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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   32315 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 17, 2023

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Well what happened to the Roman Empire? Did it get ransacked by hordes of Goths, Huns, Franks, Vandals, Visigoths when its people/political leaders became too soft to lead their own armies?

What happened to the Islamic Empires? They ate eachother until the Ottomans remained, then the Ottomans were consumed by nationalism (the Young Turks , the Arabs, the sorry story of Armenia).

What happened to the British Empire? It was the largest in population and land area, ruled territories across the world, mobilized very diverse peoples. Yet it disintegrated within living memory because its non-British constituents didn't want to be part of it. Only the settler colonies had real affinity and made sacrifices for it. Britain, Canada, Australia, South Africa actually made an effort in the world wars. India would've fought on either side, they didn't care for the empire they lived in. Of the 40,000 Indian POWs after the disastrous Singapore campaign, 30,000 joined the Japanese Indian National Army.

The INA's members were viewed as Axis collaborators and traitors by British soldiers and Indian PoWs who did not join the army,[21] but after the war they were seen as patriots by many Indians.[21] Although they were widely commemorated by the Indian National Congress in the immediate aftermath of Indian independence, some of the members of the INA were denied freedom fighter status by the Government of India.

Ruling over multiple nations is a source of instability. Nations all want their own states and always have. The history of multiethnic empire is like a horror movie, watching and waiting for nationalism to rip it apart. And, per horror movie conventions, there is a lot of blood.

And what is happening to the American Empire? I agree that immigration can be a source of economic strength. If you look at the names of people writing AI papers, a great number seem to be Chinese or Indian. Yet what is it doing to the cohesion of the USA? Why is it that the US can't even fill the ranks of its army anymore? Could it be that immigration and the diminishing status of the founding, British-derived American population is sapping American strength? Who wants to die for the North American Economic Zone? What is going to happen when the US faces a serious crisis?

“A man does not have himself killed for a half pence a day or for a petty distinction. You must speak to the soul in order to electrify him.” Napoleon

I'm not totally against immigration but it should be done slowly and carefully. You can put Scotland and Wales and England together to get Britain (but even that is not easy, as a quick glance at a history book will reveal). Mass immigration is a historic anomaly and dangerous. You trade legible gains like brainpower and economic growth for illegible loss in communal trust (all those papers showing how diversity lowers cohesion), a loss of the spirit needed to make sacrifices for the country.

while it has been all but extinguished by the deluge of wealth that the west continues to enjoy at the expense of exactly those hard-working immigrants and ethnic minorities overseas.

I always find narratives like this fascinating, how precisely is this at the expense of those overseas?

No, the answer here is that the average western white has simply gone soft. Accustomed to a lifetime of obscene wealth and decadence, the white has become completely blind and ignorant to the grim, flesh-and-blood realities of living in the third world, which suffers from orders of magnitude less wealth and access to resources than the west. Whites have no understanding of malnutrition, poverty, hostile climates, lack of access to healthcare, lack of social safety nets, nor lack of generational wealth.

How is this not exactly the same thing that some of our local white supremacists say about the Jews, except with a few word substitutions?

I categorically reject white supremacy and antisemitism.

To deny that western whites live in materially more wealthy and comfortable circumstances than the third world is, plainly, ignorant.

I'm pretty sure that Western Jews live in materially more wealthy and comfortable circumstances than the third world. So I don't see how that's responsive.

(And if your answer is "Jews do, but not because of their religion", the answer is of course "whites do, but not because of their race".)

For that matter, Western Jews live in materially more wealthy and comfortable circumstances than white supremacists.

You're responding to half of my post and ignoring the other half. I'm sure that if you live in the third world, Western whites are doing better than you. I'm also sure that if you live in the third world, Western Jews are doing better than you. How are these different? Are you claiming that Western Jews aren't doing better because of their religion, but Western whites are doing better because of their race?

Comparing whites to Jews was an aside.

