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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

I haven't heard the words (quadroon, etc.) uttered out loud unironically ever in my life, and I was born and raised in more or less rural Alabama, and both sets of grandparents regularly used the term "nigger" though notably (to me) neither of my parents ever said the word within my earshot and wouldn't allow it said in the house (by me or my brother.)

I remember 'mulatto', 'mestizo', and 'half-caste' used. Adult males may or may not have used the word nigger occasionally, but not in the presence of blacks or women- and none would object to it even if they didn't personally use it. It was definitely a cultural descriptor as much as it was a racial term though. Nowadays people know what a 'cholo' and a 'castizo' is and might use the term, but only the former is derogatory.

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

At the same time, "someone on Twitter said" doesn't tell us much. What 'someone'? Right wing someone, left wing someone, progressive Marxist someone, Aryan supremacy someone? There's a lot of ground that "someone" covers and we don't know if the tweet, taken out of context, is supportive (I'm a liberal, told ya that reality has a liberal bias), is grudgingly supportive (I'm a tankie, liberals get the bullet too, but this once they were right), is supportive from the other side (I'm conservative, this is where we can agree with liberals), is condemnatory (I believe in the superiority of the white race as proven by HBD and the stupid liberals are trying to tar us as spreading misinformation, this is what we have to fight against) or what.

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

Do dogs have more variance? A lot of the phenotypic differences are driven by single genes; it's not implausible that genetically chihuahuas and great danes are slightly closer than Yeniseians and Negritos.

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

I'd be curious to know about how good most genetically distant populations, Mbuti pygmies and Australoids fare in that respect.

There's plenty of partly-aboriginal people running around in Australia. They just look white. And there's an entire ethnic group(cape coloreds) descended from Dutch-Khoisan crosses in South Africa.

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

You’re wrong. Epsteins schtick was to find young troubled girls as young as 11 or 12. He would even get them to find more girls for him:

https://www.npr.org/2020/01/16/797011139/u-s-virgin-islands-officials-epstein-trafficked-girls-on-private-island-until-20

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

Epstein was raping 11 year olds (allegedly): https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2020/1/15/lawsuit-alleges-epstein-trafficked-girls-as-young-as-11

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

It's worth noting that Latin American immigration is not universally non-white, has a long history of assimilating pretty well- and generally not to the criminally inclined underclass, the Hispanics and blacks hate each other and the Hispanic underclass is probably not, proportionately, much higher than the white one- and that Hispanic fertility in the US holds up much worse than native white TFR.

There are criticisms of Latin immigration- they're terrible drivers who raise premiums for everyone, they drive down wages for the native lower-working class, etc. But America's underclass is, mostly, black. The non-black underclass has plenty of whites in it, and I wouldn't claim those whites are any better than the blacks. The median Hispanic in the US works as a cook or a mechanic or construction worker, pushes his kids to move up the social ladder but doesn't complain when it's only one rung, and uses no drugs worse than pot. His daughter is likely to marry a white man, give birth to European looking and acting children, and have higher fertility than her peers who marry other Mexicans. His son likely has a better chance of stable and productive employment than his white peers. The developed parts of Latin America with lots of whites are, by the standards of high income inequality middle income countries, the best in the world- much nicer places to live than former soviet countries, South Africa, etc. It's unlikely that Hispanic immigration will raise income inequality or suppress economic growth by enough to reach, say, Chilean levels. Hispanic migration is simply not a crisis to US ability to maintain its functioning civilization.

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

I don't know how reliable they ever were. Before the Internet, the traditional mass media were the only media. There were no other voices. They could easily have been as bad as they are now, and nobody would have known. If anything they might've been worse, as they had less scrutiny.

The structure of it alone practically demands an oligopoly. After all, how many people can afford to run a national TV station, and that's before we start talking about licensing and permits. The same goes for large publishing houses.

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

Very well, since the two of you did speak up for him, I'm going to knock it down to 2 weeks. It'll only get worse if he doesn't get better.

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

Nazi Germany mostly inherited the imperial German military system, essentially intact but unused. Reviving it was politically popular and the sort of thing that was inevitable from whoever rose to the top in the Weimar republic. Hitler's main military reforms were either net negatives like the SS or copies of the adaptations other major powers made to the lessons of WWI, coupled with the existing highly-competent Prussian officer corps's adaptations to the lessons of the Spanish civil war.

It's true that Hitler did some common-sense reforms that he can fairly get credit for, but these reforms were, well, commonsense- few of them were unique to Germany.

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

You can see it, but I think in general deeper messages just don't get though. Heavy-handed moralizing is used because it works.

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

This is a generalized woke failure that they just... fail to say anything convincing to anybody not onboard with their program to begin with. They look ridiculous not like 'just decent persons'. Libs of TikTok was successful propaganda by showing wokes explaining their position in their own words.

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

There was a joke repeated in And the band played on from the early days of AIDS:

What's the hardest part of getting AIDS? Convincing your wife you're Haitian.

