site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   31956 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 22, 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.

10
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

That's also why I'm more okay with something closer to open borders in the USA: Our culture is already so hollowed out that migrants moving here are probably adding, not subtracting, from whatever "culture" there is in the US.

I knew this was coming. I have read too many “conservative” commentators who decry mass immigration to European countries but celebrate it in America (“because we’re a different sort of country, built on ideas”) to expect anything else. People are perfectly capable of looking at Syrian gang members shooting each other in a Stockholm mall (shouting in Arabic the whole time) and recognizing Those men are not Swedes. They will never be Swedes. Nothing short of a magic spell could turn them into Swedes. And yet when asked to apply the same logic to that same sort of men in America, an impenetrable mental block descends and makes it impossible for even the same commentators to reach the same conclusion.

America is not a special country that exists outside of history. It is not mysteriously immune from the realities of human biology and heredity. “American” is not a magical category that is infinitely capacious and malleable in a way that no other extant ethnicity or nationality is. It was, in fact, founded as an ethnostate, exactly the same way that Sweden was. The men who founded the country said so at the time, and the history of the demography of the country supports that reading. Syrians are no more capable of becoming Americans than they are of becoming Swedes.

There are tens of millions of Americans who can directly trace their descent to families who lived in this country 400 years ago. I am one of them! Those people were settlers and invaders who displaced the indigenous population that had previously occupied that land; that is also true of nearly every human population group on earth. The Europeans who showed up to displace the Iroquois and the Cree did not become Iroquois and Cree. They were a new people, capitalizing on the weakness and decline of the existing population. The exact same is true of the Syrians moving into Sweden.

Unlike the Iroquois, though, Swedes have the actual power and numbers to easily repel this invasion by force of arms at any moment. The Swedish military could locate and forcibly deport or eliminate nearly every Syrian in the country within a month if they desired to. If you believe it would be cruel to do so, that’s fine; I don’t even necessarily disagree! But the fact that they choose not to do so in no way means that the country is benefiting from the presence of those people. The same is largely true of the United States - only the scale of the problem is different.

There is an enormous regional disparity in Italy. Northern Italy is like Germany, rich and highly developed; Southern Italy is like Greece, poor and corrupt. This has been the case for as long as Italy has existed as a country, and no attempts to address the problem have succeeded.

This phenomenon has an obvious HBD explanation: the Southerners are just genetically incapable of having a functional society. And indeed, the further south one goes down the Apennine peninsula, the greater the admixture of non-European genes.

But although most Italian immigrants to America came from Southern Italy (since it was poorer), Italian Americans have integrated seamlessly into White American society. How do proponents of HBD explain the disparity between Southern Italians in Southern Italy and Southern Italians in America? My guess would be that it is caused by cultural and institutional factors. Why do you believe that Syrians, unlike Southern Italians, are not "capable of becoming Americans", even though both groups come from highly dysfunctional societies?

Agree, we need to get rid of the Irish and Italians. The papists are ruining this once great nation.

And so have the birthrates...

More effort than this, please.

We're not scared of the boogeyman because we know how the movie ends.

But it could have gone very differently. The story of Italian and Irish assimilation is not a story of open borders. In fact, quite the opposite. Starting in the late 1920s the United States closed its borders, shutting down almost all immigration. After decades with very little new immigration, the existing migrant stock more or less assimilated into the rest of the population. Unlike today, this "melting pot" culture was deliberately encourage and celebrated.

This success story is the exact opposite of what the open border types encourage.

While I laughed, this kind of drive-by irony isn't the norm here, by design.

Agree it was low effort. I do think however think invoking the Irish is the best response to doomerism about immigration. Today 1/6th of Americans identify as Irish! The great replacement theory already happened by a group of starving refugees with different religions beliefs who answered to a foreign high priest and it worked out pretty well.

The Irish were ethnically almost indistinguishable from the English and Scottish settlers already present in America, and the Catholicism was not that big of a deal--it took America from English to more Dutch or German religious demographics. And even then, as the poster below me says, it caused problems. Also, there wasn't "replacement" going on because the native birthrate was above replacement.

There is not a good comparison to modern immigration policy here.

Ehh. The Irish still were footsoldiers for the big city machines and early 20th century progressives, who, in the end, have made America much worse as a whole.

Historically, the US was in fact capable of assimilating diverse immigrant populations. Maybe we’ve lost that ability due to philosophical trends. Maybe it always was an accident of history, and nations without the economic snowball of the late 1800s can’t replicate such a feat. But clearly, we managed to assimilate Irish and Italian and other cultures to the point they usually get labeled as white.

I live in Texas. We have an enormous South and East Asian population, which has not generated unrest. It’s not that they’re just the best and brightest. Opening up a nail salon or restaurant is not a high-skill occupation. What it does require is buy-in to the American paradigm of advancement. The same is true for Sweden, which is perfectly capable of assimilating anyone who wants to buy in.

It’s easy enough to believe that gangbangers aren’t interested in advancement by legitimate means. Those men aren’t Swedes because they don’t care about being Swedes. They probably wouldn’t become Americans, either (though I guess our cultural products are a lot stronger than the Nordics). Cool, don’t let them in.

I don’t think this applies to the general category of Syrians. Sweden was right to expect an Ellis Island scenario where they get a bunch of productive workers ready to do cheap labor. It’s their implantation of the filters which has fallen short. Improve their ability to reject bad actors—or to convert them into cooperative ones—and Sweden can get this under control.

Those men aren’t Swedes because they don’t care about being Swedes. They probably wouldn’t become Americans, either (though I guess our cultural products are a lot stronger than the Nordics).

Arguably many immigrant-background gang criminals etc. in Sweden and other European countries have assimilated - they just haven't assimilated to the European mainstream cultures but to the omnipresent, America-originated (though these days somewhat detached from that root, ie. UK roadman subculture becoming more common as a point of reference) global underclass subculture, or subcultures.

Many of the biggest issues in Sweden re: immigrants are due to outlaw biker gangs (Saturadah is known to be immigrant-oriented), but biker gangs have been an issue in the Nordic countries even before immigrant crime really became a thing. There arguably is not a single form of organized crime more American, both regarding its origins and cultural signifiers, than outlaw biker gangs.

Furthermore, of course, there are a plenty of immigrants in Sweden and immigrants who have assimilated completely to Swedish mores, even if these might be liberal Swedish mores. During my career in left-wing youth politics here I visited Sweden to meet the local left youth organization a few times, and saw little difference between members coming from native Swedish or immigrant backgrounds; often both types were able to trigger an automatic Finnish "goddamn Swedes..." reaction somewhere in my subconsciousness.

I think most of the issue is a problem that’s really based on the idea that there’s no gradation to ideas, and that no ideas are inherently better or worse than any other ideas. It’s lead us to become the culture of the indulgent parent who cannot help but give the children in their home exactly what they want exactly when and how they want it. That’s probably the biggest difference between the Great Assimilations of the past and now.

If you moved to America or Sweden or anywhere in Western Europe, you were expected to assimilate. You had to speak English in America, you had to learn to dress like Americans, to like American culture (or at least be okay with it). You had to send your kids to American schools where they would absolutely learn American culture. The same sort of process happened in other countries. I don’t think that a Muslim immigrant in 1900 would have been permitted to wear a Hijab or skullcap. They certainly wouldn’t have been able to demand that schools and workplaces install ritual baths or schedule their work/school day around prayer times. That forced them to assimilate.

We’re honestly doing the opposite, and not only not forcing new immigrants to join the mainstream, but actually unassimilating our native populations by allowing various “lobby ethnics” to simply carve out accommodations for whatever weird fetish, weird dress or hairstyles they want to wear, or practices they want to do. And the rest of us are taugh very early on that raising any objections to weird thing people do is wrong. It’s even wrong to express the idea that there is or should be a norm. Teaching the old books, talking about the old religious heritage, all of this is simply thought crime.

And thus we’re creating a cultural chaos where you can never exactly trust that anyone around you shares anything with you. Maybe he has a pooping on the floor fetish. Maybe he believes in jihad. Maybe he just meditates all day. Maybe they’ll wear pajamas, maybe he’ll dress in a Muslim robe or wear Tizit, or a suit. They might speak English or not. It’s impossible to share a culture.

You had to speak English in America, you had to learn to dress like Americans, to like American culture

Really? Could not all sorts of languages be heard on the streets of the large cities (and in some cases elsewhere) for decades and decades after the immigration took off, whether it be Yiddish, German, Polish or something else? Indeed one occasionally reads those stories about the remnants of an immigrant community in some place or other where the old-timers still speak another European language.

True, but if you for some reason want to go out into the wider world — for work, for recreation, for education, whatever it might be, you had to at least get onboard with the dress, customs, and language of America. You couldn’t get a job and expect them to accommodate your cultural or religious garb. You wouldn’t be allowed to continue to speak your native language outside the enclave especially at work or school. This forced people to eventually assimilate.

Some of the difference is technology. I have Google translate and I can thus understand at a basic level, most languages well enough to do a very basic interaction. The rest is a sort of malaise that assumes that a country can actually survive as a cohesive unit without at least some baseline of a shared culture. The idea that one should be permitted to “let their freak flag fly” is corrosive because it’s precisely those shared expectations, morals, and folkways that produce social trust. I can’t really know that a person who behaves wildly out of the mainstream shares any of my values. I don’t know what would and wouldn’t offend them. This leads to less social interaction and often much shallower interactions because I can’t know what’s safe for polite conversation.

Yeah, non-English, native language institutions and schools were the norm for most of American history, and were even legally codified in many states. That only reversed during our WW1 xenophobic fervor, and even then the Supreme Court ruled its illegal to forbid native language schools.

I don’t think that a Muslim immigrant in 1900 would have been permitted to wear a Hijab or skullcap.

To be precise, they would have been legally permitted, but people would have been permitted to deny them employment or services on those grounds. In at least some respects, it was a freer time all around.

  • I don’t think that a Muslim immigrant in 1900 would have been permitted to wear a Hijab or skullcap. They certainly wouldn’t have been able to demand that schools and workplaces install ritual baths or schedule their work/school day around prayer times.

I mean, unless they were in a Muslim-heavy immigrant community. You certainly had thatt sort of... not quite enclave, but significant presence, in some areas, I believe down to things like German-language newspapers, for instance.

Sweden was right to expect an Ellis Island scenario where they get a bunch of productive workers ready to do cheap labor.

Completely inaccurate. It's not like there weren't previous examples to draw from. Mass immigration to Europe didn't start with the Syrian War.

One look at the French banlieues should have given an observant Swede all he needed to know. Ellis Island comparisons from a hundred years ago strain credulity when there are recent examples much closer to home.

I don’t think this applies to the general category of Syrians. Sweden was right to expect an Ellis Island scenario where they get a bunch of productive workers ready to do cheap labor.

What why? These are literally men who refused to take a side in a civil war.

I don’t follow.

A male Syrian refugee had the option of, instead, joining the Syrian Armed Forces, the Syrian National Army, or the Free Syrian Army and/or providing material support for one of those.

This is a very easy comment to make from, one imagines, the comfort of the West.

The comforts of the West having been provided to me because some of my ancestors took the hard road. Look at the Constitution wise men wisely put in the word "Posterity".

I think you should read what the founders thought about titles of nobility. They explicitly say it's bad to consider yourself any more special or claim any special privileges due to what your ancestors did.

Ignoring "all men are created equal" because of this one single word "posterity" that may not even mean literal descent is bizarre. I'm always confused by people who identify so much with being Western or American and still hold such anti-individualistic and anti-meritocratic values.

I expressed a very meritocratic opinion about Syrian refugees.

More comments

And if you were John Paul Jones I would not have quibbled with the comment. You don't get to take some sort of vicarious credit for the actions of your ancestors, and that their actions helped deliver the prosperity you live in that hardly gives you the right to pontificate on the bravery or otherwise of Syrian refugees.

You don't get to take some sort of vicarious credit for the actions of your ancestors

They would probably disagree.

Of course.

If you're suggesting his unwillingness to join one of those armies means he will be reluctant to do normal labor, I have to disagree. Staying in a warzone is unappealing for any number of reasons. A wife and kids, for example.

deleted

America has never been an ethnostate. If anything it is the literal anti-ethnostate. As far back as 1776, Thomas Paine pointed out that less than a third of Pennsylvanians were of English descent and so any claims of being an English nation were already moot.

The direction has been clear since then: from just Anglos to accepting all Germanic and Celtic peoples to accepting all "Judeo-Christians" and so on. I too have colonial ancestry, but I don’t see how my New England Puritan, New Netherland Dutch, and Palatine German ancestors formed any sort of ethnos. They certainly wouldn't have said so, those of them that even had a language in common to communicate in. Their blood may be mingled in me now, but so is that of subsequent waves of immigration from Europe and Asia. Where do you draw the line?

