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 -
At risk of repeating what's been said downthread, your entire disposition towards the topic betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of what's going on. Veganism isn't based on some argument. Either you care enough about animal suffering to do something about it or you don't. Factory farming is, in a lot of places, a torture farm. If you care a lot about animal suffering there is no "argument". There's just a fundamental factual truth about the nature of harvesting animals for food and from there on all else follows. Same is true for 'white nationalism'. Either you care about white people, their bio-diversity, history and continued existence or you don't.
You are not asking for an argument, you are asking for a bonk on the head that makes you see the world in a different light. For some that's videos on Facebook and documentaries, real world experiences or socialization. Whatever it is, you're not dealing with arguments and I think it would behoove you and people who talk like you to stop pretending you are a machine that digests paragraphs and sorts out the fact and logic. You're not.
While some white ethnic groups will likely disappear due to immigration(cockney speakers I think?), white people will continue to exist in every plausible future. In fact whites will make up a decent chunk of the population of America in most plausible futures. You don't have to be a white nationalist to recognize that it doesn't require any actual changes to the way the world will likely work for white people to continue to exist in a fairly wide diversity.
More options
Context Copy link
Sure, but no one has a utility function of 0/0/0/0/100.
You can make all types of arguments about why veganism also gets you other things you want beyond reduced animal suffering (maybe it's better for the environment or fights the obesity epidemic or has other health benefits or etc), you can make all kinds of arguments about why it doesn't lose you other things you want (it's easier and cheaper and tastes better than you think, common intuitions about it making you scrawny or low-energy are wrong, etc).
If you care about animal suffering 15, then whether becoming vegan would lose you more or less than 15 in other areas is the determining factor in your decision. And all kinds of arguments are relevant to that calculation.
My answer to that would be 'motivated reasoning'.
Most arguments aren't 'real', for a lack of a better term. They're just stepping stones to get to the promised land, which any actual believer already knows is real. The whole game of 'arguments' is to help the unbelievers, or yourself in days of need, to that place. In other words, arguments are traced back from the thing you already know is true.
I'm not saying there aren't vegans who are vegans for some reason other than the animal suffering, and that those guys aren't making data driven arguments in some sense that's disconnect from the moral impetus driving many vegans, but, in my experience, those are not the vegans we are talking about in the OP.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I'm white. I care about white people continuing to exist. I'm also not a white nationalist. We'll thrive just fine next to Mexicans and Asian immigrants. The Indian families on my block are not wounding my ability to thrive as a white man.
This appears to be the very falsest of dichotomies.
I’m very worried about shrinking white population coupled with an ideology that says “white man bad.” Other groups already have a pro group in bias (except for whites since we bought into the whole color free paradigm). But add to that extra hatred and it isn’t pretty.
I live in an Indian majority community. Often, I feel like a stranger in a foreign land. My wife gets visible in uncomfortable when I mention this alienation that occurs in my country. This isn’t anything the Indians are doing wrong and most of them seem like nice people. But it isn’t my culture and that is a net negative for me.
More options
Context Copy link
Which one of these 'ways' does not, in some form, effectively exclude immigration and enforce some sort of segregation to maintain a white population? I am curious considering the state of Texas, which has recently gone majority hispanic.
At risk of sounding to snarky, that's like, your opinion, man.
You fit the description of someone who says they care whilst they don't, rather well.
You know a lot of those hispanics are actually literally indistinguishable-from-southern-Europeans white, right?
And a lot of them are not.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Detroit was once called the 'Paris of the West'. I don't think anyone calls it this anymore, except as a sarcastic snub at Parisian decline. The Detroit that was has been permanently lost due to demographic changes.
Everything seems fine until it isn't. Suppose the Indian community, or the Mexican community vote for candidates who'll redistribute resources for whites to Indians on the basis of oppression (or any reason they can find) - why wouldn't they? That's in their interests. Why wouldn't they seek to advance their own collective self-interests? Helping the ingroup and harming the outgroup is basic human nature.
