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 -
Well, for one thing, right from the "concentric circle 2", I quite wonder why I am supposed to sympathize with white nationalism at all, considering the stakes, if I'm not firmly within the circle 1, "whites in every situation".
More to the point, though, these sort of of ponderings demonstrate, more than anything else, that race is indeed socially constructed, at least in large part and perhaps the most important part. If one was to consider human race on a firmly biological basis, it would probably be based on human genetic clustering studies like the one which procuded this image, I'm pretty sure everyone here has seen it. Yet, those clustering studies tend to demonstrate that Europeans and Middle Easterners are indeed closely very genetically related compared to other major continental subpopulations (and what else would you use as a comparison); of course you could divide those clusters to more and more groups to get the result where Europeans and Middle Easterners show more as distinct populations, but at some point it just becomes p-hacking. If we consider Europeans and Middle Easterners as a part of the same population, then surely ethnic Jews, who tend to in roughly 50 % European and 50 % Middle Easterners, are very firmly a part of that cluster.
And yet white nationalists tend to talk about Jews as wholly and unambiguously nonwhite and the migration of Syrians, Turks and Algerians as race replacement. This is one mystery that I've never quite seen firmly answered. Of course one might say that they are not white-white because they are Jewish and Muslim and so on, or because they don't identify as white themselves, but then you just prove more firmly the (partially, and perhaps the most importantly) socially constructed basis of race.
Do you live in the US?
If you answer no; you need not care about WNs at all. Europeans have their own problems, namely, excluding non-European migrants from the continent on account of it being mostly fiscal suicide unless we talk Chinese, educated Indians or similar Americans.
Of course there is some need for me to care about intellectual movements in America, even fringe ones, since their developments will inevitably show up in European discourses in some ways.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I have to say that any faux-biological definition of "white" that leaves out the country with one of the highest rate of blonde hair and the whitest skin tone is pretty suspect to begin with. You could make such division, but calling it "white" would be pretty stupid.
More options
Context Copy link
The history of explicitly racist regimes suggests that the definition of the favored race tends to widen over time. Apartheid famously counted Japanese people as white, for example, and the history of Latin American racism is mostly the blood purity requirements to be considered white being loosened and not tightened.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link