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MadMonzer

Temporarily embarassed liberal elite

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joined 2022 September 06 23:45:01 UTC 

				
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MadMonzer


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite

				
				
				

				

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					joined 2022 September 06 23:45:01 UTC
				


				
					

					
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				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 3, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
They shouldn't be. I'm considerably more pro-immigration than the median Mottizen, and I think that family reunification immigration for extended family members (including for extended family members who are also spouses!) is bad policy.


The legislative history of the Hart-Cellar act suggests that the idiots who wrote the legislation thought that allocating most of a capped quota of green cards to family reunification was a backdoor way of preserving the pre-existing ethnic mix in America without national-origin quotas.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 3, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
CIS is slow to approve applications for visa renewals, and the timetables are sufficiently unpredictable that "it's your problem and you should have applied for a renewal in good time" is Kafkaesque advice.


Legal immigrants who end up temporarily out of status pending a visa renewal are mostly victims of unintentional bureaucratic fuckery. Requiring them to leave the country and wait for an unpredictable length of time for the government to handle paperwork defeats the purpose of whichever law let them into the country in the first place - the historical policy of not deporting people with pending visa renewals exists for a very good reason.


Using bureaucratic fuckery as a deliberate tool to reduce legal immigration is a maximally harmful way of accomplishing something that could be done more effectively by issuing executive orders to CIS to deny more marginal visas, and even more effectively by changing the law to close the legal immigration routes that shouldn't exist. It was a proposal in Project 2025, which even suggested impounding IRS funding to deliberately slow down processing and create this kind of situation.




Get them all.




IS the claim here that every legal immigrant deported is good for America? Would it have been good if Elon Musk and Melania Trump had been deported when they were temporarily out of status?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 3, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


and activist Gerrard Winstanley, leader of the so-called Diggers




Commemorating the Diggers (a radical group who appeared in the immediate aftermath of the English Civil War and were violently suppressed by Cromwell) as proto-communists is straightforwardly correct.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 3, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


How does one waste four months of investigation on this?




Walter Mitty: Cops, Cops, Freddie Starr ate my hamster!


PC Plod (to Freddie Starr): Hello, hello, hello. Did you eat the hamster, Freddie?


Freddie Starr: No


PC Plod (to Walter Mitty): We spoke to Freddie Starr and he denies eating the hamster.


Walter Mitty: He did too!


PC Plod: Can you help point us towards any evidence?


Walter Mitty: No. But if you let Freddie Starr eat my hamster and get away with it I'll call you Xist.


PC Plod: Okay. We will try to investigate this and see what happens.


PC Plod fills out an "Opening of Investigation" form. Given the 300 other forms he had to fill out this week, he doesn't have time to investigate anything


Four months later


Sergeant Simple: The Inspector is going to be checking our paperwork soon. What did you find in the
Mitty/Starr investigation?


PC Plod: I didn't even find the hamster.


Sergeant Simple: Then close the investigation with no crime.


 PC Plod fills out a "Closure of Investigation - No Crime" form.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 3, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
And the first person to call out the story as implausible (Richard Bradley, who would be picked up by Steve Sailer) was Glass' editor at George. Part of the hilarity of the scandal was the sudden widespread mutual knowledge that essentially every big name in the media read Steve Sailer and the need to prevent it becoming common knowledge.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 3, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I think your example illustrates exactly my point: Ottoman and later Republican Turkey was mostly run by European-origin (white) Muslims precisely because race and ethnicity is important–in this case, because ethnic Europeans tend to be more capable at running large and successful empires.




While physiologically white, the Turkish elite of the Ottoman Empire were not European. The Ottoman Empire was founded in what used to be called Asia Minor and is now called Anatolia - i.e. on the Asian side of the Bosphorous. And the Turks themselves were descended from Steppe nomads who repeatedly conquered and then went native in Muslim Persia before moving west to take bites out of the Byzantine Empire.


The ancestral homeland of white people (defined by genetics and physiology) stems a long way into western Asia, and includes Africa north of the Sahara.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 3, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


affinity towards European culture, or are they more likely to side with the foreigners, and deconstruct and denigrate the culture




Go to your local symphony orchestra or opera house. Apart from the people there on free tickets for schools, everyone will be either Blue or Han.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 3, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


First, how sure are we that he is actually black, given that he lied about everything else?




His physiology is unambiguously black in the published photos.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 3, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
There are no deans in Cambridge. In a flipped version of the American system (where departments have Chairs and faculties have Deans), Cambridge departments have a Head of Department whereas faculties have a Chairman of the Faculty Board.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 3, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
And was sufficiently rigorous that the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors recognised it as a valid pre-professional degree. Which isn't much given that some Anglia degrees had the same status, but is more than SPS. And HSPS is worse than SPS because adding social anthropology to the mix somehow manages to dumb down the average even further.


There were real economists and lawprofs involved in teaching Land Economy. SPS was taught by sociologists. 'Nuff said.


