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WandererintheWilderness


				

				

				

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WandererintheWilderness


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				

				
				
				

				

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				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 23, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


There are major parties in Israel that are less liberal than Iran; shall we sanction them?




They haven't shot tens of thousands of protestors last January after being warned not to by the US.




They tried that. Their offer was rebuffed, perhaps because of the Israel Lobby




Far be it from me to accuse Israel of being reasonable either! Nor did I intend to claim that Iranians are strange evil mutants who have never considered the kinds of course of action I describe. Indeed, the fact that they did come to the table once is all the more reason to be disappointed that they don't seem willing to do so again. Bush was a long time ago. If they'd come forward with all those bullet points this year, would Trump have said no again, or would he have told the hawks in his cabinet where to stick it and leapt at the most obvious path to his Nobel Peace Prize that fate could hand to him on a gold-plated platter?


I should clarify as I did elsewhere in the thread that I don't actually support the current war. I just don't think Iran is remotely blameless for it, which is different from saying they bear sole moral responsibility for it, or that they left Israel and America no choice but to attack. I just cannot believe that there is nothing Iran could have done to deescalate once you open up the "willing to say on camera that uh, actually, maybe we're sorry we shot those protestors and maybe Jews and women and gays are alright and maybe America isn't the Great Satan and maybe it doesn't need to be destroyed" options in the decision tree.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 23, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I never actually said I supported the current war, which I don't really. But you can simultaneously reject a vigilante lynch mob as barbaric and counter-productive, and point out that in point of fact its target was guilty of a pattern of gratuitously antagonistic and frequently evil behavior which they could have quit at any time and without which the violence would not have escalated to this point. It doesn't justify the attack, but justifying the attack wasn't the topic of the thread, it was Iranian leadership's decision-making ability.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 23, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I don't dispute that; I dispute that this particular ethnos get to hog the word "American" all to themselves when at the very least black, slavery-descended Americans are equally distinctive, have been here for centuries too, and are equally laughable to imagine all sailing back to the shores of their forefathers one day.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 23, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Not yet. Not until you build it. Not until you say it out loud (…) I want to regain my own national character.




I don't know how else to tell you that this is not going to happen. There's no constituency for a WASP ethnostate because it's just not a plausible thing to want. There are fifty million African-Americans and I'm sorry, but they aren't going anywhere. The Civil War was probably the last time a mass exodus back to Africa was remotely on the table, and even then it was kind of a laughable idea. They're centuries away from African soil being their land and African culture being their culture and African languages being their language. Talking about sending them all away as "foreigners" is like trying to get the Saxons of England to "regain their national character" and send the Normans home nine hundred years too late (except worse because there are fewer ethnic Normans and it'd be somewhat easier for them to reintegrate into French society if France were willing to take them back). It's just not happening, the boat has sailed.


Recognizing this sheer statement of fact does not necessarily entail that "American means 'man of any race or none in particular'"; you could plausibly argue the line that American means one of a bounded number of specific ethnicities, if you really want. You could say that eg WASPs, Black Americans, and Native Americans (1) are established, centuries-old, distinct subtypes of Americans like Han, Zhuang, Manchus and Miaos are distinct subtypes of Chinese - and that it's still possible to be ethnically non-American by not being part of any one of these groups. A multi-ethnic polity is not necessarily the same thing as a race-blind one. There could be a world where America moves in that direction, it's unlikely but it could happen.


What you're proposing, however, is simply impossible.


1: Please let us not go on a tangent about the term 'Native American'. I just thought it would be less confusing here than any variation on 'Indian'/'Amerindian' insofar as we started out talking about Indian immigrants in the Punjabi sense.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 23, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I don't care where he was born, he's not American. I don't care what passport he has, he's not American.




But that's not the point. The point is that, since (rightly or wrongly!) his citizenship is not in any actual danger whatsoever even by a very restrictive reading of the Constitution, he has no personal incentive to bend the laws towards more permissive forms of birthright citizenship, as you were claiming.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 23, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Politely: quit it. "Americans" are not a race or ethnicity. They just aren't. On no serious theory are black Americans not Americans. You can claim to only recognize WASPs as your "countrymen" if you want, but "WASP" is not, nor will it ever be, the legal or the everyday, common-sense definition of the word "American"; insisting otherwise will only breed needless confusion. Like, dude, this isn't about political correctness. You'd have to search pretty far even among white supremacists for any significant numbers of people who think the sentence "Martin Luther King was an American activist" is somehow using the word "American" incorrectly.