It seems worth noting that the Mexican community has not done this when they have had the opportunity, except incidentally(eg Spanish as an acceptable language of instruction in schools). The equivalent of those black activists pushing for reparations can't get elected.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
As a practical matter we should limit immigration. Canada really opened the gates. They are something like 20% immigrant at this point. And then didn't build significantly more housing. They really screwed themselves on that last point.
I think avoiding Canada's horrible immigration policy is orthogonal to forming a white ethnostate.
How are the 20% Indian families / other immigrants in Canada wounding the Canadians' ability to thrive?
Is quantity a quality of its own?
Every other Indian family on your block has a family member that they're trying to get to the US using existing laws. These people are probably not going to vote to shut down legal immigration until they've brought all the people they need first. Perhaps they'd even vote to make it more like Canada.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
There are many, many people who care about white people who aren't "white nationalist".
I feel like your sentence needs a little of defining before it holds any relevance.
If I say I care about X, but I wont lift a finger to help X, do I actually care?
If I say I care about X, but refuse to acknowledge that X can ever be at risk or in need of help, and constantly browbeat anyone who acts like there might be risk or need of help, do I care?
Most people are not "white nationalist" because the term is actively marginalized. Most people, in fact, don't like to label themselves as anything at all. They just have their beliefs and opinions and look for the best representation for those beliefs and opinions they can find. Sure, you can care about white people and not associate with some label, but to actually care about white people you have to act like a 'white nationalist', for a lack of a better term, in some form. Ingroup bias expresses itself very uniformly.
As a side note, it's very easy to make up bad faith arguments for what constitutes to 'care'. On that front I think we have a good example from a recent Tucker Carlson interview where he bites into Ben Shapiro a bit.
(A more relevant clip from the interview.)
Does Ben Shapiro care about Israel? Obviously he does. Does he care about America? Well... To an extent he has to, right? He lives there, after all. And he gets animated over various political things over there. Saying he does not care is kind of stupid. But that's also not really the point. Ben Shapiro obviously cares more about Israel than America. Same can be said for many voices in American politics who were happy to tell the world that the Oct. 7 event was equivalent to 10 9/11's. The numbers here, given we know the rough deathtoll of both, can only represent the emotional weight placed on the events by those who make such claims. Why else make a low brow comparison like that.
The point being made here is that you can care about a lot of things. Giving yourself an excuse to say you care is easy. But its how you prioritize things that allows us to see what you 'really' care about out of all the things you say and act like you care about.
If what you meant to say was “advocate for white people”, “donate to white nationalist organizations”, or “advocate against affirmative action”, you could have said that.
From my perspective it seems like you chose a deliberately milquetoast word to make people seem crazy for not liking white nationalists.
That's not what I meant to say. There are certainly a lot of people in the world that do not care about white people.
I am at a loss for what to do for you, if that's the case.
To maybe rephrase what was being said; Vegans care about animals. I know they do because they don't eat animals as an act of protest against the practice of farming and killing animals for food. I might 'care' about animals in some way. I certainly don't like the idea of torturous factory farming. But how much do I care? I certainly am still eating animal meat and produce. Judging by action, I certainly do not care as much as a some type of vegan.
In a sense you can say you care about something if you feel like you do. But that, to me, feels like we are just debasing the word 'care' to a point where it is meaningless. For example, if you told me you cared a lot about your dog, but acted indifferent to it at best and barely walked it to a point where it was obviously having issues, I'd conclude you are either lying or that your words don't mean very much, or that you are stupid to a point where you don't understand that you need to walk your dog, and that this needed explaining to you.
In any case, I don't think people are "crazy" for neglecting their dogs. I would, however, feel justified in concluding that their own description of themselves as caring about their dog is inaccurate at best.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
You are defining "care" to mean "form an ethnostate excluding non-whites". That's a pretty extreme form of "care". That's so extreme I will reject it as a good definition. There are valid ways to "care" without being a white nationalist.
More options
Context Copy link
White nationalism doesn't just mean "pro-white", it is generally defined by its advocates as including a desire for the existence of white ethnostates. It's like conflating "cares about jewish people" and "zionist": many jews believe zionism harms jewish people instead of helping them (and doing it with white nationalism is even less accurate because zionism is currently more mainstream).
It's not just a matter of prioritization but of beliefs about the world. There are plenty of normal people who genuinely think that racial diversity benefits everyone, including white people. Furthermore, even within the realm of people who both know about HBD and think it potentially justifies government discrimination on the basis of race, most are not white nationalists. For instance white nationalists have termed Emil Kirkegaard an "IQ nationalist", though in the linked post he ends up concluding that explicit IQ nationalism would just amount to much the same thing as skilled worker laws, and the important thing is keeping out the far-below-average immigrants without IQ tests or racial discrimination being nessesary. Even if you go to a more populist community like /pol/, there are both white nationalists who think each race should get its own ethnostates, but also plenty of people who only have an issue with specific races like black people and don't care about racial separation otherwise. If your definition of "white nationalist" includes people who want to ban black immigration but allow mass-migration from Hong Kong, on the basis that they believe that such immigration would benefit everyone in the destination country including white people, it's not going to be very recognizable to conventional white nationalists.
If you have some way of maintaining white populations without borders or segregation laws I'd be interested to hear about it. Would be a new theory in a now rather dead school of thought called White Nationalism 2.0
How about "White people should breed more, for they certainly have the capacity to support more children. If they want. And if they don't care enough to proliferate, how can I?"?
But they are not breeding more, just like every other population group that's dealing with modernity right now. So people who actually care would seek solutions in the real world, rather than fiddling with rhetorical sneering to excuse their lack of care, like you are doing.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
There are immigration policies other than "white ethnostate" and "open borders". Mass immigration sufficient for your concern to happen would presumably come from countries that suck to live in, and countries that suck to live in rarely have many high-quality immigrants. Even under the current U.S. immigration system, demographic replacement has little to do with the small numbers of highly-selected immigrants, it's the reproduction rates of the population groups already in the U.S. and the ways for low-quality immigrants to bypass that selective system.
I asked for policies that could maintain white populations. A constant stream of immigration is a constant dilution of the population that has to suffer it. That's not maintaining white populations but slowly eroding them.
No? That depends on birth rates, intermarriage rates, and the actual rate of immigration from different nations and races. Non-hispanic whites and asians currently have the same birth rate, which presumably means east-asians specifically are even lower. Furthermore, assuming you count people with 98% white and 2% east-asian ancestry as white, intermarriage is going to reduce the proportion of the minority demographic, and unlike with black people I don't know of any research indicating there's a disadvantage to having east-asian ancestry. (There was that one survey of online hapa communities where they seemed to do worse than average whites or asians, but that was obviously because of the selection bias of participating in those communities.) So even if your immigration policy ended up letting in more east-asians than white people, that doesn't mean the country would end up more east-asian over time. And of course there are plenty of hypothetical selective immigration policies where the end result would be the majority of immigrants being white without being an outright ethnostate, in which case the end result will be a higher proportion of white people than if there was no immigration at all.
It actually doesn't. Unless you are proposing an immigration policy of a % based immigrant population and zero intermarriage rates, the constant stream of foreign DNA into the native population will change it.
Lets define, for the sake of argument, the current white population to be 100% white from now on. Lets take that population and say that only asians are allowed to live with it as a 5% of the total population... Any white making a family with an asian is a white not making a family with another white. That's a minus. Every child of theirs that makes a family with a white is another minus. The effect of every single mix raced person is compounding.
As you correctly point out, hapas can look very European. An asian/European quadroon certainly doesn't carry as much visual baggage as a white/black quadroon. But how do you count those people? Are they white now? Does that mean we can bring in more immigrants to maintain our 5%?
Unless you envision a world where the white population can grow endlessly, the presence of a constant stream of foreign DNA will inevitably change the white population.
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
In fairness, there's certainly white nationalists who would consider mass migration from east Asia acceptable to their white ethnostate on the basis that they'll die out except for the women who marry white men and then have phenotypically white children.
More options
Context Copy link
While I agree that one can be pro white without being a white nationalist, I strongly disagree with many of your other claims.
One could claim that anyone who supports anything that is destructive for a group, "cares" actually.
