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.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
This shows the disconnect between leftists and Aboriginal leaders and what the actual goal was. Now the mask is off and the leftists see what they really believe.
It's really that simple.
Wow, that's a remarkable quote. It's incredible that they can openly state they want nothing less than ethno-supremacy while mainstream media sources are calling so many people racist for not being one-sided enough in their favor. A banal and obvious observation I know, but you usually don't hear admission of it that plainly, and that puts into perspective how incredible it is that such a narrative is safely forwarded by people who are treated like they have a monopoly on the concept of racial justice in the mainstream discourse.
It really is incredible that this is has widespread buy-in among serious people living in the west. Apparently an explicit ethnostate is something we should be aiming for and defending. Their ultimate aim is to establish explicit rules around this:
You can read more here. Imagine if something like this actually became law in a nation purporting to be a liberal democracy.
...erm, aren't we talking about Aboriginal people?
Israel does get plenty of criticism for its approach here, obviously, and it doesn't seem relevant to Australia. I think the better comparison would be to other self-described indigenous peoples. Certainly during the Voice campaign we heard a lot of people talking about Maoris and Native Americans and Canadian First Nations.
Honestly something that struck me on doing very basic research into other countries' Indigeous persons was that the Australian Aboriginal's life expectancy gap with the median was about the same size as it is for the Maoris and First Nations people. Despite the latter two having the 'benefits' of deeper recognition in their countries.
Really? Amerinds seem a lot better off than I’d expect aborigines to be, based on how I’ve heard them described.
Well, let's take some specific metrics. Let's compare Australian Aboriginals, Maoris, American Indians, and Canadian First Nations relative to the surrounding culture, on a few different metrics.
Hypothesis: if the claim that the Voice and recognition would help to close the gap is true, the gap between indigenous and non-indigenous people should be significantly worse in Australia than in the other three nations.
Life expectancy:
(sticking with pre-covid figures if possible)
Aboriginals: 71.6 years male, 75.6 years female. Compare to 81.3 years male and 85.4 years female for non-indigenous, for an average gap of around 10 years.
Maoris: 73.0 years male, 77.1 years female. Compare to 80.3 years male and 83.9 years female for non-Maori (same link), for an average gap of around 6-7 years.
American Indians: I'm having a harder time finding a clear result here. This page gives 73.1 years for Indians, versus 79.1 years overall average, though it's not by gender. However, it could be more complicated, and America is the largest and most diverse nation, so I'm more cautious here. Pages like this suggest it might be more complicated. Still, let's ballpark it around 6 years.
Canadian First Nations: 72.5 years male, 77.7 years female. Compare to 81 years male, 85 years female for non-indigenous, for an everage gap of around 8-9 years.
Conclusion: Aboriginals do have the worst figures here, so count that as circumstantial evidence in favour of treaties and recognition. That said I would like to see a lot more evidence around causation.
Income:
(I'm not going to stress about currency conversions here, or weekly versus yearly income, because what matters for us here is the indigenous:non-indigenous ratio)
Aboriginals: Average weekly household income is $1507 AUD according to the ABS (compared to anything from 1358 through 2061 in general)), but equivalised, AIHW says $830 AUD, compared to $1080 for non-indigenous. I'm just going to estimate that Aboriginals are making approximately 77% what non-Aboriginals make.
Maoris: This site tells us that in 2013 the median income for Maoris was 78.9% of the national median, which I'm happy to just accept.
American Indians: Wiki has us covered here: $56,990 USD yearly median household income for Indians in 2021, versus 76,330 for the whole population. This translates to Amerian Indians making about 75% as much as non-Indians.
Canadian First Nations: Per page 32 here, average indigenous income in Canada is around 66% that of non-indigenous people.
Conclusion: I don't see any correlation here. Aboriginals are the 2nd-best-off of these groups, and the gap between Aboriginals, Maoris, and American Indians seems well within margin of error to me. The real surprise for me here is Canada, which I didn't think was that much worse.
I was going to make a pass on education as well, but that's proving harder to find figures for.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Funny, but I think you'll find Israel to have no shortage of mainstream criticism on the basis of its status as an apartheid settler-colonialist etc state. I do not think it is as easy to find such things critical of efforts to constitutionally enshrine the veneration of "designated oppressed minority groups" like the aboriginals.
