site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   33889 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 9, 2024

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.

8
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

You're right about massive population changes in our past, but they were not all positive.

Consider Detroit, for example. In 1910, Detroit had around 450,000 people, 99% of whom were white. Thanks to ample factory jobs, and the Great Migration, the population exploded to 1.8 million by 1950. Among the new citizens were 300,000 black people from the Deep South who filled valuable roles in the city's numerous factories.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_Detroit

We all know what happened next. Today, Detroit's population has fallen to 600,000 give or take. The white population has fallen to just 10%. The factory jobs disappeared and today the median household income in Detroit is just $37,000 making it the poorest large city in the U.S. Much of the income comes from government transfer payments. Labor force participation is incredibly low.

https://poverty.umich.edu/files/2019/10/Detroit-Labor-Market-1213.pdf

Job shortages are temporary. Demographic change is forever. First, the white citizens of Springfield will leave. Then the Haitians will leave. And it will eventually end up like Cairo, Illinois - a ghost town.

Yeah, Detroit had a bad run with a combination of the capitalistic incompetence of the Big Three ownership + corrupt leadership + the general Sun Belt migration.

Meanwhile, the vast majority of the most economically dynamic and innovative and growing regions of the US are far more diverse, with the places that are less diverse mostly slowly dying out. This includes red states too - Houston, Miami (weird how the amount of Haitians wasn't a worry for all the VCers and blockchainers a few years ago), etc. There aren't a ton of super-white areas of the country with massive growth. Even a place like Nashville is diversifying as it grows.

  • -11

Even a place like Nashville is diversifying as it grows.

This seems to be suggesting the opposite causal direction to what you're claiming - that growth/dynamism causes diversity, rather than that diversity causes growth/dynamism.

The more black a place is, the more of a shithole it becomes. As far as I can tell this is an ironclad law of the universe, never to be thwarted by any amount of handouts or progressive apologetics. Pointing to a bunch of places full of Hispanics and intoning vaguely about "diversity" is a transparent dodge.

Springfield is fucked. In a few years everyone will have bars on their windows, ten years after that the town will be dead. Watching good progressives pretend that this time it'll be different is a comic spectacle at this point.

We have lots of discussion here all the time about the unfortunate state of black demographics. It is fine to "Notice" and comment on this. It is not fine to simply make blanket, very general assertions intended to be inflammatory, which you do all the time. Something about Haitians seems to be stirring up an unusual level of nastiness in the mod queue, but unlike the last few people I have warned, your record is nothing but shitty comments like this.

Banned for a week.

I've personally lived in an African village of about 1500 where I was literally the only white for about 200k, and it wasn't a shithole, except by shallow criteria such as relative poverty (many lived in literal mud huts). But these huts were swept clean, the interior stone floors regularly polished to a slippery sheen, the people's clothes, such as they were, were ironed (with a fucking iron heated over a fire) and generally it was a very pleasant place to live.

That's an interesting observation. I wonder whether it's something about village life that makes people care about their reputations (see C20th British housewives scrubbing their doorsteps to keep up appearances). African cities look pretty filthy from what I've seen.

That said, I assume somedude was more talking about crime. In that case, the relationship is much clearer.

There have been many studies and philosophical reasonings on this. Anonymity, Dunbar's Number, reputational importance, clan survival, reciprocity odds, etc...The reasons are multitude and it is only in WEIRD societies that we can have nice cities and large groups that all act like small groups.

"Among the most prominent features that make people WEIRD is prioritizing impersonal pro-sociality over interpersonal relationships. Impersonal psychology includes inclinations to trust strangers or cooperating with anonymous others. " https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/09/joseph-henrich-explores-weird-societies/

A good reason to not import too many non-weird clannish people at once.

Houston actually does have really high crime rates, albeit not St Louis tier. Of course Texas racial dynamics are a bit less apologetic than elsewhere in the country, having white bosses over all-POC crews is totally normal.

And there's the rub.

Some immigration is good. Some is bad. I'll argue that the high skill immigrants Silicon Valley gets are good. And low skill immigrants from Haiti are bad.

with the places that are less diverse mostly slowly dying out.

Studies have shown that when people move within the U.S., people of all races migrate towards areas that are whiter.

Except some currently high skill American residents are the descendants of low skill immigrants and refugees. If you actually want long-term dynamism and growth, you actually have to roll the dice on people without the right papers and hope for the best. Worked pretty well the first 250 years or so.

Would you not consider the importation of millions of Africans during the slave trade to be a similar 'roll of the dice'? I would say these Haitain migrants (being quite literally African American, in the sense of being Africans who have lived in the Americas for hundreds of years) are much more similar to America's current AA population than they are to the Jews, Irish or Italians of yesteryear.

This isn't Reddit so we can say these things explicitly. Subsaharan Africans have very low IQs (85 for AAs, 76 for Haitians). This can be compared to European IQs of around 100 or East Asian/Ashkenazi IQs of around 110. With this knowledge, can you really say that importing tens of thousands of Haitians to be a 'roll of the dice'? It seems pretty obvious to me that we can predict what will happen.

Those people came from populations with average IQ's that wouldn't be literally retarded in civilized countries. We can expect Italian(average IQ upper nineties) and Chinese(average IQ vaguely above 100) peasants to occasionally produce a genius. This is unlikely from Haitians.

Sixty years of progressives failing miserably to budge the racial gap in... pretty much everything... and this guy thinks bulk import of Haitians is "rolling the dice" like this might just be the part where they suddenly start pulling it off.

Our nation is more diverse than ever and less dynamic than ever.

I mean, the citizens of Springfield were already leaving. I don't like Haitians, wouldn't be happy to have them near me, and if a bunch of them were heading to my suburb I'd be on the phone with state elected officials demanding they be rounded up and shipped somewhere else. But in the long run this doesn't change the future of Springfield's white population. It was already dead.

The real victims here are the Haitians. In one generation they're going to be utterly wrecked by the US welfare state, VR porn, and fentanyl. They will be chewed up and spit out. Their birthrates will crash through the floor and that will be the end of them. They are now being thrust into the hedonic suicidal memetrap that is modern culture, and they are even less equipped to survive it than the whites they are replacing.

I don't disagree. Haitians should make something of themselves in Haiti. Their kids will masturbate to pornography until they get erectile dysfunction and smoke themselves out of having jobs, mostly milling about wondering who their dads are.

Native whites can recover(if they want to) by joining a religious community. Haitians don't know that, and the black church isn't as good at setting people on the straight and narrow.

Of course, it couldn't happen to better people. Literal devil worshipping jigaboos don't arouse much sympathy.

  • -12

Really hating someone still isn’t license to ignore the rules.

Going with a one day ban to cool off a little.

You gonna apply that to outlaw83? I seriously doubt it.

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