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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 31, 2025

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I actually liked the show. Good acting (particularly by the incel kid--his first time acting iiuc) and well-shot. I am quite the sucker for the one-shot, apparently. It's a beautiful reflection of the neuroses of our society.

The issue: it's entirely fictional and doesn't represent anything real. Which is entirely fine as fiction, but a lot of viewers are having trouble distinguishing fiction from reality. One MP called it a documentary.

For reference, open up Homicide in England and Wales: year ending March 2024 and Appendix Tables.

You might notice lots of things, but some (mostly obvious) things I'd highlight:

  1. Men in aggregate are murdered more than women.

  2. The rate of homicide has been trending down for all age groups. This is driven by a decreasing rate of homicide for women, while the male rate has remained stable.

  3. There is zero Tate effect, stating the Tate effect as a statistic showing murders of a female victim increasing during his influencer period. This also holds even when looking at particular age groups. More accurately, there's a negative Tate effect if anything: guess he's mostly helping women. He loves the free marketing, regardless.

  4. Children are murdered at a much lower rate than adults. To ground everything that follows, one to two dozen girls are killed per year in England and Wales, and two to four dozen boys.

  5. Under sixteens, when they are murdered, are mostly murdered by parents and step parents. Look at Worksheet 16 of the Appendix tables. Of homicides where there's a known suspect, the vast majority of suspects for girls are one of the parents. Boys are also most likely to be murdered by a parent, but they have more distribution throughout the other categories.

  6. Look at Table 34 of the Appendix tables in the victim under 16 section, which breaks out homicides by the sexes of the victim and suspect. Woman kills girl is the smallest category. Following that are man kills girl and woman kills boy, which are about equal. Man kills boy is the largest category. (Considering point 5, "man" and "woman" should be read as "father" and "mother.)

  7. Maybe it's in the 16-24 age group we should be looking? But even there, there's no evidence of a Tate effect. Murder rates do increase, but driven almost entirely by boy victims rather than girl victims (Worksheet 4). The largest category of suspect for female victims in aggregate is the partner or spouse: the "acquaintance" or "stranger" categories that incel killings would fall under are barely represented (Table 34).

I want to revisit my point 6. A boy is at least one order of magnitude more likely to be murdered by his mother than a girl by an incel (though both happen extraordinarily rarely). Should we make a TV show about it? Hold hearings in government about it? Order that all expectant mothers need to attend a mandatory class on how they need to purge themselves of misandry and not murder their sons?

true crime shows usually feature karens and highly intelligent men as the killers. This is because their crimes are shocking and unexpected

This is kind of @Sloot bait, but that's not the reason. True crime shows feature Karens because Karens are a self-insert for the viewer, and they feature the men they do because etc.

I want to revisit my point 6. A boy is at least one order of magnitude more likely to be murdered by his mother than a girl by an incel (though both happen extraordinarily rarely). Should we make a TV show about it? Hold hearings in government about it? Order that all expectant mothers need to attend a mandatory class on how they need to purge themselves of misandry and not murder their sons?

The truth is that incels are not hated because they are very murderous. Their crimes are much more serious than that:

  • They are icky
  • They made the mistake of being born straight cis-male, which marks them as oppressors in the woke mindset
  • They might follow manosphere influencers with pretty antique views
  • They presumably might not compete for money and status to attract a mate, thereby calling the natural order of society into question
  • Presumably, they might not even treat every hot woman with the devotion which is her birthright

Women will put up with hot men who are not feminists, but if your sexual market value is small and you are also on the bottom of to woke oppressedness totem pole, then you are expected to be an Ally to your betters. See the Scott Aaronson saga for illustration.

The issue: it's entirely fictional and doesn't represent anything real.

As I will get around to expanding on in another comment, this show is purely pornographic.

I want to revisit my point 6. A boy is at least one order of magnitude more likely to be murdered by his mother than a girl by an incel (though both happen extraordinarily rarely). [Paraphrased] Should we treat women just as badly as we do men?

I get that this is rhetorical but the answer is "yes, obviously, their rules fairly".

There's a quip about literacy, usually misattributed to Twain, that goes something like "The person who does not read has no advantage over the person who cannot read."

IMHO the same applies more strongly to numeracy. I would dare to hope that Starmer et. al., at least passed Algebra, and perhaps Calculus ... but what even was the point, if, when they have concerns that can be informed by mere arithmetic, they don't even consider using that? I'd like to offer kudos to you for offering a better analysis than I've seen so far from politicians or journalists, but I wish that were a greater compliment than it is.