The reality is that people who particularly dislike intensely a group and it comes part and parcel with such dislike, tend to support its demographic replacement and abolishment/extinction. This is because it is genuinely harmful to the group as a group to become a minority in their own homeland, or go extinct. When Noel Ignatiev is saying that "abolishing the white race is so desirable that some may find it hard to believe that anyone other than committed white supremacists would oppose it." he was infact an anti-white racist. And this is me understating it. His agenda was genocidal.
If someone cares about a group but supports something that is genuinely destructive for them, we should consider whether it matters how much they care. It could also be the case that they aren't honest.
Conversely, people who support a group and are part of such group tend to oppose such replacement. Because it is beneficial to a group to not become a hated minority in its own land, or go extinct.
This way of thinking is definitely able to be understood when it comes to other ethnic/racial groups, and how colonization by foreigners or their replacement or even possible extinction is bad actually.
As for white nationalism in particular. The reality is that it is the boogieman, not because we have a rational society reacting to the greatest threat of racism by white people, because we see the dominant rhetoric and policy to be of an anti-white form, and president Biden to have made comments more in line with Ignatiev's comment than against it. Comments about how mass migration should happen to replace white Americans. The threat of its extremism is used as an excuse to promote an anti-white agenda and part of the denouncements have to do with fear and a desire to prove to be one of the good ones and not be cancelled and slandered. And it is in fact the case that a society that is hysteric no matter what about X group nationalists, tends to be racist against said group. More so the case when that group is actually mistreated in policy, and denounced in rhetoric. When it doesn't have representative organizations.
In reality, unconditional limitless nationalism for any group can be immoral and therefore white nationalism can be immoral in this manner but also a lack of any nationalism comes along with said ethnic group being oppressed and mistreated. It is a common aspect of the worst mistreatment and destruction of an ethnic group to attack its nation and denies its existence and legitimacy. To disallow it national self determination and to promote the tyranny of being governed without its interest being represented. Another aspect of this is toleration of other nationalisms to excess, and this is also something that is happening.
So if one group rights should ideally end where another group right's begin this necessitates a general broad quite different and more qualified and nuanced take on white nationalism, over the approach of treating it as the worst nationalism ever which brought things in the current anti-white racist situation. Nor should the correct approach be unconditional support of anything that could be pro white and anti non white groups and constant double down in that direction in a limitless fanatical manner.
The preferable way to frame things and a workable system for different groups is one of international justice that recognizes the reciprocal rights and limits of different nations, including white and not white nations.
Certainly there can be forms of white ethnostates that are analogous to zionism in behavior, and there can be imperialistic white nationalist behavior that can be rightfully opposed but the existence of european countries that wanted to remain european has a) been the dominant model b) population where political class moved away still support this in many cases like in France where they oppose the replacement of French by non French, including presumably non french whites c) we still have some white countries that the political establishment supports remaining such.
The change in attitude is recent. Even in the USA is from a couple of decades.
The idea of opposing being replaced is certainly less controversial than zionism in that it doesn't step over the rights of others in the way zionism did.
And has been treated as less controversial in general outside of the movement that Ignatiev represents. Ironically, allowing mass migration in turn made the accusations of racism more of a reality that the opposite. I would argue that opposing your own extinction and your nation's colonization is opposing anti native racism and in line with international justice. While having an agenda in favor of whites not having any homelands represents a very extreme form of racism.
This is in fact compatible with european countries not having their own people going extinct and a minority, but remaining majority, and the USA as multiethnic but again opposing mass migration explicitly because it is immoral for the white Americans who created historical USA, to become utterly disminished in the country they created and dominated. Although under this framework it was legitimate for Americans to have made a choice in the past to not open their borders to the rest of the world.
As we see with the results today, such migration was an important factor in the rise of anti-white racism.
If I could tinker with history, I'd really love to see what would have happened had Thomas Jefferson's early-1780s plan to free the slaves and then repatriate them all to their African homelands been adopted.
I'm picturing a time-traveler handing out to Southern (and other slaveholding) members of the Continental Congress Civil War histories and copies of Gone with the Wind , accompanied by unvarnished descriptions of the nation's demographics and race relations circa 2023, how they are viewed even by their own descendants, some footage of the 1992 Rodney King riots, and possibly selected clips from gangsta rap.
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
More options
Context Copy link