domain:alexberenson.substack.com
Tacherus
8hr ago
The Pitt as a lagging culture war indicator
So I’ve been watching The Pitt with my wife lately.
The premise of the show is to follow doctors and nurses in an ER over a single 15-hour shift, much like the old show 24.
The show has been praised for its accuracy and I certainly find it intense at times.
That being said, I’m halfway through the Emmy-nominated season and while the medical drama part is solid, I’ve been repeatedly struck by the culture war aspects of the show.
According to Wikipedia, development began late 2023 after the writers strike and into 2024. The show premiered in early 2025 and has already been renewed.
It’s good and I’ve enjoyed watching it.
That being said….
There’s a bit of a culture war time capsule effect that shows up from time to time. It’s intermittent but fairly heavy-handed I think:
- a medical student is lectured on intent vs impact after offering the aid of a social work to a homeless mom
- a trans woman is treated for a cut and a med student draws attention to the “misgendering” of insurance records. We’re told it’s cool to have fixed this
- we’re shown the “correct” way to interact with an autistic patient. A sr resident has apparently never done this before and is in awe of a second year “neuro-divergent” resident who helps the patient
- a 17 year old girl is brought in for an abortion. The doctors commit fraud to make it happen and even talk the kids mom into it
It’s hard to convey from the descriptions but there are two themes I want to comment on.
The first is what is treated as something to joke about vs a Very Special Message. We get jokes about drug addicts with nicknames, jokes about frat boys in car wrecks, jokes about whether a medical student killed someone or just got unlucky. No joking around though when it comes to using terms like “unhoused.”
The other major theme that to me comes out strongly is a vibe of knowing the answers to all these political issues. There’s never any exploration or even acknowledgment of a controversy beyond as an obstacle to be dealt with.
For instance (mild spoilers) the girl coming in for an abortion evidently missed the 11 week deadline. No problem! Doctors will just lie. The mother of the patient isn’t on board but that’s ok the doctors will browbeat her into it and suggest the daughter will never speak to her again if it happens.
Sometimes even the doctors don’t know what to do like in the case of an incel with some violent journaling or a patient who’s been poisoned by his wife—she claims without evidence or corroboration that he’s molesting their daughter and we’re horrified to learn that she might be the one in trouble!
Overall though, the attitude is one of “we know the answers but sometimes society isn’t quite caught up yet.”
Will be curious to see how the tone of shows like this changes having now entered an era of “reckoning” and “post-mortems” of democratic hubris.
the_Culture_is_great
21hr ago
The implication that a "ghetto boy" is a member of a "virulent invasive species" is both literally false, and metaphorically wrong.
I shouldn't have to explain why it's literally false.
The metaphor is wrong because in the typical understanding, the actions we should take against "invasive species" should be extreme, up to and including eradicating them from the "invaded" area.
You can make a nature/nurture point just fine without bringing these kind of implications into it.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
22hr ago
I also think having an upvote/downvote system on what's supposed to be a neutral discussion forum is just completely idiotic. Everyone just uses it as an "I agree" button for upvotes and "I disagree" for downvotes. This functionally means any left-leaning or even just contra-MAGA opinion gets heavily downvoted. I've had plenty of people then use this as an excuse to claim the equivalent of "uhhh, can't you see you're getting a lot of downvotes!?! Have you ever stopped to consider that maybe this is because you're wrong and stupid!?!?!?!?" Pure heat, negligible light.
However, you can actually block yourself from seeing the score if you use Ublock Origin and add the following to your filter list:
www.themotte.org##button.m-0.p-0.nobackground.caction.btn
I consider this 100% essential if you want to use this site and ever substantially disagree with MAGA talking points.