I don't even know what you're trying to do here. I can understand some forms of insistence that Americanness is more than a piece of paper. There can be an actual, coherent political agenda behind that kind of linguistic warfare: for example, if you don't think paper citizens who barely speak English and don't meaningfully identify as American or participate in American culture should, in fact, be allowed to keep their paper citizenship, or to stay within the country's borders. That's a coherent, achievable political project, and the definition games make sense within that project.


But like. There's no constituency for expelling all non-WASPs or stripping them of citizenship. It's just not gonna happen. So what's the point of insisting, against all common usage, that you're only a real "American" if you're from the same ethnic group as the Founding Fathers? Literally what is the point? If you got your wish and everyone started using that as the definition, all you'd get would be a needlessly obnoxious situation where "Americans" are a hazily-defined plurality within the much, much broader cohort of "American citizens", and are one of several groups who participate in "American culture" and "American politics". That helps exactly no one. If what you want is just the dubious self-esteem buzz of getting to say "I'm a real American™" with the full blood-and-soil weight you give to the word, please just try to be happy with "I'm a Heritage American" or some other suitably complimentary turn of phrase, without trying to gerrymander what the bare word "American" means into uselessness.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 23, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Does this mean that they have to physically prevent them from acquiring residence? How does the sovereign make it "impossible", given the reality of the physical world?




I think "acquire a residence" means something stronger than "physically residing". The sovereign has accepted the immigrant's allegiance, however reluctantly, if the immigrant comes to be acknowledged as the lawful resident of a house or apartment within the sovereign's own legal system. If an immigrant goes stealth and squats in an abandoned building without anyone knowing, they could be there thirty years and it wouldn't make a difference - but if they buy or rent a place, and this is on record, and the immigrant would have legal recourse in US courts if someone infringed on their property rights, then the US has in practice accepted them as a subject, whether or not it regards their presence on US soil as theoretically unlawful.


Hence, I read "unless the bare legal prohibition…" as saying "unless we start saying that, because they're not lawful residents, all their real-estate dealings are to be deemed legally void by definition" (which I think is… maybe not quite intended as a reducio ad absurdum, but certainly as a reducio ad this-would-be-a-completely-different-and-very-radical-conversation-that-no-one-seems-prepared-to-have-right-nowum).


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 23, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I mean, I'm not even making a moral argument here, at least not in that second sentence. Just… they could do it. It sure would stop the war and improve their situation.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 23, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


They don't have moves that improve their situation left




I mean. They could voluntarily reform themselves into a peace-loving liberal democracy. They could even ally themselves to the US outright, or even to Israel!


And I know, I know, they're not gonna, it is to all intents and purposes as much of a ridiculous fantasy as "all Iranian weapon stores could spontaneously transform into rose petals overnight", but… on the other hand, no it isn't. These are human beings with moral agency and rational minds. In principle there should be nothing stopping them from just ceasing to be an oppressive warmongering theocracy, and then, miraculously, the rest of the world would stop trying to blow them up.


At some level I don't think we should lose sight of that basic fact when evaluating the decision-making ability of Iranian leadership. There is a right answer here, and although it's completely correct to start from the premise that they are simply never going to pick it, that fact alone should tell us something.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 23, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I think it's all crazy to assume we'll keep progressing the way we did in the last century and a half




Most cryonics believers aren't really assuming that, just that we'll hit some kind of A.I. singularity soonish that'll have the same results.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 23, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
But we're not talking about one-night stands; we're talking about nude pics and camgirls. Even taking the innateness of the feeling you describe for granted it's nonobvious that the evo-psych dynamic would translate to that kind of thing - indeed someone upthread argued the opposite, that being camgirls makes women feel good about themselves for atavistic reasons because it activates the "I am successfully wooing high-status males" circuits rather than the "I've just had sex" circuits.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 23, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


My personal preference is "the vice is available but there's lots of friction/a high cost associated with obtaining it."