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

The US recently changed those policies, and monogamous MSM are allowed to donate blood. If it helps, they shortly afterward also allowed "residents of Europe in the 1990s" as well, because maybe they don't have Mad Cow.

But yes, lots of people died of HIV from tainted blood transfusions in the 80-90s. Isaac Asimov is the famous example that comes to mind, although maybe in some of those cases it was used as a cover story.

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

I would like to chime in in Turok's defense- as someone who does not agree with him very much- that he has slightly improved. I agree with goodguy- he is obnoxious but a month is too long.

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

Heavy-handedness of the message makes it useful vehicle for spreading non-wokist media literacy. When you are watching it together with friends/family (I watched it together with my wife), you can easily point how gratuitous and ridiculous the messaging is. (See how they wrote the Mr Angry Taxpayer as extremely unsympathetic overweight white male? And his complaint that the staff was preferentially taking in non-serious but sympathetic cases was correct.)

Sometimes I wondered - either the writing team was so blinded out by their politics they didn't notice when overtly woke writing was so illogical it got a Straussian reading, or was there someone in scriptwriting team getting non-woke Straussian takes past the radar.

Incel plot-line was the biggest flag here. Evidence he is an incel planning a school shooting is flimsy - we are told he wrote a list of names girls in his class he hates in his diary - and only part of it shown-on screen is his mother's testimony and interpretation. POV character, Dr Robby points out there is not much legitimate basis for them to do much, but tries to talk with the boy who leaves the hospital. Everyone in the ER acts like a classic bigot about the 'incel', and when the big shoot-out happens, they double up the bigotry. Pushy doctor McKay reports him to the police and everyone else spreads unfounded rumor that the kid is the shooter among the patients, who get agitated. Dr Robby shows some skepticism, pointing out that it is not really justified to arrest people for thought crimes. They have the mother to sign the paperwork for boys involuntarily commitment. Audience should take notice how the whole thing resembles a witch hunt. Later, the suspect returns to the ER, where he is promptly arrested. The writing team pulls a switch which is surprising only if the audience had joined in the bigotry - the boy wasn't the shooter. It was telegraphed almost because there almost always is a twist after such a build-up.

The ER held him for psych evaluation anyway, because the paperwork was signed and they are scared he is a troubled incel who might do something. Robby tells McKay she has fucked up, and McKay 'talks with him', delivering a sanctimonious speech that is mostly about her own insecurities. Nevertheless, everything is magically fixed because later we see a shot of the boy agreeing to talk with therapist. Superficially it validates McKay's actions, I thought it fell flat - given the series had established that boy was guilty of nothing but sulking. Taking some distance from the emotional beats, the plotline as written is about gross injustice caused by suspicions and rumors. Everyone with any life experience knows that half-hour chat with psychiatrist usually solves nothing. Only thing missing is written comeuppance for the ER team.

The second one was the Two Dads. They made so large a point how there was two dads, with neurodivergent doctor launching into emotional rhapsodies how the dads were so happy with their baby, with no word for the surrogate mother. Bu if you watch watch what happens the episode, it is kinda weird because the dramatic medical drama of the episode is how the surrogate non-mother does all the work and almost dies of complications of the delivery. Just because the "dads" could be happy. Meanwhile she is othered as non-mother unperson by the staff while they save her life, who treat only the dads as family who matters, and have no acknowledgement for what she did - the baby is immediately disappeared from her view to be bottle-fed by the "dads", no mention of colostrum. Only one of the "dads" gets some lines reminiscing on their friendship and how she is doing some kind of sacrifice while almost dying. Realistically, the situation would be even more troubling because surrogates usually are not life-long friends of the "dads", but doing it for monetary compensation, with no memories to be reminisce about. If you don't come with strong progressive priors, the practice of surrogacy does not come out looking good.

Friday Fun Thread for July 18, 2025

For longer-distance endurance races, men's performance seems to peak around age 33. I would expect an earlier peak for more explosive/fast-twitch dominated events.

Depends heavily on the sport, the individual, and the degree of chemical assistance available.

But I also think high-level athletic research (while still being the only really valid research on the topic) is going to be biased towards people who peak earlier. To become elite at most high end sports, you have to be an elite youth-level competitor by the time you're 20 at the latest. And the flipside to this is that the mileage on the body and the injuries start accumulating earlier. We don't actually have much of a model for what happens if someone starts competing seriously at 25, because to get to the point where they're competing seriously at 25 most people have been competing seriously at 18. A tommy john surgery, or a blown out knee, or accumulating concussions, are going to get you started on your decline even if your athletic peak was still ahead of you.

UFC champions, who have tended to start out in MMA later as they train something different-but-related before switching to MMA professionally, average 33, and fighters typically begin their decline at 34. MLB players peak between 27 and 30, but that curve has moved up a few years after the beginning of steroid testing. MMA is notably poor on testing compared to the other major pro sports, and the individual sports are generally more poorly tested than the major professional team sports where the league has some degree of physical control over the players. Soccer players peak at 27 on average, but speedy wingers peak earlier and decline faster than burly centerbacks. NFL running backs decline almost immediately, while offensive linemen can often stick it out well into their 30s.

