely that Trump’s government or the Republicans would investigate themselves.

I also had the following few thoughts:

  1. Pirro is another female member of the Trump administration that is floating into his crosshairs. Burgum doesn’t when it should be said both the Reflecting Pool and the National Mall are on his watch.
    1. My personal theory is that all the corruption (the government-doled contracts) would be under Burgum so why attack your personal money-maker.
  2. I was researching on no-bid contracts under Obama and Democrats are the one who investigated him. This is reinforcing my thoughts that even if “there is corruption on both side”, the magnitude is different.
    1. Current republicans in Congress are spineless.
    2. Republican voters don’t mind corruption as long as their cultural objectives are satisfied.
    3. Regarding the above, I personally think they’re willing chumps.
    4. Regarding above, I suppose Republicans would call it acceptable tradeoffs.
  3. I still have yet to see video and images of the cuts in the reflecting pool. I’m sure Trump would have loved to “truth” it out.
  4. If there is Trump Derangement Syndrome, there is growing evidence of Reverse Trump Derangement Syndrome where genuinely bad things done by Trump and his administration is downplayed and excused by his supporters.
    1. Which I suppose is what we do for our tribe.

Edit 1: Looks like Trump got some more words today about how much Pirro "folded like an umbrella" and "choked" on this case.

Edit 2: David Hearn was the only one indicted, there were at least 3 others also charged and publicly named but their cases were also dropped. Earlier I said David Hearn was the only one charged.

I suspect Trump has it backwards. There likely was some damage caused by vandals, but the majority of the problem was caused by it being a rush job. Note that nothing Pirro said disputes the earlier evidence against Hearn; he was accused of pulling on the liner with his hands, the claims of knife cuts were earlier. Of course once you know there were significant defects, the case becomes muddy; chance of proving beyond reasonable doubt that vandals did a particular bit of damage, especially with their bare hands, is very low and the dismissal is appropriate.

I think it's bs. The vandal did some damage, and whether it's over or under $1000, that's a question for the jury to decide.

Broken windows and all, but just because some structure is already damaged or fucked up doesn't excuse vandals from doing more damage to it.

You mean "whether David Hearn is a vandal guilty of damages more than a $1000, that's a question for the jury". Just as much as the worst possible case against Hearn can be waged, the best most charitable interpretation of Hearn's actions can be offered. And if we follow that broken window analogy, to me it was the Trump administration that led to the broken window in the first place, seems like that is more worthy of investigation and prosecution.

Anyway, Pirro made the mistake of backing down and admitting defeat. Trump would never.

I think in order to do real damage with your bare hands it has to be at least a bit fucked up already. Interesting that they don't seem to have attempted to bring charges against the other people who were apparently apprehended by the park service, but this guy seems to have really tried to get it - pulled up a lot more than either of the two women and then started beefing with the cops.

Sure, I’ll take a crack at it, it’s a beautiful night for an argument.

Have you been to Washington DC lately? Trump got the National Guard to clean up the worst of the homeless blight. Union Station looks beautiful right now. Trump got money to turn the fountains back on. They’re gorgeous, they hadn’t been turned on in decades. I was out with a friend near the Capitol at night and we were stunned. I’ve even heard liberals admit that Meridian Hill Park is more beautiful now, thanks to Trump.

There are still some problem spots. There’s a church downtown, I think it’s the one on I street and 5th Northwest, where the ministry lets the homeless congregate on their property in a tent city. Sometimes I’ve seen them congregating on the bridges just within the Virginia boundaries. Virginia doesn’t like them either, but they’re not under Trump’s control and won’t just do what he tells them.

Have you ever been to a Trump property? His hotels are genuinely very nice, his restaurants have good food, the service is excellent. The Trump Hotel in Vegas has a good claim to being the nicest hotel on the Strip. The Trump Hotel in DC has noticeably declined ever since they got turned into the Waldorf — both of the last two times I’ve been there the wait staff have hassled me over $300 because some man who sat at the same table as me walked away to some other side of the room and they wanted to close the table down. And Trump Tower in New York is a gorgeous building that genuinely turned the corner for Manhattan in the 80s. The last time I was there, which admittedly was a few years ago, huge swathes of it had to be closed down to security threats. There are always liberals who want to vandalize it.

So now we come to the Reflecting Pool. There were protesters holding up signs saying that between Trump and the algae, they were rooting for the algae. There’s a minor black market selling chips off the tarp, because people reached their hands in and got some. There are bars all over town where you can order drinks like a “Blue-Green Reflecting Pool Margarita”.

There is, in short, a whole class of people who are cheering for decay, they want to see things break because they get to gloat when it happens, and when it does happen they will deny any responsibility as they cheered it on.

I am now receiving a lecture in incompetence from those people.

Look, it’s actually not a blow to my ego if the pool guys did a shoddy job. That happens sometimes. It’s not like Trump personally drained the pool and laid down the tarp down. He’s just going to get some guys to fix it.

You probably see that as a failure because you’re not used to setbacks because you’ve never built anything.

It’s not like Trump interrupted the left’s stellar record of building things on time and under budget. Those fountains have been off for twenty years and the Reflecting Pool has been collecting algae for at least that long. What did Biden do about it? Bush? Obama spent multiples of what Trump has spent so far and didn’t get any better outcomes. But I don’t get treated to rants about how Obama was incompetent. All I’m hearing here are defenses of how Democrats had such integrity because they conducted go-nowhere investigations so they could get a TV spot about how they’re willing to criticize their president. Maybe if I went looking I could find examples of Republicans criticizing President Trump, I don’t know, it might be really hard.

So it’s Trump’s Fault because, why, exactly? He skipped the biddings process? The famous Washington DC bidding process that always produces great and cheap results on time? The great fantastic bidding process that makes sure no mistakes or setbacks are ever had? Yeah Washington DC works so well why doesn’t Trump follow the Washington DC process? If only we’d spent more money having more meetings everything would have turned out ok. Trump must be too incompetent to hire a contractor.