But isn't this "friction" what causes the vice to be be debilitating in the first place? There would be nothing problematic about widespread promiscuity and sex work (certainly not about cyberpornography with zero risk of STDs etc.) if it carried no social stigma that makes it more difficult to settle down later in life or get a good job, etc. It's not the actual sex that directly ruins women's lives in the way that doing too much cocaine will physically kill you, it's the very same negative consequences which, yes, also serve the prosocial function of warning most away from that lifestyle.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 16, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


What fucking guy is the unlikely combination of hot enough to get a woman to go on a date with him, romantically frustrated enough to engage in Man-o-Sphere content, AND clueless enough to talk judgy redpill lingo about bodycount and hypergamy to the woman he's on a date with?




Are these really such an unlikely combination? I'm sure these streamers are largely scams like any overpriced self-help program, but equally, the ideology would hardly have persisted for decades if it literally never landed any of its believers a first date, so the first two items in conjunction don't seem especially hard to believe. That leaves the third, which is handily rephrased as "what percentage of guys who only got a date at all from studying dodgy PUA-type techniques will proceed to flounder once they have the real flesh and blood woman in front of them and need to engage her in conversation?", to which I would be very surprised if the answer was in the single digits.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 16, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Being physically attracted to someone is an extreme prerequisite for wanting to spend the rest of your life with them.




Sure; but it is not the only prerequisite, and past a certain level of time and energy spent looksmaxxing, you're going to be neglecting other, very necessary things that aren't confined to the merely carnal. Also, I'm not convinced that being the most attractive gives you anywhere near as big an edge in the fall-in-reciprocated-love game as it does in the getting-lots-of-one-night-stands game. A relatively high baseline of attractiveness is important to both, but comparative attractiveness seems much more important to the latter.


In any case, I think you're making an argument that these guys don't actually make. I might be mistaken - I'm not exactly an aficionado - so if you want to prove me wrong, by all means show me prominent Manosphere types evangelizing about the two-sided intellectually, emotionally, spiritually fulfilling romantic relationships that looksmaxxing has netted them. But my understanding is that the very notion embodied by the "Red Pill" meme involves denying that such things are possible.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 16, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


The "Clavicular Thesis" would be closer to "Looks are the most important thing, more important than everything else."




Most important for what? For getting casual sex, sure. For developing a soul-deep bond with someone you'd enjoy talking to every day for the rest of your life… jury's still out. Or, rather, Manosphere types don't even try to make such an argument, because they don't believe in romance. I think that's the underlying assumption that makes them repellent and anti-human, the real Clavicular Thesis: "there's no such thing as true love, so don't even worry about anything more sophisticated than hacking the female monkey brain's sex drive (for which looks are trivially the most important thing)".


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 16, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Funniest option is if he was talking about Maduro.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Chesterton's Pill
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Nor are they necessary, we have medical regulators and legislation to cover professional ethics, and their authority supersedes the oath.




Perhaps. I think I'm with Scott in believing that there is important, difficult-to-replicate social power in the solemnity of a time-honored oath, as distinct from the bureaucratic fuss of laws and guidelines. It's easier for an overconfident doctor to think his confidence in his personal judgement should embolden him to voerrule the letter of Subsection 7B of Amendment Fifteen to the O.V.E.R.L.O.N.G.A.C.R.O.N.Y.M. guidelines for the state of New Guernsey, than to tell himself that his confidence in his personal judgment should embolden him to overrule the sacred internationally-recognized pledge that all western doctors have taken since before the birth of Christ.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 9, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Define "converted". I think jihadis are generally gunning for a world where infidels are made to mouth along to Muslim prayers and follow shariah law; I don't think most actually care whether the infidels come to really, truly accept Allah into their innermost hearts, or at least, even if they think that on the margin this would be preferable to forced worship, I don't think they expect to ever get that far. Thus the goal qua desired-endgame-worldstate is "a world in which some people are forced to worship against their will", which is an evil thing to want regardless of how you get there. Perhaps our disagreement stems from my thinking of the "goal" as the "once you reach this step, stop" endpoint in the decision tree, while you restrict the "goal" to "the specific features of that worldstate that make it desirable"?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Chesterton's Pill
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Oh, that shouldn't be taken at face value, and there's some kind of implicit utilitarian calculus involved?