Even the anti-voice arguments did not speak in anywhere near the harshness that Israel is often regarded with. Instead, they focused on how "This won't even help the aboriginals!" instead of it being a concerted effort to officially develop a new ethnostate policy.
More options
Context Copy link
It's especially insane to me in that, if one were going to be racist against any group, Aboriginal Australians have the weakest arguments to make of maybe any ethnic group in the world. They have made virtually zero scientific, economic, cultural, sporting, artistic, political, military, domestic contributions to global culture.
I literally can't think of any other ethnicity, outside of super specific small groups, that I can't make a better argument for. Gypsy culture might be made up of criminals, but Django Reinhardt. We've seen the arguments against Jews and American Blacks rehashed a million times, but vast swathes of modern physics and literature and music and sport argues in their favor. Serbians can't have an independent country for thirty years without starting a war, but there's plenty of great Serbians. Even little Arab Palestine has given us the odd poet, or emigrant businessman or model.
What have Aboriginal Australians ever contributed? The digiridoo?
There is something of a cottage industry here of people arguing about the overlooked complexity of Aboriginal civilisation. Often it's very vague and unquantifiable stuff about having tended the land for millennia. Sometimes it's just noble savage nonsense, like the claim that at least they didn't war with each other (they did) and all respected each other (they didn't) and had gender equality (take a guess).
Sometimes it's a bit more complex. Dark Emu is the most famous text to spring to mind - a fellow argued that Aboriginals had a settled, agricultural civilisation.
As far as I can tell Dark Emu is a simple motte-and-bailey. The easily-defended motte is that Aboriginal people, like pretty much all nomadic hunter-gatherers, recognised good spots, would leave seeds behind them for their return migration, and could make basic fish traps and the like. The implausible bailey is that this constitutes agriculture and the Aboriginals were "ahead of many other parts of the world".
Having read Dark Emu I found it kind of incoherent where a lot of the case for Aboriginal statehood is essentially 'they were unsophisticated to the point that there was not a conventional state to be made war on and/or a concept of territory, therefore the conquest is illegitimate as they never surrendered' then Dark Emu tries to argue that they were notably more sophisticated than the basic understanding which... legitimizes European conquest?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
There are some excellent Aboriginal athletes. But yeah, not a ton of scientists or businesspeople.
I'm not a big HBD guy - not because I think all people are exactly the same, but because I think cultural and governance issues are usually much more important - the two Koreas being a prime example. But if I were the kind of guy who wanted to go around making HBD arguments... the ethnic group with an average IQ of 62 that continues to have catastrophic outcomes on every socioeconomic measure no matter how much money and effort is spent to try and help them would be one of the first examples I'd reach for.
Richard Hanania has argued that the example of North Korea supports rather than contradicts the argument: https://www.richardhanania.com/p/the-east-asian-package
Hanania is an idiot though. North Korea's outcomes are objectively terrible. I don't doubt their people are every bit as intelligent as South Koreans, but that just goes to show the limits of what intelligence can give you.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
With such a damning comment, do you know any Aboriginal Australians?
More options
Context Copy link
A post modern belief system that had a lot of influence on the Cthulhu mythos?
As a random aside, there was a great supplement to the Cthulu RPG based around the Mythos in Australia. Bunyips vs Elder Things etc. It was even added to the National Library.
It also inspired a board game, which is pretty good if you like the idea of chasing down Bunyips with an armoured train.
Link doesn't work, but that sounds like fun.
Should be fixed now.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
That's awesome, I am going to have to track down a copy! Are you very familiar with it? I see I can buy the pdf from chaosium, but I'm not buying a second edition from 2019 sight unseen, not for more than $10.
I've browsed it, but sadly don't have a copy myself and can't help tracking it down.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
That’s the point though. You’ll notice most of what the ultra woke point to as ‘whiteness’ is the very things that make or made whites so successful. I’m trying hard not to straw man but it really does seem like a bunch of this crap is just cover for worshipping lack of success through bad behavior, stupidity, and dysfunction, and stigmatizing productivity and contribution. I couldn’t tell you why that worldview exists; I think it’s a side effect of turning African American cultural complaints into mental masturbation, but it really is what it looks like.