There is a path towards a single American nation, the same one followed by the Romans from a civic identity that encompassed the whole of the Mediterranean world from Gauls to Numidians to an ethnic one of Greek-speaking Romanoi living in the Eastern Empire after losing most of the Middle East to the Arab invasions.

However, the road to Byzantium is a hard one and involves the loss of prestige and power on the world stage and a retrenchment into more parochial, local concerns. In many ways we are already on it, but it is not the rediscovery of a centuries old white ethnic identity (though depending on the exact demographics it may be framed that way by some) but rather the binding together of those populations that are already here, be they of European, African, Asian, or indigenous descent, and from our perspective it may seem as strange for that new people to claim the mantle of "American" as it would be for Augustus to see some Greek Christian from Anatolia in the 10th century claiming to be "Roman."

America has never been an ethnostate. If anything it is the literal anti-ethnostate. As far back as 1776, Thomas Paine pointed out that less than a third of Pennsylvanians were of English descent and so any claims of being an English nation were already moot.

While it is true that Pennsylvania and the Southern upcountry weren't ethnically homogeneous by any means, the colonial and early US absolutely had an ethnic nation: Yankee New England. It was a ridiculously homogeneous area -- culturally and ethnically -- for North American subsequent experience. Their culture was also very influential on American culture generally for a long time, too. So, America has historically had at least sub-national ethno-states in the past.

Now, however, they have greatly subsumed into 'general American' culture, fully assimilating into the broader gestalt of the republic. When was the last time you ever saw someone called a 'WASP'? Even New England itself is plurality Catholic these days so, while Yankee heritage is still probably very widespread there, there is a new ethnicity living in New England that is descended from the Yankees and a whole lot of newcomers.

There are tens of millions of Americans who can directly trace their descent to families who lived in this country 400 years ago. I am one of them! Those people were settlers and invaders who displaced the indigenous population that had previously occupied that land; that is also true of nearly every human population group on earth.

I have ancestors who were on the Mayflower, and mostly-indigenous ancestors from Mexico, and I work with a bunch of guys from India. Even if we acknowledge the "realities of biology and heredity", my intuition is that there's plenty of "good stock" from the rest of the world that we can import into the United States to our own and their benefit. Every culture has its elites, and even "backwards" cultures like Ireland have been able to overcome low IQ's and become functional societies with an influx of resources.

It's a big 'if', but if we were able to screen every immigrant for either high-IQ or high-Conscientiousness, and remove those with violent criminal histories, I wouldn't have any issue letting in massive numbers of people into the country, up to what we could safely educate into American culture and values. America would definitely change, but that would inevitably happen even with closed borders, and an America built of either the smartest or hardest working people in the world seems like one that I would be proud to pass on to my children, even if wasn't 100% identical to the America I grew up in.

but if we were able to screen every immigrant

What would have to happen in America to make this true?

You admit it's a big if, it sounds more like an impossible dream to me.

We don't even get everyones name now.

I agree with you that there was a point at which the US had a meaningful culture to defend. My point is that at some point along the line, the waves of mass migration to the US, along with economic ("right wing") and cultural ("left wing") liberalism, destroyed any meaningful, unified culture the country had. Yes, there are people who can trace their descent to the Mayflower, but they are a very small percentage of the current US population (and I also think that a lot of them no longer care about, protect, or even know the culture and traditions their ancestors brought here). Given this situation, I think the benefits of ~open borders (to both the migrants and the country) outweigh the harms. If you talked to me 70 years ago, maybe I'd go the other way, but we're way past the point that Sweden only passed about a decade or two ago and could still meaningfully reverse.

Culture isn't a glass that can only be emptied. It can be filled as well.

After the U.S. stopped almost all immigration in the 1920s, there was a considerable amount of ethnogenesis and culture building that happened for the next several decades.

If we stopped mass immigration again (still allowing for small amounts of talented immigration) I think we could see a similar result. The America that emerges in 2070 wouldn't be the same as today, but it would be distinctly American as opposed to the corporatized globalhomo we're descending into today.

