@MadMonzer's banner p

MadMonzer

Temporarily embarassed liberal elite

4 followers   follows 0 users  
joined 2022 September 06 23:45:01 UTC 

				
User ID: 896


				
				
				

			

		

	














	


		


			



	

		

			

			

				

					

						

							
						

						

							
							

								
MadMonzer


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite

				
				
				

				

					4 followers  

					follows 0 users  

					joined 2022 September 06 23:45:01 UTC
				


				
					

					
No bio...

				

				

				

				

				

					

					

					
					
					

					
User ID: 896


					
					
					
				

			


					

						
					



		

	

 











			
			

			
			

			




	


		

			
‎

			

				
				

					Hour
					Day
					Week
					Month
					Year
					All
				

			


			
‎

			

	
	

	 Hot Bump Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
	



		

	






	

		
		

		
		
	

	

  







		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 17, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


3,000 people is nothing




180,000 people signed a change.org petition calling for London to secede from the UK over Brexit.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 17, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Most Barclays employees are going to be at 3 (Peon -> MD -> Jes Staley -> Epstein)


Anyone with a Clinton number of 2 has an Epstein number of 3, and that is a lot of people.


The guy was one of the best-connected people on the planet - he makes Paul Erdos and Kevin Bacon look like nobodies.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 17, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
At least as regards speech restrictions, the historical evidence is that even rules that are intended to be used exclusively by ingroup against outgroup end up mostly being used to settle personal beefs within the ingroup.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 17, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


The Mossad did not have hundreds of millions of dollars to spare to channel through Wexner or anybody, if they had the money by whatever means, they had other things to spend it on instead of a vague 40 year influence operation with as yet completely unclear outcomes led by a compulsive liar with no real loyalty to Israel beyond his ethnicity




I think I agree with you there - if Wexner was paying Epstein to run a Mossad-linked blackmail ring, he was using his own money and not Mossad's.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 17, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Most of Wexner's net worth was his L Brands stock, which Epstein won't have been taking a management fee on. If Wexner was like other founder-CEOs his non-L brands net worth would have been less than a billion for most of the period.


If Wexner was paying Epstein a management fee on his own stock in his own company of which he was the full-time founder-CEO, we are back in the territory of "Wexner was using fund management fees to pay Epstein under the table for something else"


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 17, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Nouning verbs is dangerous. It uses a word that pointedly fails to describe itself, and if you as much as think the word "non-self-descriptive" then you will no longer be capable of coherent thought.


Verbing nouns is safe as long as you verb the noun "verb" first. Whether "verb" is a self-descriptive word or not is unclear, but not dangerous.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 17, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Does anyone know what, if anything, the connection is between the work that led to transformers and the rapid developments in corporate big data/machine learning (particularly recommendation algorithms and similar marketing strategies) going on at around the same time? The model of AI history in my head has the post-Woo era of AI beginning with the Netflix recommendation algorithm in 2006, but I don't know how accurate it is.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 17, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Epstein was a millionaire, not a billionaire.




The best published estimates of Epstein's peak net worth are around $350 million.


Epstein's main source of wealth is his relationship with Les Wexner, who founded L Brands, a retail empire which ended up owning (among other brands) Victoria's Secret, Abercromie & Fitch, and Bath & Body Works. Googling suggests Wexner had a peak net worth of $9.6 billion, so Epstein got about 4% of it. Epstein was, over a 20-year period, managing basically all Wexner's assets apart from his L Brands stock, as well as large parts of his personal life.


It is just about plausible that Epstein was exploiting Wexner's trust to charge ridiculously high fees (charging 2-and-20 to buy leveraged S&P futures is a good living if you can get it) to manage Wexner's non-L Brands assets and made the $350 million in a legal-but-scuzzy way. It is also possible, and in my view more likely given Epstein's history of criminality, that he was embezzling. But you don't need a non-Wexner sources of dirty money to explain Epstein's wealth.


Incidentally, Wexner met Epstein before Maxwell did (1987 vs "early 1990's") and was deeply involved in pro-Israel activism, so if Epstein was a Mossad asset it makes a lot more sense that Wexner rather than Maxwell made the initial contacts. Top conspiracy theory is that of course Wexner did not in fact display uncharacteristic naivety in his relationship with his majordomo, and was in fact deliberately overpaying Epstein as a way of paying him under the table for his work for Israel. (I'm not sure why I don't believe this one - it actually makes a lot of sense).


