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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 20, 2025

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The whitest parts of America are the highest trust. Robert Putnam has shown that social trust is related to homogeneity. We also know that oxytocin allele expression is related to social trust, so not every group has the same amount of social trust. If you value “social mobility”, the easiest way to increase this is to live in a homogenous high-trust nation. This is why the five nations with the most social mobility are Nordic, and all of the top 10 are European. And so,

if one wants to live in a society with high trust and social mobility,

their primary ambition should be to maximize how many Europeans exist around them, particularly Northern Europeans. And it seems everyone knows this, hence migration. But this is problematic for those who deserve that level of trust, but for whom the trust is reduced with every addition of foreigner. Because they deserve to live around their own kind, just as much as an intelligent individual whose genes express a high IQ should be able to work productively according to his genes.

An ideology for people too stupid, degenerate, or incompetent to survive in an honest meritocracy

Notably, high-trust Europeans do not feel this kind of sentiment, which is why they enact policies that help their own citizens and promote social mobility. Right now they think that everyone is their people, because they have been misguided, but this can be changed. Meritocracy is also not a historically common idea in Europe. It’s also not very evidenced by science. A person’s identity is not their IQ, it’s the whole package of genes which they share in common with their family and extended kin, IQ involving a sliver. Meaning a high IQ Russian has more in common with an average Russian than a high IQ Persian. This is why a high IQ member of a nation in history continued identifying with their nation. A high IQ is just one genetic expression of a group, and it may even come at the cost of other valuable group skills (like in-group preference!).

Thought experiment: you have a group of Northern European Utah Mormons who were selected by both race and culture to be hyper-trusting. Let’s assume they aren’t gay furries. How do you convince them with reason to invite foreigners to live alongside them? The only reason their theology stopped being explicitly racist is that the American government forced the change upon them. I can imagine, you know, that they may want to invite some Chinese or Japanese families for fun. Maybe an Italian architect, maybe a Japanese designer. But why would they ever increase their foreigner proportion by more than 1%? Is this in their interest?

The more we refer to the priestly caste the more I am reminded of Babylon 5.

"Three castes: worker, religious, warrior."
"They build, you pray, we fight."
– Neroon of the Warrior Caste to Delenn of the Religious Caste

What happened to the worker caste in the US? The religious caste outsourced everything?

The religious caste convinced itself that it was the working caste.

Let’s assume they aren’t gay furries.

Cheap shot?

I just didn’t want the inevitable “but how can you forget —“, he is an outlier

Well, Trace isn't a Mormon any more, so I hardly see the relevance.

How would you convince Mormons to invite non-Mormons to live alongside them? I'm not sure. 45% of Utah is non-Mormon, so it doesn't appear to be that difficult, and as far as I'm aware Mormon Utahns don't seem to have any great hatred of their non-Mormon neighbours.

Or is it specifically how you convince 'Northern Europeans' (Nordics? Germanics? Aryans?) to live alongside non-Nordics? That again doesn't seem that hard? Minnesota, for instance, was settled as majority Scandinavian and Germanic, I believe, and it now seems pretty welcoming of non-Nordics.

I just don't particularly see the riddle here. Neither Mormons nor Northern-European/Nordic/Germanic/Aryan/Whatever people are in fact inherently predisposed to exclusionary ethnic communities. You may just be typical-mind-ing here. Perhaps you feel a kind of visceral opposition to living in a community that's something less than 99% Nordic, but demonstrably not even most Nordics feel that way, much less most fair-skinned people, and much less people in general.

You can’t provide a reason for why they would rationally opt into immigration if they knew all the data. Mormons do not have autonomy. So there’s no “revealing preference” here. Nordic countries brought in immigrants under the false belief that everyone in the world is just like them; science and research has now disproven that. If Sweden knew what they knew now, they would never have brought in immigrants. You cannot persuade Swedes logically to do this.

Those are statements of dogma, not reasoned arguments. What reason do you have to think that it's genuinely inconceivable that a majority-Mormon population would ever welcome more than 1% of a non-Mormon population? That Swedes would never welcome more than 1% non-Nordic immigrants? On what basis do you think that? There's at least directional evidence at the moment suggesting that both Mormons and Swedes are happy living in societies that are less than 99% homogenous.

You've also avoided clarifying exactly what you're talking about - I understood you to be making a racial argument here. Presumably Norwegian immigrants to Sweden are fine. German? Slavic? Italian? I am guessing that by 'immigrants' you mean 'non-northern-European immigrants'? Likewise are you assuming that 'Mormons', contextually, means fair-skinned Mormons?

