site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 3, 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.

6
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

If "racial homogeneity" and "supererior aryan genetics" really are the be-all end-all of success how

Whose strawman are you attacking now?

Is biodeterminism biodeterministic or not?

It'd determine almost everything were we beings who did not need mineral resources or foodstuffs to exert their will.

We do need these things.

And in any case you'd be hard-pressed to find any non-drooling racist who'd tell you that he believes anglo-saxons are inferior to Germans.

So I'm really not sure what you're aiming at here.

It'd determine almost everything were we beings who did not need mineral resources or foodstuffs to exert their will.

Why doesn't it determine the acquisition of material resources and foodstuffs?

I honestly don't think I'm being uncharitable or an ass to ask this. The term is "biodeterminism", but now we're talking about resources and food, presumably tied to arable land. That ain't genes any more, is it? We can soften the theory to say that superior genes give a considerable advantage that tells in the long-term, but then there's the problem that the only long term we can test this against is the past, which we already know the results of, and we're not actually going to be around to see a similar stretch of the "long-term" future, are we?

It's typically relevant when talking about outcomes for individuals sharing a culture.

Like you said, if you want to talk about outcomes for nations, there's too many variables.

Okay, what's the determined outcome that we should expect, given the evident bio?

There was a passage you posted once, that talked about how if you stepped through the last few hundred years in fifty-year increments, reasonable predictions would be completely blown out every time. I can imagine reasons why that sort of pattern might not continue, since there's good reasons to think the last few hundred years have been unusually prone to chaos... but why would one be sure the chaos has concluded?

You talk about Anglos devouring the light-cone, an eventuality that, accounting to translation, I think I agree would be less than preferable. Are they going to devour the light-cone because their biology determines it?

Okay, what's the determined outcome that we should expect, given the evident bio?

For the most part, SAT scores and the like – the distribution of individual human traits.

It also explains how North Koreans can have a functional, technologically sophisticated, orderly society in a situation that would have caused any African nation to implode in months.

It goes without saying that HBD is a skeleton key to a lion's share of American political enigmas.

But you probably understand the intellectually serious version of HBD at this point anyway; this flirtation with Hlynka's «Aryans of pure blood r superiors und prevail» Hitlerist gibberish is not something I need to knock down once again. And, of course, Nazis are less prominent in this school of thought than Jews.

HBD is a powerful framework for intra-social analysis; it allows us to ponder questions like these and its answers gracefully stand the test of time, while their rejection is a festering wound of academic culture.

I concede this is far removed from predicting international events, because the way people with different traits are assembled into a society is not trivially determined by those traits. It would have been interesting to discuss whether there is an inherent biological – or any other – reason explaining why, say, Ukrainians can have meritocratic leadership, while closely related (despite certain protestations) Russians are ruled by back alley thugs such as Zolotov and produce headlines like «“Russian Elon Musk” died from rape and torture in jail». And the OG Elon Musk's own biological potential did nothing for South Africa. Von Neumann, too, did relatively little for Hungary and Germany. I dabbled in theorizing about slots for qualitatively different expressions of human potential that some stable societies have and others lack. But it's a difficult topic.

I don't think Anglos (who are «basically mid», again) will devour the light cone; I'm no Cecil Rhodes who explicitly aspired to that nor someone who takes his racist delusions seriously. I'd guess that Musk is a mutt in Hlynka's terms, and Von Neumann's case is obvious enough. Those are the sort of people you need to come up with the idea of tiling the universe in self-replicating probes and the logistics to bootstrap this process.

The thing is, at least one of Anglo-derived societies had assembled the full stack of necessary slots. And it sure looks like their biology, which molds their moral instinct, played a role in making that possible.

Is biodeterminism biodeterministic or not?

Only when it is convenient to the woke Bay-Aryan's current argument for it to be so, otherwise it's an uncharitable strawman. ;-)

I think you know as well as I do.

The sort of person who uses words like "racial homogeneity" and "Hajnal line" without a hint of irony.

'Hajnal line' is a real thing. People from inside of it are kind of peculiar. I'm not one of them, as far as I know.

As to racial homogeneity.. do you really think we have any people who're very much in favor of that here ?

As to racial homogeneity. do you really think we have any people who're very much in favor of that here ?

Yes. Absolutely.