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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29600 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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Let's start at the beginning. I previously tried to track down The List's origin but gave up after I only found xeroxed pamphlets. Turns out that Okun wrote The List in a fit of frustration, without any research whatsoever

Wait, I'm not going to listen to the damn podcast episode but isn't this part pretty straightforward? The Smithsonian's infographic helpfully reports its origins:

Image: © NMAAHC, All Rights Reserved. Download PDF. Data Source: "Some Aspects and Assumptions of White Culture in the United States", by Judith H. Katz, ©1990. The Kaleel Jamison Consulting Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

They co-occur in other contexts, like this memo on White Culture on seattle.gov website:

White Culture description comes from many sources, including: Tema Okun-White Supremacy Culture, 2001. Judith Katz –Some Aspects and Assumptions of White Culture in the United States, 1985. Robette Ann Dias - Transforming Institutional Values: Revisited, 2008. Joseph Barndt – Understanding and Dismantling Racism: The Twenty-First Century Challenge to White America, 2007. p. 234. Barbara Major – Chapter 7 - How does White Privilege Show Up in Foundation and Community Initiatives?, from Flipping the Script: White Privilege and Community Building.

Here's Katz's original, and as one can easily see it is essentially cited verbatim in the infographic. I don't know what Okun's contribution even is.

Katz is, in my opinion, making very fair and logical arguments for the case that white culture provides advantages to her fellow writes:

When the participants finally were able to move through the layers of denial, avoidance, shame, and confusion, they began to generate in their groups a fairly consistent listing of dimensions that characterize White Culture in the United States. While it was clearly understood that not all whites believe in the same set of assumptions and values, it was also clear that White Culture forms the underpinnings of what many whites believe is “appropriate” behavior in many organizations. White Culture I the lens through which many white people view, evaluate and judge themselves and others regarding what is “professional” and “normal” behavior in many contexts.

These assumptions, as stated above, get baked into the policies, practices, and norms or our organizations. When that occurs it puts whites at advantage – cultural advantage – and all other groups at a disadvantage. It creates “Affirmative Action for Whites,” i.e., a playing field that is slanted to our advantage.

If our organizations are going to be fair for all so we can leverage the diversity of the workforce, we as whites must expose the positive cultural bias that organizations have for us to the light of day. We must make it visible and acknowledged and known. We must ensure that white cultural aspects are utilized when they are appropriate and add value for the benefit of all. And we also must ensure that they are not utilized when they prevent some groups from making their full added-value contribution.

Indeed! In a culture where adherence to rigid time schedules, hard work, protecting property, self-reliance, objective rational linear thinking etc. are not only less valorized but held to be cringe and fascist, would whites have any advantage? I suspect that they'd still have some. But elevate a few equally important dimensions for which White culture couldn't even develop nuanced enough concepts – e.g. sassiness, swag, chutzpah, assabiyah, ghayrah, cha bu duo, jugaad, shikata ga nai, ponyatiya – and you'll see them first fall behind, then run away in shame to their ancestral homelands.

Whites have to make an explicit argument as to why rules prioritizing their culture are better for everyone.

Please explain how the remnant culture left over at that point avoids being outcompeted, crushed, and enslaved by one that still values objective thinking and hard work. What, you just put the sassiest guys you can find in charge of military R&D and hope you maintain a technological edge based on chutzpah? Fill your logistical chain with guys who don't adhere to schedules but have a lot of swag?

My impression is that woke activitists assume that there is functionally infinite seedcorn and that they can complete the worldwide revolution before people begin (literally and metaphorically) starving and they themselves get eaten. That things like a healthy social fabric and functioning economy and strong military just spring out of the ground, or at least America's versions of those things are resilient enough to never fail.

Please explain how the remnant culture left over at that point avoids being outcompeted, crushed, and enslaved by one that still values objective thinking and hard work

Well, obviously it'll do so by succeeding with the universal cultural takeover against all major competitors to begin with, and also – possibly – by guilt-tripping the cream of the crop of «white culture» inferiors into maintaining automatic weaponry and such. I suppose that's the plan.

also – possibly – by guilt-tripping the cream of the crop of «white culture» inferiors into maintaining automatic weaponry and such.

That doesnt really sound like retreating to ancestral homelands to me.

I can't believe I'm saying this, but it is lucky for humanity that the Chinese don't care about western morality.

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If the legal and enforcement apparati are all filled with the swaggilicious and biased against the objective hard workers, the crushing goes the other way.

What swaggy beat cop is gonna take orders from some old-ass captain?

If the orders comport with what the beat cop wants to do anyway, it doesn't matter where the orders come from.

Sure it does. Obedience implies submission, which is not swag.

...I'm not sure that most people's thought processes are that formalized or sophisticated.

Indeed! In a culture where adherence to rigid time schedules, hard work, protecting property, self-reliance, objective rational linear thinking etc. are not only less valorized but held to be cringe and fascist, would whites have any advantage? I suspect that they'd still have some. But elevate a few equally important dimensions for which White culture couldn't even develop nuanced enough concepts – e.g. sassiness, swag, chutzpah, assabiyah, ghayrah, cha bu duo, jugaad, shikata ga nai, ponyatiya – and you'll see them first fall behind, then run away in shame to their ancestral homelands.

