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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 6, 2025

100ProofTollBooth Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog. 23hr ago

(Don't) Burn This Fucker Down!

A guy's been arrested for the Palisades fire. Note: link to an article from the Guardian, which I know is goofy, but the details are better in that article than in a few others that I pulled.

Of note:

After dropping off a passenger, according to the investigators, Rinderknecht parked his car and walked up a nearby trail, taking iPhone videos at a hilltop location while listening to a rap song whose music video included objects being set alight. He had reportedly listened to the song and watched its video repeatedly in the days before the fire.

First, I'm pretty stoked that the government went to what seems like a lot of trouble to find this guy. In fact, I can't remember if there was much reporting, at the time, on this being an intentional / negligent fire. This is tempered by the fact that this arrest was obviously only possible by employing the surveillance state to its fullest extent. People get squeamish about facial recognition technology, but using cellphone location data is both less "emotionally" invasive as well as more durable as a tracking mechanism. Maybe carrying around constant location trackers in our pockets is a bad idea?

Second, culture war angle (of course) - Odd and lonely uber driver dude sets something on fire while listening to rap music. Was it truly intentional? Maybe, maybe not. Negligent, yes. What's truly frightening however is that this is literally an almost literary manifestation of alienated male nihilism. Rinderknecht didn't shoot up a school / church/ political figure. He didn't disappear into drugs / porn / 4chan. He didn't commit suicide. He just kind of got pissed off one night and started a fire that deleted a whole section of a city.

We need to give the boys something to do. I've written about this before on the Motte. One of the primary tasks of human civilization has always been to manage, curtail, and, when necessary, punish the violent impulses of young men. War and famine did a lot of the heavy lifting for a while, and "frontierism" helped out towards the end (i.e. the idea that listless young men could at least try to find fortune in physically difficult locations. Not just "The West" but think also whaling ships, mining, etc.) But the world is fully mapped now, more or less. If you pack up your shit and hit the road, YouTube is going to be the same wherever you go. You can't get it away from it all when it's all in your pocket.

The necessity is in developing better pathways for young men to enter adulthood and develop a sense of self paired with durable external meaning. Some sort of religious or, at least, high-minded civic metaphysics is a necessary part of this. Young men, on their own in a truly atomized sense, turn into their own kind of decentralized stochastic terrorism. Stochastic chaos might be the more accurate term.

But this won't be accomplished by TikTok ads (lol) encouraging the boys to man up and / or talk to a therapist on BetterHelp (thank you for sponsoring this podcast, BTW). I think it requires the sincere confrontation of a modern liberalism that prizes the autonomy of the individual above the stability of society. I can see a good argument to be made that liberalism should be about the tension between those two things. But I don't believe we're living in that world. We're in a world where individuals demand acknowledgement, recognition, and validation from all of society all of the time regardless of any conflict between an individual's value system and societies. This is "live your truth" in a nutshell. And when that nut cracks open, it burns down everything it touches - like, literally.