Ultimately you can see it as a rejection of the idea of competence and hierarchy. All hierarchies and power differentials are inherently unjust according to a far left view, because they involve one being dominating another. Competence is simply a way to justify the hierarchical subjugation.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I typed out and then deleted a longer comment - something which I’ve done several times before whenever the subject of Australian Aborigines comes up. There’s nothing I can say that won’t be perceived (correctly) as cruel and dehumanizing. As far as I’m concerned, they are an actual honest-to-god Stone Age relict population. Not the blue-eyed fake Aborigines who’d be empowered by this farcical “Voice” venture, but the real ones out there in the Outback sniffing gasoline. They appear to have somehow avoided most of the evolutionary pressures which have caused nearly every other human population to develop modern human physiognomy and cognitive aptitude. I get genuinely distressed when I look at them or when I think about what Australia could possibly do about this population, and it would be beyond the bounds of tolerable behavior in this community for me to comment in any detail about what I foresee for them moving forward.
I've honestly always wanted to see a proper, unbiased longitudinal study of the Stolen Generation to establish what the life outcomes of the 'stolen' were versus those who remained remote. I suspect the results would shock the common narrative.
More options
Context Copy link
You're a little out of date on this - we successfully reduced petrol sniffing in Aboriginal communities by 95%
All we had to do was develop special petrol that doesn't get you high when you sniff it and ban normal petrol in Aboriginal communities.
LMAO WHAT, I thought Rama Rama was just a meme.
More options
Context Copy link
This is some black-comedy satire article leaking into real life. I thought I was jaded, but this is horrific.
What's the denominator for those numbers? I'm reading that Central Australia has only about 40K people, 43% Aboriginal + Torres Strait, so call that 17K, so 7/17K gives a drug-overdose-per-100K rate of 41 ... which is higher than the USA (32/100K in 2022) but not by nearly as much as you'd hope. The US already has demographics with worse rates (and I'm talking "males", not anything with p-hacked granularity), and our rates are still increasing, not dropping by 95%. A lot of the increase is fentanyl, but cocaine and meth are going way up too.
I'm not shocked that people use drugs and a minority of them OD. I get that for opioids and meth.
But this is serious talk about an "epidemic" of huffing gasoline. That's horrible and so much worse than an American who sometimes does a bit of coke.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Oh trust me, it gets way more horrifying than that.
For example, approximately a quarter of Aboriginal girls in remote communities are victims of child sex abuse.
Are the pure native Australians able to speak in languages in a fully fluent way?
More options
Context Copy link
How much of that is authorities tolerating Stone Age norms about consent and marriage, and how much is creepy uncles?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Gene therapy. If there's a good reason we're not going full steam ahead on it, it's yet to find my ears (GATTACA and associated neo-ludditism is excluded from good).
Oh wait, the sterling and terminally resistant to reality claim that all human populations are equal, especially cognitively so, acts as a barrier to even recognizing there is a problem, or at least it's not the kind of problem you solve by giving them handouts or schools.
I'd argue that the prior British policy of encouraging interbreeding was a step in the right direction, even if I suspect that diminished the capabilities of inter-racial children. It would all have been worth it, if it eliminated a disgruntled population of millions that modern Wokists can point to and yell "systemic racism" without much in the way of pushback since HBD left the Overton Window.
Can I interest you in Brave New World, or the more recent and pop-sci-fi Red Rising? This is the first step towards genetically predetermined caste systems, for further hominid speciation. You don't get Gammas or Reds without people like you arguing for Alphas and Golds.
While mildly entertaining works of fiction, they're about as accurate a representation of the future.
Without something going seriously awry, there's no chance that humanity ends up in a caste system of that nature, since-
We have robotic automation, which is more efficient and less ethically dubious than breeding a slave caste.
Genetic augmentation is unlikely to be expensive after economies of scale develop, and there is no plausible path to having such a wide gulf between the haves and have nots.
HBD suggests we already have stark differentials between different populations, so it's a moot point. How many aboriginal Australian Nobel Prize winners are there again? And how many Jewish ones? Your brand of ludditism makes a terrible tradeoff of denying the uplift of one end of the spectrum while claiming to prevent what already exists.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I predict that progressives will turn on a dime on the idea of HBD as soon as gene therapy becomes a viable way to bring all groups into IQ parity. They might not acknowledge the change publicly, but there will be zero barriers to implementation.