Assuming you are a third-worlder, I'm comparing whites to you, and I'm comparing Jews to you. Both groups are doing better than you. For that matter, Asians who live in the west are doing better than you. Depending on exactly where you are in the third world, it's even possible that Western blacks and Hispanics are doing better than you. So why are you picking on Western whites specifically? What does being white have to do with it?

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Whites have no understanding of malnutrition, poverty, hostile climates, lack of access to healthcare, lack of social safety nets, nor lack of generational wealth.

That's because whites abolished those constraints. Whites made the bulk of global wealth and the intellectual property (artificial fertilizers, vaccines, medicine) that sustains the 3rd world. In 1950 the population of Europe was double that of Africa. Today it is half and shrinking.

new victimhood narratives

Whites exported all this intellectual property (often at subsidized rates for poor countries in the case of medicine). Whites provided trillions of dollars in economic aid and opened markets to 3rd world countries, opened borders to accept immigration, accepted the loss of our own local industries due to cheap competition...

Whites could've just stolen the Middle East oil - we chose to pay for it. Whites could've rained down incendiaries and atom bombs upon anti-colonialists - instead we chose to incinerate those states who had an actually oppressive vision for the 3rd world - Germany, Italy and Japan.

I don't begrudge poor countries from playing the game, yet accusing us of a victimhood narrative is a complete reversal of the facts. In the case of Rotherham, whites covered up the rampant sexual abuse of their own children by 3rd world immigrants lest it seem 'racist', suppressing reports for years. There is a huge diversity apparatus across the Anglosphere that deliberately sabotages my (white) employment prospects in favour of non-whites.

Accepting as true the progressive axiom (as I take it) that equitable outcomes - as in uniform distribution of resources, wealth, and otherwise, across all racial demographics - must be achieved, I have no problem with systematically disadvantaging whites in order to effect a rebalancing of resources across said demographics.

I don't know but I'm guessing that both of our socio-economic positions are well above the global average, given we speak very good English and post on this forum. Do you truly see it as good for a large chunk of your wealth and income to be transferred to others? I certainly don't. I believe in property rights, the legitimacy of nations and meritocracy. I don't want my wealth or income redistributed. I want to live in a nation-state where the nation's collective interests are defended, since this is the most harmonious and stable kind of governance. And I want meritocracy within that nation-state for efficiency.

I fully suspect that you don't actually believe in 'equitable outcomes', you're just prepared to use the idea for as long as you think it's advantageous. You seem to dislike the other aspects of progressive dogma, yet embrace this part.

my position is that having abolished such constraints within their own societies, whites have been insulated from the very constraints that they have abolished and have now been disconnected from the material realities that they have, in generations past, laboured to reduce.

I agree here, there is certainly an element of weakness and passivity that you see in a late Roman Empire or a decadent Caliphate soon to be razed by some Central Asians. Precisely because of this weakness I am uneasy about creating the conditions for new and exciting ethnic conflicts. You say 'the West's problems are due to becoming lazy, feckless soyboys', I say that the West should be very careful about immigration and diversity. There's no serious contradiction here.

literal genocide (and not just in the sense of "people used the incorrect pronouns" on Twitter) and street executions are taking place overseas in literal warzones

Street executions and ethnic cleansing is not isolated to the 3rd world thanks to the work of progressives, as they admit themselves: https://twitter.com/GodCloseMyEyes/status/1414619671056297984#m

Forget bitching about pronouns or latinx (which I never even mentioned), this stuff is serious. Enormous amounts of wealth is being taken and redistributed. The people being victimized here are white, whether that's in terms of job opportunities transferred by diversity commissars, jobs transferred out of the West by excessive trade liberalization, actual people murdered or raped by hateful and ungrateful 'Syrian refugees' or other non-whites. Now you might say 'that's your own fault', I dispute that - our leaders whose incompetence and malice exceeds historical comparison are to blame. Who voted for mass immigration, a huge diversity apparatus or nonsensical wars in the Middle East?

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