This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I won't disagree with your contention that forcefully supressing a population keeps them, you know, surpressed. But I will contend that this imprudent and short-term civilisational management, because oppression degrades a people culturally and spiritually. Oppression makes brutes of a people, and the oppressor ends up riding a tiger.
I contend that there's strong empirical evidence in support of the brutalising effect of harsh oppression. If you're willing accept that premise then please skip the next two paragraphs.
Despite what a lot of activists will claim, the vast bulk of sub-Saharan Africa only experienced European colonialism for a bit less than a century: 1875 or so until 1965 or so, arguably starting later with the Berlin Conference in 1885. The obvious exception is South Africa, which had much earlier settler colonialism as opposed to the later and more popular extractive model. Looking at the societies that have emerged post-decolonisation, a really striking fact is how much more violent South Africa is than any other country in the continent, even those that have experienced recent military conflict. I'm talking specifically here about murder rates, by far the most reliable measure of violence even in extremely badly-run societies (ie most of Africa). South Africa is notably more violent than almost any other African country; in some cases up to 30× more (note that oppression is colourblind, and SA's only large competitor in the murder stakes is Nigeria, anothe country cursed with intense ethnic conflict, and jockeying, alternating subjugation of the Yoruba by the Hausa historically, and the inverse now).
This presents a serious challenge for a strictly white supremacist position; South African blacks had by far the most contact with civilising whites of any peers on the continent, and have come out of the encounter by far the most violent. This pattern shows up throughout the world; Russia is famous for tsarist oppression of its populace, and really high levels of interpersonal violence. Brazil was the largest slave nation in the world (surely an oppressive institution...) and is far more violent as a result than the vast majority of African countries. Even thinking of my own lovely nation of Ireland; historically oppressed, and authentic brutes for much of history as a result. In our case we were a big European outlier for most of the 20th century as a country with vastly higher levels of interpersonal violence than others; but the longer we went post-independence, the closer we tracker to the European norm. This was separate too and preceded our (literal) enrichment; getting richer didn't make us less violent and ignorant, it was a precondition for same.
I could go on and on but to my mind there are more than sufficient natural experiments around the world showing that, whatever the quality of the biological substratum of a people in the first place, oppression en masse tends to coarsen and degrade en masse. There are certainly very many interesting sub-mechanisms and processes behind this but, sinilar to your own big-picture view of oppression working as a large-scale system, I won't bother to speculate on them here.
Given this observation about the development of peoples, oppression as you propose it is storing up trouble for the future. In a world than has experienced the French and American revolutions, it just doesn't seem tenable to me politically that any Western society is going to have the will to keep oppressing its untermenschen forever (or at least, not in the form of coarse and ill-fitting explicit racial oppression; something a bit more subtle like a class system can of course coexist with liberal democracies forever). You can genocide them, or you can fully emancipate them, but history demonstrates that you can't keep kicking the oppression can down the road forever. And about genocide, let's be realistic; it is the civilisational equivalent of murder, the guilt of which is analogous to the guilt in a single (non-deranged) individual. It cannot have no effect. If you want to argue for the desirability of an America which had sent its formerly enslaved population to concentration camps once it was done with them... that actually would be interesting and I'd engage with it. But I doubt it's your belief.
Full legal and social emancipation, with all the calamities it entails, is a plaster (band-aid in American) that the US had to rip off sooner or later. An interesting counterfactual for you is this; what do you think would be the state of the US today if reconstruction of the slave regions had been completed in earnest and totally? This has been pulled off successfully in other societies; my understanding is that it's not a sociological impossiblitiy but rather a particular project which failed and was aabandoned in the 1870s US, only to be picked up again from the mid 20th. Really fascinating "what if?" there. And incidentally, lest you think Haiti is the only possible model of post-slavery societies in the western hemisphere: no! Look at Barbados, look at Jamaica; both pretty respectable societies that made a much better go of the same raw material, through better stewardship, institutions etc.
I’ll note that South Africa, Brazil, and Russia have some of the world’s highest levels income inequality, which broadly speaking tends to track quite well with a society’s general crime rate that typically determines murder rates.
More options
Context Copy link
How do you then explain the Mfecane, which was an exceptionally brutal and genocidal conflict fought between blacks in this area, before it was colonized?
Notice that midway through my huge screed I talked about oppression of the Irish by the English, or Russians by themselves. Oppressive social structures don't need a racial dynamic (though they are still helpful colour coding who is oppressing whom).