TLP had this great distinction about omnipotence vs omniscience. The man who chases omnipotence is out in the world acting. The man who chases omniscience sits in the corner watching smugly with the attitude that his “understanding” is actually superior. Trump didn’t follow the rules, which proves he’s incompetent. Because I know what the rules are, which I read in a newspaper just now, I’m actually more competent than Trump.

So here’s something like a flow chart prediction of what will happen next:

  • Trump will hire contractors to fix the Pool again. If the first contractors are found to be at fault, the Federal Government will win back money, and liberals will say this proves Trump is incompetent. If the first contractors are not found to be at fault, liberals will say that Trump is lying and so he must be incompetent.

  • Once the pool is fixed, if it stays fixed, we will all basically move on forever. Liberals will never give credit for fixing the Pool, because the first time he fixed it it didn’t work.

  • If the pool is fixed and gets broken again, this is double proof that Trump is incompetent. In no way would this ever possibly suggest that anybody is trying to break it. If that were possibly true, Trump should be able to indict the vandals in a city that sides 95-5 with the vandals.

Because, at the end of the day, the people cheering for algae and homeless shelters in front of the churches, who will actively sabotage every attempt to clean anything up, will then deny that there could possibly have been any sabotage. The people who won’t build anything will explain why you can’t build anything. Well, actually, we can build anything, we just choose not to, we have to go through all this environmental review, contract bidding, community impact, it’s really complicated.

I’m dreaming of the anti-Trump future. Every town in America has a building permit for high-speed rail from California, and a grocery store run from New York. The fountains are all turned off so we can save money to fight climate change. Elon Musk’s wealth is confiscated so we can give it to someone who knows how to build things, like Barack Obama. And the Reflecting Pool is given over to the algae, in honor of the Piscataway, Pamunkey, Nentego-Nanichoke, and Nanticoke-Lenape tribes, whose land this originally was.

It seems like a "only Nixon could go to China" situation. Washington D.C. doesn't have any voting representation in congress so it doesn't have anyone to fight for it when it comes to budgeting, it has the 4th highest National Parks deferred maintenance backlog of any state even though it doesn't really have a major national park. If Obama had decided to use money from Yellowstone admission fees to get the fountains in D.C.'s Malcom X Park running again that would easily slot into narratives about Washington politicians plundering the country for the benefit of big city liberals. But Trump has a genuine passion for monumental architecture and infinite credibility with the Republican base so it doesn't cost him political capital to do this stuff in a way it would most other presidents.

There is, in short, a whole class of people who are cheering for decay, they want to see things break because they get to gloat when it happens, and when it does happen they will deny any responsibility as they cheered it on. (…) I am now receiving a lecture in incompetence from those people.

I don't see the contradiction. These people aren't cheering for the decay of the pool because they have a fetish for badly-maintained pools; they are cheering to make fun of Trump's incompetence. Now without a doubt, they enjoy having reasons to dunk on Trump so much that they "want" him to fail so they can keep on jeering. That's not a great attitude. But bringing up incompetence isn't an inexplicable last-minute about-face, it's been the point from the start. ‘Har-har, look at Ozymandias up there, the great public works he's so stupidly proud of are falling apart before our eyes, the Emperor has no clothes.’

This is just the nice rationalization they like to tell themselves. They’re not actively cheering for the pool to fail, see, they just want Trump to fail, and also want to make it likelier for Trump to fail, and they don’t especially want to fix the pool themselves, well, they would, but it’s complicated, it has to be done right, the contract process alone is very complicated… There’s always another reason why doing things is incompetent and sitting in the corner watching is wise. And the great thing about reasons is that there’s an infinite number of them.

This is why I bring up the TLP omnipotence/omniscience fantasy. They don’t want to fix the pool, they want to be right!

I'm not saying they don't want the pool to fail; I'm saying they want the pool to fail because its failure could be held up as evidence of Trump's incompetence. Why else would they care? (I agree they wouldn't particularly care to fix it if it were up to them and there was no political dimension to it at all; but I don't think we'd be seeing the same jeering enthusiasm for watching it falling apart.)

Yeah, that's the rationalization. They don't want the pool to fail as such, they want the pool to fail because of Trump. But then, next time, it will be because of Vance or *because of Rubio. And then when they're in charge of fixing the pool, there will be all sorts of other reasons why it can't be built: environmental review, DEI impact, it's not a good use of money when there are starving children in Africa, etc. etc. etc. There will always be some reason why, when they literally cheer for the algae, it's not literally cheering for the algae as such, it's knowingly self-ironic in the context of hoping Trump fails to clean the algae. And you're stupid if you don't understand the distinction. But the distinction is invented. The point is never about fixing the pool, the point is for them to be right.

Virginia doesn’t like them either, but they’re not under Trump’s control

Clearly virgina does like them if virginia is inviting them to stay

The sign "The Buck Stops Here" that was on President Truman's desk in his White House office was made in the Federal Reformatory at El Reno, Oklahoma. Fred A. Canfil, then United States Marshal for the Western District of Missouri and a friend of Mr. Truman, saw a similar sign while visiting the Reformatory and asked the Warden if a sign like it could be made for President Truman. The sign was made and mailed to the President on October 2, 1945.

...

On more than one occasion President Truman referred to the desk sign in public statements. For example, in an address at the National War College on December 19, 1952 Mr. Truman said, "You know, it's easy for the Monday morning quarterback to say what the coach should have done, after the game is over. But when the decision is up before you -- and on my desk I have a motto which says The Buck Stops Here' -- the decision has to be made." In his farewell address to the American people given in January 1953, President Truman referred to this concept very specifically in asserting that, "The President--whoever he is--has to decide. He can't pass the buck to anybody. No one else can do the deciding for him. That's his job.

