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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 17, 2026

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you've conveniently forgotten the most obvious and immediate person a violent criminal would want to mislead as to his motivations and capacity for choosing another way: himself

He's not deceiving himself, he doesn't have the IQ for that. You're reading way too far into psychology here. They are not torturing themselves with guilt or deliberately keeping themselves ignorant, they're not lying to seem like good people to themselves seconds after they were just boasting to about all the horrible rape they've been doing!

"When she sees you with a knife or anything that is a weapon, she will stay still, she will never scream"

This is not the words of a man who is trying to defend his own ego, his self-image of being a good person!

Furthermore, it is obvious that these people don't think about longer-term consequences of their actions (or to be more precise, think much less about consequences), even when it is to their benefit. That's almost the definition of intelligence, having a long time-horizon, planning and predicting the future. At the very least it's incredibly close to intelligence or a byproduct of intelligence. You already said you agree on this about group differences. What do you think the group differences are exactly? How do you think they got this rapey culture if it wasn't derived from their nature? The Dutch or the English taught them to rape women?

The guy who murdered Iryna Zarutska, Decarlos Dejuan Brown Jr - would you say he demonstrated understanding of the consequences of his actions? He obviously could've attacked strong men with a knife but he picked a weaker target instead. Presumably he knew, even in his state of retardation, that attacking a big guy was a lot more dangerous than a small girl. But that standard of 'consequence understanding' is so pathetically low it's laughable. He gained absolutely nothing from killing this girl, it cost him a great deal to do so in public under cameras. It was a really stupid decision even if we assume it was easing his racial hatred.

Would you give these guys a prize for their deception antics in pretending to be a nice guy before 'jackrolling' the girl and 'going one by one'? They've executed some basic calumny, hurrah for their faculties! No, they've risked getting HIV, they know about that risk but they rape anyway for a momentary thrill. They're retarded.

You should reread and comprehend my comment where I said 'it doesn't come naturally to them'. Calculus doesn't come naturally to me, I struggle with it. They can reason but at a low level and often not at all, especially if it's something more abstract. They didn't understand the first couple of times when the white guy is like 'oh how did the woman feel about you raping them'. They weren't evading, it went over their heads! it takes them a few seconds to crank up the underdeveloped consequences-understanding engine, especially if it's abstract moral thinking rather than just crude violent plots. Note also this is the absolute most barebones moral reasoning possible.

And in that connection, you decided that a rapist's defensive claim intended to deflect from naming his impact on his victims -- an almost textbook self-protective act of ego defense for whom the target is the self and the journalist is just witnessing it

I really don't think you watched the video, how they laugh about threatening to kill and rape these girls, the jackrolling, how they bring up their rapist antics impromptu and then have them deciding to lie about how they feel to protect their self-image. I don't see how you can have watched it and thought 'oh these guys have a normal mental process and would lie to themselves'. At most they pattern-match, comically switching to 'oh yeah rape is wrong' when prompted... seconds after talking about how sometimes she enjoyed them raping her, seconds after talking about how they do it forcibly at knifepoint.

He's not deceiving himself, he doesn't have the IQ for that.

This seems like a strange claim. Three-year-olds lie to themselves when they've been naughty. I agree with @urquan that it's an extremely basic, natural human reaction to a feeling of guilt, not some sophisticated cognitive contortion that only superior minds can master. If anything, I'd say that idiots lie to themselves more thoroughly and more successfully than midwits and geniuses - less cognitive bandwidth means less lingering self-doubt about one's own bullshit, once swallowed.

These aren't the words of a man who is trying to defend his own ego, his self-image of being a good person!

Why not? It all depends on where he's built the mental wall. One form of denial is "I never raped a woman at knifepoint, of course not, it's not true, you're lying", but another form, which is just as psychologically soothing, just not legally helpful, is "it's an animal instinct, I couldn't control myself, it's not that I'm a mean person who wants the girl to suffer, I just literally couldn't think about that until I got my nut out". Many serial killers, never mind rapists, rationalized their behavior to themselves in this way - not by lying to themselves about what they were doing, but lying to themselves about how much agency they had in choosing to do it.