Africans are perfectly capable of oppressing one another brutally without outside help.
This says nothing either way about my central thesis that oppressing a group while people in your society have access to books about the French Revolution is not a tenable strategy in the long term.
In the long term, no political system survives. Even if takes the bare minimum standard of egalitarianism, female suffrage, it only has a track record of less than two centuries. Even French revolution is less than three centuries old, less than many monarchies, making the Chinese proverb that it is too soon tell what its long term consequences will be on point.
Speaking of the Chinese people, when do you expect them to truly stand up? The Reds have managed to hold on to power for more time than segregation is illegal on the US.
Akshually... oppression isn't a binary state, it's a scale. I'd contend that the leash on the Chinese people has been loosened gradually but meaningfully since Mao's era, very skillfully, in such a way as to uplift them and allow a more advanced society without slackening too much and causing social disharmony
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I won't contest that Jamaica and Barbados are better than Haiti, yet I'll contest 'pretty respectable society'.
Jamaica has one of the higher murder rates in the world. 44.5 murders per 100K as per 2020. Barbados is at 14.
Haiti was only at 6, surprisingly enough. I imagine a fair few murders are not reported there and even if that's not the case, it's still a very poor dysfunctional country outside of crime.
Chile was at 4, Argentina at 5. Neither of these countries are known for their spectacularly good governance, that's where a 'pretty respectable society' ought to be at or below.
Australia is at 0.8, Japan at about 0.25. These are definitely respectable societies.
The US, of course, is at about 6. Russia is at 7. Yet both countries have made many scientific developments, an ameliorating factor in my view. The entire black-African world, Caribbean included, has only a single Nobel outside Peace and Literature.
Source website is here: https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/ETH/ethiopia/crime-rate-statistics
What else should a society be graded on other than scientific achievement and not killing eachother? What is there apart from prosperity (albeit an abstracted precursor form) and harmony?
How does the US look if you break the statistics out by race? My suspicion is there a minority population with a disproportionate contribution.
Is it the extra-judicial nature of the killing that feel warrents a poor grade? Many of the precursors to current western governments executed far more people than today.
IIRC Scott did this back in the day. Blacks are high, Southern Whites are at about 4-5, so equivalent with the white and stable parts of Latin America, non-southern whites(he didn't make a distinction between old-stock whites, ethnics, and urban/rural) are below 4 but still higher than Europe or Canada, and Hispanics as a whole are higher than Southern Whites but lower than the rates in places like Mexico or Black America.
More options
Context Copy link
Of course there is, I considered including Detroit as a small Jamaica, the murder rate is about the same. I just wanted to be concise.
Absolutely, extra-judicial killing is the problem. Perhaps I should've been more specific in my last paragraph. If I included executions, I'd probably have to include war as well. Anyway, executions are for a different purpose. Chemotherapy kills healthy cells like diseases do but its purpose is to improve the health of the body, not reduce it.
Yes people are selected for death via execution much differently than war casualties.
Would you think over periods this selection would apply a selection pressure?
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/147470491501300114
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Every country is the same for that. I don't think there has ever existed a country with equality in murder rate.
No multicultural country anyway.
Your suggesting honor games are behind the disproportionately murderous minority?
There is, surprisingly, quite a lot of evidence behind that hypothesis- it's notable that White Southerners also have elevated murder rates, although not as high as blacks, and for obvious reasons the two cultures are similar. In the case of White Southerners, their culture being acceptable to criticize, there's been a few articles alleging that honor games are behind higher rates of interpersonal violence. This probably generalizes at least partially to blacks, given that the cultures are extremely similar and the similar but more intense problem with increased levels of interpersonal violence.
While I do enjoy the idea of Chicago afflicted with dualists intent on maintaining honor. The comorbidities of other crime with the murders suggests to me pecuniary and regular criminality, lack of self regulation and executive function.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Sub-Saharan Africans in RSA aren't native to the region and so don't even have traditional African levels of crime control. That's what you're seeing the effect of.
Detroit but with hot weather - the same results as you got when progressives actually did get to use their pets to enact their violence revenge fantasies on their class enemies.
You're getting some slack for the same reason a strident leftist often does - so many people reporting you that inevitably something will be over the line, and that's not a dynamic we want to encourage.
But this is over the line. It breaks most of our discourse rules.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link