"The Buck Stops Here" Desk sign - Harry S. Truman Library & Museum

I personally think your argument can be summed down to:

  1. "Have you looked at the other things he did?"
  2. "Trump tried, you can't blame him for the results of others"
  3. "They are terrible people who would have persecuted him anyway"

I think those are fair points and can be discussed at length, but I think you didn't address the incompetence of this Reflecting Pool debacle which was my main point. I noticed I didn't detail Trump's incompetence in my thread starter so I'll do here so you can have a chance to respond.

I think Trump picked an incompetent Secretary of the Interior in Doug Burgum

Earlier you said:

Trump will hire contractors to fix the Pool again. If the first contractors are found to be at fault, the Federal Government will win back money, and liberals will say this proves Trump is incompetent.

Your flow chart is very incomplete, the same contractors (Atlantic Industrial Coatings) that was hired for the initial renovation was hired to repair it. I find it unlikely that the Federal Government will get any money back.

The renovation project was rushed, as stated from the dismissal:

An employee with Brown Construction Services, Inc., a contractor responsible for monitoring AIC’s progress, noted in a May 7, 2026, email that “it appears AIC is significantly behind schedule.” This email was sent to several DOI employees, and revealed a sense of urgency and rushing.

The handling of evidence of supposed vandals was bungled. No videos, no pictures, only witness testimony by the NPS which we have no evidence whether they are reasonable and truthful people or raging liars. (Body cams would be great here).

Claims about other kinds of vandalism like knife cuts or dumping of phosphate with again no evidence.

The National Mall with the emblazoned 8647, there's no chasing that?

Now all the above can be argued is Burgum's fault, but then I would point to the quote up top. I've mentioned before but I find it very strange that Burgum can keep bungling and there's nothing to be done.

I think Trump picked an incompetent District Attorney in Jeanine Pirro

Let's work backwards from the possible futures that are already lost to us.

  1. Hearn went to trial and lost his case. Pirro is an idiot for dismissal now.
  2. Hearn went to trial and won his case. Pirro is an idiot in prosecuting in the first place. Possibly leading to more discovery that could embarrass the administration.
  3. Pirro office waited to get more information and evidence from DOI before deciding to get grand jury indictment (maybe under a different charge?). ding ding ding, we have a winner.

I don't even know why Pirro has to be DA for DC, what makes her more special than the other MAGA-aligned attorneys out there that Trump picked her. (I can also wax on about how Trump is incompetent at enlarging his circle so that he has more MAGA-aligned attorneys out there to pick from).

I think Trump was incompetent and set a deadline in retrospect couldn't be achieved

Once the pool is fixed, if it stays fixed, we will all basically move on forever. Liberals will never give credit for fixing the Pool, because the first time he fixed it it didn’t work.

Yes, that's how it works. Just like how people can still point to the 2012 renovations that Obama did and failed. I do hope that this time the pool is fixed for good so that there is no need for multi-million dollar renovations in the future. But did it have to be done before? Can't it be done after? Just need some marketing "Today is the 250th anniversary of this great nation, look around enjoy this, because tomorrow we will start the renovations of special landmarks in this great city that has been left unfunded by all the previous guys".

Yes, I know, at this point it's veering into Monday morning quarterback, but agian, I point to the quote above.

I think Trump is incompetent at enlarging his group of supporters

If there were more MAGA-aligned attorneys, he would have a better pick of the litter instead of Jeanine Pirro.

If the pool is fixed and gets broken again, this is double proof that Trump is incompetent. In no way would this ever possibly suggest that anybody is trying to break it. If that were possibly true, Trump should be able to indict the vandals in a city that sides 95-5 with the vandals.

If there were more MAGA-aligned attorneys, maybe they can convict vandals even when the city sides 95-5 with the vandals (remember John Adams defending the murderers?)

If there were more MAGA-aligned people, maybe there won't be any vandals even.

This is veering into non-Reflecting-Pool reasons on how Trump is not enlarging his group of supporters so I'll stop here.

Now one thing that really irked me about your comment.

I am now receiving a lecture in incompetence from those people.

...

You probably see that as a failure because you’re not used to setbacks because you’ve never built anything.

You just made a bunch of assumptions about me then attacked that. You didn't even address my arguments, just attacked this imaginary me you have in your head. You've already lumped me into all the people that you detest and assumed the worst.

Ok, let's go back to your arguments

1. "Have you looked at the other things he did?"

Yeah, at this point after over a decade of Trump in the spotlight, I do have a general understanding of the things that Trump did. You can say all you want about Trump being a good builder and he makes good buildings, but that's not the same as being a good president. I put more worth on your arguments about how Trump drives down homelessness in DC. But that can be criticized too.

If the homeless numbers are down, where are they going? I don't see much news about low cost housing being built in DC. Maybe those homeless people you see "congregating on the bridges just within the Virginia boundaries" are exactly the former-DC-homeless. That's certainly one way to fudge the numbers.

I found this article from 2025 July that shows how the homeless numbers dropped and has its own critiques:

“It does not count people who are in Rapid Rehousing, which is really a tactic that we feel the administration is using to kind of shuffle people out of the shelter into Rapid Rehousing and then not have to count those people as homeless,” ... “In our meals program, we’re still serving lots of meals, more than we have in previous years, and on outreach, we’re still seeing a lot of people and serving a lot of people,” ... Additionally, increasing encampment closures can both force people out of the city and between different jurisdictions and make it more difficult to find people living outside, which could also lead to an undercount.

And maybe we shouldn't celebrate too early seeing as in 2026 the homelessness numbers increased slightly.

In fact, I honestly think Trump would be doing a good job of making DC beautiful (though I haven't been there recently). But there are criticism, and yeah, it's nothing to do with the incompetency regarding the Reflecting Pool.