All that being said, I'm in the best shape of my life right now, this year, at 33. But I don't disagree with @self_made_human about 25 either: at 25 I had more potential, I could be anything, even if at 33 I currently am more. Athletically, at 25 I could still have runway to develop skills that, at this point, I won't reach. My hair was thicker, I could sleep off a hangover easier, I could eat bad food and worry about it less. I was in my last year of grad school, which is the peak of a certain kind of status for many people: you've accomplished a lot so you have something to stand on when you boast, but you haven't found your level in the professional world yet, so you can talk all the shit you want about what you might do. 25 was a very good year

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

I don’t think we should stop talking about it. I find Epstein fascinating enough that I’ve read almost everything (possibly everything) ever written on him. I think he was a real life example of extraordinarily high verbal intelligence, which is rarer even than the spatial equivalent. I’m talking about political attention. Apologies if that wasn’t clear, I don’t think the discussions we have matter politically, obviously.

We discuss a lot of things ere that aren’t the most important thing in the country, we discuss architecture, obesity drugs, video games, history, whatever.

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

They aren't all ruthless realpolitikers, plenty are true believers in socialism as a winning platform and that the DNC only loses elections because they aren't radical enough. That's means and motive.

Consider an alternative possibility, which we've seen demonstrated in public numerous times: The Democratic party lacks balls, has always lacked balls, lacks balls at every level from top to bottom. The strain of trying to pretend to have balls and be a Democrat eventually gave Fetterman a stroke and now he's a blithering retard.

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

large scale illegal migration from Central and South America I can’t countenance the wasting of that singular political moment and energy on the irrelevant sexual proclivities of a disgusting but dead man decades ago.

Until mass immigration is solved, this is the absolute political issue, above anything else, beyond everything else. The same is true about other irrelevancies, like Iran, Ukraine, tariffs.

Then don't comment on these threads, or just comment one sentence that you don't care about anything more than you care about Blanqueamiento, and move on.

The motte is for truth seeking, not petty dishonest political persuasion. It probably won't work for the latter anyway, and even if it did the US voting population of the forum might be 50 on a good day, of which I'm not sure you yourself are included.

How am I supposed to trust anything you say about the matter after you tell me that nothing else matters except deporting brown people? Your top level post the other day, do you actually believe that Epstein was just a particularly hot gay hustler, a Gold Digging Hall of Famer, or is that what you determined was the best thing to say to protect Stephen Miller's political project? Is everything you say about all the issues you just told me don't matter to be ignored, just a weather-vane tested method of finding the right piece of whataboutism to get everyone to shut up and give ICE more money?

I just don't understand how one goes on the motte and says "stop talking about X, it doesn't matter compared to Y." Because nothing we talk about on the motte matters; thus the truth is all that matters. And I'm disappointed that you've disavowed it.

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

Another dubious extrapolation - the scale of the gangs we know about increased a lot after 1997 when Blair legalised fetching marriage.

Do you read j’accuse on substack? While I find him histrionic and extremist much of the time (and wouldn’t endorse his politics), he tracked down an extensive list of old newspaper articles about criminal cases that made very clear this was going on in a major way since the mid-1950s, single-digit years or even months after any non-negligible immigration from Pakistan began. Even I was quite surprised at that. There are quotes in many of them from police and others that suggest this was already a widely-known about issue among local police and councils by the mid-1960s at the latest, when pressure began on the left to take action to reduce the chance of race riots in the wake of Powell’s peak popularity.

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

based on the rates in Rotherham

Most of the other gangs that have been busted were an order of magnitude smaller than Rotherham. The coverup ended a decade ago - we have a pretty good handle on the size of the problem, and we now know that Rotherham and Telford were unusually bad. This wasn't known at the time Sarah Champion took up the issue - so she was making a reasonable guess at the time.

(over the 65 year period of mass immigration from Pakistan)

Another dubious extrapolation - the scale of the gangs we know about increased a lot after 1997 when Blair legalised fetching marriage. Apart from a few places with powerful local ethnic-Pakistani political machines (Bradford/Halifax is the only one of the local grooming gangs where this is a plausible factor) the police would not have gone soft on Pakistani sex offenders until well into the 1990's.

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

There are people (all women I believe) on those prisoner letter writing forums who are in touch with her.

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

Pearson’s method extrapolated from both Rotherham’s population and the rate there and the relatively population and distribution of the Mirpuri/Pakistani community in England.

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

Buddhism isn't really religion. It's psychology. The way out of the cycles of suffering can be reached in this lifetime with correct practice. The Buddha told us how. It was later that people added all sorts of mumbo jumbo around it. I'm well on the way to liberation myself. No other way of life offers a concrete and comprehensive framework for comprehending and working well with the mind. To say that sheer atheism can compete with the buddhadharma is a very silly statement born out of ignorance. No offense.