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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   3542 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 5, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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He’s not totally gone, he posted in this week’s culture war thread.

I’m pretty sure that indicated he was totally gone.

He graduated college.

I feel a bit of Catholic guilt engaging in this kind of ad-hominem and psychoanalysis, but then again I'm a cuck/faggot/race traitor/jew-lover so whatever.

I might have some timing/details wrong, I'm not as long-tenured as some around here and I haven't read every word Kulak ever wrote. But when he started writing he wrote as though he were either still in college or a very recent grad. He talked regularly about classes he'd taken and his degree and education. Most of the changes in his writing are pretty easily explained when you figure he's gone from a university kid taking English classes and being a touch edgy around campus, to a recent grad on an ill-fated motorcycle trip, to a hot-take artist trying to hustle a living on the internet.

When he was in college, radical libertarianism made sense. Libertarianism is often a rhetorical shelter for rightists in universities and other leftist spaces, though it's increasingly been discredited for that purpose by Mises-Caucus types. It has the advantage of being philosophically consistent, and thus easy to defend, and of offering easy "outs" from getting into the tough identity convos that are difficult to navigate politely with other right wing intellectual sets.

There's also the Libertine aspects of Libertarianism, which is very convenient for a college student. Being a Christian Nationalist requires certain sacrifices in the "sluts, drugs, and beer" departments during uni, which Libertarianism doesn't ask of you. Kulak's older stuff was leavened by this kind of fun, which has been largely absent from his more extreme recent works, though it's hard to see how it would fit in anyway.

Then he graduates, goes on a big motorcycle walkabout like his idol Clayton Atreus, and just like his idol Clayton gets into an accident which he stated crippled him pretty significantly though presumably not to the point where suicide was required by honor. Since then, he's stated that he lives off of his substack subscribers, and possibly other online monetization, and to my recollection has not mentioned any other remunerative labor as part of his life.

You've gone from reading naughty thoughts from an erudite college kid, to reading the thoughts of a somewhat crippled professional hot-take artist dependent upon the goodwill of the kind of people who pay to read the latest in esoteric hitlerism and think it's fun to put "dark" or "warlord" in front of assorted things.

though it's increasingly been discredited for that purpose by Mises-Caucus types

What are "Mises-Caucus types"?

I'm using the term broadly (types) rather than specifically (the actual org) to refer to Right-Libertarians who are more right wing than they are libertarian.

The historical dynamic circa Obama era college campuses (when Dennis was a punchline) was for right wingers to claim to be fiscally conservative (sane) but socially liberal (live and let live) in order to avoid being treated poorly by left wingers of the time. Libertarianism offers an intellectual framework to argue against the Civil Rights Act without having to argue against black people, and argue against legal protections for homosexuals without arguing against homosexuality.

Over time that cover has worn thin, as it has been overused by people who WANT to argue against black people and homosexuality, and are willing to sacrifice a lot of legacy libertarian intellectual priorities (anti police, anti death penalty, anti government regulations of private sexual or pharmaceutical life) to do so.

The mises caucus itself has largely been a small and weird group concerned with trying to hijack the libertarian party and tie it as a junior branch of MAGA, in hopes of getting some libertarian priorities passed by Team Trump. This may be a shrewd move as sausage making weather vane politics, and reflects a broader feeling that the greater threat to personal liberty is no longer PATRIOT Act Republicans but woke Democrats.

But the point of the reference is basically that as the people using Libertarian as code for"not left" have increasingly used it as code for "right wing," the rhetorical gambit for young men has lost its value as cover.

For a comparison: American Catholics who gesture vaguely at Liberation Theology as a defense when leftists attack the Church.

They are the "pragmatists" who caused the Libertarian Party to effectively endorse Trump rather than supporting its own candidate, Oliver.

Article

To be honest, I consider myself a libertarian, but never had any desire to support any of the LP candidates. Oliver personally checks too many woke boxes for me (no, it's not about him being gay, that part doesn't bother me at all). And in practical terms, between woke takeover and compromising on some libertarian principles to stop the woke takeover, I think it is prudent to choose the latter. When the choice is between Hamas-supporting racist trantifa totalitarian marxists and somewhat-bigger-government conservatives, I think a practical thing for a libertarian would be to vote for the lesser evil. If the woke threat ever goes away, we can go back to the discussion about making somewhat-bigger-government into smaller-government, but I personally think positioning it as "both are equally impure and there's no difference" to me is childish and silly.

but I personally think positioning it as "both are equally impure and there's no difference" to me is childish and silly.