In my day, English was considered the easiest Tripos. Land Economy and SPS were seen as the Triposes with the dumbest students (apart from Education, which back in the day wasn't a real Cambridge Tripos just as Homerton wasn't a real Cambridge College. The latter has very much changed, though apparently not the former given where Arday teaches).


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 3, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


My single favourite genre of non-fiction is stories about liars getting exposed as such.




I enjoy the genre too, and my favourite remains the unravelling of the UVA frat rape hoax.


If that was the tragedy, this one is the farce. And a farce worthy of Feydeau himself. The Arday case is absolutely hilarious. Among people who understand Cambridge, it doesn't even hurt my degree because I can raise my eyebrows and say "Lol SPS" with a knowing expression. [For those not familiar, SPS (Social and Political Sciences), now called HSPS (Human, Social and Political Sciences), was the main social science degree at Cambridge, and had a reputation as the least academically rigorous undergraduate degree the University offered.]


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 3, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Is “White” really an important social division in Britain?




No. The ethnic cleavages that matter are "British and Irish vs wogs, who begin at Calais", "Muslims vs everyone else" and, in Wales, "Welsh-speakers vs English-speakers". But the British race relations industry is reading from an American script, so "white" is an important category for them. And of course also for intermeddling Yanks like Elon Musk or @erwgv3g34


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 3, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The teller isn't expected to follow AML/KYC requirements beyond "this is what you need to escalate, and this is how you escalate it". The AML/KYC team that handle escalations are going to be working off a set of policies that are too long to memorise.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 3, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
My technical expertise is limited for BTC, and non-existent for other cryptos - but wouldn't you need a separate passphrase for every key in the wallet to do that?


Best practice for BTC is to use each address and associated keys once only, which would make that impractical for a working wallet and pretty annoying for a cold storage wallet - you would need to memorise a new passphrase after each deposit or withdrawal.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 3, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Offended and insulted, rather than necessarily turned off.


Turned off by their men showing sexual interest in other women in a low-status way, definitely. And slow-mo replay of the shower scene in an anime is as low-status as it gets.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 3, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The optimal physique for impressing other men (gay or straight - mutual admiration among male bodybuilders who get that far is pretty homoerotic) is more muscled than the optimal physique for attracting women, which is more muscled than the physique you get if you optimise for balanced athleticism*. Men in actually elite military units are a lot fitter than you or I, but they aren't obviously jacked, and they would be if it made them more combat-effective.


* Obviously there are some areas of strength-focussed sport, notoriously including baseball hitting, where being jacked and roided is optimal for performance if there is no drug testing regime in place.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 3, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Timeline 3: (doesn't quite work fast enough to get to 99.6% by 2100, but the overall mechanism is plausible and can be delivered by voting harder)


    

  • A right-populist government ends illegal and low-quality legal immigration, restricts legal high-quality immigration in ways which make the UK an unattractive destination for high-quality immigrants with options, and ends the bullshit which makes it advantageous to self-identify as non-white.
    • 

  • Non-Irish immigration drops to negligible levels
    • 

  • There is already no taboo on interracial dating in the UK, everyone is doing it except Pakistanis, and Pakistani parents are breaking the law in order to stop their children dating interracially. Laws against child abuse and forced marriage would probably be enforced by a right-populist government.
    • 

  • After a century or so everyone is mixed-race, and most people are mostly white given the starting demographics.
    • 

  • All the mixed-race people tick the "white" box on the census because there is no gain from identifying as anything else.
    • 



				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 3, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
A large part of the decrease in the "Christian" share of the British population mostly comes from culturally Christian non-believers changing which box they tick on the census. It is not the case that 94% of British people believed in Jesus Christ in 1951 - in fact I would be mildly surprised if 94% of Anglican priests did. (It is also not the case that 54% of British people believe in Jesus Christ now - I don't, and I tick the CoE box on the census because it helps causes I like for the number to be higher.)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 3, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Yes - it is certainly possible to write banking and aviation laws that an intelligent layman can understand and put the technical detail into agency regulations. (The UK does this). There is an open question about when the technical detail should go into primary legislation (which means that at least the legislators on the relevant committee will need to understand it) - for instance the EU puts most of the technical content of its bank capital adequacy rules into primary regulation in a way the UK and US don't. The Anglosphere tradition is that the only time you have to put the detail into primary legislation is tax law, and even there the US has delegated significant tariff-setting powers to the President (with the Trump tariff litigation being about whether this delegation should be interpreted broadly or narrowly).


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 3, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I do not get this argument. The ECHR prevents you from directly deporting someone who makes a claim of asylum.




The ECHR doesn't even say that. ECHR caselaw says that you can't deport someone to a country where they will be mistreated in certain ways. It is completely legal (and most ECHR countries have done so) to state, correctly, that a certain country does not mistreat people in the relevant ways and that you will not entertain asylum claims from its citizens and legal residents, and start summarily deporting people who fit that description. Spain does it with Moroccans, for example. The Refugee Convention works the same way, but in practice the list of relevant ways you can be mistreated is strictly broader under the ECHR than under the Convention, so the Convention is de facto irrelevant to European refugee law.


