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've been looking into this guy. Peg me as shocked that, if only superficially, neoreactionary thought has penetrated the highest levels of GOP politics. Vance cites Curtis Yarvin as one of his influences and follows BronzeAgePervert and Steve Sailer on X. He advocated for dismantling the federal bureaucracy and ignoring legal challenges to it in a 2022 Vanity Fair interview — which they correctly characterize as a coup.
All this feels like nothing more than watching 2012 Tumblr ideas leap into the Democratic platform overnight. Whether Vance's NRx ideas are sincerely held or not, it's fascinating. As an NRx favorite, Mosca, said:
So a tiny gaggle of too-online neoreactionaries triumph and take command of MAGA, quite ignoring the mass of tens of millions of boomer normiecons.
There's an important distinction to be made between NRx taking over RNC, and RNC assimilating NRx. The alt-right learned that lesson the hard way. I'll keep an open mind as to what Vance represents, but given that he already seems to be beating the drum of war with Iran my bet is Vance represents the Neo-Con reconstitution under a different banner and aesthetic. Many of us have been pointing at NRx for being esoterically or even exoterically Zionist for some time, and Vance seems likely to me to be the expression of this fact.
Can you point to this pointing?
My thread here was related to the fallout of the Lomez dox (JD Vance follows Lomez on Twitter by the way, along with Steve Sailer). This entire circle pushes edgy criticism towards everything: liberalism, Protestantism, White Womyn, Catholics, except they hold mainstream sensibilities when it comes to Jews, and they counter-signal criticisms of Jewish and Zionist influence. If Vance becomes the pinnacle of NRx influence in the White House it is most likely going to express as ultra-Zionism rather than any pro-white or reactionary political influence.
My prediction is that Vance is going to represent the RNC assimilating NRx edginess and aesthetics as a Trojan Horse for ultra-Zionism, just like the Neocons before them.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Why are the jews your only issue?
Like, objectively, there seem to be far more important things to life in the US than whatever minor portion of the budget gives aid to which parties in the middle east.
Nowadays, it's more of the Indian Question (IQ), imo. The newer wave of overtly nepotistic ingroupers is bound for a Noticing, any day now.
More options
Context Copy link
Seconding this question, I've asked /u/SecureSignals the same question before and he didn't respond.
I've long been perplexed by the phenomena of super smart people getting obsessed with Jews, and unfortunately the people who fit that description appear to be universally averse to public introspection.
More options
Context Copy link
The bigger question is why am I the only one to notice Vance advocating for war with Iran, and complaining about Biden not doing enough for Israel? Why am I not dazzled by Vance's flirtation with NRx which is giving others cause for optimism? Because I know better, that's why. I can see what's going on, and it's the trajectory that has been predicted by people that know better for some time. The Thiel network is finally bearing real fruit, and it is already showing itself for what it is.
You're still dodging the question. Why the obsession with jews, what makes you think the JQ is so much more important than everything else?
Imagine we are in alternate world, where anyone who is someone says that South Africa is our greatest ally, that "our values" came from Pretoria, that United States would not exist without South Africa, where every American politician travels to South Africa to honor the Voortrekker memorial and swears to support South Africa to the end, supply it with unlimited money and weapons, and send US armed force to defend South Africa if necessary.
And when someone objects,people are asking: Why are you so obssessed with Afrikaners? Why you hate them so much? Do you want to send them to concentration camps again?
More options
Context Copy link
This is a Culture War thread, the JQ is highly pertinent to Culture War problems including the most important of our day, on issues ranging from foreign policy to media influence, academic influence, identity politics, social media censorship, Hollywood culture-creation... The importance of that issue is also relative to the fact that it's a completely taboo topic in political and cultural discourse. So it's an extremely important issue to Culture War, and it's actively ignored or countersignaled by the establishment Right Wing. This has to change. Instead, you get stuff like NRx that collapses into a JD Vance "Vote Republican, support Israel" like every other "right-wing" movement which ignores or countersignals the issue.
What.. even ? To a person who think a nation that mines 200-300,000 tons of coal daily but couldn't spare enough to burn ten thousand corpses , yes, the entirety of the NRx collapses into 'Vote Republican'.
Pay no attention that most NRx guys are not very hot on Israel, or that any politician who'd even wish to do anything about the Israeli lobby would have to spend years pretending he's okay with them.