2. "Trump tried, you can't blame him for the results of others"

I do agree with the general sentiment of applauding someone for trying, it's very much in the spirit of one of the best quotes from Teddy Roosevelt. But just as much we can praise someone for trying, it is not mutually exclusive of how we can't criticize the incompetence with which it was carried out.

And as pointed out way way above, "the buck stops here". Fairly or not, Trump will be judged in the court of opinions and history for his AND his administration actions.

3. "They are terrible people who would have persecuted him anyway"

Yes, they would, that's just competition. That's the eternal game of politics and culture warring. You have to win, and win so decisively (like let's say gay people in present America) so that you can't be persecuted on whatever it is you're fighting for. Trump could have been "he's a fascist but at least he keeps the pool clean" Mussolini-style (even if in fact Mussolini never did get trains to run on time really), but he didn't, and so therefore the narrative was made and he will be podunked on it. So yes. Incompetence.

I think Trump picked an incompetent Secretary of the Interior in Doug Burgum

Burgum was previously the extremely-popular governor of North Dakota, whose reputation was so strong that he was floated by national media as a candidate for Trump's VP slot. He was considered a once-in-a-generation pick for DOI because his life spent in America's Interior, and his vision for what to do with it, are considered extraordinarily strong for a position that is usually passed-over by candidates of the first rank.

Your argument is that Burgum is an incompetent Secretary because one investigation into one failure didn't produce enough evidence to convince you. And what evidence there was you dismissed out of hand. Do you have any thoughts about Burgum's record of competence on oil drilling, wind policy, solar, wildlife refuges, Indian Affairs, national monuments? Well, Burgum is incompetent because user lollol thinks NPS rangers need bodycameras.

I think Trump picked an incompetent District Attorney in Jeanine Pirro

Jeanine Pirro was appointed District Attorney after Trump's first choice, Ed Martin, was forced to step down from nomination because of Thom Tillis. The position of US attorney for DC is a thankless job because the DC attorney's office is a viper's nest of career lawyers who are more aligned to the culture of Washington DC than conservative or Republican priorities. Jeanine Pirro was, at least, somebody who sacrificed quite a lot by aligning herself with Trump over the last 10 years and was, by all accounts, somebody who was actually interested in the meat-and-potatoes work of running the DC office.

Your argument is that Jeanine Pirro is incompetent because, on one case out of the hundreds on her portfolio, she dropped a case facing a 95% Dem Jury Pool Indictment she was forced to initiate because of political considerations made by her boss. Ever been handed a lose-lose situation before? Now, look, I'm no Jeanine Pirro defender, I think Trump's assessment that she choked is probably right, and I think she's wrong to back down and lose face and she'll be punished for it. But your theory, essentially, is that she must be incompetent because, on the only issue you bothered to look at, you didn't like what you saw. You admittedly don't even know very much else about her.

So maybe you see what I mean? When I summon TLP and his point about lazy omniscience. You don't actually care about the Reflecting Pool as such, you care about being right. You don't actually know much about the details of how this stuff actually works. But you're sure Trump must be incompetent, and you're willing to seize upon whatever first evidence you find to prove that you're right. And if it weren't that, it would be something else. Pirro backed down, so she must have been incompetent. But if she had kept fighting, that would also be proof of incompetence. Etc. etc.

Just to work down the list of other arguments, for the sake of completeness:

I think Trump is incompetent at enlarging his group of supporters

Trump was the first Republican to win the popular vote in a generation. You almost surely mean something more specific by this, maybe that Trump doesn't attract more high-quality people to his movement. But I'm sure that no matter who Trump attracted, you would come up with a definition for why they were a priori incompetent.

If there were more MAGA-aligned attorneys, he would have a better pick of the litter instead of Jeanine Pirro.

Again, Pirro was not Trump's first pick because the Senate constrained him.

If there were more MAGA-aligned attorneys, maybe they can convict vandals even when the city sides 95-5 with the vandals (remember John Adams defending the murderers?)

Yeah, Trump just needs super lawyers with super law who are so good they can convince even Democrats who hate them to support them. Why hasn't Trump done this?

You can say all you want about Trump being a good builder and he makes good buildings, but that's not the same as being a good president.

No, the point is that in your rush to declare that Trump is "incompetent" you've hastily elided obvious domains in which Trump is very capably competent. Instead of constraining your broad strokes at all, by e.g. saying that Trump is good at building but bad at [something else], you've locked yourself into the very silly argument that Trump isn't good at anything. Now you're doubling down on that strange premise.

If the homeless numbers are down, where are they going? I don't see much news about low cost housing being built in DC.

Your argument now is that Trump is incompetent because he didn't fix everything everywhere all at once. Trump can't actually solve low cost housing in DC, at least, not without Congress or DC authorizing more housing within DC.

Maybe those homeless people you see "congregating on the bridges just within the Virginia boundaries" are exactly the former-DC-homeless. That's certainly one way to fudge the numbers.

Yeah that was my point. Trump can do everything in his power clean the city up, but he can't do everything in libs' power. One half of the political spectrum wants to kick the homeless out of parks, one half doesn't, the half that doesn't will shelter the homeless and say, "see, you can't kick the homeless out of parks, you must be incompetent!"

But there are criticism, and yeah, it's nothing to do with the incompetency regarding the Reflecting Pool.

Yeah, right, my argument (my observation really) is that there are a lot of people emotionally attached to Trump being wrong, therefore they will invent a reason why what he is doing is wrong, no matter what he actually does. It's in fact what you're doing in this very argument.

But just as much we can praise someone for trying, it is not mutually exclusive of how we can't criticize the incompetence with which it was carried out.

This is empty rhetoric. No matter what Trump did, you would find a way to criticize it, and then justify that by saying your just calling balls and strikes. It's not an argument, it's a rationalization.

