site banner
naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31609 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 16, 2023

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.

13
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Wait, Russia wants to conduct population replacement?

In effect yes. Or at least people who matter in Russia do and act on this intention. You can consider this analysis to be representative of the underpinning rationale. Immigrants are an economic necessity in the simplifying Russian economy (simplifying, to some extent, because of adaptation to uneducated slave labor), see. Russians don't want to work for subsistence wages, don't breed enough, and we sure can't entice people from nations with high human potential to come over.

Moreover, even in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic crisis, Russia continues to be in need of foreign workers. Marat Khusnullin, RF Deputy Prime Minister, in an interview with the RTVI television channel at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, emphasized that "...the lack of migrants is a great risk for the country's economy, and now is the main problem in construction. Nearly 50 per cent of migrants work in the construction sector. And unfortunately there is a low level of productivity in construction which makes it impossible to do without migrant labour in the next one to two years. Russians, unlike migrants, are not prepared to work 12 hours a day at a construction site for around 50,000 rubles at the most. The average wage makes up 25 per cent of the cost of construction and up to 50 per cent in some cases. Using the labour of migrants reduces the cost of construction. [46].

Of course, one must recognize that experts arguing for it are mostly blank slatists with leftist politics (and their sponsors are capitalists who couldn't care less about identities of worker bees), so they're not really thinking of this in terms of population replacement where populations are substantial entities. Like the late demographer Vishnevsky (also known as Rabinovich) argued,

Russia does not need Chinatowns or African villages, but a real migrant adaptation machine. [...] When there was a mass migration of peasants to cities in the USSR, essentially they were the same Africans. Yes, the language was the same, the people were identical, but very different cultures clashed. There was a system of "digestion": elimination of illiteracy, workers' schools, cultivating a desire for education. It was not always good, but it was implemented on a large scale and more or less functioned, allowing many immigrants from the countryside to master the urban culture. The authorities recognised the need for this work and allocated funds. Teachers were enthusiastic and felt they were missionaries, bringing culture to the masses, and their work was not tedious. If we managed to re-create something like this in relation to migrants, there would be a result. But there is no demand for it. Meanwhile, it would be fatal to hesitate: the larger the population of a country, the more migrants it can digest. Right now we have one hundred and forty-three million people, and when we finally recognize what needs to be done, there may only be one hundred million left.

So, if done well, there's no loss here, Russians and non-Russians are fully fungible.

And who do they want to replace their population with?

The same offer you've seen above, Central Asian Turkic peoples mainly.

I was under the impression that the country was fairly racist and slavic-supremacist.

Sure, that's what one can get from listening to Western Neo-Nazi Putin Stans and from resentful Washington "policy experts" of Baltic stock (who are, ironically, wielding quasi-woke anti-colonial discourse and Pride badges to obscure their own SS roots) alike. Or from our pal Kamil Galeev, who seeks to advance his tribe and admits gleefully to exploiting gullible Westoids by feigning admiration of their naive slogans. There's plenty of trivia to substantiate the accusation. «Russians have a slur for every nation and ethnicity they've interacted with», so popular on Twitter (who doesn't?). «Russian landlords discriminate against non-Slavs» (of course, Americans of all people know how this goes and just why the market may reward making inferences from a person's ancestry; except their supposedly most-oppressed minority is American, genetically different but of the same language and faith and comprehensive civilizational background, and not straight out of an impoverished society stuck between tradition and modernity, in the middle of a tribal conflict, rife with opiate abuse, underground Salafi mosques and ISIS sympathies). «Here's a list of a dozen minority surnames of military dead in Ukraine, this is evidence Ruskies have smuggled an ethnic cleansing into the war!» Or, like, «there was an unironic Neo-Nazi march in Moscow... just 10 years ago!» People who seriously parrot this crap are either ignorant or knowingly deceptive, just happy to get some rhetorical ammo for their preconceived attitude with regard to Russians.

In reality, Russians are about as racist and supremacist as is typical for Eastern Europe. Of course, far more ethnic Russians than Western Europeans are racist as hell, but they have about as much systemic power to act on this prejudice as Appalachian Whites. Many, especially of the older generations, are thoroughly brainwashed by the false Communist era messaging of давно поперемешались все/нет никаких русских – «we've all been mixed up long ago anyway/there aint such thing as an [ethnic] Russian» – message that fails to convince peoples with healthier ethnic self-identification and thriving diasporas. All have to respect the authoritah of «ethnics»; not a single one among well-known people in Russia is more dangerous to offend than Ramzan Kadyrov, privates serving on a strategic nuclear site can be wantonly bullied and robbed by a random local ethnic bandit, and for your average small business owner local Dagestani mafia matters at least as much as local cops. Putin tries to appeal to our schizophrenic «multinational Russian people» by saying he's a Lakh, an Ingush and so on. He sometimes courts with Russians too, saying that we should try to attract diaspora Russians even more than other immigrants. And of course there's the 'Triune Russian People' pretext for the war.

But that's about it.

Interesting. It seems like there’s not enough people in the stans to actually replace Russia, and even the would be replacement theorists know it.

Stans have high (and increasing, post-USSR) TFR, so in the long run something may work out, but yeah, this far it only slows down the process of decline, even in Russia alone. Which is why the suggestion to repopulate Ukraine with those guys is preposterous.

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