According to the lore, they didn't use coal, they used freshly cut wood or harvested brushwood. And they allegedly burned an average of five thousand every single day, on makeshift open-air pyres, with a few dozen workers in a small camp of less than 5 acres. ChatGPT estimates for its part that cremating 5,000 people would require burning 750 cords of wood, or about 1,500,000 kg as a daily requirement. There are no documents or accounts for the transport of these mass quantities of fuel to the camp, which was a well-known camp in the surrounding area. There have also been 0 excavations proving the existence of any cremated remains of the allegedly ~1,000,000 people who are said to have been cremated on that site, despite the claimed burial areas being precisely known.
The quantity of coal mined across the entire German industry doesn't solve the problem of how this small camp cremated 5,000 people per day on crude open-air pyres with nobody noticing and with no shipments of fuel.
All the factorio in the world hasn't been able to help you see a real-world logistical impossibility in front of your very eyes, you are still gullible.
Only Treblinka is used open air pits and harvested wood. Open air pyres were, a feature of I believe one camp only. Other used specialised cremation furnaces into which bodies were continually pushed as soon as there was enough room. Lot of heat was retained in the furnace itself and so on.
a) ChatGPT is a lobotomized moron.
b) human bodies, especially of older people who haven't been starved in a camp contains a fair amount of energy. You don't need to spend 300 kg of wood to burn a person, especially not if done in bulk meaning the from the burning doesn't escape as would be the case in a large pile of stacked bodies interspread with wood. With a body fat content of 20%, each 50 kg corpse in essence contains the energy of 10 kg of coke.
Crematoria were made out of heat resistant bricks and accumulated heat in themselves.
Heat of vaporization of water is 2.3 MJ/kg. For a 50 kg body containing 35 kg of water, that's about 81 MJ. Meanwhile body fat of 20% for the same gives you 10 kilograms of fat tissue, which has an energy content of 380 MJ. Heating up the 35 kg of water 70˘C is 10 MJ (4.2 kJ/kg*K). So, there's plenty of energy in a corpse to heat up and water evaporate all its water. In fact, in a non-malnourished person there's several times more heat.
c) burning of corpses using firewood under the open sky was only a feature of one camp, Treblinka, which had a workforce of 1.5-2000 people. Let's say you've got 1k people working on that, each day, 12 hours a day. Even with just hand saws, one person can cut down and strip of branches maybe 6-8 solidly sized (~500 kg) trees without difficulty in that time, probably far more. We're up to 3000 tons of wood this way. Not difficult at all to cremate people with that much wood, they probably only needed a fraction of that because like I said, even slender corpses contain a fair amount of energy.
With an essentially infinite workforce and large woods adjacent to the camps, that's not a real issue.
Pretty sure people noticed the burnt corpse smell, as the nearest village was only 4 km away and according to the few survivors it was so bad that if it was blowing on the sorting camp, work had to cease, but what could the villagers do ? What use do you think it'd be to complain Germans about a bad smell ?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I appreciate you responding, though I must admit I was more curious about any psychological insights than culture war analysis.
More options
Context Copy link
You will find that topics absent from the discourse are much more commonly so for reasons of being completely unimportant/uninteresting to anyone than vice versa...
Yes?
Yes.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The topic is certainly not absent from the public discourse, it is the most important issue in the public discourse. The Holocaust narrative, being pro-Israel, "fighting anti-Semitism", these are all expressions of this issue and they are treated with utmost importance by everyone on both sides of the political aisle. What is lacked is any critical perspective because of the consensus held by both sides of the political aisle.
Does this look like a guy who thinks the issue of Jewish influence is uninteresting and unimportant? No, it looks like someone who is ritualistically submitting to Jewish influence, and whatever exposure to NRx he had hasn't helped him. "Vote Republican and support Israel", same old same old.
...
Make up your mind, guy.
Nobody gives a shit though -- except for a handful of obsessives such as yourself.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This is a good point. Can the mods force him to answer this if he wants to keep jew posting?
I’m going to go with “no.” That’d be a whole new level of micromanagement.
I agree in general, and I do think people should be able to have opinions I find odious, but if you are going to make it your thing, some level of forced engagement instead of just drive by jew-posting might be better than just straight up banning/ongoing warnings of "chillllllll."