Globohomo is neocolonialism. It's pushed by more than our corporate overlords. It's the state religion of PMC women, homosexuals and their allies.

it would be distinctly American as opposed to the corporatized globalhomo we're descending into today

What is "corporatized globalhomo" if not distinctly American? Ask any Frenchman, Russian, or Indian and they will tell you quite clearly where it comes from. Now that doesn't necessarily make it good, but some monsters are homegrown.

Corporatized globalhomo is not distinctly American. It is merely what happens when there is no unifying national identity or purpose. It takes root anywhere there is not something strong to resist it. Which is why it has also colonized Germany, Australia, UK, and Canada (but less so France and much less Japan).

France is so globohomo that gay men told me when I was there, that there are no gay bars anymore (outside of Paris) because it's depassé so all the gays go to straight bars. I assume that means they're so integrated into mainstream society that the distinction between gay and straight bars just doesn't exist. As a gay man this sounds horrible because I don't want to be rejected by 90% of the men at a straight bar and I don't want to just hit on the obviously homosexual ones.

And regarding Japan, have you watched the NHK lately? Their news is more globohomo than NPR half the time (though I suspect it's more reflective of an attempt at fawning to the international media/pleasing Americans as propaganda than any actual reflection of the beliefs of the people of Japan). Their traditional culture does seem like a strong defense against globohomo however, I would broadly say that South Korea feels more globohomo than Japan though it's hard to say how much of that is due to SK's much more recent modernization than Japan's. Japan feels more mid-20th century while SK feels more 21st century, so SK has more globohomo while Japan has more of a mid 20th century hippie Beatles energy (still!).

Germany has gone so globohomo because of a very German obsession with not appearing to align with Nazism and don't seem to have the desire to dream up anything other than the American globohomo enterprise. The UK actually feels less globohomo to me as the culture is so pessimistic that they don't take globohomo very seriously and just seem to put up with whatever's going on in a passive way. I haven't been to Australia at all or Canada very much so I can't comment on the globohomo invasion of these places.

Edit: After re-reading your comment I do actually agree with what you said, I formulated my response as a knee-jerk reaction to the idea that France and Japan aren't globohomo at all (which isn't what you said.) So excuse me. I do agree that strong local cultures are a bulwark against globohomo.

It was, in fact, founded as an ethnostate, exactly the same way that Sweden was. The men who founded the country said so at the time, and the history of the demography of the country supports that reading.

Where was this?

No, I mean where is the proof that the people founding America intended it as an ethnostate?

I figured that is where you where asking for, but you where not asking very clearly. Here is an example of an American founding father speaking on the subject of race and ethnicity.

https://reimaginingmigration.org/benjamin-franklin-and-german-immigrants-in-colonial-america/

Okay. But that is one person, is this a more widely held opinion?

But how could America have been founded in America if America didn't exist prior to the founding of America?

Don't post low-effort jeers like this.

And yet when asked to apply the same logic to that same sort of men in America, an impenetrable mental block descends and makes it impossible for even the same commentators to reach the same conclusion.

Part of the issue here is that America defines nationality not along ethnic lines, but by citizenship (so does France, although this appears less in Anglophone discussions). Swede refers both to citizenship and generally to a specific subset of Scandinavian heritage. I'd say these map generally to language groups, but that's not fully the case (there are Swedish-speaking Finns): identity is a complex and often locally-defined concept, and Americans have generally embraced the "Melting Pot" outlook that "American" is not an ethnic group.

The problem is that "Those men are not [Americans]. They will never be [Americans]" is not obviously a true statement: one can absolutely (with appropriate vetting, which is hopefully not open to gang members shooting each other in malls) choose to become an American. One can become a citizen of Sweden, but our linguistic blurring of Swede referring to both heritage and citizenship makes "becoming a Swede" less obviously correct.

there are Swedish-speaking Finns

Who are actually ethnic Swedes living in Finland.

If one wants to be pedantic, there are also Swedish-speaking Finns living in Sweden. (As in, people belonging to the minority called "Swedish-speaking Finns" - and I know enough Swedish-speaking Finns to know that is indeed exactly their self-identification - who have migrated to Sweden.)

If I’m reading the OP correctly, he’d say that form of “becoming” an American isn’t good enough. Unless one adopts American values, one effectively remains in their original culture. I’m pretty sure he’s saying American values require something very similar to being a WASP.

Another term is to call it a Lockeian understanding of individuals and nations.

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