Quantumfreakonomics
21hr ago
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Of course Trump is in the Epstein files. It was deniable 2 weeks ago ("two more weeks" guys finally get a win), but there is really only one reason everyone in the administration would suddenly get cold feet and display the same suspicious nothing-to-see-here attitude at exactly the same time. They didn't just want this quietly ignored, they wanted this GONE.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
22hr ago
Racism is, after all, the default state of humanity
Like, yes, but also no? Mostly no. First of all, we should probably state that race doesn't really exist. There's nothing inherently, fundamentally, deeply different about human groups. There are some genetic quirks here and there. Sometimes these genetic quirks collect in particular geographical and sexual assortment groupings. But groupings mix and blend like crazy, and different quirks show up, and then sometimes get re-blended, and sometimes groupings get big enough that humans in their constant drive for classifying and categorizing and delineating end up giving them a linguistic label. Sometimes, quite frequently in fact, these linguistic labels end up being poorly applied, but sometimes they are pretty accurate, or the label shifts and stretches to match some underlying grouping. And anyways, these labels very often extend poorly and incompletely to individuals: even a single mixed-race person breaks all the categories.
In this context, the modern (popular) understanding of race is probably less objectively "correct" (insofar as it even makes sense to say) than the more ancient understanding of race. Historically, and I mean by that roughly before the initial advent of genetic theories and eugenics and all that stuff, racism was the case where it applied geographically to clustered sexual assortment groups. And usually (but not even all the time) this worked just fine, because mass migrations and mixings were semi-rare. We should also note that even here, culture and race are basically intertwined quite tightly, because both are primarily geographic and spatial in nature (although culture can spread memetically and through trade links faster than actual sexual interlinkage). These migrations did happen though with some decent regularity, but the typical person alive would have limited exposure to other groups anyways. As especially "empires" grew (typically defined as a cross-cultural/ethnic political entities, as opposed to "kingdoms"), and increasingly leveraged what we could call cultural technologies, you did start to see some differentiation.
But here, it's important to take things into perspective. Locally, skin tone differences due to tanning would imply social things mechanically, but melanin differences were not seen as the primary differentiator, and nor were other ethnic groupings. Empire-wide, you'd get some local-geographical discrimination and categorization, but the interplay with culture was also very important. And even more than culture, social status. If you look at Rome, for example, as a time in history when you had different ethnic groups interacting all over, and frequently (in a relative sense), social standing and nationality seemed to matter much more than localized ethnic groupings inherently. There was this general idea of "barbarians" but that had again more to do with culture than race.
Fast forward. Today, many people think of race as skin color, and maybe a few other scattered traits like facial structure or whatever. This is ahistorical, frankly, at least when it comes to skin color. Slavery really did a number on the country and dichotomized things, for one, and also the modern "categories" are, frankly, terrible, even without skin color explicitly. "Hispanic/Latino" is such a uselessly broad categorization. Brazilian is its own pot of crazy. "Middle Eastern/North African" is like, very loosely its own category but doesn't even show up in many official government questions. We now have this vague notion of "white" which sometimes does and sometimes doesn't include Eastern European origin in addition to Western European origin, and sometimes includes Spaniards but sometimes doesn't, and anyways I'm not going to get into all the (common) edge cases, hopefully you get the idea.
And underneath it all, you have increasing rates of "interracial" kids. Underneath it all, even if you are to try and be scientific about "race", you still have to make a highly controversial and indefensible decision, which is where to "snapshot" racial differences as a baseline. When we are talking about Chinese people, are we talking before or after the Mongol invasion? How local are we going? Are 'Han' Chinese from Northern China different than 'Han' Chinese from near the Vietnam border? Do we distinguish Koreans from Chinese? What about Japanese, who objectively stayed more isolated historically? How linearly do we interpret genetic distance? Is a Japanese person more or less different than a Chinese person vs a White English descent person from a Portuguese? Are we just admitting that we're taking culture and history into account, or are we still insisting on some genetic measure? If we're talking genetic facts, are we allowing for snap judgements?
All this to say that sure, historically humans discriminate, but no, they didn't think of race like we do now. Racism is an obsession of modern discourse, and it just doesn't make sense. Most notably, there's this conflation of culture, nationality, and genetic "race" as one giant construct - often this is lazily referred to as "race", but it really is more broad. Maybe we need a better word.