Or… you can just ignore the JQ posts you don’t like. There’s a little minus sign icon next to the post that you can click to hide it, so you never have to see it again. Isn’t that the best solution of all? Then the mods don’t have to filter by content, and people who hate the JQ posting can proactively avoid having to engage with it.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
There is a rule about posting on multiple subjects. Past some point, if he keeps doing this he becomes a single issue poster.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
A war would be more serious; fair enough.
I'm not dazzled by his flirtation with edgier corners of the internet; radicalism has a lot of downside risk.
Does this mean you're a follower of Fuentes?
Nope, beyond that I agree with some of his criticisms of NRx. But I'm not a Christian Nationalist either.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
They're obviously the most powerful and dangerous group of hyphenated Americans.
That isn't really an answer to the question.
What answer are you looking for?
I suppose I was asking something closer to foreign policy, not domestic policy.
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
I don't understand this. We had this system for nearly two hundred years and nobody called it a coup when the old guy's people got cleaned out and the new guy's people got installed. I don't see any reason to call it a coup when you could instead call it the return of the spoils system.
I take it back, I see the reason to call it a coup: to whip people into a frenzy, such that they'll do anything to avoid that outcome.
And then we passed civil service reform acts, which are still on the books. If you intentionally break the law by firing bureaucrats on partisan grounds, and then ignore the courts ordering you to reinstate them, you have made an illegal power grab and set the constitution aside. In my mind this can reasonably be called a coup.
I have an idea:
Win the presidency and both houses of congress.
Eliminate the filibuster.
Repeal the Civil Service Reform Acts.
Repeal the Administrative Procedure Act.
???
Unleash total executive power over federal agencies and regulations. Very legal, very cool.
Why wouldn’t this work?
Yes, that would be entirely legal. (Though difficult to imagine in practice, because a large part of the GOP is still legacy republicans). What Vance suggested, though, was "when the courts stop you, stand before the country, and say 'The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.'"
I do not believe TPTB will allow the populists to win through the normal methods. This is just a prior, not a position I have proof of, besides observing Lucy pull away the football on many occasions. If the above program were seriously approaching accomplishment through legal methods, the establishment would throw a coup of their own.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
By this standard Biden has couped too. The border and student loans would both be considered illegal actions.
Changing bureaucrats is above competency at enacting your agenda - Democratically. The outgoing people may be competent but they are partisan robots too that will interfere with your agenda and not do their job. Intellectually and functionally competent but they will still not execute the executives policy.
As I understand it, Biden accomplished these by slithering through legal loopholes, not disobeying the courts. When the Supreme Court overturned student loan forgiveness, the Biden team did not say "Screw you, Clarence Thomas, let's see you stop us" and strike the ledgers anyway; they set lawyers to find every technicality on the books. Same with opening the borders.
Of course, I am not implying moral superiority on the Biden side. Merely that, as Scott wrote about populism vs. the deep state in Turkey:
Coups are necessary for anti-establishment side of a populist vs. establishment showdown. The establishment side can just let the systems run and get their way.
They pretty much did tell the court fuck you. They were told it’s unconstitutional. They did it anyway. Cases take a long time to make it thru the system. He did it anyway. Sounds like a coup to me.
Choosing not to enforce the border and abusing the meaning of the word “asylum” while importing voters and using tax payer money is a coup in my book. Words have meanings. Asylum when the law was written meant something very specific - as in facing direct violence due to political belief. Biden decided it means I make $1 an hour in Guatemala and want American money.
You can say this is “exploiting loopholes”, but laws and words are always going to have a great deal on inexactness to them. And as the years go by people change the meaning of the word.
I don’t even know what you are complaining about with bureaucrats. They aren’t elected people. How is that a coup? It’s not like importing millions of voters, banning proof of citizenship, and changing election results.
Only in the trivial sense that every time the President breaks a law he also violates the Take Care clause. Biden v Nebraska was a statutory interpretation case which held that the clause in the HEROES act allowing the Secretary of Education to waive or modify student loans in connection with a national emergency (which COVID qualified as) didn't extend to the kind of broad-based loan forgiveness that the Biden administration wanted to do.
Having been told that he couldn't use the HEROES act, Biden looked around for other sources of statutory authority which didn't involve such a big stretch. The biggies are Publicig Service Loan Forgiveness (The statutes say that the government can discharge student loans if someone works for the government or certain other "public service" employers for ten years. This used to be almost impossible to claim because of paperwork requirements, but Biden just cancelled the loans for anyone whose employment record showed the required ten years of public service.) and income-based repayment (The statute allows the Secretary of Education to define rates and thresholds, and Biden made them a lot more generous). These are also going to end up in front of SCOTUS, but if statutes are interpreted to mean what they say Biden would win. But this Supreme Court has tended to interpret delegations of power more narrowly than you or I would based on reading the statutory text because they don't trust Congress to protect its own Constitutional role.
I don't even think this is "exploiting loopholes" at this stage. Congress intended to give the Executive broad discretion to write off student loans for borrowers who were struggling to repay them, and they did. Congress may or may not have intended that discretion to extend as far as Biden is taking it - the answer is probably mu because Congress notoriously doesn't have a brain and can't intend things other than explicitly. If America had a functioning Congress, Congress could have said what it meant. As we are, the administration and the Courts are butting heads over who gets to decide questions that Congress negligently chose not to.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I would think that the plan would be to fire them based on lack of merit?
In his own words, "fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people", to "seize the institutions of the left" as a "de-Baathification program, a de-woke-ification program".
He's not saying to fire bad bureaucrats or incompetent DEI hires; he's saying to fire democrats.
He's not saying to fire democrats; he's saying 'fire bureaucrats who won't take direction from the executive'. 'Disobeys the boss' is grounds for firing literally everywhere.
This seems like a sane-wash. Vance did not say "fire bureaucrats who won't take direction from the executive". I agree that doing that would be proper (and presumably legal). He says "fire every single midlevel bureaucrat", which doesn't seem to suggest leaving in place those who do take direction.
The fact that Vance goes on to advocate defying court rulings against the move suggests heavily that he acknowledges his preferred path would be explicitly illegal and that he doesn't care.
That seems like kind of an in-sane wash to me -- do you really think Vance plans to fire tens of thousands of people?
(and replace them with other people -- to be clear there are probably quite a few mid-level bureaucratic positions that could be eliminated altogether a la Millei)
Why wouldn't I believe it? It's what he said explicitly. And he went on to further state what he thought the consequences of that move would be and how he would respond to those consequences.
If you think that's an insane plan, fair enough, but that's what he says in his own words that he wants to do.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The full video and (admittedly autogen'd) transcript is here, with the relevant quotes starting around 23:00 to 30:00 (probably not worth listening to). I'm not a big fan of the Andrew Jackson worship, but the question itself assumes that said bureaucrats will be defying executive direction.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Could you quote the part where he's saying that? I've read the article and what I'm seeing is only what popocatepetl quoted.
You are seeing "we want to fire Democrats" in the article? I'm not.
Assumption: when he says "our people", it means Republicans in 9 out of 10 cases.
So, when he talks about firing everyone, but replacing them with Republicans, it sure looks like Democrats as a class are being fired, while only individual Republicans are.
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
More options
Context Copy link
Good. We want people who are not afraid to listen to diverse influences even if they don't agree with them.
Remember when they went after Clinton for smoking weed? This is the 2024 version of that. The world improves for the better when bullshit attacks fail to stick.
No, elected officials dismantling the unelected bureaucracy is the opposite of a coup.
You’re completely right.
It’s not a coup, it’s a restoration.
The irony is that it’s what normiecons have been dreaming about for generations but they’re by and large too cowardly and squeamish to actually go through with what’s needed to achieve it.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I bet he does follow the neoreactionaries because he seems like a person who would follow that stuff. But I think he has a lot of shared background with me. That is what high IQ rust belt guys do.
I feel like the only difference between me and him is he wrote a book and gives better speaches.
The only difference is he is a lot more successful!
I say in jest as a fellow rust belt kid. I could relate to a lot of what Vance wrote in Hillbilly elegy.
Read the book awhile back, my wife was interested so we watched the movie last night. I didn't remember him attempting to steal a TI-89 in the book, though there was a scene showing this in the movie. Checking just now there's no mention of attempted theft in the book, just that Mamaw made sure he had one.
Meanwhile, in my life, one of my delinquent friends helped me out by lifting a TI-89 from Wal-Mart.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
And it seems to have been added to his wikipedia page an hour ago, so expect this to be heard.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link