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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 20, 2024

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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.

A genuine question I have for the people who don't like immigrants here: In your ideal world what would you have the immigrants who come to the west do when they get here?

I've heard people complain about immigrants drawing welfare when they don't work; I've noted all the complaints about immigrants driving down pay and making the job market more competitive when they work normal people jobs and I've sure as hell seen all the attacks launched upon them when they come and take over the very top of society to rule the natives beneath them.

So my question very simply is: given that immigrants aren't going to stop coming any time soon, what should they be doing that will make them acceptable in your eyes?

  • -10

Truthfully? I just want the country I grew up in back.

I want back a justice system and a police force that punishes crime, regardless of "disproportionate impact". I want back a world where I'm not skipping over 50% of the job listing because they explicitly say they have a focus on "marginalized people" for the role. I want back a country where it doesn't feel like we can't have one single nice thing because some third worlder does some third world shit and ruins it. I want back a country where our government isn't a naked racial spoils system. I have no illusions that the government was never corrupt. Just like I have no illusions that my auto mechanic is probably fleecing me. However, my auto mechanic, despite probably ripping me off somewhat, at least also keeps my car running. The government is just handing out sinecures to nakedly incompetent diversity hires, and meanwhile the country is falling the fuck apart.

I want back a country where I'm not awash in naked anti-white propaganda, and it doesn't feel like my government is oozing hate out of every pore at me.

If these wishes could be accomplished without violent expulsion, I'd be down. It felt like we had all these things in the 90's. Maybe that was an illusion. I don't know. Maybe the 90's was the top of the roller coaster, where for a brief moment the acceleration has almost cancelled out your velocity, before you plummet straight to hell. I no longer know what to believe that I'd say publicly about "multiculturalism". But privately, seems to me it's only going to end in genocide, and I'm not confident about who's.

As far as I can tell, the primary beneficiaries of "disproportionate impact" policies and hiring of "marginalized people" are black people. The people advocating and voting for these policies are white people.

How and when did this come about? Well, affirmative action dates back to the sixties, and was well underway in the nineties. As for where all these black people came from, if I remember your family history correctly, I am afraid you will have to blame your ancestors.

As for where all these black people came from, if I remember your family history correctly, I am afraid you will have to blame your ancestors.

Regrettably so. We were on the wrong side of both the revolution and the civil war. 'Won' both.

I've said this before, I'll keep saying it: solidarity with the far threat against the near enemy. progressive whites do not view normie whites as their own kin, the normie is the enemy to be subjugated. blacks are merely the enemy of normies so advancing blacks is useful. if blacks all turned out to be value aligned witb normies the progs would abandon them, just like the progs abandoned asians and now latinos. in the competition for cultural supremacy, the prize is being the dispenser of the systems spoils. that the fruits are withered because the normies tending the orchard have been replaced by blacks (or in europe muslims) is not a possibility entertained by progs.

As for where all these black people came from, if I remember your family history correctly, I am afraid you will have to blame your ancestors.

If we were truly to accept this argument, we could strictly limit affirmative action to ADOS, rather than all Americans of African lineage. On the other hand, maybe this could be acceptable: it would rule out race-based favoritism on behalf of, for example, Barack Obama and Claudine Gay.

I am against affirmative action in general, but I think there are some progressives who are on board with that.

What if my ancestors didn't own slaves, and in fact fought to free them? Do I get a prize?

They weren't a problem when they were slaves. Your ancestors fighting to free them are why we're in this mess.

You know why the south lost and Rome fell right? Slavery is as bad for the owners as it is for the slaves. It stifles every good thing in humanity and promotes the bad. Most surviving cultures have figured that out.

Slavery was a bad idea, and should never have been implemented. You might as well blame Kulaks and wreckers for the failures of Communism. Your ancestors should, in fact, have picked their own damn cotton.

You call it slavery, I call it animal husbandry. It worked just fine and while cruelty to animals sucks, domestication is not evil. Often it's a pretty great deal for the animals. Nature is harsh and wild animals are generally worse to each other than their human masters.

My ancestors are at fault inasmuch as they failed to adequately anticipate the fatal flaw in voting-based government, which is the incentive to expand the franchise to those who should never have had it in exchange for political support and dominance over the responsible opponents who refuse to stoop so low.

I'll go ahead and agree that modeling your fellow man as animals, or more specifically, social mammals, and then using animal husbandry techniques on them is valid. The same soothing and awareness and empathetic techniques work on both. I do notice that- "animals" being a slur is completely unfair both to humans and to non-human animals.

But chattel slavery was piss poor animal husbandry. As evidenced by its fruits. If your animals are suffering, you're not doing a great job. If you are in physical conflict with your animals, you have failed to engage with them emotionally. This is the smell of your mandate of heaven rotting beneath your mismanagement.

If your animals can learn read and write and become functional independent general intelligences that can potentially engage with high society and you aren't bothering to cultivate that. You fail druid class!

We allow all kinds of hot takes, including "slavery was good, actually," as long as you can argue the case civilly and in accordance with our rules.

You've broken a few of those rules, notably "Be no more antagonistic than is absolutely necessary for your argument" and "Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion."

Sometimes people really want to say something about a particular group of people, because this is what they really, honestly believe. Things like "Jews are vermin," "Women aren't sentient," or "Black people are animals." And when we mod them for saying these things, they complain that we are "protecting the feelings" of the group they despise. Well, no, we don't care that you might hurt someone's feelings (arguing that blacks have lower IQs and higher criminality, or that women are hypergamous, or that Jews have disproportionate power in Hollywood, likely hurts some people's feelings, but you are allowed to say that). But it's one thing to describe your grievances with the behavior of a group, and quite another to declare they are less than human and should be treated as such.

Assuming you are not just trolling, pretend there are black people participating here (sometimes there are) and that you aren't trying to insult and denigrate them (even if that's what you do want to do - you may not).

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You call it slavery, I call it animal husbandry.

Humans aren't animals. Animals can be safely disregarded. Humans cannot. That is the distinction.

Often it's a pretty great deal for the animals.

And yet, they don't seem to have appreciated it, and because they are humans and not actually animals, their lack of appreciation is in fact dispositive.

My ancestors are at fault inasmuch as they failed to adequately anticipate the fatal flaw in voting-based government, which is the incentive to expand the franchise to those who should never have had it in exchange for political support and dominance over the responsible opponents who refuse to stoop so low.

I do not believe Abolitionism won because its supporters expected to reap new voters. All evidence I've seen indicates that it won because its supporters considered chattel slavery an intolerable evil, and were willing to make considerable sacrifices to eradicate it. I believe they were correct in this estimation. If you wish to disregard the humanity of Africans, I certainly cannot stop you. Leave them in Africa, and it's no business of mine what happens on the other side of the world. Bring them here and you make them, and by extension yourself, my problem.

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I'm still waiting for my prize for being the first of my ancestors to even be born in the western hemisphere, so I'll let you know.

You're your own ancestor?

Though art God. Drink water, grow closer.

No, you can sit in the same bucket with the white Ellis Island immigrants, who also never owned slaves.

You should know that somebody took your comment, combined it with the comment of @SecureSignals below, and posted in the /r/BlockedAndReported weekly discussion thread. I first assumed it was you yourself, but then I saw it's two different comments glued together.

ETA and it's gone. You can find the traces, a few replies of the "are you okay?" kind. It wasn't me, and I'm very curious what was the purpose of it all.

That's a fascinating sub with much wrongthink; has Reddit become more tolerant or is this sub just flying under the radar until they get the inevitable ban? I stopped browsing Reddit when they banned CCJ2, so I don't know how things go over there nowadays.

Great. See if I end up needing another new account soon. Nothing good ever comes of being noticed.

And because my comment wasn't yet visible to common users by the time of deletion, the culprit must be one of the motte mods, dun-dun-dun! But seriously, good luck, man, I remember the shitstorm with your previous account.

With 2 comments you say this?

Is there really a culprit? A crime? I don't know the tone of the comment over there, maybe it was totally mocking, but I also don't really share the fear that someone might notice us anymore. We're not on reddit, we are free of the gigajanny's tyranny.

It was not quoting those two comments, somebody was posting them as one and under their own name. Very weird. You can head to https://old.reddit.com/r/BlockedAndReported/comments/1cw6mpn/weekly_random_discussion_thread_for_52024_52624/l5bwmui/ and see that the replies line up with the contents of the posts by @WhiningCoil and @SecureSignals. Maybe one of Iconochasm, JTarrou, professorgerm, SerialStateLineXer, or somebody else who I don't know, caught it, but it stayed up for such a brief period that I doubt it. One could take these two comments and ask people in that thread if they recognize the result.

I'm tired of this matter, back to lurking for months. Peace.

And because my comment wasn't yet visible to common users by the time of deletion, the culprit must be one of the motte mods, dun-dun-dun

Really, now?