Now, many people here at the Motte seem to take the tack that so what, categories are imprecise, but all that matters is some kind of "predictive accuracy" for my mental heuristics. Can I predict that a Black-presenting person will rob my store, and does that merit treating them different? These are different questions, and have more to do with "discrimination" (which includes much more than race) than they do race itself, and I've gone on too long, but let me just end by saying that if you think historically there was anything remotely like these modern issues of 'asians are good at math' or 'blacks are criminals' you are dead wrong. Historically, those statements are really weird to say. Charitably, you can maybe say that these issues are common to the last ~2 centuries of history, as transportation technologies accelerated migration trends, but you really can't say more than that.
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
11hr ago
I just turned 25 today, since I have some time and it's a quarter of a century, ama. I hope this isn't seen poorly lol. But I'm quite happy to have seen this milestone.
CrispyFriedBarnacles
6hr ago
I'm pretty sure there's a fascinating generational divide at play in things like this.
Here's my folk theory on that. Because of the particular circumstances Boomers were born into, many of the more artistic ones were raised in a much more conservative environment, then had a massive crisis of faith / trust / belief in the late 60s through the 70s, and then had to figure out a way to reintegrate themselves into society and make art about it. And because of that, whatever their other flaws, they were often VERY good at making entertainment that could talk to actual moderates and conservatives, because in many cases, they were the black sheep who had charted an overt path away from where they had started. They were the prodigal sons, but when they returned, they intended to remake culture with what they had found.
If you were a conservative, trying to maintain a traditional culture, these people were like the pied piper of Hamelin. They were really good at targeting younger members of your home communities, seductively you might say. They were legitimately good at representing things you recognized while also undermining it with a certain kind of criticism or nuance, at their best. Or even when they were provoking, they were good at signaling that they were provoking from within a shared tribe, so to speak.
Gen X didn't have the formative experience of the draft, and they grew up in the shadow of both this artistic explosion as well as the backlash, the stagflation of the 70s, and the rise of the religious right, and the cold war of the 80s. They saw the huge excesses of the divorce revolution and the drug culture and AIDS as-it-was-experienced and various miserable, alienating radical activist movements. They were, perhaps, particularly attuned towards cynicism about politics and messy ambiguity in art as a result. The best Gen X (at least when they were young) was often provocative, knowing exactly how to needle a conservative majority, but rarely preachy... (although if I go back and listen to, say, Eddie Vedder now, I can recognize the west coast SJW inclinations there the whole time). And also, the left of center counter culture got stomped down so incredibly hard in the 80s that they legitimately recognized themselves as outsiders, a kind of marginalized dissent. And Gen X got irony.
I think (when it comes to art and communication), everything kind of went to hell with the combination of the collapse of conservatism in the George W Bush years, the rhetorical success of, especially, Jon Stewart, and the messianic rise of Obama. Because it ushered in a kind of generational change, and that meant that a lot of the Millennials, especially, developed their early political identities during the Bush years and then experienced a conversion experience with Obama, all while internalizing the worst elements of Jon Stewart's frequent stance of "we, the smart ones, don't even need to refute the arguments of these moral monsters and intellectual imbeciles, and so we will use a condescending sneer at them instead". And I mean, I liked that tone during the Bush years too - it was very fun and self-satisfying. But it mixes with thoughtful art really, really poorly, it doesn't do nuance or ambiguity, and it really only works when you're preaching to the choir. And once Obama swept it, it turned out that being against something legitimately lousy was easy mode, and when you're for things (like high speed rail in California, or a really aggressive trans agenda), and you leave a giant trail of wreckage in your wake, sneering at your opponents simply isn't enough. That doesn't persuade. It doesn't take reality seriously, or your own failures. Everything that made those messy dissident Boomers so effective had dried up. And I really do think radically different life experiences played a major role here. I think there's an ugly tendency in modern progressive culture broadly for people to want to feel as though they are both, at once, the eternal put upon victims and dissidents of power, while also the natural experts, the aristocratic power that stands in perpetual judgement due to intellectual merit and thus moral merit. And... that just really sucks for sophisticated art. And then the radicalization that happened in the lead up to Trump has just made everything vastly worse, of course. I've noted it before, but the run up to the 2016 election was the first time in my life that I had EVER seen artistically cooler, non-cringe media from Republicans than Democrats. It felt, at the time, like that was an important bellwether of something.
