site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 20, 2024

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.

8
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Erik Prince was on Tucker Carlson. It was nearly two hours, and I enjoyed most of it. They talked about Ukraine, the CIA, republicans, Afghanistan, drone warfare, surveillance, smartphones, and much more.

https://x.com/TuckerCarlson/status/1792963714779426941

https://rumble.com/v4wl5or-erik-prince-cia-corruption-killer-drones-and-government-surveillance.html

Also youtube, somewhere.

I wanted to transcribe this part, and talk about it. Approximately 1:09.

EP: There's a lot of people that are considered American citizens that probably shouldn't be considered American citizens.

TC: I agree with that completely, but an actual American, someone who grew up here.

EP: Fair. But the left has devalued American citizenship, it should mean something to be an American. I mean, a Roman citizen: it meant something.

TC: I mean a Venezuelan gang member who's here illegally is every bit as American as you, who was born in Western Michigan, so yes, I'm quite aware of that.

EP: Anchor babies, birthright citizenship, all of that must go.

TC: Yeah, you wonder if we've reached where that is impossible for the country to act in its own interest just because of the changes due to immigration.

EP: I read a lot of history, and I know that things have been a lot worse in certain societies, and corrective events can be shocking and traumatic to people but it's still possible.

I have not been shy about voicing my thoughts on citizenship, so to hear them echoed in some part on a platform like this was interesting and unexpected.

What other societies is he talking about? I am most familiar with the Reconquest, where the mohammadeans were driven out of Iberia over centuries. That fits pretty well with what Prince is saying. I'm less familiar with the partition of India, by religion, then the separation of Bangladesh from Pakistan. This seems less relevant. What else is there? And what would that look like in the USA and Europe?

There's plenty to talk about from this conversation. The parts on drone warfare were particularly interesting to me, but didn't seem to fit with the rest of this post. And I'm out of time, so I post this as-is without any further commentary.

I really don't get why people go straight to ethnic cleansing. It's a political non-starter for one unless we're on the brink of collapse, and there is several steps in-between here and there that are much more reasonable. Every single larger european country used to be multiple regions & ethnicities that didn't really identify as one, and there are quite a few accidents of history which would have led to a very different structure; Burgundy as an independent entity, or a much larger (or smaller, or integrated) Austria, or a mostly-unified Scandinavia, and so on. That the current shape feels so "solid" was the result of a deliberate process of propaganda and suppression of minority identities. The only reason why we nowadays can be so laizze-faire with european minority identification is precisely because of this process. My mom didn't speak high german for example, only low german, but was bullied in school even by the teachers until she could speak "proper" german. My parents only taught high german to me. And this obviously was toward the far end, both in time and in tameness, of the process.

There is so much we can change; We can tie welfare to much more stringent requirements, enforce a common language, or for a more extreme option we can require extensive civil/military service with explicit statements of loyalty. And there's even some "positive" actions still lacking; For example, I personally know an arabic guy who fell into alcoholism bc he was literally not allowed to work for multiple years due to his legal status, and he wasn't willing to engage in illegal work (in itself a laudable quality, even if it arguably was wrong in this case!). Many of the more extreme options will probably result in some levels of emigration, but that's still very different than forcibly removing people of which a decent percentage would likely have been willing to adjust.

The issue here and where the anti-immigration people will fundamentally disagree with you is you assume the issue with immigrants is mostly cultural assimilation and not biological assimilation. It’s assuming if you suppress minority culture they will turn into good Protestant Americans. Biological assimilation is still possible but requires even more extreme measures. Germany is quite dull today. We wiped out an entire generation of their fighting men. Central America similar went thru a big filter with the Spanish. I believe England was executing something like 1% of their lower class for a long time. One theory of Ashkenazi is the ethnicity faced strong selection pressure for entering the merchant class and thus selecting for IQ. There are processes to biologically assimilate a people, but in the modern world that is an order of magnitude more extreme. The U.S. too this day has failed to assimilate the African American population.

Genetic engineering could be a potential solution in the near future.

While the theory about how medieval executions drove a certain kind of evolution is cute and somewhat plausible, I consider it far from proven. If you asked me numbers, I'd say 20% to be true in broad terms, 40% to be true directionally but too weak pressure to be notable, and 40% to be just wrong. There is also the problem that executions have been a mainstay of cultures everywhere. As I remember, the relevant paper was OK in terms of "this is a theory, and it somewhat fits with some available evidence" but bad in terms of "this theory is actually significantly better than competing theories".

Much more plausible to me is simply that the cradle of humanity from which most non-africans descend was a pretty strong bottleneck with, among other things, multiple neurology-related mutational sweeps. Secondly the civilisational band of europe - middle east - asia has exerted pro-civilisation pressure over literal millenia, and from the available evidence the centre of highest development has changed multiple times. The problem with arabs really isn't biology, the moment they bother to assimilate they're pretty good citizens. That argument applies much more to (sub-saharan) africans, which still are a pretty small minority here.

In addition, I happen to be a pretty strong proponent of genetic engineering anyway.

Arabs have a genetically low IQ today because extremely high rates of cousin marriage drive down their intelligence(a side effect of Islam). Arab Christians have IQ scores on par with north-western Europe. It’s not implausible that ancient middle easterners had IQ more similar to Europeans than to their modern descendants.

I’ve been led to believe, perhaps falsely, that this should only account for about 5 IQ points. I suspect (not epistemically well-founded) that the Christian non-Ashkenazi Jewish IQ advantage in the Middle East could derive partially from wealthier, more educated segments of society being more resistant to conversion (like recusants in England). Middle Eastern Christians sects and Jews (and maybe Druze, Yazidis, other religious groups? I’m not too familiar) always strike me as resembling unusually large, Indian-style jātis

There’s probably a lot of factors behind Maronites having the highest IQ in the Levant, including Jews as a whole(although not if you split out ashkenazim). Recusants being wealthier is probably a factor too, but I think the cousin marriage effect is exaggerated by generations upon generation of inbreeding. There might also be a factor of women being more resistant to conversion with intelligence, in particular, due to Islam having a deserved reputation for treating women more poorly than Christianity.

In addition, I happen to be a pretty strong proponent of genetic engineering anyway.

I too very strongly support genetic engineering. However I expect that even if we did this the low grade whites left wouldn't be partcularly happy about the enhanced negro who is now better than them and starts taking his new rightful place in society. I expect they will still complain just as much about that state of affairs as they do about the current one (much like how they complain today about black Nigerian Elites).

And even if you raised these whites to the same level as the upgraded blacks the complaining still wouldn't stop. What were litanies against people sucking on the welfare teat will become jeremiads against the minorities driving wages down.