Trump could have been "he's a fascist but at least he keeps the pool clean" Mussolini-style (even if in fact Mussolini never did get trains to run on time really), but he didn't, and so therefore the narrative was made and he will be podunked on it. So yes. Incompetence.

See what I mean? The pool was dirty before Trump cleaned it. But you don't want to give him any credit, so you have to contort this one-way construction where you would have given Trump credit, you would have been fair, but, alas... You've not even taken responsibility for your frame, you've just outsourced it to "the narrative".

So now that I've taken the time to address all of this point-by-point (which I will probably not do if we have future rebuttals), I want to come back to this:

You just made a bunch of assumptions about me then attacked that. You didn't even address my arguments, just attacked this imaginary me you have in your head. You've already lumped me into all the people that you detest and assumed the worst.

"Detest" is a strong word here, I don't think I said that, I'm sorry if I did, I don't hate you. And sometimes my remarks are aimed at "you" and sometimes at the imaginary rhetorical "you," which is an effective and valid way to construct an argument without rebutting every point-by-point, please-don't-take-it-personally.

However, at bottom, I think I have interacted with your point of view to a significant level and addressed it very thoroughly, no matter if some of the points I rebutted don't describe your position as you would make it, because I think the conclusion goes more or less like this:

You believe, a priori, that Donald Trump is incompetent. You would find any flaw Trump makes and use that to justify your criticism. It doesn't matter what the flaw is. If the pool breaks, it can't be from sabotage or vandalism, no matter how many people are cheering for that exact outcome. If the pool doesn't break, it must be too expensive. Or the contract was corrupt. Or it was a bad use of money. But you would never extend this criticism to your own group: I don't see any forthcoming mea culpa about how Obama was also incompetent, or how all presidents are incompetent and Trump is just the latest, or how many leftists criticizing the pool explicitly want to destroy it. No, you want to claim the neutrality of just calling balls and strikes as you see it, but that neutrality will never reach any conclusion that isn't what you wanted.

"The Buck Stops Here"? Trump is already having the pool fixed. But I don't think you're really interested in having the pool fixed. I think you're interested in being right.

Your points about me not knowing enough about Burgum and Pirro to able to judge someone is both correct and not correct. Yes, it's true that the best way to judge and form an opinion of a political figure is to take the grand totality of what they do. But just like every other political figure, the way they are judged are usually by a few thing that defines them. Could be Biden and not stepping down from running, could be Harris and her no regrets defending Biden on national TV, could be Hillary and her non-secure email servers, could be Obama and his arrogance (Iran, dealing with Republican congress), could be Tim Walz and the Somali fraud cases.

Notice how I used Democratic figures to satisfy your complaint how I don't give examples of incompetence to your "other side"?

For me, Burgum and Pirro are defined by the events of the Reflecting Pool and the National Mall. I'll be perfectly happy to read what you have to say about their records elsewhere. Like I said:

You have to win, and win so decisively (like let's say gay people in present America) so that you can't be persecuted on whatever it is you're fighting for.

Thank you for going through the arguments. I find that your reading of them differ from mine quite a bit. I will endeavor to go through your arguments as well

I think Trump is incompetent at enlarging his group of supporters

Trump was the first Republican to win the popular vote in a generation. You almost surely mean something more specific by this, maybe that Trump doesn't attract more high-quality people to his movement. But I'm sure that no matter who Trump attracted, you would come up with a definition for why they were a priori incompetent.

If there were more MAGA-aligned attorneys, he would have a better pick of the litter instead of Jeanine Pirro.

Again, Pirro was not Trump's first pick because the Senate constrained him.

If there were more MAGA-aligned attorneys, maybe they can convict vandals even when the city sides 95-5 with the vandals (remember John Adams defending the murderers?)

Yeah, Trump just needs super lawyers with super law who are so good they can convince even Democrats who hate them to support them. > Why hasn't Trump done this?

Maybe it's easier to point to examples of competence as a contrast. The reason why FDR is competent is because he's able to get people to keep voting for him and his party so that FDR can keep doing things he wanted and drive his enemies into political footnotes, one could say FDR got and maintained a large group of supporters.

Another example is Reagan, who went up in vote percentage from 50.7% in 1980 to 58.8% in 1984. Reagan is a good example of enlarging his group of supporters (with the standout example being the quips made between him and the Democrat surgeon for his assassination).

Trump definitely has an upward trajectory, from 46.1% in 2016, to 46.8% in 2020, to 49.8% in 2024. And yes, Obama has a downward trajectory, from 52.9% in 2008 down to 51.1% in 2012. But if we pit Obama vs Trump, is Trump likely to win? I think not.

And yes, I do think Trump isn't attracting the higher quality people to his movement. And I disagree with your argument that I am so uncharitable to not recognize competence in Trump picks. I never said it before on this forum but I do think and know that Tom Homan is more competent at his job of deporting people without controversy than Greg Bovino.

Your argument about the Senate, don't you feel the counter argument lurking right behind the corner: "If there was a large bench of good lawyers for MAGA, then even if Thom Tillis blocked Ed Martin due to Jan 6th ties then another Ed-Martin-esque person can be found."

And also importantly, I see you didn't respond to: "If there were more MAGA-aligned people, maybe there won't be any vandals even."

Which I want to also mention that just as much as you think I haven't proved "there are no vandals of the reflecting pool", you haven't proved "there are vandals of the reflecting pool". Incompetence of the contractor is definitely proven based on the dismissal though. In fact, it's probably better to focus on the National Mall because that's obviously vandalism.

You can say all you want about Trump being a good builder and he makes good buildings, but that's not the same as being a good president. No, the point is that in your rush to declare that Trump is "incompetent" you've hastily elided obvious domains in which Trump is very capably competent. Instead of constraining your broad strokes at all, by e.g. saying that Trump is good at building but bad at [something else], you've locked yourself into the very silly argument that Trump isn't good at anything. Now you're doubling down on that strange premise.