I've seen Freddie de Boer bemoan what he calls the "We are already decided" stance (or something like that). I think if you're in communities that have already adopted that stance, it becomes very difficult to make sophisticate, nuanced art that can reach out to people with other life experiences.
I remember early on in cancel culture Chris Rock (I think) talking about how he couldn't play colleges anymore. And he had some statement that was like, "You can't be wrong anymore on your way to being" - suggesting, I think, that even if you were going to tell a joke that ended up with an approved morality, you weren't allowed to even play around rhetorically with the unapproved morality, or give it is due, or take it serious, as a rhetorical technique before ending up where you were supposed to. I think I'm paraphrasing that roughly right. And I think (if I am) that that captured some of the specific tension I find so interesting here.
2rafa
9hr ago
It’s funny to me that in real life, many a man will cop to being friends with various kinds of scumbags with the “yeah, I wouldn’t want him to marry my sister, but he never did anything to me” reasoning, but somehow when it comes to celebrity I’m expected to be scandalized that people stayed friends with Epstein even though he had a thing for 16 year old girls (whom they may well have believed were 18 anyway).
Even a thousand Epsteins wouldn’t be as bad as, say, the Rotherham scandal where 12 year olds were being sexually tortured and pimped to hundreds or thousands of strangers, sometimes dozens a day. Yes, what Epstein did (paying 16 year olds for sex and having them recruit their school friends for the same purpose) was cruel and wrong - and he deserved jail for it - but in the grand scheme of all sexual crimes it was far, far from the worst.
Goodguy
21hr ago
For the record, I do not upvote or downvote people on here, and I would support getting rid of the upvote/downvote system here entirely. It gives me a nice pleasant dopamine hit to see a comment of mine upvoted, and I enjoy that very much, but overall, I feel that upvote/downvote systems make political discussion forums worse, not better. For one thing, they feed into a sense that the people who are writing the comments are like athletes in the middle of an arena, fighting it out to the cheers of the audience. Not exactly something that inspires intelligent thought.
That said, I disagree with your notion that any left-leaning or even just contra-MAGA opinion gets heavily downvoted. I write contra-MAGA opinions on here all the time, and they get upvoted more often than they get downvoted. Sure, sometimes I write something that does not fit the average Motte writer's political opinions and I get downvoted a lot, and I can clearly infer that it is because the downvoters disagree with me. But given that I often write things that go against the local average and still get upvoted a lot, clearly it is more complicated than that.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
20hr ago
There is a problem here, and the problem is you.
The problem, specifically, is that you post a lot of these kinds of sneering borderline kinda-making-a-point-but-mostly-just-sneering comments, and increasingly people are getting frustrated and angry and snapping at you, and then we have to mod those people (because you are not allowed to attack someone) and it's starting to look very much like this is your game.
Sometimes we ban someone not because any one post was terrible but because their overall effect on the community is so negative that there seems little value in allowing them to keep throwing shit. We don't like to do it; it's very subjective. We can't read your mind. Maybe you really are sincere about everything you say, you believe you are making good, valid points, and your manner of expressing yourself is just so off-putting and against the grain here that it drives people crazy. But we've warned you enough, and you keep doing exactly the same thing, that I suspect you know what you're doing and you're doing it on purpose.
So I'm telling you now: stop it. Or I will propose to the rest of the mods that you should be banned under our catch-all egregiously obnoxious category.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
5hr ago
I think there's an ugly tendency in modern progressive culture broadly for people to want to feel as though they are both, at once, the eternal put upon victims and dissidents of power, while also the natural experts
I wonder if this is a universal human narrative: "Our enemies are simultaneously too strong and too weak" is frequently described as a common trademark of fascism, but honestly I see everyone in politics playing it these days, like your observation here.
