site banner
PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   2251 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.

2
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

What happened with or to KulakRevolt/FromKulak? I never checked out the culture war threads since I got my fix from nrx blogs and Hindu Twitter, though I wish I switched out the latter with the CW here. This isn't an attempt to gossip or concern troll, he's clearly a very skilled writer and fairly smart, I don't have much context as to how he went from his motte post of the year to a much more cynical attitude.

I wish him well.

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.

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

The hock?

Hock my balls.

In all seriousness: this guy. I don’t normally share mod notes, but in this case, his final note says “unban him if he survives.”

I love this place.

IIRC (I probably don't): A while ago, a user on this site kept posting about how he was going to be dropped off by helicopter with nothing but a knife in an isolated location as a way to forge himself into a real man or die trying. The isolated location was Hock Mountain, so he called this escapade "the Hock". The moderators eventually banned him for being a single-issue poster, since he kept talking about it but never actually did it.

The isolated location was Hock Mountain,

That mountain would have been a sensible choice -- as I recall his actual goal was a winter crossing of the Brooks range in Northern Alaska, which is much more ambitious.

I forget why he wants to call it The Hock, he may have been coy on this point...

"Hock" in this context means to throw; he intended to "Hock" himself out into the wilderness to survive by his grit.

It doesn't though -- "huck" means "throw"; "hock" is something the guy just kind of made up. (ironically there's also kind of snowshoe/ski hybrid called "Hok", that would have been a better equipment choice for his quest than what I recall him considering -- I don't think he knows about them though)

Pretty much. His hope was that completing The Hock would make him attractive to women, who he thought were picking up on the fact that he hadn't done anything tough in his life.

https://manifold.markets/BenjaminIkuta/will-skookumtree-pinetree-successfu

Specifically, he believed women weren't interested in him because they want (and can magically sense) a man who has overcome mortal danger. Thus the Hock.

I think this position is true in principle. Women are attracted to men on a mission. That user's solution seemed extreme. But if he had directed his energies into making meaningful strides in his chosen passion (such as, say, hiking) then I think there would be a lot to commend in it. And, as a happy side effect, he may well have become more attractive, or at least more fulfilled.

Women are attracted to men on a mission

He is/was an American med student. If he'd toughed it out a few years longer, I think his difficulties in getting laid would have been greatly ameliorated. I'm sure some nurse would have snatched him up regardless of his weapons-grade autism!

I think there's definitely something to what you say: women are attracted to men who have drive, who are capable of doing things, etc. I just don't think that SkookumTree's position was defensible. He believed that it was specifically overcoming mortal peril that women valued, and that they only wanted men who had done this. That was going too far, but he refused to listen to the many people trying to point that out to him.

It’s a leviathan shaped hole.

There is a really good Chris McCandless/Grizzly-man joke in there somewhere in there but im not smart enough to make it.

I'm embarrassed how much I giggled.

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.

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.

It happened in large parts of north England and for over two decades, to the point where there are books about it. Every sane person would want a lot more than just mass deportations here. My reply also clarifies how this is worse than the the Jimmy saville issue.

The people doing thus are explicitly doing it out of racial and religious angst. Islam allows subcontinent dwellers to get away with crime. Even today, most news media won't touch it, most politicians simply pretend to ignore it and pajeet mullahs from a country that's pajeet even for India are ether gloating about it or diverting attention if they are simply not quiet so that this passes over.

Kulaks not wrong to want violence, he's wrong to call for it as the state just wants a way to simply label you as a stereotype. Jim of Jim's blog has some good takes, some psychopathic ones, I earlier commented on how women don't always enjoy rape (surprise surprise) as they purposefully don't visit unsafe places, India lost tourists because it has a rapey image, Pakistan has no tourists at all compared to Thailand for the same reasons. It's not just ntr or criminals being hot, it's simply the state telling people "fuck you, you can't do much and if you fight, we'll do you even worse".

After all, if you can justify reperations, why should policing and then by extension women not be left unchecked? You've had similar calls for women as reperations in my nation so my point is brought up so elucidate that such trains of thought do exist within many. I might be wrong and may regret writing this however. Double standards are universal, they don't stop just at uni admissions.

I don't want to be culture war ish but this is where we are at. Richard Spencer regrets his alt right time because one bad incident was enough, it took him 8 years to see similar memes come back to life due to a thermidor. The central nation states ability to conduct violence and the civilians being toothless with a police and armed forces ready to shoot you isn't a pretty situation.

