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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023

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Perhaps the creation of a Hapa race, occupying a healthy middle point between the excessive individualism, sentimentality and recklessness of Europeans (the acute failure modes of which we are witnessing all around us) and the excessive communitarianism, coldness and safetyism of Asians, is the key to unlocking a superhuman race of people...

Wait what?

This reminds me of Russia fetishism among the Trad-right. Oh here look a 'traditional" society with a third our church attendance, higher abortion rates, higher divorce rates, lower fertility, extreme alcoholism and spousal abuse... But look at manly Army ad they have. Yes, and what does traditional comradery mean in a nation with Russia's history of de-facto slave armies? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dedovshchina

You can't just use words, and assume that the versions of them that exist in other societies have anything to do with what you are envisionining. What does communitarianism mean here?

Well, even in the most atomized White American neighbourhood, If I have an accident and am dying in public view, I can be 100% certain that someone, who i've never met will stop and try to help me within seconds. Can you say the same in China? Why not?

And how, in the wake of our covid response do you feel like describing Americans as reckless and asians as safetyist, with the ideal somewhere in between, is reasonable. I mean, I know there are some Whites who feel we didn't mask enough, but you might be the first White nationalist sympathetic person I've found expressing that view.

And how, in the wake of our covid response do you feel like describing Americans as reckless and asians as safetyist, with the ideal somewhere in between, is reasonable. I mean, I know there are some Whites who feel we didn't mask enough, but you might be the first White nationalist sympathetic person I've found expressing that view.

To be clear, I am not talking about Covid at all here; I’m as vociferously anti-mask as any right-wing poster here and was from pretty much the second I saw the early IFR estimates for Covid. I’ve never felt more in-sync with the Red Tribe than I did during Covid. However, all that is contingent on the fact that Covid was not remotely as dangerous as it was advertised to be. I do think there is a persuasive case that if it had been the kind of super-pandemic it was initially purported to be, there probably would have been untold millions of working-class white people who would have died like flies from not taking precautionary measures, due to apathy or generalized (justified) distrust of the government or pig-headed “if I want to get sick and die that’s my God-given right”. It happened in this case that those traits were adaptive to the reality of the actual disease, which was a nothingburger; there’s no guarantee that the next pandemic will be as fake and gay, and in that scenario it may very well make sense to talk about whites as reckless.

No, what I actually had in mind were things like the massive disparities in tragic fatalities, firearm accidents, concussions from bar fights, and all the other sorts of mayhem you can encounter in the ER at any major hospital in the U.S., versus what you’ll find at an equivalent hospital in Asia. Yes, I’m aware that the 13% are contributing far more than their fair share to these phenomena, but if all the ADOS got teleported to Jupiter tomorrow, U.S. numbers, and European numbers more generally, would still differ markedly from Asia’s.

Well, even in the most atomized White American neighbourhood, If I have an accident and am dying in public view, I can be 100% certain that someone, who i've never met will stop and try to help me within seconds. Can you say the same in China? Why not?

I do agree with you that China seems qualitatively different from other East Asian countries in some really interesting and unflattering ways. It almost seems to be simultaneously very communitarian - in the sense of high conformity, willingness of the population to follow orders and to not make trouble, and a general low-agency environment - and also low-trust and low-altruism. The worst of both worlds, in a way; all the bad parts of communitarianism without any of the good parts.

However, your post wasn’t just about China; your argument is that this battle is racial; that there’s something about the Asian race generally that makes it fundamentally incompatible with the European race. And what I’m pointing out is that many of the failure modes you’re pointing to appear pretty much specific to China and not generalizable among East Asians as a whole, or even Han Chinese as a whole, given that I don’t think we see some of these problems in Taiwan or in Singapore or in the communities of overseas Chinese in places like Indonesia and the Philippines. So, while I agree that there are points of profound difference that present significant potential for conflict between European-derived civilization and Chinese civilization as currently constituted, I disagree that this conflict is properly a racial conflict.

Yes, I’m aware that the 13% are contributing far more than their fair share to these phenomena, but if all the ADOS got teleported to Jupiter tomorrow, U.S. numbers, and European numbers more generally, would still differ markedly from Asia’s.

And, perhaps as relevantly, US numbers would be much higher than most of Europe's, which would be higher than China's, which would be higher than Japan's.

I mean, yes, obviously there's overlap between the US murder rate and Europe's, but the white homicide rate, firearms death rate, etc is still noticeably higher than, say, France or England or Germany.

What about in an Asian American neighborhood? Do you think they would let you die on the street? If yes, why? If not, what is different between Chinese-Americans and Chinese-Chinese?