Whites have to make an explicit argument as to why rules prioritizing their culture are better for everyone.

I thought we sorted all this out back in the day. We let the Maxim gun do the talking, determined whose culture was best in a fair and objective fashion. Japan copied our notes and everyone else got wrecked.

At no point has anyone challenged our physical mastery of the environment, it's only these niggling mental/psychic attacks that are doing us in. It's unfair in a sense for the Mule to take over the First Foundation, he never contested them strength to strength. Of course, he got his way since mind control overmatches physical power. No argument is more important than success. But it's not that he had some greater organizational skill, some superior knowledge of technology, he had no powerful energy source... He was never operating on the same metrics of strength and success as they were.

Losing to China would be a noble defeat, in the sense that the PLA storming the last redoubts in Washington and London proves that we failed at our own standards of military efficiency and technical sophistication. But getting culture-broken by Katz and her kin is something else entirely. No argument is more important than success, yet some successes are better than others.

At no point has anyone challenged our physical mastery of the environment, it's only these niggling mental/psychic attacks that are doing us in. It's unfair in a sense for the Mule to take over the First Foundation, he never contested them strength to strength.

But have you considered that the focus on «fairness» is scrub mentality, and ironically at odds with «Win at all costs» value that Katz attributes to Whites? That «we wuz» attitude is deservedly mocked by people with the strongest white identification, too? You cannot rest on your laurels and simply demand admiration, appealing to some objective truth. Will you whip out your Maxim guns again? A word to another descendant of Aaron regarded as a great teacher in the West, the author of one of my favorite poems:

Any system you contrive without us will be brought down

We warned you before

and nothing that you built has stood

Hear it as you lean over your blueprint

Hear it as you roll up your sleeve

Hear it once again

Any system you contrive without us

will be brought down

You have your drugs

You have your guns

You have your Pyramids your Pentagons

With all your grass and bullets

you cannot hunt us any more

All that we disclose of ourselves forever is this warning

Nothing that you built has stood

Any system you contrive without us

will be brought down

Sure, some successes are more important than others. And the point of winning is to define which is which.

I admitted that winning is the key thing and we are clearly not winning. The kind of 'fairness' I was talking about is lesser to winning.

I was thinking about some kind of right-to-rule mechanism but couldn't quite articulate it. The First Foundation had a better understanding of physics than the fringes who struggled maintaining their atomics, they were better organized than the declining Empire on Trantor. That gave them legitimacy since they were more efficient in using external resources, that's where they got their power from. Because of that strength, they could run society better. They were fairly happy and prosperous, everyone else was declining. The Mule wasn't better at using external resources, he had the power without the legitimacy. If he showed up in Ancient Egypt he could only rule Ancient Egypt, he couldn't improve it significantly. If the Foundation arrived in Ancient Egypt, they could. And the Mule was worsening the Foundation during his brief rule I think, he crushed their creative spirit with his mind control.

That's only a fiction but it captures what I'm trying to say. Winning is the most important thing, but it is not everything. Winning through actual superior strength, through a more advanced understanding of the universe is better than winning because of your wordcel skills and the tolerance of your victims.

Being punctual, precise, professional, rational, hard-working and so on are closer to the universal norms of efficiency. Just because Katz and co pull some mental judo trick that makes good things unfashionable, it does not follow that they're actually worse. There's not some kind of cultural relativism where all values are equal. Some actually do work and others fail. Even if the good values have dysfunctional predators, they're still good and they still work. Maybe all we needed was the ability to ignore all these naysayers and whiners, the ability to say 'compelling argument, now face the wall'. We were 95-99% right, just missing the error-protection code that prevents these cancers emerging.

I would say the first burden of proof is not on white people why rules that benefit their cultural values benefit everyone, but rather that these cultural values have anything to do with white people at all. Indeed i think that was the initial point of contention with the whole infographic thing. I would argue that hard work, urgency, rational and linear thinking, etc., regardless of how valuable they are, are values shared by people of a huge range of ethnicities/races/cultural backgrounds etc..

Towards the second point i would further say that this is the case largely because these values or whatever we want to call them are in fact better for the cultures that prioritize them. I think the short version of the argument for why this is the case is that history has sort of made this argument for us. Cultures throughout history that have valued these things have fared better, for the most part, than those that did not. Another would be that if you find yourself on an uninhabited island, devoid of any sort of society that may advantage or disadvantage you arbitrarily, it seems obvious that valuing urgency, hard work, and rational and linear thinking would on its own provide a pretty substantial advantage over not valuing those things (or over sassiness or some other example), in the face of predation, starvation, the elements, and all the rest.

There's a totally valid point to be made i think about how what values a culture prioritizes are a subset of the universe of ones that are valuable, and probably that the boundaries of this subset are to a degree a product of "white culture", whatever that actually is, at least the United States. But you can make that argument without denying non-white people any ownership in universally valued and valuable things like hard work or, for christs sake, rational thinking, which the unfortunate infographic failed to do.

I would say the first burden of proof is not on white people why rules that benefit their cultural values benefit everyone, but rather that these cultural values have anything to do with white people at all.

Well that's the rub isn't it? The IdPol brain-worm seems to eat a person's ability to cleanly draw that distinction. A common thread that carries through both the woke left and the alt right is this weird prevarication/doublethink surrounding race and culture.

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