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 17, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Robert Maxwell was deeply involved with the Israeli deep state, but the dates don't line up for him to have recruited Epstein. Mossad membership is not hereditary, and nothing apart from her parentage points to Ghislaine being Mossad. If she was, she wouldn't have been senior enough to be Epstein's handler (in any case, as a diaspora Jew who never lived in Israel she would not have been eligible for the required Israeli security clearance). Plus there are plenty of other Israeli figures in the Epstein files, up to and including former Prime Minister Ehud Barack, who could have recruited and/or handled Epstein, if he was in fact Mossad.


I find Epstein being Mossad plausible, but on balance less likely than not because I think Mossad would have tried to cover up the sex crimes if he was their top asset. I don't find either Maxwell being responsible plausible.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 17, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Known philanthropists can get academics and other people whose work is funded by similar patronage-begging to email them back for the obvious reasons. In addition, Minsky and Bach were affiliated with the MIT Media Lab, whose director Joi Ito was deeply committed to keeping the Epsteinbucks flowing to the point where (assuming the information about Neri Oxman which became public during the epic Ackman-Big Academia social media feud is roughly correct) being willing to put on dog-and-pony shows for Epstein was a condition of continued employment.


Chomsky is a piece of shit who didn't do anything for Epstein that he wouldn't have done for Pol Pot, of course.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 10, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think we can, and in this case should, hold off on the invective until after the funeral.


There are plenty of blameworthy people in this affair who are still alive and still hold office in the University of Cambridge. Let's take the time to go after them. Hilary Cremin for instance, apparently has advanced skills in "Peace Education" which I am sure could usefully be deployed in Somalia for a few years, which would also provide her with some source material for her autoethnographical research.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 10, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Although she doesn't explicitly benefit from formal affirmative action, parts of the conservative movement have a strong felt need for black and female talking heads in the same way that establishment institutions do.


Per her Wikipedia article, her first big break was being hired by TPUSA as "director of urban engagement" which sounds like a job title you would use if you specifically wanted to bring a black person on board, or at least do targetted outreach to black people (for which a black talking head is practically a necessity - black Americans don't listen to white movement conservatives for good reasons). Wikipedia being Wikipedia, they darkly hint that she was hired as a token black in order to deflect allegations of racism against TPUSA.


Despite the lack of formal affirmative action on the right, I think a pure grifter could do better as a black conservative than a black leftist because there is so little competition. "Reasonably attractive" is also more valuable in right-wing spaces than left-wing ones.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 10, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
My wife is a freelance writer and she only signs over full copyright when she writes for in-house publications in large organisations, or early in her career when she was working on the type of day-rate contract that would now be considered disguised employment and trigger tax liability under IR35.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 10, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'm not challenging the claim that doctors kill more people than guns - I'm challenging whether this made sense as a trivia question.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 10, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Crain is a case where a combination of clinical incompetence and what were in effect paperwork requirements (even if they required an additional scan to meet under the circumstances) for a medically necessary abortion permitted under Texas law led to lifesaving treatment being delayed with, as it turned out, fatal results. Ngumezi was straightforward malpractice - giving a pregnant woman who doesn't qualify for a medically necessary abortion abortion pills is just as illegal as doing a D&C, and more likely to have bad clinical outcomes.


In both cases, the doctors involved were subject to professional discipline. I think disciplining the Crain doctors is a bad idea, but I understand why the Texan authorities think it is a valuable face-saving measure. The message of Crain is now that if you are a doctor or hospital administrator in Texas, you should do anything you can to stop miscarrying women going anywhere near your hospital, as there is no medico-legally way of treating them. And hospitals trying to keep hard cases off the premises will lead to more Crain-type deaths.


Barnica was an entirely correct application of Texas law as it existed at the time. At the time she would have had the moribund fetus removed under non-Texan standards of care, there wasn't a life-threatening emergency - she became septic after the heartbeat stopped. Texas has since changed their law so this shouldn't happen again, although other red states have not.


Cox is something different - it was a case involving a non-viable fetus and there was never a real risk to the mother beyond the inherent risk of pregnancy. The Texas abortion law doesn't have an exception for non-viable fetuses and this is intentional on the part of the Christian pro-life movement that wrote it. Paxton's grandstanding over the case, while ghoulish, was entirely correct as a matter of Texas law, was popular with the pro-life conservative base, and probably contributed to him winning his recent Senate primary. I don't think it will be a major contributor to his losing the general to Talarico, although it should be.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 10, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
And the numbers on the card are all dubious.


