site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 21, 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.

14
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Well, I do think that the establishment of something resembling a black ethnostate - my hope is that it will be a formally sovereign separate nation, but it’s possible that it’ll just be a de facto black part of the United States with special carve-outs and autonomy - will be key in preventing widespread racial violence. Since I do not want widespread racial violence, I believe that separation between whites and blacks will be necessary. It doesn’t have to involve every black person in the country, although as I’ve explained before, I want it to actually succeed as a functioning nation, and that will mean it’s going to need the best and brightest people - the ones who are a “credit to their race” like some of the black people I know - to run things and to do everything they can to make it thrive.

I’m not really interested in having that larger discussion right now; I would say “you can peruse my back catalogue of posts to see more about my views on that issue”, but I post a lot, and this site has no search function to help you find what you’d be looking for! In any case, I’m not a “white nationalist”, in the sense that I don’t think white people cannot peacefully coexist with any non-white people, but I am a “black nationalist”, in that I believe that on the whole black people cannot coexist with non-black people. (Again, I’m talking in society-scale terms, and not about specific individuals, many of whom do not fit this pattern.)

I am a “black nationalist”, in that I believe that on the whole black people cannot coexist with non-black people. (Again, I’m talking in society-scale terms, and not about specific individuals, many of whom do not fit this pattern.)

Do you think this is an immovable problem due to genetics or some inherent 'nature', or a cultural one that can be solved over time?

Culture has a genetic substrate. “Cultures” didn’t just fall from the sky and pick different peoples at random. Certain cultural “technologies” can be spread in a coordinated way, and thus produce changes in the way that certain peoples live, and this can even sometimes produce changes that get people to reliably work against their own genetic proclivities, but this is a messy process that fails more often than it succeeds.

The best we can usually hope for is some sort of “synthesis”, where a people commits to adopting as many parts of a foreign culture as they can and then they morph the incompatible parts of that culture into something that works for who they are as a people. This is the story of Christianity in northwestern Europe. I could point to East Asian countries’ adoption of a syncretic, non-individualist and non-“liberty”-oriented form of liberal democracy as well.

I’m not ready to say that ADOS blacks are totally incapable of adopting any sort of syncretic, attenuated form of first-world civilization. That’s the way it looks to me right now, but maybe “in the fullness of time” that prediction won’t bear out.

What matters to me is how things are right now and the manifestly evident failure of the massive society-wide attempt - AKA the “Civil Rights Movement” that you seem to love so much, which was actually just a Trojan Horse for race communism - to bring blacks up to our level. If blacks are going to make it, they’re just going to have to make it on their own. Non-blacks simply cannot be held responsible for making that happen anymore.

What matters to me is how things are right now and the manifestly evident failure of the massive society-wide attempt - AKA the “Civil Rights Movement” that you seem to love so much, which was actually just a Trojan Horse for race communism - to bring blacks up to our level. If blacks are going to make it, they’re just going to have to make it on their own. Non-blacks simply cannot be held responsible for making that happen anymore.

Hah, I just used it as an example of how change can happen without political violence. Of course there were some pretty serious race riots, but to me that's very different than violence specifically against political figures. I find the latter far worse, even though it may be more fair in some sense.

I mean I don't think we're that far off in terms of how we view this situation. The Civil Rights Movement was a great and understandable idea at the time. I think that most clear-thinking folks at this moment have realized the problem is much more complicated than we thought at first, and we need to go back to the chalkboard and rethink some of our basic assumptions around racial equity.

That being said, I'm optimistic there are gentler, more cultural solutions as opposed to just creating racial ethnostates. We've seen where that path leads, and it's not a good one.

The Civil Rights Movement was a great and understandable idea at the time. I think that most clear-thinking folks at this moment have realized the problem is much more complicated than we thought at first, and we need to go back to the chalkboard and rethink some of our basic assumptions around racial equity.

Did you intend this to be read literally? If so, I think it's straightforwardly false? More than 50% of intelligent and capable people in politics, and also not in politics, believe strongly in racial equality in exactly the ways you're saying aren't correct. Most of the remainder thinks the problem is culture, welfare, affirmative action, etc. And of those who believe there's a genetic component to racial iq gaps, the ratio of clear-thinking to not is about the same as the general population (see the replies to any popular twitter post about it).