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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 13, 2023

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Where Winegard's argument falls apart

Hold on, how do you even know which side (if any) Winegard himself takes on this position? I found the two characters in the dialogue to be immaculate representations of their respective positions. I believe advocates of either side would enthusiastically approve of their side's character in this dialogue. The ideological Turing tests pass with flying colors here.

Really? I would be absolutely shocked to hear the writer sides more with Cleanthes than Philo.

Cleanthes allows too many major assertions by Philo to go unquestioned, and those that are pushed back against are only done after conceding ground.

That being said, I do genuinely believe the author is trying to fairly portray his more moderate opposition and does a better job than most at doing so.

I also don't think there's any distinction between "whites should fight for their interests" and "we should strive for a colourblind meritocracy", and it's revealing that Winegard makes no attempt to define "white interests" beyond dismantling DEI, affirmative action, reducing immigration, all of which can and are being advocated for without needing to resort to white nationalism.

"Advocated for" and failing miserably. And the door for that advocacy even being allowed gets shut harder and harder as time goes on. You lose your job, lose your right to free expression on the public square of the internet, you get stripped of your credentials, or denied the credentialing process, even face criminal prosecution now. Not for the speech directly, but it puts a target on your back, and the DOJ or Soros DA's will find something to get you on. Even statements as simple as "It's ok to be white" cause the enforcers of anti-white demoralization to freak out and over react. I don't care if it was a joke from 4chan designed to provoke them. It still provokes them! Just because some asshole knew they'd act retarded, doesn't take away that they are, in fact, acting retarded.

Average white Americans have no interest preserving Western Civilization or spend anytime thinking Shakespeare, Beethoven, Kant, Eliot, Locke, Hume, Russell, et cetera. Average white Americans (like everyone else) are intermarrying at high rates, befriending and starting businesses with non-white people, and just generally getting along.

Yes, average white Americans, suffering generations of demoralization propaganda, have been warded away from their cultural birthright. This is exactly why there needs to be more white identarian awareness. They should be encouraged to revel in the past achievements of their culture. They should be encouraged to understand the themes and meaning behind them, and preserve them for future generations.

Asians create different civilizations from Europeans who create different civilizations from Africans and so on.

I mean. Do they? I feel like modern China and Europe and America are more similar to each other than they are to any of China/Europe/America 2k years ago. Recently, both Russia and China had relatively similar communist revolutions, and it's China that managed to crawl their way into a functioning capitalist system.

White identity also gives people meaning. We are a tribal species. We find meaning in groups.

Even assuming we lump Jews into whites, 'white identity' still cuts out like 1/5 of my friend group and people I like online. Sure, those are mostly Asians and Indians as opposed to hispanics/blacks.

There certainly doesn't seem to be anything stopping Indians or Asians (or Jews) from mastering online dissident-right ideas and twitter reach, if you go by demographics. If anything they're overrepresented, as one would expect from IQ.

Why should I care about whiteness individually, when Indians, Chinese, Japanese, some south asians and middle easterners, seem to be perfectly productive and intelligent citizens?

The costs of not embracing white identity are already colossal. Whites are losing control of their own civilization; they are a quickly dwindling and despised minority in the countries they created

To the significant extent that that's true, it's entirely of their own desire and creation. Embracing white identity here is a blunt proxy for rejecting wokeness, liberalism, whatever you call it. I think Philo would admit he'd have no reason to embrace white identity if white/asian/jewish/indian elites had no interest in uplifting blacks or mass hispanic immigration or w/e. But ... why not just ... directly advocate for that? And if you can't do the that, you can't do the much tougher task of embracing white identity anyway.

FWIW @jewdefender I appreciated you posting that article here and think the discussion it spawned was fine, not sure why you deleted it!

maybe get a new gimmick?

Even assuming we lump Jews into whites, 'white identity' still cuts out like 1/5 of my friend group and people I like online. Sure, those are mostly Asians and Indians as opposed to hispanics/blacks.

Where in the article does it say you can't be friends with them?

To the significant extent that that's true, it's entirely of their own desire and creation. Embracing white identity here is a blunt proxy for rejecting wokeness, liberalism, whatever you call it. I think Philo would admit he'd have no reason to embrace white identity if white/asian/jewish/indian elites had no interest in uplifting blacks or mass hispanic immigration or w/e. But ... why not just ... directly advocate for that? And if you can't do the that, you can't do the much tougher task of embracing white identity anyway.

Well, it hasn't worked yet, and it's chances of working sense white identity politics decreases with every million illegals that cross the border. See the popular definition of insanity as trying the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Where in the article does it say you can't be friends with them?

Friends and coworkers, often people that you or your white friends marry, people you integrate your life with. If white identity means anything at all, it means caring more or doing more with white than nonwhites.

Well, it hasn't worked yet, and it's chances of working sense white identity politics decreases with every million illegals that cross the border.

I don't understand your point here? You're arguing that in the status quo you're losing on demographics. And if all whites suddenly became wignats, then you'd start winning on demographics. That's true. It's also true that if everyone became HBD liberals, you'd stop losing on demographics. I don't see why this privileges white nationalism over HBD liberalism. There needs to be some other argument.

This got a lot of reports for being "low effort".

It does pass my very low standards for not being "low effort": There is context. There are some of your thoughts on the context. And there is a jumping off point for a discussion.

What people probably did not like was you dropping the text of a very long article into the main thread. That is mildly annoying, and I'll try to explain why:

I read a lot of the writing on this website, and it has spoiled me in a specific way: I no longer enjoy reading stuff if I can't talk with the author about it. My learning style is often very discussion oriented. I don't fully understand a point from someone else, or sometimes even my own thoughts on a topic until I try to communicate it.

This website is explicitly dedicated to discussion. Just posting a ton of someone else's writing is against the spirit of this website since we can't discuss with that author.

Some reports, likely a significant fraction of them, come from the period after it was posted but before it was edited, when the post was the one line of introduction at the start, a big pile of quotation, and absolutely nothing else. I know that's what pushed me to report it.

That context makes more sense

I read a lot of the writing on this website, and it has spoiled me in a specific way: I no longer enjoy reading stuff if I can't talk with the author about it.

That's a very interesting phenomenon that I've also noticed in myself. I can still tolerate some writers, but they have to be good at anticipating objections.

Agreed.

It is not free to create whatever web it pleases. But humans are free to create whatever culture they please.

There is no phrase dismissive enough to properly acknowledge this folly. But. If wishes were fishes we'd all have a fry

Did you have any commentary on this, or are you just dropping the full text of some article into the thread in the hopes that people read it and start their own discussion?

Edit: Ok, that's better with the paragraphs you wrote at the end in your edit.