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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 21, 2023

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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).