Testing123
7hr ago
You’re actually underselling the wokeness of the Pitt. Some mildly SPOILERY events:
-
A black woman comes into the hospital with extreme pain. A white doctor thinks she is faking the pain to get painkillers, but a non-white doctor comes in and declares that she has sickle cell anemia and really is in pain. -
Later on, a white main comes into the hospital with extreme pain. The white doctors believe him, but a non-white doctor correctly infers that he’s a drug addict. -
A white family has a kid with measles because they didn’t get him vaccinated. They then delay treatment almost to the point of the kid dying because the mother “does her own research” with blogs. -
A white man in the waiting room is repeatedly rude and causes escalating problems because he has to keep waiting to be seen by the doctors while more injured people get treatment before him. At one point, the white man complains about other people getting treatment with his tax dollars. Later, the white man punches a female administrator in the face and says something MAGA-y. -
A white woman in the waiting room initiates a fight with someone because the latter person is wearing a hospital mask. IIRC, the white woman even screams something about Fauci lying. -
An obese woman comes in with a vague problem. A doctor tells her to lose weight and the obese woman gets upset. Another doctor comes in, finds the real problem (which isn’t related to obesity) and scolds the first doctor for being fixated on the obesity. -
A very old black guy comes into the hospital and prompts a speech by the main white doctor about how a group of black doctors made some important medical discovery 50 years ago that is underappreciated today.
This is just off the top of my head, I’m sure I’m missing a bunch of these.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
19hr ago
Is there a reason you're modding a post made by one of the few consistently left-leaning posters, while not modding posts like this? Arguably this post and this post are borderline too. If the issue with this post is that it's making a generalization of a group in a somewhat mean way, then there'd be plenty of posts the mods ought to come down on even in just the past few days. There's also WhiningCoil's post comparing nonwhites to "virulent invasive species" that's been sitting for over 24h without mod action, although you said up above that you weren't equipped to handle that one so OK I guess, as long as it eventually gets handled.
If the issue is that other people are getting triggered and snapping at him, they should be the ones to pay the price alone. Otherwise it's just an informal rule of "anyone who goes against the dominant ideology on this forum (i.e. leftists) gets banned eventually when people get mad at them". The 3 borderline posts I linked don't have this problem because they're going with the dominant ideology.
My personal opinion is that none of these should be warned/banned, except for maybe WhiningCoil's that's a little too egregious.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
21hr ago
I find it impossible to believe that if there were some hint of damning evidence about Trump in Epstein's files that it wouldn't have gotten leaked during either of the last two elections. There is just no conceivable value that the Dem establishment would have held high enough to cause them to refrain.
Much more believable that the juicy parts of the relevant hard drives and data were "accidentally" thrown into an incinerator in 2019.
That seems like a bad way to judge a metaphor? If you say "wolf in sheep's clothing" or "fox guarding the henhouse" that has very little to do with the typical way farmers respond to animals threatening their own animals (shooting them).
For reference, the quote in question:
It's all well and good to want to plant seeds, and failing to plant your own, nurture what you can find. Just make sure you aren't nurturing some virulent invasive species that will leave the land barren.
Whether accurate or not, I think the crux of the metaphor would be the idea of carelessly planting something that is destructive to the other plants/environment (particularly because they aren't well-adapted to dealing with it), not any particular response. The focus is on the planting/nurturing, on some poor gardener who thinks all seeds are the same (e.g. is a blank-slatist regarding nurture/nature) and then is left with the consequences, not on what he should do afterwards.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
21hr ago
First of all, we should probably state that race doesn't really exist.
You can take medical images in various different modalities, you can even mask off either the high-frequency or low-frequency spatial data, and use a machine learning classifier to reliably determine self-described race. Race is real, and it is pervasive.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
19hr ago
I said "first of all" but so far responses have been fixating on this point rather than the broader point that modern racism doesn't back-extrapolate to history very well at all. That's presentism. Modern racism has at best very imperfect analogies historically (at the very least, pre-industrial ones). I just want to register my annoyance that I'm being argued with on a point that's not germane to the topic I was trying to refute.
What you say is true! Any categorization algorithm, which usually involves some kind of "cutoff" that is chosen, is inherently subject to a confusion matrix with its accompanying tradeoffs. Right? You have false positives, true positives, false negatives, true negatives. To continue that analogy, in the modern world, the tradeoffs are actually kind of large. Total model "accuracy" hits unacceptably low numbers, in my opinion, because of how many blurred borderline cases there are, resulting in miscategorizations of various types. So I guess what I was trying to say is that people have currently 'latched on' to race because of its salience in the political conversation, but it's a poor tool for the job. So sure, race as a categorization algorithm "works" to some extent, and so in that sense it's "real", but we shouldn't be in the habit of substituting models of reality for actual reality. That's the sense by which I call it "not real" - it works (kinda sorta) but it isn't a true depiction of reality. A lot of people especially on this forum go around pretending that race is a Big Deal, and are the equivalent of the gender essentialists (which I actually kind of am) but for race (which I am definitely not). But gender is like, obviously and self-evidently a Big Deal, and race is... well, it just isn't. Not by itself!
This is why I always try and insist that we should have different conversations for issues of race (broad category that, critically intersects with a lot of more-potent things like culture, social status, economics, etc that we might as well discuss more directly!) than we do for issues of discrimination (where we debate and talk about ethics and how they intersect with practical reality and probability) because otherwise everyone always ends up at cross-purposes.
We're gonna have to see if Trump actually goes through with the lawsuit and what happens over it, but given WSJ and Murdoch decided to go through with the article knowing his plans (they even state in the article that's the comments they got when reaching out to the admin) I'm expecting they might be storing more in the barrel still and baiting.
As a North Carolinian, I saw a similar story play out with Mark Robinson where he claims it's fake, starts a lawsuit and then quietly dropped it after things were no longer relevant. Especially funny cause he kept using the username in question too.
Still whether or not this particular letter is real is mostly a distraction from the Case of the Missing Epstein Files we kept getting promised only to end up not existing and things like the altered video. Probably why this is the first time JD Vance suddenly has some thoughts to share, of course none about the Epstein situation, it's so sad how we just don't talk about it anymore in favor of random drama of the day.
Anyway funniest conclusion will be a real letter but not by Trump or associates, but by Epstein and associates faking it and putting people's signatures on things for some weird fantasy.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
20hr ago
For instance, I'm developing a game, and the standards for indie games over the past decade have ballooned to such a wild degree that we're now selecting for elite members of the population who can learn and do anything. If 8-10 years ago you could succeed off a fun gameplay loop alone, in 2025 it now takes a unique art style, a healthy and active social media presence, and a fun+unique gameplay loop at minimum. You may counter that I'm describing the mega-hits, but the market is so risky that if you're not aiming for a mega-hit, you're rolling the dice on a flop. Gamers have criticized the industry for years for letting AA games die, but they died at the hands of the consumer.
The real problem with all of this is that our best and brightest are competing to make video games and other pieces of entertainment which are, let's be real, mostly meaningless. Not all games can be Expedition 33.
No offense meant, but ideally these gifted people would be going into government and industry, not spending all their time on video games.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
20hr ago
For one thing, they feed into a sense that the people who are writing the comments are like athletes in the middle of an arena, fighting it out to the cheers of the audience.
This is a pretty good analogy.
I write contra-MAGA opinions on here all the time, and they get upvoted more often than they get downvoted.
Care to share an example or two of this? My experience has been stuff like this conversation, where I said I doubted that Biden was pocketing bribes.
I've had contra-MAGA posts that go slightly positive if they're very high effort, but the difference between me posting that and say, posting an antifeminist piece is that the contra-MAGA post will be like +50 | -45, while the antifeminist piece will be +50 | -2 or something.
Do me a favor and explain why it's literally false?
The metaphor is wrong because in the typical understanding, the actions we should take against "invasive species" should be extreme, up to and including eradicating them from the "invaded" area.
