site banner
PaperclipPerfector  15d ago (text post)   36590 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 27, 2025

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.

5
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

or the perspective of a ivory tower bureaucrat who is careless with money that isn't his.

I will point out that Scott has given literally hundreds of thousands of dollars of his own money to charity, so whatever else you want to say about the guy, it strikes me as very unfair to accuse him of only giving away other people’s money.

Frankly, I found most of the comments on that post even more vacuous and tendentious than the post itself. Scott’s central argument appears to be that the amount of money given to organizations like PEPFAR is such a tiny drop in the bucket of the government’s total budget that such programs are essentially costless. In this framing, there is no serious trade-off between helping Americans and helping Africans; we can easily do both.

Now, I’m open about the core of my opposition to programs like PEPFAR: I want less Africans, not more. Obviously it would have been better for those rescued Africans to have never been born, rather than for them to suffer and die of preventable illnesses; however, in my opinion it is still better for the future of humanity for them to die rather than for them to live and to continue to multiply until they are the majority of the world’s human population. Routing any significant amount of resources toward increasing the sum total of Sub-Saharan Africans (or even toward keeping the number static) is a gross misuse of those resources: not merely a waste, but in fact one of the most counterproductive imaginable uses of the money.

However, in order to reach this conclusion I’ve obviously had to jettison some of the foundational tenets of Judeo-Christian morality. I don’t expect to be able to persuade people like Scott to adopt my point of view. And if you take seriously his moral beliefs, and also grant the claim that the budget of PEPFAR is so minuscule and utilized so efficiently that it’s not taking away resources that could have made a comparable impact in America, then his post makes a lot of sense.

(Now, one other very persuasive counterargument to him is that much of the NGO money supposedly going to medical treatment is actually being surreptitiously funneled toward funding anti-regime media in these African countries in order to sow political disarray for the geopolitical benefit of the American intelligence community. If someone wants to make that argument to Scott, that would represent an actually-compelling rebuttal to his post.)

I want less Africans, not more.

https://www.condoms.com.au/donate-to-africa/

Routing any significant amount of resources toward increasing the sum total of Sub-Saharan Africans (or even toward keeping the number static) is a gross misuse of those resources: not merely a waste, but in fact one of the most counterproductive imaginable uses of the money.

Yeah, it's subsidizing the proliferation of one of the most low human capital and negative value-add populations of the world.

If money is to be spent by the West in Sub-Saharan Africa, it should be on cash in exchange for tubal ligation for teenage girls and women under 35 or so. We can free SSA girls and women from the oppression of pregnancy and child-rearing, and we can better empower them to focus on their education and careers. If there's cash left over that, the West can pay for and provide stipends for children of all ages getting much-needed gender affirming hormone therapies and surgeries. And then if there's money left over that, to be Inclusive and all, the West can do cash in exchange for vasectomies for the men.

The US withdrawing foreign aid to Africa is not going to decrease the amount of future Africans, unless you can get the rest of the world to agree to a policy of blockade and imposed famine. As it stands, the Chinese, Europeans, Japanese, etc. would be more than happy to pick up the slack and claim the moral high ground, meaning the only result would be damaging America's international reputation while saving a miniscule fraction of the federal budget.

If you want to lower the African population, all you have to do is accelerate their demographic transition through development work i.e. what organizations like USAID are supposed to be doing anyway. Getting girls in school and providing them with contraceptives will tank the birthrate faster than waiting around for them to starve or die in a pandemic (even if you tried bombing them you'd have about as much luck as Israel has had in Gaza). They don't have to become rich to stop having children; France underwent the transition in the 19th century when they were poorer than anywhere on Earth today.

Moreover, if your problem with Africans is their migration to western countries, then all you have to do is not let them in and it becomes a non-issue. If you assume that this is impossible because white people are too altruistic then I don't see how you can imagine getting them to cut off foreign aid either. If your problem is that Africans are taking up land and resources that would be better utilized by higher IQ populations then I refer you to the previous paragraph (or we could just invest in eugenics).

the amount of money given to organizations like PEPFAR is such a tiny drop in the bucket of the government’s total budget that such programs are essentially costless

“Essentially” is doing quite a lot of work there. The existence of a massive cost doesn’t negate the existence of a far smaller but still very large cost.

I will point out that Scott has given literally hundreds of thousands of dollars of his own money to charity, so whatever else you want to say about the guy, it strikes me as very unfair to accuse him of only giving away other people’s money.

I will consider this if he working as hard as he can, living an ascetic life, giving it all away. One gets zero moral points taking the fruits of another person's labor.

I’ve obviously had to jettison some of the foundational tenets of Judeo-Christian morality.

Where did Jesus say one should advocate Caesar take money from others and redistribute it according to one's will?

Is that true? On my phone right now but I’m pretty sure the absolute number of Native Americans in the US is higher than any time in the pre-Columbian era. And were they really better off back then when murder and torture were commonplace ? Maybe, maybe not. But it’s definitely debatable.

In 2010, 5.2 million US Americans identified as native. The pre-Mayflower native population of what is today the US has been subject to many estimates but I think most seem to place it around 5-20 million.

In addition, most of those “natives” as of 2010 were 75%+ non-native by genetic origin and almost all would have been more than 50% non-native, certainly outside of Alaska. So I think it’s quite likely that absent any European colonization there would probably be a higher native North American population, sure.

2025 numbers are way up from 2010 but point taken about European admixture. Most of the explosion in Native American population numbers is just essentially white people self identifying as Native (I won’t name names).

Color me skeptical about pre-Columbian population numbers which are highly influenced by bogus culture war politics. 20 million is wild.

Pre-Columbian population isn't the right basis assuming (as is believed) many natives were wiped out by disease before the US was founded. The Mayflower was in 1620, which is considerably later than 1492.

Tangential, but I was expecting a lot more culture war fallout from Reich's pre-columbian population estimates paper. I guess even in 2020 that fell under "easier to just ignore than attack," especially after Saini's "the return of race science" failed to take him down.

Do you have a link for said paper, or a pointer to it?

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-03053-2

Thank you!

If we want to help Africans, we can invade Africa, redistribute the resources of their war lords, save more lives and profit at the same time. Would Scott support this? If the notion of subsidiarity supersedes the interest to invade, then we can just as easily argue that the notion of subsidiarity supersedes our interest to help.

some of the foundational tenets of Judeo-Christian morality

This is really just the Parable of the Good Samaritan being abused by bad exegetes imo

I don't know if Scott would support invading Africa and imposing more humane governments on the continent, but having read much of his writing, I feel that he would at least give the idea an honest evaluation rather than dismissing it out of hand.

Wrong- we can try to invade Africa and redistribute the resources of their warlords into helping ordinary people. Perhaps a long term occupational state- say, a garrison of cleruchs- can make the lot of African peasants very slightly better. The USA is constitutionally incapable of doing this. What would actually happen if we invaded, say, the DRC is that, first off, things would get way worse because of collateral damage. Then Kinshasa would be rebuilt, until it broke into another civil war, the transitional government stole all the development money, and we wound up back at square one.

If we want to help Africans, we can invade Africa, redistribute the resources of their war lords, save more lives and profit at the same time.

Uh, we tried that in Afghanistan and let's just say it wasn't exactly a profit center for the government (not to even touch on the other points).

If you think we tried to colonize or patronize Afghanistan you are greatly mistaken. We gave them free money

That's not even remotely what we were trying to do in Afghanistan.

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