Small correction: "reperations" should be "reparations".

not wrong to want violence, he's wrong to call for it

Ideally it would happen organically.

The men of 1915 Atlanta organized a "Vigilance Committee" for the rape and murder of one girl, to see the perpetrator hanged.

Vigilante hangings were really having a cultural moment in that time period.

This is not a good thing.

Uh, vigilante hangings in the south had been a big thing for a while, and ended because the law managed to crack down on criminals enough that it wasn’t viewed as needed. It wasn’t some sort of fad; the republic of Texas had a civil war over the practice, although it gets lost in the history books for ‘also being at war with the commanches and Mexico simultaneously’ reasons.

There was a bit of a spike circa 1915. Noisy, yes, but there are a couple obvious suspects. I think it’s fair to describe the Second Klan as a cultural moment.

For reasons discussed previously, I think OP’s choice of Leo Frank is pretty disingenuous.

I concurrently believe that 1) Leo Frank was a pedophile who deserved to hang, and the actions of the klan in defending an innocent black man are a rare mark in their favor and 2) wanting to talk about Frank all the time is probably not motivated by sincere interest in justice practices in 1910's Georgia. So no disagreement about that.

Lynching was definitely A Thing which has been a feature of the south since there was a cultural region identifiable as the south; describing the second klan as a cultural moment is fair, referring to a bump in lynchings concurrently with the great war is probably fair, but referring to lynchings as a cultural moment is not.

No?

I'd think it serves to both punish the wicked and level set expectations for prosecutions.

If corruption is preventing the administration of justice the city needs a Vigilance Committee.

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.

Cuckoldry is a subject and an insult I try to stay away intuitively, nothing good comes from even knowing about it

Though see also the legendary American obsession with the putative virility of black men

Which never made any sense to me, not a surprise that people who actually believe this stuff are usually wierdo outcasts who pay internet domme mommies money.

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,

I disagree, Jimmy abused hundreds, and maybe thousands but it's very difficult to claim the numbers would be the same. The targeted rapes are targeted, Jimmy was just a creep, thus is you treating host girls as war brides and state supplicating to your demands due to the cathedral having set the consensus. His reactions align with sanity, the suggestions don't.

I'm surprised to know if he did fedpost on reddit, I cannot imagine even using cuss words there unless they're targeted towards non bioleninsts.

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 did adderess the point and have similar sentiments but different suggestions, I hope that helps me with kulak's basilisk

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'm unaware of what he was like before, I didn't surf the culture war threads. I have similar views somewhat, at least anti police and judiciary ones from reading Aidan Maclear but calls for violence on the daily basis does not seem very high percentage.

Kulak isn’t very intelligent and isn’t a very good writer. This has nothing to do with his ideology; there are people with ideas I find far more repellent here and elsewhere who I would freely admit are clearly intelligent, compelling writers. I think he has a kind of sincere autistic charm to him, but he’s not even 50th percentile smarts among regular contributors here.

To this point the two kulak posts I most rememeber from the Reddit days are one where he had a foaming diatribe against sales as evil and soul sucking, but a humorous unawareness that sales as a field was more than cold calling. He had worked one soul sucking sales jobs and blindly extrapolated a nonsensical point out of his narrow angst.

The other was an incoherent unworkable point of view about living on boats. Something like a suggestion that everyone should.

Either way, the guy has always been extremely narrow in his point of view and very bad at scaling or extrapolation, which is why the default to fed posting is his sweet spot

Who are some you recommend. I don't read much of the culture war stuff, I should now and check out the quality contributions thread too. I was told to read your takes btw so do recommend some by yourself too.

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

My reactions and sentiments, what I would think would ideally happen to such people is medieval, modern judicial process is too kind even if it's carried out properly on all which it can never be. My question was for him asking for more violence publicly, if anyone who's not related to the kids or even is goes out and does what Cain Velasques did, the UK will find a good way to spin the story around.

Bad political action is worse than no political action, having the sentiments and calling for them to be carried out are different things. Jan 6 didn't kill millions of bioleninists, neither did charlottesville yet people are spending years behind bars for both.

For clarity - I truly think the kind of punishments that you see via Islamic nations like public humiliation, mass deportations and inclusion of everyone Complicit alongside state actors is the minimum. I subscribe to the idea of not not having formal police and judiciary at the city level or rather a much weaker one because in such a scanrio, you can get justice and tell people to leave your part of the land alone.

That does not happen unfortunately, we live in far more cucked times, any calls for violence will make it worse. I'm not calling for down votes or a ban.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats