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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 18, 2023

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The answer is simple. What you are starting to notice the lies that underpin the whole secular progressive worldview.

You're expecting social constructs and conflicts to abide by inductive logic when they don't.

You're expecting IQ scores and educational attainment to be proxies for intelligence and rational behavior when they are not.

You're trying to assign value based on identity only to realize that the whole concept of identity is incoherent.

You're starting to notice "the leviathan-shaped hole", and you are starting (if only just starting) to become red pilled.

You know why white nationalists are hated don't you? Because they are losers. Look at who they seek to emulate, the Nazis? don't make me laugh. The Antebellum South? as much as it might pain some of my long-dead ancestors to hear me say this, that dog wont hunt. Like I said losers. Now imagine the most stereotypically racist, and toxically masculine, man that you can. Sheriff Buford T. Justice himself transplanted into the modern day. Now ask yourself what does white nationalism and the dissident right have to offer such a man that he can't get for a better price elsewhere. Why would a man like Sheriff Buford T. Justice want to associate himself with a self-loathing Hollywood Jew like Steve Sailer? or the cavalcade of faggots, furries, and perverts that follow him?

You can try appealing to academic consensus but academia is a progressive feminist bastion and Sheriff Buford T. Justice is suspicious of your fancy city talk.

You can try appealing to strait Nietzsche "will to power" nonsense but Sheriff Buford T. Justice is a god-fearing man.

You can try appealing to simple racism and this plan might just succeed but Sheriff Buford T. Justice, being a southern man, will be sure to point out that not all niggers are black.

self-loathing Hollywood Jew like Steve Sailer?

Sailer isn't Jewish. Fuentes supporters were wilding recently on twitter with accusing everyone of being Jewish, and as a joke most everyone who wasn't with them started saying they're actually Jewish..

So, a meme.

Now ask yourself what does white nationalism and the dissident right have to offer such a man that he can't get for a better price elsewhere. Why would a man like Sheriff Buford T. Justice want to associate himself with a self-loathing Hollywood Jew like Steve Sailer? or the cavalcade of faggots, furries, and perverts that follow him?

Elsewhere? Where are the non-explicitly white nationalist communities that would offer what a 1970s comedy movie character would want? Where are these 'winners' upholding the West's heritage shamelessly?

Where are these 'winners' upholding the West's heritage shamelessly?

All around for those who have the eyes to look.

  • -14

Responding universally to questions about specifics is not exactly a good way to convince people that something exists. "Where's energy? It's all around us maaan."

Come on, at least give three examples. Better yet ones that you wouldn't dismiss as being ridiculous failures.

At this point the only people I see who are taking the Western canon seriously are all fringe pessimists that have long given up on political solutions and are writing about it in the past tense.

Responding universally to questions about specifics is not exactly a good way to convince people that something exists. "Where's energy? It's all around us maaan."

You're not wrong, and yet at the same time how else am I supposed to answer? Dude might as well be asking where all the non-pozzed girls are, the answer is "not where you're looking."

Dude might as well be asking where all the non-pozzed girls are, the answer is "not where you're looking."

That can't possibly be a fair comparison.

People who would uphold the West's heritage shamelessly should be easy to find, as they would fly their colors high. On the other hand non-pozzed girls have no incentive to publicize their virtue, as modesty is a central aspect of being 'non-pozzed', by opposition with OnlyFans or Twitch performers.

So if I'm not looking in the right place for people who are both pro-traditional Western values and proud to display them, where am I supposed to look? Is there a British Empire going around colonizing the world I just haven't noticed?

Why would a man like Sheriff Buford T. Justice want to associate himself with a self-loathing Hollywood Jew like Steve Sailer? or the cavalcade of faggots, furries, and perverts that follow him?

The much larger cavalcade of "faggots, furries, and perverts" on the other side seems to have quite a following, so those chartacteristics fail to be distinguishers.

Basically what @slothlikesamwise said.

That there is a more popular cavalcade to the left doesn't mean he has to join the one standing next to it.

They are distinctives within the right tho, he doesn't have to choose the left but merely not this one faction.

a self-loathing Hollywood Jew like Steve Sailer?

Steve Sailer is not Jewish. His ancestors were primarily Swiss. He has discussed this numerous times. Do you have any evidence to the contrary?

He may not follow the Jewish faith, but his mother's Jewish and in a bio-deterministic world that would make him Jewish.

Meanwhile in a non bio-deterministic world, I think that rubbing elbows with producers and being a member of that culture should be enough to mark one as "a Hollywood Jew".

That said @2rafa correctly points out that Ronald Unz would have been a better example. That's on me for not really paying attention to who's-who in the WigNat/dissident blue tribe.

his mother's Jewish

I have never heard this before. Would you happen to have a way for me to confirm that handy?

but his mother's Jewish

Is she? This is genuinely the first I’m hearing of that. Where did you find that info? A cursory search turned up no results for that claim.

That's on me for not really paying attention to who's-who in the WigNat/dissident blue tribe.

You already know what I’m going to say. This seems like Example #846 of you making a bold claim about a figure in your outgroup, and then having to walk it back when someone points out that you made it up or mixed up two completely different people. You keep claiming to have some valuable insight into what makes your outgroup tick, and yet so often your statements about them are not only wrong, but are directly contradicted by reality. You don’t know anything of value about the people you’re talking about, which might be why you have to keep making things up about them.

Where do you find that Steve Sailer’s mother is Jewish?

Given his other comment about “rubbing elbows with producers” - something which I also don’t think Steve Sailer does or has ever done - I’m almost wondering if he has mixed up Sailer with David Cole. They do both write weekly columns for Taki.

I already admitted that I should have used Unz as an example instead of Sailer but there is there no "confusion" here at all. The entire Takismag crew is composed of degenerates.

No, there literally is confusion because you have mixed up two different individuals, attributing to one of them things which are true of the other one. You appear to have been thinking of David Cole, but saying Steve Sailer. None of your criticisms of the one even remotely apply to the other. You can’t tell the difference between them, because you are too lazy and too obstinate to even attempt to develop a cursory understanding of a topic on which you nevertheless continue to opine very confidently. The next time you post another screed about how you understand the Dissident Right than we understand ourselves, I do hope that people will take a moment to recall that you can’t even be bothered to get the basics correct.

I don't think it's certain, but he's apparently adopted and believed as of 2002 that one of his biological parents is Jewish:

Personally, having been raised in Los Angeles a continent and a generation removed from the 1948 Trotskyist vs. Stalinist squabbling at CCNY that obsesses some prominent neoconservatives to this day, all this NYC in-fighting seems a little remote to me. I have one foot in all three camps (I guess that makes me a campstool): I'm Catholic; I've always assumed I'm biologically half-Jewish (I'm adopted); and I'm an Anglophile and an admirer of WASP culture. So, I wish everyone well.

How interesting, truly some archival Sailer deep lore.

Yes, Sailer isn’t Jewish and also isn’t antisemitic by the standards of the dissident right, I suppose he has a minor Paleocon ‘noticing’ thing, but he’s more aligned with Murray and Hernnstein than with MacDonald.

Unz is probably the best example of a self-hating openly Jewish person on the DR, essentially uncritically believing and arguing that every single thing that went wrong in the 20th century West was the primary fault of Jewish people.

Why not try to emulate Israel? They seem like winners not losers.

Why not try to emulate Israel?

Ahh the old "To defeat the Zionist we must become the Zionist" gambit. ;-)

I can think of numerous ways in wich I would like to see the US become more like Israel, but I don't think the BAP-reading RETVRN types are going to like what I have in mind.

Why are we defeating zionists again?

Excellent question.

Hlynka will have a good reason for why Israeli Jews have an interest in their identity, don't worry.

I’ve never gotten the impression that he has a particular fondness for Jews or Israelis, he just doesn’t hate them for HBD reasons specifically. His is almost a kind of Marxian antisemitism, largely cultural.

He is philosemitic, certainly. He thinks people who advocate for white people are losers because "whole concept of identity is incoherent", but it turns out he has a lot of respect for Jews who identify as belonging to a tribe which claims to have been literally chosen by God as God's favorite people. It's a deep contradiction of Hlynka but it isn't his fault per se, he is properly interpreting his own religion which does demand this exact contradiction.

His is almost a kind of Marxian antisemitism, largely cultural.

It's entirely cultural. I actually have a lot of respect for the practicing Jew who actually tries to keep to the covenant and the sabbath. After all, there but for the grace of God go I.

My antipathy is more for a certain sort that seems to treat their status as a member of the chosen/anointed as a substitute for virtue. To paraphrase Ian Malcom, "you have all this power and knowledge, but it didn't require any discipline to attain it, and now you want to sell it, you want to sell it".

Ironically Marx himself is one of the more quintessential examples of the type.

Frequent_Anybody2984 misses the other, equally important side of the equation, which is the conservatives who are so deranged that, even in the face of all these progressive aggressions which you have mentioned, they will still join the Progressive chorus of hateful denunciation of anybody who advocates for the interests of white people. Hlynka in particular is interesting, because he relates white nationalists to progressivism whereas Hlynka himself is better than any progressive at regurgitating the progressive-approved denunciations of the radical idea of advocating for the interests of white people in the face of the patterns of facts you have laid out.

Hlynka himself mentioned being "red pilled", the actual red pill is that Hlynka is playing his role which has been laid out for him within our progressive paradigm perfectly. The left is anti-white, the mainstream conservatives are also anti-white, that's the red-pill, and Hlynka's strong knee-jerk reaction against the idea of advocating for white Americans is proof of that. He's on the same side of progressives on that question, even as the demographic profile of the country radically changes at a historically unprecedented rate, you can rely on Hlynka being there to strongly inform you that you are a loser if you care about white Americans.

The left aint "anti-white" they're Anti-West. White is not a skin color it is a state of mind which is how guys like Tim Scott, Clarence Thomas, and Larry Elder end up being labeled as "white nationalists" by the LA Times.

You're trying to assign value based on identity only to realize that the whole concept of identity is incoherent.

Is it really, or is it just the way it's practiced here in the west? In much of the rest of the world, it's taken for granted and assumed. When LGBT organizers took to the streets in Russia and were banned, much to the collective butthurt of those in the west, it only became an issue here because the wrong identity was the losing side of an issue. Identity is just coalition politics.

I have always felt that Paul Graham captured the modern concept of identity quite well. I can understand calling it incoherent, meaning confusing, in how people argue about it, often holding incompatible or contradictory views. That people try to game social status around the concept of identity does not really speak to the usefulness of identity as a concept when reasoning about the world for any given individual.

Is it really, or is it just the way it's practiced here in the west?

Yes it is. The entire concept of identity as it is popularly described and understood amongst secular progressive types is a load of functionally incoherent nonsense. Not only that, it actively degrades the individual's ability to read and understand social dynamics.

I would even go so far as to contend that; if people were to start approaching identity as a simple political/religious affiliation and not something that has anything to do with the "lived experience" or "intrinsic qualities of" the identified, that this would represent a substantial improvement over the current status quo.

That doesn't really disagree with my statement, I think. Certainly the way it's practiced by American progressives, I agree it's incoherent and a lot of nonsense. But that's a far cry from saying identity itself is bs. And granting as much, it's what human beings do regardless, so I'd say it's better off figuring how how to channel and deal with it than overcome it.

I do not think that it is "a far cry" at all. I think that this is one of the places where the "leviathan-shaped hole" in the discourse is most manifest. There are effectively two mutually exclusive and contradictory concepts of "identity" that currently exist in the same space. That within the identifier and that of the identified. Assuming the goal is to understand, we'd be better off tabooing "identity" entirely.

Assuming the goal is to understand, we'd be better off tabooing "identity" entirely.

I think the practical hope for something like this leaves so much to be desired that it's not even worth spending any political capital over it. We could already count the number of problems that lack otherwise realistic political and economic solutions, but for the fact that people can't find any common agreement or consensus to identify their own self-interest with the importance of the issue at hand. And I think torpedoing things like Christianity or Nationalism doesn't help a civil society in the long run.

People have an identity, whether they want to admit it or not. Societies carry a national identity, the ones that don't, don't exist. There's no such thing as an individual without a history, lineage, common language, ethnicity, whatever else have you. It's a fantasy to believe otherwise. What does lacking an identity leave you with that's superior to a person who has one?

People have an identity, whether they want to admit it or not. Societies carry a national identity, There's no such thing as an individual without a history, lineage, common language, ethnicity, whatever else have you.

Yes, and this is precisely why the liberal fetish for emancipation is so destructive. Having rejected all deeper connections they are left with nothing but the superficial, and thus find themselves embracing social atomization.

The alternative, of course, being subjection to those of higher status they are connected to. Aside from "be the patriarch in the patriarchy", there's no good solution.

Would it be accurate to say that one of the things that makes it incoherent is that they think Identity is intrinsic, not chosen?

I think a good chunk of the incoherency comes from trying to have it both ways.

IE wanting to treat chosen qualities as intrinsic and intrinsic qualities as chosen. Contrast the whole trans-women in sports debate with a senescent white male threatening to take away Mee-Maw's black card if she doesn't vote for him.

Sooner or later something has to give.

I agree with you even though I don’t agree with racism. Politics is simply social power. And the vast majority of people really don’t have thought out positions on issues, they follow whatever the powerful people around them (elders, bosses, authority figures, teachers and professors) tell them that good, honest, hardworking people believe. This is why issues like minimum wage get terrible traction— the only people who care are people who get paid hourly. Trade unions are a non-starter because wanting one is coded working class, uneducated, poor, and hated by the political elite and businesses. Hence people won’t allow themselves to favor them, and would be offended if someone suggested they need one for their office. Go down the list of any issue, and the difference between things that are popular and unpopular is the power of people holding that position.

This is why issues like minimum wage get terrible traction— the only people who care are people who get paid hourly.

This doesn't seem true. Talking about raising the minimum wage and wealth inequality is popular amongst the nytimes reading PMC

Yeah but there’s a reason the federal minimum wage didn’t change much for decades and had its maximum purchasing power in 1968… they don’t actually care that much.

I mean, except the highest minimum wage is in the most left-leaning places in the US. The US minimum wage hasn't raised nationally, because of right-leaning congresspeople.