site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 24, 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.

4
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

... a few million? self_made is evidently smarter than most american whites, and HBD should tell us the indian average is lower, so

... a few million? self_made is evidently smarter than most american whites, and HBD should tell us the indian average is lower, so

Why should HBD tell you that? India's been pretty civilised for ages, and Indians have the same basic subspecies makeup as whites AIUI (and there was plenty of geneflow even after OoA2; Persia wasn't a hard barrier, which is why Indians look more like whites than they do Chinese). I would expect the average Indian IQ to have been lower in the 20th century due to the Flynn effect, but I don't see a reason to suspect a large genetic difference. If you have something I'm not aware of, I'm all ears.

Indian students score so poorly on the PISA exams that their government pulled out in embarassment. Most lines of evidence suggest that there is extreme IQ stratification in India, with only certain high-caste subgroups performing at or above European or East Asian levels.

So, a substantial part of the Indian population has the Y-DNA haplogroup R, which is a European lineage almost certainly introduced to India by the Aryan steppe invasion which conquered the existing Dravidian culture in the north of the subcontinent and introduced Indo-Aryan language and culture.

However, there is a gradient of R ancestry which is stronger in the north and much more rare in the south of the continent, where more South Asian Y-haplogroups such as L and H are far more prevalent. And of course once you look at mitochondrial ancestry, which comes from female ancestors, you see far more Asia- and India-specific lineage, such as the M haplogroup. This is consistent with the story of male conquerors intermingling with local women of Dravidian ancestry in the north and spreading their DNA in areas where they had political and cultural control. Over time their ancestry has been diluted substantially by intermarriage with people of ancient pre-Aryan Indian ancestry — people related to the Austronesian peoples of Southeastern Asia.

The big question mark over the Austronesians from my POV is the substantial Denisovan admixture, which fits the pattern of (lack of) civilisation suspiciously well. According to WP the Denisovan admixture in Indians is of a smaller level, similar to that in Orientals.

That's a ton of people. We should not be inviting millions of people into the country. That's too much by an order of magnitude, and we're only talking about one country that is not compatible with our values and culture.

The US currently has 40M people who were born in foreign countries? I can see the argument that that's too much, but a few million doesn't seem like that many to our current 350M.