Imagine if you will the early Christians, hiding in the catacombs. Leaders are debating amongst themselves about missionary plans for the future. One stands up and says "You know, the sun-worshippers have a lot in common with us, and on a few issues they really aren't that bad, maybe we should join up with them instead of calling them demons. At least we'd get a few wins in the books!"

Perhaps they would have been right about the sun worshippers being preferable to the other pagans. Perhaps such a combination might even have achieved some noteworthy goals in the second century. But it is overwhelmingly likely that such a move by Rome's Christians would have precluded the future Constantine, and the empire would never have been converted to Christianity.

There's an important difference here. Religion is about Absolute Truth. Politics is about governing and getting things done (or, if libertarians prefer, not done). The amount of compromise and practicality to be expected from those differ substantially.

But it is overwhelmingly likely that such a move by Rome's Christians would have precluded the future Constantine, and the empire would never have been converted to Christianity.

Somehow I doubt supporting Oliver or Jorgensen or any of the latest LP nominees would get us even a step closer to the Libertarian Emperor of the US. Of course, LP can prove me wrong, but unless they discover immortality pretty damn soon I don't expect to see it in my lifetime. Especially not when consistently nominating woke candidates. Woke voters already have a party to vote for.

What happened is kind of a sad story. Kulak, you see, unsuccessfully attempted the hock… and the rest is as it is.

The irony is that this is arguably a more true explanation than not.

Lol

Consider it another piece of evidence that NTR is the mind-killer. His meltdown looked like a fairly common instance of how men go down a negative thought spiral about their tribe's women being taken by the ethnic outgroup. (Using the anime culture term here might seem a tad basic, but that subculture still tends to produce some of the most unhinged demonstrations of these thought patterns in action. Though see also the legendary American obsession with the putative virility of black men.)
I'd reckon the same thousands of White British girls from low-human-capital backgrounds were sex-trafficked by old men who look like the cast of Top Gear long before the Pakistanis came along, but this would never inspire an emotional reaction from halfway across the internet. (One individual was seemingly single-handedly about 1/3 as prolific as the entire Rotherham gang, but who is fedposting about the BBC now?)

I continue to not understand why his fans assess him as a "very skilled writer and fairly smart". I was willing to grant that perhaps I was being distracted by the rambling/malapropisms/formatting and higher-IQ readers could see past the style (which he always claimed was a deliberate choice to... throw off writing analysis?) and see some spark of brilliance in the substance behind it, but the circumstance that, in what was by all accounts a parting shot in which he could no longer contain his righteous fury, he did not for a moment break with the style even as he went through an emotional outburst made me update in favour of it being genuine and him really being somewhat confused and verbally challenged.

I won't defend Kulak, but c'mon man.

I hope you can see how gangs of men raping tens of thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of girls in horrific ways is bad.

Your crime stop is trying to justify or contextualize this disgusting abuse and dismissing it as racism. That's the exact reason why the crimes kept happening, how the victims' cries for help were ignored, and how the perpetrators were given comically low sentences (when they were tried at all). The smug attitude of people like you directly led to thousands of children being raped. No, these "low human capital" girls were not going to get raped anyway. What an insane thing to think.

Furthermore, you seem to have no awareness of the scope of the problem. For one, it wasn't just Rotherham.

Being jealous of your tribe's women is not exactly racism - it does not require ascribing any particular qualities to the people who take them other than that they are outsiders. Racism could then be used to rationalise why you find it bad that they get with a member of the outgroup rather than a member of the ingroup you have no particular relation to, but that's not what I was insinuating or talking about.

Furthermore, you seem to have no awareness of the scope of the problem. For one, it wasn't just Rotherham.

He was the one who started to talk about Rotherham. I'll admit I did not know about the number of other similar cases (I had only heard of one smaller one) until looking just now, though "hundreds of thousands" still seems unrealistic. (I'd guess maybe 50k as an upper bound for the last 40 years, which seems to be the time window over which the published counts run. Adding up numbers from all the cases I could find on Wikipedia gives about 10k total.)