Meaning a high IQ Russian has more in common with an average Russian than a high IQ Persian. This is why a high IQ member of a nation in history continued identifying with their nation.

The Russian elite were for centuries francophiles who disdained the slavic culture of their peasant countrymen. In fact the entire project of 19th century European nationalists was essentially the convincing of high IQ individuals to stop identifying as part of a multinational imperial elite and start identifying with poor farmers who spoke the same language, so it was clearly non-obvious to them that they should do this.

Seems like something that’s still in place today to an extent.

People of the multinational upper class often feel more kinship with one another even though they’re from different countries than they do with the lower class people in their own country.

This is honestly true in my own life. I’m in grad school. My friends are from all over the world. I have a lot more in common with them although they’re from Iran and China and Ecuador than I do with people even in my own family in the US who never left their hometown and whose thinking and interests in life are very foreign to my own.

It’s sort of a self sorting by intellect and interests.

I gather this is what is meant by “globalists”.

the entire project of 19th century European nationalists was essentially the convincing of high IQ individuals to stop identifying as part of a multinational imperial elite and start identifying with poor farmers who spoke the same language

Is what the intelligent wing of the modern right wants basically equivalent to what the old European nationalists were trying to do?

The whitest parts of America are the highest trust.

The highest trust parts of the US aren't "white" as much as they are "red" and "rural". States like Utah, Idaho, Wyoming , and Vermont. Even in bottom tier trust states like Lousiana and New York, the trend holds with the highest trust counties being those with the less urban development and more Trump voters.

their primary ambition should be to maximize how many Europeans exist around them

To what end?

Europeans do not feel this kind of sentiment

And why should I as an American care what Europe thinks? You have yet to make the case that racialism creates better outcomes than a color-blind meritocracy. I also note that when Europe does "enact policies that help their own citizens" those polices are contingent on citizenship and cultural affiliation rather than race with France favoring the French, Spain the Spanish. The notion of "whiteness" or a unified European race is notable in its absense.

Re: the "thought experiment", we convince them the same way we have historically, through the ruthless enforcement of cultal norms. If you don't love God, Guns, Baseball, and Apple Pie you can GTFO of our country.

There was definitely a racial aspect to being French, Spanish, or German until very recently. Or even American. Blacks obviously didn’t have full rights and that was obviously by design.

There was definitely a racial aspect to being French, Spanish, or German until very recently.

Yes, and what i am saying is that to the extent that this is true, the French, Spanish, and Germans did not view themselves as members of a monolithic pan-European "white" race. They viewed themselves as members of the French, Spanish, and German races.

They definitely viewed themselves as white and were white supremacists by today’s standards. It just wasn’t the only thing that defined them. Where do you think the idea of the White race came from? There’s tons of writing over centuries where they talk about this. It was more that there were sub classes of whites and within that other white racial hierarchies.

They definitely viewed themselves as white

Not really no, they viewed themselves as members of the French race, the German race, the Spanish race, the Slavic race, etc...

Where do you think the idea of the White race came from?

Post WWI socialists needed a scapegoat and they latched on to Kipling, or more precisely the people and worldview he represented. Today's woke leftist apple doesn't fall far from it's century-old Marxist tree.

This is just not true. There’s countless amounts of scientific racism, laws, racial codes etc going back to the beginning of the age of discovery. Looks like you’re a big DR3 guy though. I could give you countless examples but you would probably blame it on socialists, democrats, and the left.

Looks like you’re a big DR3 guy

Is that supposed to be a condemnation?

Are you arguing that "socialists, democrats, and the left" are not to blame?

Not really no, they viewed themselves as members of the French race, the German race, the Spanish race, the Slavic race, etc...

They were certainly nationalistic but if you make this extraordinary claim that they thought a white person from a rival neighbor was as alien as a black tribal from exotic Africa, you should provide some extraordinary evidence.

You want evidence? Consider that Generalplan Ost coexisted with a German alliance with the Japanese. That the Molotov Ribbentrop pact, coexisted with war on Norway, Poland, and France. If your example European ethnostate actually believed in a unified pan-European "white" race they had an odd way of showing it.

Precisely, and to the extent that they indulged in racialist theories, those theories made some very fine-grained distinctions among different European peoples. The white/northern-European/Aryan version of the thesis has to be filled with epicycles in order to make it match either historical or contemporary experience.