I can certainly think of places where Trump is competent, but if you do ask me in general then I do think his presidency is more incompetent (Greg Bovino style) than competent (Tom Homan style). Yes, it is a reflection of my value judgment as a member of the public. Now I didn't count your "Trump is competent at building stuff" because that wasn't about the reflecting pool.

To showcase something I did find that shows Trump's competence somewhere in this reflecting pool thing, I was going to leave this for a future thread reflecting on the pool (pun intended) but I think Trump's "pool guy" is probably a good pick. Initial reporting has Trump saying this:

"I said, I have an idea. I'm going to send my contractor over and take a look. He looked at it ... he said it's really decaying and it's a terrible condition, but if you would, I'd like to work two weeks on cleaning it up ... and he said 'it'd take me two weeks,'" he said.

"Our job will take one week. It will cost about a million and a half dollars."

Now the article didn't know who this pool guy is but it sounds to me like the later reported John Cafaro and Greenwater Services who got a $1.7 million contract to install “nano bubble” device that clean the pool. And look, the problem with the algae arrived because they turned off and moved those devices for Trump's UFC/birthday activities as the devices are large and eyesores.

Did it take a week? probably. Did it cost about a million and a half? 1.7 is pretty close to me. Did most media conflate Greenwater Services and Atlantic Industrial Coatings (who does a different job and got a much bigger contract)? Yeah, looks like it to me. So in fact, there were actually two "pool guys" (multiple guys I'm sure), though I don't think Trump knew Atlantic Industrial Coatings so he is another layer removed from that incompetence (and yet more on Burgum/DOI and how did that come about)(but then again Trump did pick Burgum).

There, I gave you a pretty valuable piece of information, I think you can stop drawing me as a Trump-hating-obsessive person who is just jumping to conclusions seeing that I do my research and cite my sources and go into detail on things and am careful with my words.

If the homeless numbers are down, where are they going? I don't see much news about low cost housing being built in DC.

Your argument now is that Trump is incompetent because he didn't fix everything everywhere all at once. Trump can't actually solve low cost housing in DC, at least, not without Congress or DC authorizing more housing within DC.

Maybe those homeless people you see "congregating on the bridges just within the Virginia boundaries" are exactly the former-DC-homeless. That's certainly one way to fudge the numbers.

Yeah that was my point. Trump can do everything in his power clean the city up, but he can't do everything in libs' power. One half of the political spectrum wants to kick the homeless out of parks, one half doesn't, the half that doesn't will shelter the homeless and say, "see, you can't kick the homeless out of parks, you must be incompetent!"

But there are criticism, and yeah, it's nothing to do with the incompetency regarding the Reflecting Pool.

Yeah, right, my argument (my observation really) is that there are a lot of people emotionally attached to Trump being wrong, therefore they will invent a reason why what he is doing is wrong, no matter what he actually does. It's in fact what you're doing in this very argument.

Why did you gloss over me saying this: "In fact, I honestly think Trump would be doing a good job of making DC beautiful (though I haven't been there recently)." I literally says that I expect Trump to be doing a good job doing the things you praised him for (cleaning up DC). Ok, let me state in even more detail then: it can be both and many things, competent at making things beautiful or beautiful things, incompetence at picking people who should be making beautiful things, competence at directing military force to cleanup homeless encampment, incompetence at actually reducing number of homeless people by passing legislation, reduce red tape, increase funding, whatever. Maybe you should recognize that my frustration is the reflecting pool incompetence and how that indicates to me on where and what domain Trump is good or bad at and whether that makes him a good Federal executive. You can point out the other things that Trump does well, and I might as well and did concede on that, but that doesn't take away the incompetence with regards to the pool.

I'm going to skip your next few paragraphs, I read it though and thought I don't think anything I say here is going to change anything because I don't know when "you" means me or "you" means the greater rhetorical you that you're rebutting to.

You believe, a priori, that Donald Trump is incompetent. You would find any flaw Trump makes and use that to justify your criticism. It doesn't matter what the flaw is. If the pool breaks, it can't be from sabotage or vandalism, no matter how many people are cheering for that exact outcome. If the pool doesn't break, it must be too expensive. Or the contract was corrupt. Or it was a bad use of money. But you would never extend this criticism to your own group: I don't see any forthcoming mea culpa about how Obama was also incompetent, or how all presidents are incompetent and Trump is just the latest, or how many leftists criticizing the pool explicitly want to destroy it. No, you want to claim the neutrality of just calling balls and strikes as you see it, but that neutrality will never reach any conclusion that isn't what you wanted.

"The Buck Stops Here"? Trump is already having the pool fixed. But I don't think you're really interested in having the pool fixed. I think you're interested in being right.

I already said this: "I do hope that this time the pool is fixed for good so that there is no need for multi-million dollar renovations in the future."

Yes, I reserve my right to criticize Trump and his administration. Yes, I can make criticisms of other presidents, just because I didn't do it in this thread doesn't mean I don't have any. Yes I reserve my right to praise Trump and his administration. Yes, I can make praises of other presidents, just because I didn't do it in this thread doesn't mean I don't have any. I don't believe that "arguments as soldiers" is good for society. I believe that there are things that are "both sides", and also there are things that are not "both sides". You can confuse me with the sometimes my remarks are aimed at "you" and sometimes at the imaginary rhetorical "you," but I know do my best that I don't and didn't do that to you.

Also besides, maybe you should turn around and do that then, you should think about where Trump has failed as a president, and not in the "he failed because he didn't do enough kinda thing", more of the "he failed because he went too far/overlooked/made a terrible decision". And maybe you did, and I don't know that, but in this thread you seem like a pure glazer to me.