Meanwhile, in the Savile case, Wikipedia cites the police as talking about 450 alleged sexual abuse victims, and allegations and semi-open discussion of it date back to the '90s. A particular paragraph goes

In 2007, Savile was interviewed under caution by police investigating an allegation of indecent assault at the now-closed Duncroft Approved School for Girls near Staines, Surrey, in the 1970s, when he was a regular visitor. The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) advised there was insufficient evidence to take any further action and no charges were brought.[11] In 2012, it was reported that staff at the school had not been questioned about the allegations at the time.[28] A former headmistress of the school said she had been "hoodwinked" by Savile,[29] but described some of those who had brought the allegations as "delinquents".[30][31]

which really sounds quite similar - and this was apparently going on for some 50 years and only was made part of the public record after his death. Between the circumstance that apparently a single person can perpetrate abuses of this scale unreported, the Epstein/royalty connections, other European high society cases such as Dutroux in Belgium, and the little contacts I had into the chav stratum of British society (back when I was a kid making friends in MMORPGs) and stories of sugar-daddy dating I heard from there, I can absolutely believe that a big portion of those teenagers and kids would have just been groomed by somebody else.

Meanwhile, in the Savile case

Savile wouldnt just be the same ethnicity though, but also high-status. Transgressions by high-status people are practically a human universal, and below a certain point people just resign themselves to it. I wanted to make a comparison here between a sheik visiting and having some kind of Epstein scenario, vs normal british bloke who somehow noone feels like stopping, but couldnt think if any plausible versions of the latter.

He was the one who started to talk about Rotherham.

No he was not. Elon Musk made it the topic du jour and we had a top level post about it before Kulak posted his screed.

We had a couple users who would bring it up every couple months long before that. Kulak might have been one of them.

I both agree with you about the seriousness of this particular crime (or category of crime) and disagree about Kulak’s sincerity. As others noted, he was demanding rivers of blood for causes as diverse as vaccine mandates, kids required to go to school, the existence of the state and various other things for years before this. It’s easy to conclude that it’s not about the issue, it’s about the guy.

I am assuming you are asking why he did the big rant post a few days ago. The answer is "that's normal for him". Kulak has always been posting about how the solution to our problems is murder. It's like, his whole thing. He just stopped fedposting around here because he found a bunch of people who wanted to see him fedpost on Substack. I don't think he's particularly smart (except insofar as it takes some amount of brains to cultivate a blog), and I definitely don't think he's a good writer. He's all heat, no light.

Even criminals need a competent defense. I mean, you and I might not agree that murdering everyone who disagrees is an optimal strategy (or at least not a Nash equilibrium) but is it so bad for someone to take the other side and at least have the discussion?

Bad as in "it should be disallowed by the rules"? No, not really. But it's bad in the sense that it's not interesting or adding anything of value to the forum.

On the one hand, it‘s likely clickbait. By itself that would be morally irresponsible.

On the other hand, imagine this: a foaming-at-the-mouth crazy person with a gun keeps saying how much he hates his discussion group, wants to kill people, and doesn‘t believe in discussion; and most of the group‘s responses are completely ignoring his main point, tone, and the reality of the situation, instead showing off how not-insulted, and what great decouplers they are, by using the ramblings as a jumping off point for a purely academic when-is-violence-legitimate discussion. Meanwhile, he puts cartridges in the chambers.

I do think there was a clear political shift from some kind of ultra-ancap anti-state position in which all government power is illegitimate and the absolute imperative is to destroy the state because it is the state (rather than what it stands for or does, necessarily) to a more generic Twitter far right position in which a supremely powerful reactionary dictator or movement has to come to power to make the world the way it should be.

How much of that was driven by his X following / paying audience on Substack and how much is organic is the relevant question, I guess. But the number of true ancaps is clearly a tiny percentage of the number of mainstream far-rightists.

I think it was significantly the latter. I've watched more than one writer get swallowed by the Twitter algo and more or less lose it. Martyrmade (Darryl Cooper) is a good example, and I'm glad he's focusing on making his next podcast and not tweeting much.

He seems like he’s still kind of anti-state, like maybe a more racist and less coherent version of Hoppe.

I don't think anything happened that I'm not just about on the same page with, to be honest. The only difference is the inclination to articulate it rather than sticking to norms. As mentioned in a couple of my recent posts about the death penalty, I am really having trouble sticking with politeness around certain issues, and things like Rotherham and Islamist bullshit pretty well top that list.

I more or less fedpost around rotherham too; I may phrase it more politely but the basic inclination of ‘this is when the britons should have started to kill people’ is not that different. I don’t think kulak having the same idea is him going off the rails; lots of people do.

Why is the cat fedposting?

  1. why wouldn't the cat fedpost
  2. if you were smart, you'd be doing the same thing

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