Neither the ECHR nor the Refugee Convention prescribes the process for asylum claims - both were written at a time when people thought it was obvious who was and was not a refugee - also when people weren't as afraid of genuine refugees illegally crossing from one safe country to another, which is what drives most toxic immigration politics nowadays.


The problem is that the ECHR does not require courts to believe blatant lies by the executive, so this trick doesn't work with evil countries like Taliban-ruled Afghanistan or countries with ongoing civil wars. The most common nationalities among small boat migrants to the UK are Eritrea, Afghanistan, Sudan, Iran and Somalia. Almost everyone from those countries has a colourable asylum claim, and apart from the Iraqis most of them are genuine refugees under the Refugee Convention. (You don't cease to be a Convention refugee until you become a citizen or permanent resident of a safe country.) The problem is that the UK wants them to stay in France and seek protection from the French authorities, and the French want them to leave France and become someone else's problem. (France is not required by international law to take back people who illegally transitted through France en route to the UK, and doesn't.)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 3, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The cryptocurrency is protected by a random number - it is a property of the crypto algorithm (not the wallet) that anyone who knows this number can steal it.


You can store the number en clair on a hardware wallet, so anyone with the wallet can spend the crypto (and someone who steals the wallet has stolen the crypto), or you can store the random number encrypted on the wallet (so you need the wallet and the key to spend the crypto). The passphrase is the key used to (symmetrically) encrypt the random number.


But if the underlying random number that goes into the crypto algorithm is not random and someone manages to guess it, then no amount of secrecy protecting your copy of the number will stop the guesser stealing your crypto.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 3, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
There are areas of law which are technical and complex for good reasons - the examples I normally give are aviation safety and bank capital adequacy. "We shouldn't have bank capital adequacy regulation" is a position which is only taken seriously by the kind of nutcase who thinks we shouldn't have fractional-reserve banks. "We shouldn't have aviation safety regulation" is taken seriously by a libertarian fringe, though as far as I can see not by most pilots. (It is the general aviation orgs who lead the lobbying effort against privatising ATC in the US).


Spending bills are, of course, technical and complex because the government they fund is. (And would still be even if the government stuck to core functions - the military budget is the most complex and technical of the lot.)


No private sector CEO could recite from memory his organisation's full internal rulebook in a complex, technical, safety-critical area. Any CEO who tried would be considered dangerously irresponsible. Above a certain size of organisation, the CEO wouldn't be able to recite the budget down the the line item.


That said, laws can and should be written clearly such that a 110 IQ non-lawyer with a passing familiarity with any relevant technical content can understand them.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 27, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I dropped Latin before they started reading Catullus, but among his more notable works (all of which were pored over by my classicist friends) were:


    

  • A Latin translation of Sappho's Greek "lyric poetry" (this is what classicists call it in learned academic journals, but there is a reason why the old-fashioned term for lesbianism is "Sapphic love")
    • 

  • His own erotic poetry about his sexual desire for teenagers of both sexes
    • 

  • Invective against his political opponents including sexual innuendos. (The modern equivalent of calling your political opponent a pigfucker, but with more poetic description of the physical qualities of the pig).
    • 



Suetonius is the primary source for most of the modern stories about sexual perversion in Ancient Rome. The description of Tiberius' BDSM exploits (he was a sexual sadist to the point where I find him sick, and I'm not exactly innocent here) is the most explicit part - the discussion of Caligula and Nero is mostly a list of who he did and where.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 27, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I would say El Salvador has done a lot more for the US right than Argentina has. But the "US right" shouldn't have any foreign allies at all (and in general nor should any other faction within a democratic country). Your allies are the enemies of your enemies, and the enemy of the US right is the US left. A foreign government who is supporting the US right against the US left is meddling in US domestic politics, which is something foreign governments shouldn't be doing, and something that all US factions who even pretend to be patriotic should be discouraging them from doing.


I think Israel is an ally of the US right, in the sense that Israel does meddle in US domestic politics in a way which is intended to help Republicans and DINOs, but turning support for Israel into a partisan issue doesn't seem to be moving either US public opinion or US policy in a pro-Israeli direction. I also don't think that Netanyahu's explicit, public, partisan-coded opposition to Obama over the JCPOA actually helped Republicans.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 27, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


True though the Rowling case seems indicative that TERFs are more likely to die on that hill/be proactively purged even if generally aligned




In the US, the TERFs lost and you can no longer be a feminist in good standing unless your feminism includes men pretending to be women. In the UK the battle between trans-inclusive and womyn-born-womyn feminisms is ongoing, with the "TERFs" (they are by no means all radical feminists) having the better of it. Rowling's money may be part of it, but I think it is mostly driven by the different class composition of 2nd wave feminism in the two countries - the most prominent trans-exclusive feminists in the UK are all older women from working-class backgrounds.