Just as environmentalists dismiss geoengineering out of hand, modern progressives will never accept eugenics.
More options
Context Copy link
I'm going to take the opposite side here, progressives tend to go by moral purity over factual accuracy, the denial of HBD will continue far longer than we have robust methods for intelligence augmentation. Right now, the best bet is embryo selection, which may be good for 2-8 IQ points unless you go for more intense selection, at which point you can really push the envelope.
Yeah, we aren't at Gattaca style Luxury Gay Space Communism yet, which is a viable barrier.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Aren't there already gene therapies being developed? Isn't it instead that testing on human subjects is subject to agreed upon international standards? I think you can do this research but you are subject to Institutional Review Boards or your country equivalent. I don't see any involvement of neo-luddites in preventing this research, unless you consider human rights to be a stumbling block.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_of_Helsinki
With how much panic and FUD there is over simply eating GMOs versus becoming them?
https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/crispr.2020.0082
That seems like regulatory hell if I've ever seen one.
Ah, IRBs, a pox on human progress, without even smallpox around to contest for the greater evil.
Why, I do, so good guess even if purely by accident.
The AMA condemns it, for example:
Imagine if they banned elective surgeries or something like braces because, gasp, it costs money, and the rich can better take advantage of it than the poor.
Make no mistake, the whole field has been pushed back decades by intentional lobbying from bioethicists and the usual useful idiots on the environmentalist side.
So in your view the current model where mostly unlimited animal testing is allowed, we should instead jump to human embryos, edit them and allow them to grow as fetuses, and as humans under comparable conditions and then test the editing results through IQ tests? Or do you think that editing of embryos should be allowed for research but not allowed to progress further toward human birth?
Edit: Or do you see embryo editing as something that should be allowed as it exists in its current state that should be completely allowed with no exceptions like elective surgery totally separate from medicine entirely?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Interbreeding was a good idea, and European genes seem to be dominant over aboriginal ones in basically every instance, but it’s important to note that the remaining pure-blooded aborigines aren’t the ones that are crying racism, it’s the mixed race descendants who everyone thinks of as just white.
I'm aware of that, but I think they'd have a much harder time getting sympathy if they didn't have their pure-bred cousins to point at, implicitly conflating the problems they face.
It's not like you can tell most of them apart from "pure" whites, which makes keeping identity cards straight when you're a card-carrying activist difficult.
Eh, white looking people that are actually half or a quarter indigenous or whatever seem to have sufficiently worse outcomes that Wokies can still claim ‘discrimination’ on the basis of things no one knows about. Being obviously wrong doesn’t stop them in other contexts.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
But Gore Vidal is in that movie!
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Consider the Dingo which may be a feral descendant of previously domesticated canines brought to Australia but for some reason were neither managed nor bred for thousands of years. The implications make it a bit of a controversial explanation.
More options
Context Copy link
Even if you take out HBD, they live in the middle of nowhere. How can they possibly generate wealth out there? I was just in the Midwest and the rural downs out there are straight up just dead and full of zombie opiate addicts wandering downtown. I was just in Peoria, IL and I have never seen such a dead rust belt city before. And this is with white people in the US. There is no opportunity for them where they live.
Each year millions of people willingly uproot themselves to go to a different country in search of better economic wealth etc, and those who have potential manage to achieve it to varying degrees. India is extremely poor, Indian Americans are very rich, high human capital Indians when placed in an environment conducive to generating wealth do extremely well. Australian aboriginals don't, e.g. Australian aboriginals in large cities don't do paticularly well compared to the median inhabitants of those cities.
More options
Context Copy link
People move for economic opportunities all the time. The catch, of course, is that they have to be economically useful.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think it goes to show how little the regime takes these kinds of people as threats. They can say this because they pose no threat and are often useful to the people running these countries. Meanwhile, the far right groups in the West get treated like a threat because they actually are. Say what you want about the trucker protest or Jan 6, but they actually threatened the regime and elites so they were dealt with harshly. There's a buffer zone on the left where they can be radicals and not really cause any issues or threaten anything. They are running up against it now with Palestine and Israel and finally getting serious push back so you can tell that is one stance that actually threatens the regime and the elites.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link