A) Does "gun violence" count suicides or not? Gun suicides are the majority of fatal shootings in America. If suicides count as violent, the number on the card is about a factor of 3 too low.

B) Doctors in Canada (and everyone else) kill far more people through medical errors than they do through MAID, it is just that we don't have a reliable count.  So the number on the card is an order of magnitude too low. 

C) Most car crashes are not accidents, but result from someone making a deliberate decision to violate a traffic law, or at least culpable negligence. Assuming they used the headline number for fatal car crashes, the number on the card is an order of magnitude too high.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 10, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Not many relative to the number of people cancelled, because mentally healthy people in anti-suicide cultures (like the west) don't commit suicide just because something bad happens. A sufficiently awful event can trigger a mental illness like clinical depression or PTSD in a susceptible person, but that leads to a suicide months to years down the line. And being cancelled generally isn't awful enough unless it causes you to lose a home or spouse.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 10, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
We allow an insanity defence for crimes committed under the influence of certain mental illnesses.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 10, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
They would say that even if it was obvious suicide. Given the stigma around suicide, SOP is to insist it wasn't suicide up until they find the suicide note. Without a note, obvious suicides get ruled as accidents.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 10, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Arday's lying was pathological, in the sense that he told far more lies than was professionally optimal. I suspect the same underlying mental illness/neurodivergence (if this is a meaningful distinction at all) caused both the pathological lying and the suicidality - particularly given Simon Baron Cohen's comments. (Baron Cohen knew Arday well enough to predict this, and was doing the groundwork to place blame long before Arday resigned his position). Given what we know now, it wasn't classic autism, and Simon Baron Cohen has blown up his own credibility far more effectively than his brother Sacha could have done with a Borat interview.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 10, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Cambridge undergraduate admissions is still sane (and to the extent that it isn't, class trumps race because British politics). So was hiring in the physics department last time I checked. This was about hiring in the education department, which was insane long before modern wokeness. Departments mostly control hiring in universities, and MIT and Caltech don't have insane departments.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 10, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


But when the Journal reported on his suicide, the comments were full of people mourning him who apparently believe that he was a nice, well-meaning academic hounded to his death by a racist right-wing misinformation campaign, and that he was innocent of all of the allegations made against him.




This is therapy culture more than modern wokeness - you can the same underlying mechanism in cases with no culture-war salience like mean girls abusing each other on social media. Suicidality is almost always crazy behaviour (I am deliberately using a vague term), and therapy culture tells us that crazy behaviour is normally caused by past trauma. If someone kills themselves, then someone else must have traumatized them, and the person who traumatized them is a killer - even if their behaviour was otherwise unobjectionable but not "kind" like giving a negative performance review or dumping a girlfriend. (The overlap with woke is that there then has to be an unprincipled exception for members of oppressor groups - a man threatening to commit suicide if his girlfriend him is considered an abuser). The English Law Commission is currently running a project to fix technical aspects of English homicide law (which frequently produces perverse results) which is going to be completely derailed by an argument about whether men whose girlfriends commit suicide should be prosecuted for manslaughter.


There people are aware that suicide threats can be and are weaponised. They just don't care when someone drops the emotional nuke of a dead body on the table.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 10, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Quibble, but if you have a contractor working for you under a "normal employment contract" then they are a disguised employee and you are committing tax fraud.


Genuine non-employee contractors (i.e. freelance writers) mostly don't sign over copyright, although it is something that can be negotiated.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 10, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
This doesn't surprise me - it is very obvious that "Evangelical Conservatives" covers and covered a coalition that includes serious committed Christians trying to legislate Christian morality (including Christian sexual morality) and also unchurched Red Tribers for whom "Evangelical Christian" is a tribal label and not a religious one trying to clown on their outgroup. (If I had to point fingers at specific pastors, I would say Billy Graham vs Pat Robertson.) It doesn't surprise me that the actual Christians have to hold their noses to vote for Republicans, or that they do.


There are plenty of leftwing shifts on social issues where "regular grandmas" as @georgioz put it, did fight for traditional values, most obviously abortion. But preserving the traditional understanding of marriage, at least in the US, wasn't one of them. (The British Christian right, despite being much weaker than its American equivalent, did fight the issue, and as a result we didn't get de facto no fault divorce until 1986 and de jure no fault divorce until 2022, despite a blue-ribbon commission calling for no-fault divorce as early as 1967)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 10, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Correct. Citizen Corvos is awarded a bonus of 4500 plasticreds.