Or, you know, at least stop subsidizing them.
pigeonburger
8hr ago
Somehow I doubt it, not for a long time. Those who have been left behind by the media are not going to be easy to convince that modern TV shows are now worth watching. And there's tremendous demand from disappointed blues for copium media where they can comfort themselves that their beliefs are self-evidently true and their values virtuous.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
9hr ago
Happy birthday!
At the age of 25, you're at your physical and cognitive peak, and it's all downhill from here. Your mind slows down, though your productivity is kept up by knowledge/wisdom compensating for decreased fluid intelligence. Your body slows down, becomes weaker and frailer, but this can be temporarily alleviated with exercise and a fastidious attitude towards your health.
Don't worry, it doesn't become obvious until about a decade later. The initial slope of the decline is gentle, you can make a good picnic on that plateau.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
21hr ago
A few things.
First, nobody likes a flouncer. You would not be the first to decide this hive of scum and villainy is too much for you and crash out. And that's entirely fair. This place is not for everyone. But if you think loudly declaring you will take your marbles and go home will effect a change in the status quo... no, it probably won't. We allow people with unpleasant views to say their piece if they can stay just this side of attacking individuals or groups. That's by design, it's because we want to have a place where you can actually be exposed to someone able to make an argument for a point of view you might find reprehensible. I do not like racists, blackpillers, incels, white nationalists, accelerationists, Holocaust deniers, and our various other deplorables, but where else can I go (except a forum specifically dedicated to those views, which would be nothing but unfiltered bile and rageposting) to hear what they actually believe and engage with them?
"But I don't want to engage with racists!" you say. And again: fair enough. Maybe this place is not for you. But what is it you want, exactly? For us to be less racist, collectively? Then be one of those who pushes back. For us to not allow people to be racist? Might as well just demand we ban all the deplorables, right?
Second: @WhiningCoil earned a number of reports on that post. He gets reported a lot as he descends further into his bitter nihilistic hole. He's been temp-banned many times under his various alts since he first started blackpilling hard on reddit, so it's not like his seething rants about how much he hates (an ever-expanding range of people) have gone without consequences. That post (and several others of his) are in fact still sitting in the mod queue because I decided I was not going to be the one to make a decision about them.
Borderline posts about how much you hate your enemies are, well, borderline, and whether we decide they cross the line depends a lot on how a particular mod reads the particular wording. Outright saying "Black people are a violent invasive species" would be unambiguously cause for a ban. Saying plainly "I hate black people" would get a lot of reports but would actually be allowed. You are allowed to hate people here! Making a nasty innuendo is, well, borderline. Same goes for a lot of the various posts we get about Jews Jews Jews.
As for the upvotes, would it surprise you to know that many of our most heated, reported, and ban-baiting posts also get heavily upvoted? The more spicy your screed about how much you hate Those People, the more likely that a lot of other people who also hate Those People will upvote you. Yes, that means we have a lot of haters here. You'll notice quite a few people also downvote those posts, though, so it's not one-sided.
So yes, this site is "tainted by racism." We have racists here, and they aren't banned just for being racist. That is intentional. The intent is not to be a haven for racists (though we've certainly been accused of being just that), but to be a place where people can say the things they can't say elsewhere, and then have to defend it. I only wish more people like you would muster the wherewithal to argue back instead of just getting indignant and leaving.
The WSJ has a new article (archive link) out detailing a certain incident where Trump was composing fanfic of himself and Jeffrey Epstein bonding over their shared secret interest in the same kinds of women, and then signing his name to it. This was sent as a gift for Epstein's 50th birthday.
I personally don't think it's that bad, but I've been heavily radicalized against conspiracy theories over the past few years. I highly doubt Epstein was blackmailing huge swathes of wealthy/influential people with pedophilia. However, if I was given towards conspiratorial thinking this probably wouldn't be a great look for Trump.
EDIT: Trump has responded, and he's furious. It appears he desperately tried to have Rupert Murdoch crush the story, but that Murdoch apparently wasn't able to do so. Now he's promising to sue. Also, Hillary.
It also looks like he might cave and actually publicize it? I don't know if the grand jury stuff is all that people are interested in or what:
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