site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   28234 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 23, 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
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

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?

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.

With such a damning comment, do you know any Aboriginal Australians?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

the real ones out there in the Outback sniffing gasoline.

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.

“In 2006 when low aromatic fuel was first rolled out in Central Australia, there were around 500 people sniffing in our region with an average of seven deaths per year; it was an epidemic,” Mr Ray said.

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.

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?

I'm not quite sure what you mean, but there are still a significant number who use their native language as their primary language. Most of them are still bilingual in English though.

How much of that is authorities tolerating Stone Age norms about consent and marriage, and how much is creepy uncles?

I don't know, but my impression is that there's plenty of both.

While that doesn’t surprise me, and a lot of Stone Age norms about age of consent, marriage, relationships, and sex wind up as just celebrating creepy uncles, it seems like it’s an important distinction to be made, especially because the authorities can in theory just say ‘no, you don’t get to marry 11-year-olds just because it’s your cultural tradition’ and the people stopping the authorities from doing so are probably mostly woke people who will proceed to pointing at that statistic in order to justify more of the woke program.

To be clear, I don't think there's any child marriage going on. But I think there's a non-trivial amount of 17 year old boy having sex with 12 year old girl and that being shrugged off as pretty much normal. As well as much older men using their power in the community to pretty much do what they like.

But, again, I'm no expert.

More comments

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.

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.

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).

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-

  1. We have robotic automation, which is more efficient and less ethically dubious than breeding a slave caste.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

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 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.

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.

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

A large majority of countries (96 out of 106) surveyed have policy documents—legislation, regulations, guidelines, codes, and international treaties—relevant to the use of genome editing to modify early-stage human embryos, gametes, or their precursor cells. Most of these 96 countries do not have policies that specifically address the use of genetically modified in vitro embryos in laboratory research (germline genome editing); of those that do, 23 prohibit this research and 11 explicitly permit it. Seventy-five of the 96 countries prohibit the use of genetically modified in vitro embryos to initiate a pregnancy (heritable genome editing). Five of these 75 countries provide exceptions to their prohibitions. No country explicitly permits heritable human genome editing. These data contrast markedly with previously reported findings.

That seems like regulatory hell if I've ever seen one.

I think you can do this research but you are subject to Institutional Review Boards or your country equivalent

Ah, IRBs, a pox on human progress, without even smallpox around to contest for the greater evil.

unless you consider human rights to be a stumbling block

Why, I do, so good guess even if purely by accident.

The AMA condemns it, for example:

The American Medical Association's Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs stated that "genetic interventions to enhance traits should be considered permissible only in severely restricted situations: (1) clear and meaningful benefits to the fetus or child; (2) no trade-off with other characteristics or traits; and (3) equal access to the genetic technology, irrespective of income or other socioeconomic characteristics.

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?

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?

Yes.

The expected benefits so grossly outweigh the costs that it's ludicrous.

I'll only accept that my opponents on this matter are being internally consistent when they advocate for every mother who grabs a glass of wine during their pregnancy to end up in the gulag. We certainly won't agree about anything, but I'll respect them more.

Humans are allowed to consistently harm the potential of their progeny, and yet a systematic approach that acknowledges the risk and considers it in service of the greater good, that's verboten. We live in a clown world, and the inmates were the ones who built the asylum, let alone run it.

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?

The fact that it's theoretically legal is little consolation when there's minimal opportunities to engage in it. Besides, there are plenty of restrictions on elective procedures, as the constant ruckus about gender reassignment surgeries can demonstrate.

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.

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.

GATTACA and associated neo-ludditism is excluded from good

But Gore Vidal is in that movie!

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.

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.

People move for economic opportunities all the time. The catch, of course, is that they have to be economically useful.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats