site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 15, 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.

9
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I have made very similar arguments before, and I remain optimistic that Jews (and East Asians) will reconcile themselves to whiteness in due time, to the incalculable benefit of all involved. I’m very bullish on the Eurasian Imperium future, in which basically the most important categories will be Those Without Substantial African/Negrito Ancestry vs. Those With Substantial African/Negrito Ancestry. I expect Jews to come out on top in pretty much any major re-sorting of ethnic/racial alliances, so obviously it is in the best interests of my descendants to make sure that Jews’ stewardship of that alliance is as benevolent and mutually-beneficial as possible.

In the Roman Imperium, did the Jew reconcile himself to the Aryan, or did the Aryan reconcile himself to The Jew? The adoption of Christianity provides the answer, of course- followed by the collapse of civilization and centuries of what are known as the dark ages.

The Roman Empire wasn't Aryan though it was Latin. Those who we would label "Aryan" today were still a bunch of illiterate peasants living in thatch huts on the far northeastern fringes of the empire.

Native Romans descended from the Bell beaker culture which was created/preceded by the westward migrations of the Corded Ware culture. The Corded Ware culture is the best approximation of a common ancestor of the Roman, Englishman, Russian, and Indo-Aryan. Most of the living Indo-European language branches are descended from Corded Ware, including Italic (i.e. Latin), Celtic, Germanic, Baltic, Slavic, and Indo-Iranian(Aryan) language families.

It's really crazy to think how these languages spoken by half the world descended from this culture.

Europeans are essentially a mix of three different population groups:

  • Eastern/Western Hunter-Gatherers

  • European Farmers (also known as Anatolian farmers)

  • Yamnayan Steppe / Indo-European

The combination of these populations varies between European countries. For example, Southern Europeans have relatively more genetic contribution from European Farmers while Scandinavians have relatively more contribution from the Indo-Europeans.

The Indo-Iranians (who called themselves Aryans) were also descended from Corded Ware culture which is why they already had significant admixture from European farmers in addition to the prominent Yamnayan (European steppe) ancestry. According to David Reich in 2019, the Aryan invaders that contributed genetically to South Asia were ~60% Yamnayan (steppe) ancestry and about 30% European farmer ancestry. This is nearly identical to modern Northern Europeans.

On the other end of the spectrum, the Sardinians have almost no Yamnayan ancestry as it was the only location in Europe that was not touched by Indo-European migrations during the Bronze Age. They are living fossils of the Neolithic European Farmers before the Indo-European invasions of Europe.

So you are technically correct that the Romans did not regard themselves as Aryan. At the same time, there is a very real genetic and linguistic origin shared by the Romans, Celts, Germans, Slavs, and Indo-Iranians that is being evoked by the word "Aryan".

Oh come on, man. I’m a lot more willing to indulge the Jew-hating stuff than many others here, because I think there’s some valuable commentary in there, but the Romans had many other things working against their long-term prospects before, during, and after Christianization. I’ve said plenty of negative things about the conversion of Europe to Christianity - in addition to positive things as well - but I think the direct causal link you’re attempting to draw here is tenuous at best.

I wouldn't call it tenuous since the relation between the two has been the subject of debate for thousands of years (not even to mention the long-term and present-day impact of Christianization), but the main point was that your expectation of solidarity from disparate groups during the Decline of American empire doesn't really have much basis. Your prediction of a Jewish and Asian reconciliation towards Whiteness is way more tenuous than relating the adoption of the Roman-era "woke mind virus" slave morality to its decline and collapse.

I’ve also compared the spread of Christianity to the spread of Woke, so I understand why you would extrapolate this parallel to predict that Christianity’s effect on Rome’s trajectory was exactly as monotonically disastrous as Woke appears to be for European-descended cultures. However, I think it’s every bit as likely that European cultures eventually end up molding Woke toward our own needs and purposes, much as they did with Christianity, defanging its most destructive aspects to achieve some sort of sustainable equilibrium.

I have made very similar arguments before, and I remain optimistic that Jews (and East Asians) will reconcile themselves to whiteness in due time, to the incalculable benefit of all involved.

Are you going to redefine "whiteness" the way it's already been redefined by the woke? Because it sounds like you are proposing not any coherent kind of "white" nationalism, but "ethnicities with high average IQ" nationalism.

I remain bemused by your campaign for a kinder, gentler white nationalism that will be inclusive of Jews and Chinese.

I would not define whiteness that way. But the good anti-racists down at the University of Maryland sort of are. They sort incoming freshmen into the two racial categories:

  • People of Color (not including Asians)

  • whites and Asians

And do you believe them?

The Whites and Asians sorting is amusing considering that May is both Jewish American Heritage Month per OP and Asian American & Pacific Islander Heritage Month.

To the extent that certain parts of the “Woke” coalition recognize that East Asians are “spiritually white” or “white-adjacent”, this is yet another example of a “The Woke Are More Correct Than The Mainstream” moment. And certainly there is a storied history within the race-realist philosophical/anthropological tradition of recognizing Asians as one of the “noble races”. White identitarians’ relationship with Asians has always been somewhat bipolar, with one extreme (such as our dearly-departed Sinophobe @Lepidus) viewing Asians as a bug-like overly-communitarian race, incompatible with free-spirited Europeans, and the other extreme seeing them as a brother race, every bit as capable of building and sustaining glorious civilizations as Europeans are. I lean strongly toward the latter extreme, as do many others. This isn’t some totally quixotic effort in which I’m going it alone.

As for recognizing Jews as white, this has pretty much been the normal mainstream view, even among race realists, for the majority of human history. The early American Renaissance conferences featured a number of staunchly white-identitarian Jews, who were unfortunately later sidelined by the more hardcore Jew-skeptical faction of the movement.