Binion's takes continue to be some of the best https://x.com/billybinion/status/2084355849045123302

This is a perfect example of why debasing yourself for a politician is never worth it. Jeanine Pirro sacrificed a lot of credibility when she publicly raked an innocent person across the coals. And in the end, she gets thrown under the bus, too. It's humiliating.

I'll never understand why so many people are willing to tarnish their legacies & embarrass themselves to get some brief validation from Donald Trump of all people. We all know he tosses people in the trash like hot potatoes. How have people not learned that? How is this worth it?

Like seriously, wtf does Pirro get out of this? She sold her soul, hurt innocent people through lawfare, wasted government resources (both time/manhours spent going after actual criminals and money) and in the end didn't even manage to make Trump or MAGA happy.

Maybe when she shares a commiserating drink with all the other people who sold their souls, hurt innocent people through lawfare and wasted government resources, she can at least feel good that she didn't overplay so cartoonishly hard that she helped Trump get re-elected.

That doesn't explain anything, it's just whataboutism.

And even revenge doesn't make much sense as a motive, like at least with the hilariously awful Comey indictment the person being targeted is James Comey so harassing him is like understandable as the motive. But Hearn is just some random guy, it seems incredibly petty to sacrifice so much face and embarrass yourself in basically every imaginable way just to legally harass a nobody.

  • -10

Yeah, totally random, self-described "concerned citizen" and double-digit ActBlue donor who knew enough about the topic to make a trip because he wanted to check it out for himself while somehow completely missing all the culture war angles, and so stuck his arm into a pool that you're not allowed to touch to feel it and wriggle damaged parts around just out of idle curiosity, but he definitely says that he didn't affect it in any way.

Completely random guy being harassed for literally no reason.

That doesn't explain anything, it's just whataboutism.

Nah, it's just rubbing your nose in your Arctic research station levels of isolated demands.

If you want a more general, real answer, it's because that's the meta. You immediately drop double-barrel, incendiary shells of rhetoric even over minor things, because the other side is going to do the same or worse, and they will never, ever, ever, show a shred of respect or grace for any kind of retiring humility or professionalism. It's not like you'd be granting respect if they'd said something bland and non-committal about "seeing where the process goes". It's not like anyone making a culture war bonfire out of a pool renovation would have chilled down a single degree - they (you) would have just kept heaping wild accusations onto the pyre*. And it's not like there aren't much more egregious examples to throw shade at elsewhere.

You just only ever notice it when you see an opportunity to pounce on the side you dislike.

*Turing Test Writing Challenge: SecureSignals style post blaming the pool issues on Israel. There was a person holding a "First they came for the algae..." sign...

Completely random guy being harassed for literally no reason.

The case was dropped due to lack of evidence (despite the constant lies beforehand saying there was tons of it), so yes. He got harassed for no reason, literally nothing came out of it.

Nah, it's just rubbing your nose in your Arctic research station levels of isolated demands.

Exactly, whataboutism. It didn't matter whether or not the soviets were right in their critiques of the US, what mattered is that they used the US as an excuse for their own misdoings. If the soviets wanted to defend their actions on the merits, they would have done such.

  • -10

The case was dropped due to lack of evidence

That's actually not what your own cite says.

I didn't cite anything but if you mean what the OP did, yes it does.

It was not until after these documents were produced that USAO-DC first became aware of information showing that the damage was the result of a botched installation and not vandalism as initially represented by DOI. Indeed, USAO-DC could only rely (on the information provided by DOI that the damage was entirely caused by vandals, including the defendant in this case, David Hearn. Because these recently-produced materials significantly undermine the evidentiary basis for the indictment initially supplied by the DOI and U.S. Park Police, the USAO-DC respectfully moves to dismiss the indictment without prejudice

Yes, the part you underlined is precisely what I was referring to. "There's a plausible enough alternative explanation that we're not going to get a conviction through a DC jury" is actually a different statement from "There was no evidence of the crime at all because we made it all up."

You are reading the first and imagining the second. Or, less charitably, lying.

Glad to see Reason is still in business; I wasn't aware. Of course, this fellow did, by all the eyewitness accounts, reach into the reflecting pool and start pulling the lining up, to the point where the park police noticed and demanded he stop, but maybe, given his background, he's just a pool lining autist, and also a true libertarian who believes that every citizen has a right to audit the structural integrity of the pool without state coercion interfering.

Yeah, I don't know what is wrong with the Reflecting Pool or how it happened, but I don't think "well this is already broken, let me rip it to bits" is acceptable. If he did what is claimed, then it is vandalism. It doesn't matter if the lining was already torn, he made things worse.

Imagine your car is stopped with a flat tyre. A passer-by then breaks in a window. "What, this vehicle was already not functional, I didn't do anything wrong!" Would anyone accept that?

Is breaking a window of a car with a flat tire the right comparison? Pulling up a bit of lining that was already torn seems more like walking by a house that's already collapsed, and picking up a handful of rubble on a whim. You could uncharitably describe the latter as "pulling bricks right out of the wall", but vandalism seems a stretch.

How is it not vandalism to rip off a piece of a national monument? You have to reach into the pool to grab a piece, it's not just laying on the sidewalk raking with the leaves.

Picking up a bit of broken-off lining is not what he's supposed to have done, though. He was yanking it up and didn't stop when instructed to do so.

I'm not saying what he did was, on any theory, lawful (nor was it a nice thing to do). But it seems to me that the salient quality of vandalism is deliberately ruining something that was fine before you got there, or at least, fine in whatever aspect you decided to wreck. Breaking the window of a car with a flat tire - sure, that's vandalism. Poking another hole in the already-flat tire… I dunno. I guess I sort of think of "vandalism", in its vernacular if not its legal sense, as requiring an intent to deface which is moot if you're only worsening damage to something that already visibly needed replacing.