I doubt very much any mod did that. Here's an alternate hypothesis: given the recent spate of trolls spinning up alts to post flamebait and then deleting all their comments, it is far more likely it was one of them. You know, like a brand new account with a great deal of familiarity with the details of motte posting, whose only two comments here are to helpfully inform us about that now-deleted post.

Did you not get that I was joking, really? Teaches me to try to do right by a person whose posts I've consistently liked for my years of lurking. If I wanted to cause drama, I could have brought up his previous identity and what forced him to create a new account, not do this weird who-knows-what-this-is that just happened.

Yeah, I'm not good at being subtle.

Good news!

The people that hate you now already hated you in the 90s. Affirmative action was already going strong and third worlders were already ruining nice things with their third world shit.

It felt like we had all these things in the 90's. Maybe that was an illusion. I don't know.

Presumably you were a kid, so that helps. It also helps that this was in the pre-internet or later the dialup era, when people were generally less ‘pilled of broader ongoings.

However, I would agree in the estimation that things have certainly gotten worse since then: Affirmative action stronger; anti-white propaganda more naked; government more explicitly a racial spoils system; justice system and police force more anarcho-tyrannic and “disproportionate impact” pearl-clutchy.

If these wishes could be accomplished without violent expulsion, I'd be down.

I could also be down for some flavors of “with.”

The people that hate you now already hated you in the 90s. Affirmative action was already going strong and third worlders were already ruining nice things with their third world shit.

The difference is just time and accumulation. Mass immigration to the U.S. started in the 1970s and really got going in the 1990s before going insane in the Biden era.

In the 1990s, the effects of immigration weren't that notable in most places even if the seeds were already sown.

And mass immigration was stopped in the 1920s, thereby allowing multiple contentious immigrant groups to assimilate. Furthermore, until the 1970s, almost all U.S. immigration was from European countries. Not counting slavery, of course.

Given that we were near record highs in 2019, imagine what 10 million more illegal immigrants has done to that number.

Efforts to "contextualize" the unprecedented wave of immigration we've experienced post-2020 are typically historically ignorant.

Ten million more illegal immigrants since 2019? What's the methodology for that estimate?

The total illegal immigrant population in 2021 (the latest I could find estimates for) was 10.5M, down from 12.2M around 2009.

I'm having a hard time this comment is being offered in good faith. Do you think the border crisis is just made up and the number of illegals has actually decreased since 2009? All those cities claiming they are overwhelmed... it's all just fake? If so, I can forgive you. Google seems to want you to believe that. They are really, really, determined to skew the information here. It's actually breathtaking how heavily their thumb is on the scale here.

https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=illegal%20immigrants%20per%20month%202024#ip=1

But, yes about 10.8 million illegals have entered the country since Biden took office:

https://homeland.house.gov/2024/03/26/factsheet-nationwide-border-encounters-hit-nine-million-on-secretary-mayorkas-watch-in-the-worst-february-in-decades/

I'll admit this article has a partisan spin. But it's based on DHS data. I could find an unbiased source if Google would let me or if I felt like running errands.

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For all the talk about Biden and Obama keeping the border secure by performing border rejections and spinning up ICE, no one ever acknowledged that Biden was seen by migrants as the opening of the gates. Migrants are motivated to gp to the USA by promises made to migrants such as DREAM and sanctuary cities, migrants are drawn to europe by weakness and riches for the taking.

The irony of developmental economics is that as western aid becomes more efficient at making poor countries richers, it just gives them resources to make a trip to the promised land. Refugee laws were made when only neighbouring countries would flood your border, now you can get a trip on Air India to Canada or get coyotes to set up food and water and transport on your way to the promised land. The only thing that will stop migrants flooding borders is the rejection of any benefits to these people, including NGOs hiding them from police and illegal work. You westerners have no idea how to deal with these culturally disruptive peoples and the rubber band will snap back soon.

You westerners have no idea how to deal with these culturally disruptive peoples and the rubber band will snap back soon.

The thing about rubber bands is that if you stretch them too much, they don't snap back; they break.

Genocide? This word has lost almost all impact through overuse in the current landscape. It also has a specific definition that is apparently being lost along with all meaning. The word was coined in 1944 by a Jewish Lawyer named Raphael Lemkin to describe what the Nazi regime had done. You think we're going to be in cattle cars soon? or are you talking peaceful demographic replacement? Those are 2 very different kinds of "genocide".