I would argue that it should instead be understood under an informed-consent framework, where it's only "harm" if informed consent is violated. You still need asterisks for treating unconscious patients first on the assumption that they'll retroactively consent to it afterwards, but it at least preserves "harm" as something which ideally shouldn't be happening at all and should always be minimized, rather than something which is sometimes actively necessary.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 9, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


We were talking about the goals themselves being evil, you shifted the goalposts to the means of achieving the goals.




I think of "achieve a world in which all infidels have been forcibly converted or killed" as a goal, which armchair jihadis can believe in whether or not they personally do anything violent to bring it about. In any case, I did say that all of this forced-conversion stuff was simply the cherry on top of much of shariah law already being evil, ie all the misogyny and killing and corporal punishment.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Chesterton's Pill
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The following meant as a genuine question to a professional, not a combative gotcha:




My colleague argued against ODD because the kid was perfectly well behaved in the clinic. I countered that ODD typically manifests at home first, and is usually restricted to familiar adults.




Of all diagnoses that look like they're made up, ODD is the one that has always sounded the most outrageously made-up to me. What do you mean, "not obeying your parents" is classified as a mental illness? Activists who claim that the mental healthcare system is just a tool of state oppression usually come across as hopeless idealists who've never had a schizophrenic try to chew their face off, or indeed, never been a mortified schizophrenic returning to sanity after a try-to-chew-people's-faces-off episode. But on the face of it, the existence of ODD as a condition real doctors take seriously seems like exactly what you would expect if their model of psychiatry was correct. It looks so ludicrously like a gerrymandered way for parents and medical professionals to pathologize and thus de-legitimize the behavior of a lucid but uncooperative patient, for their own convenience or indeed revenge.


So I guess what I'm asking is: do you think a real case of ODD looks more like your Bangladeshi young man who occasionally flips out and bites his family members for no reason, while getting along with them the rest of the time and having no coherent complaint against them? Is that what it's supposed to look like, and thus, the reason why non-obviously-corrupt doctors take it seriously as a diagnosis? It doesn't sound like it, since you weren't sure about the diagnosis in this case. But if not, what is a perfect platonic case of ODD supposed to look like, and how do you distinguish it from a perfectly sane kid who dislikes their authority figures (or authority figures in general)?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 9, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Not every religion teaches that humans should submit totally to the will of the divine in the way fundamentalist Islam teaches. Even among faiths whose teachings could be phrased this way, it is by no means a majority who hold that it is acceptable or desirable to force such submission at the point of a sword, or that people who won't convert should, all else being equal, be killed rather than allowed to live outside the faith, which I would define as the key beliefs that mark a "jihadi".


(I think it's, empirically, entirely possible to be a Muslim without being a jihadi, so I don't mean to be condemning "every Muslim" - though it does require taking certain liberties with the text of the Quran which I don't think any major Muslim authorities would publicly endorse.)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 9, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I don't think this is the same kind of "picking and choosing". Sure, not all the aims of jihadis and Nazis are evil, but all jihadis and Nazis pursue at least some evil aims - whereas many (most?) environmentalists have wholly good aims. Thus any given jihadi or Nazi, even if they're non-violent, has some amount of evil intent, while the same is not true of a given non-violent environmentalist.


(And anyway, insofar as "bringing humanity to the light of Allah" is ultimately a euphemism for "enslaving humanity to the tyrannical will of a supernatural being" I would consider that an evil aim in itself, even before the specific of shariah law are taken into account.)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 9, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Jihadis and Nazis, whether non-violent or violent, are pursuing evil aims. At least some environmentalists are pursuing good aims.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 9, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
They needn't believe that it's risk-free; they simply think that the point of protests is to intimidate and shame the bad guys into retreating by showing how many people stand against them. This can involve knowing there's a risk of being shot, and still be a very different mindset of "the point of protests is to create martyrs".