Of course, this fellow did, by all the eyewitness accounts, reach into the reflecting pool and start pulling the lining up, to the point where the park police noticed and demanded he stop, but maybe, given his background, he's just a pool lining autist, and also a true libertarian who believes that every citizen has a right to audit the structural integrity of the pool without state coercion interfering.

The case was dropped after all so what Binion is really saying is don't harass random citizens with weak lawfare just to cover for incompetent contracting work.

  • -10

It's hard and expensive to take cases to court and potentially all the way through trial with what I guess would be a DC jury (I don't know the nuances of how the system works with regard to the severity of the offence and the parks jurisdiction). To be fair to libertarians, I'm sure that Binion would also complain about people being charged and successfully plead out for much less serious stuff from the other side, but to be fair to everybody else I'll also point out that the balance of these sorts of cases is not exactly equal, in terms of who gets charged and whose charges make it to sentencing. Of course, a more efficient justice system would just summarily deal out minor punishments to people who commit obviously intentional vandalism on camera, but that's a regime-complete problem. The "shoddy contracting work" point has been hashed out elsewhere so I have no need to address it.

This is a perfect example of why debasing yourself for a politician is never worth it.

This is just an argument for never getting into politics. If the goal is to feel as though you have never "debased yourself" then your only option is to be an irrelevant commenter like Billy Binion, always out of the fray and above it all.

What Jeanine Pirro gets out of it is that she gets to be US Attorney for DC. Pirro is nominally qualified for her position, but in practice has been a tv personality for the past 20 years; no other administration would put her in this kind of role.

With Trump's coterie of subordinates, there's a pretty clear mix of opportunists and sycophants. One of the attractions of working for Trump is that because he can't/won't source talent from conventional recruitment pools, you can jump directly to positions of power if you know the right people and are willing to lick boot.

Charges have been dropped, by the Trump administration, in the most publicly embarrassing way possible, and we still have people in the comments endeavoring to be more Catholic than the Pope saying that it was definitely vandalism.

The tide is going out and we're finding out who was skinny dipping.

Did you read the motion? I just don’t see how the fact that there were issues with the construction means the multiple eye witness accounts were incorrect.

The prosecuting attorneys, who wrote the damn motion and are more familiar with the facts of the case than we are, despite their clear incentives both personal and from above to prosecute, thought that the shoddy workmanship undermined their case to the point that it was unprovable. The prosecutors publicly embarrassed themselves rather than proceed with the case. Because there was no possible way they could prove a crime here. Do you think that they put themselves in this position for fun?

Based upon the initial reports provided by the Department of the Interior (“DOI”) and the USS. Park Police (“USPP”), the United States Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia (“USAO-DC’) presented the grand jury with evidence that damage to the Reflecting Pool was caused by vandals, including the defendant in this case, David Hearn, However, it was not until after the return of the indictment, that the DOI provided additional documents to the USAO-DC indicating that damage to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in June 2026 was the result of flawed installation by the contractor, Atlantic Industrial Coatings (“AIC”), and the rush to complete the project prior to events associated with the America 250 celebration in the weeks surrounding Independence Day 2026. It was not until after these documents were produced that USAO-DC first became aware of information showing that the damage was the result ofa botched installation and not vandalism as initially represented by DOI. Indeed, USAO-DC could only rely (on the information provided by DOI that the damage was entirely caused by vandals, including the defendant in this case, David Hearn, Because these recently-produced materials significantly undermine the evidentiary basis for the indictment initially supplied by the DOI and U.S. Park Police, the USAO-DC respectfully moves to dismiss the indictment without prejudice.

The motion consists of the prosecutors outlining at length why they think that the issues with the construction mean that the multiple eyewitness accounts are either incorrect or irrelevant to the indictment handed down. To defend the original indictment means asserting that one knows more than the prosecutors, or assuming that the prosecutors appointed by Trump, who were willing to work on the original indictment, have suddenly become part of a TDS conspiracy for...reasons.

Assumes facts not in evidence. The line prosecutors are likely all strongly anti Trump or think it’s a waste of time focusing on a relatively low level crime. The only person with skin in the game is the AUSA. So on the one hand her office is pissed at her and the judge is giving her grief and on the other hand her boss wants her to prosecute. She also knows she will lose the court regardless of the evidence given the jury pool.

It is a tough situation for the AUSA and because of that the paragraph you quote isnt necessarily indicative. If you read the motion, the paragraph you posted is incorrect. All the additional information provided is that at least some of the damage is attributed to poor construction. But the evidence is also consistent with vandals making it worse.

You can claim the prior portion of the motion was wrong but it means some of the motion is wrong. I would wager the evidence was described correctly and the conclusion is wrong.

I find this to be the lowest form of commentary. Instead of making an argument you get to sit on the sidelines smugging that the other people making an argument look ridiculous. Without even having the courage to frame it as an argument to specific people that can then win or lose on its own merits.

At the self-appointed "only plan-truster on the Motte" I'll add then -- Trump himself didn't back down! Trump said that Pirro choked. The pope is still Catholic.

That seems like a really bad motion. Literally the evidence is “there were construction problems and therefore the multiple first hand witnesses who saw this person doing damage isn’t true.”

They saw him pulling up pieces of the liner, with his hands. If these pieces of liner were loose already due to construction problems, the "damage" is nonexistent (they'd have to be removed anyway).

Except it was described as being violent. Perhaps there was something loose but violently pulling the liner would make it worse.

While federal law's text doesn't care about the actual impact on repairs rather than just whether a nominal damage was done -- people have been got for vandalizing federal property slated for demolition, albeit only under the misdemeanor version -- in practice juries tend to be pretty skeptical and the actually impact matters for the specific version of the crime. I'm pretty harsh on DC juries, but I don't know that I could vote to convict here, at least from the public information. He probably had some malicious intent, if the "awfully sensitive" comment holds up, but that really shouldn't be enough on its own.

I think there was zero chance of winning even if the construction was perfect.


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