site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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.

24
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Yes, but that's not the point. My argument is that the whole woke/proimmigration bent is certainly not new a) in Western Europe b) towards African or Middle-Eastern immigrants.

It's also worth noting that one of the reasons why there are occasional attempts from EU to get the Eastern European countries to take in more refugees is that then the Western European countries wouldn't have to host those refugees themselves.

Meh. I just think such attempts were fundamentally dishonest and merely meant as a culture war bone thrown to Eastern European liberal opposition groups and their Western pals to chew on, and an excuse to complain about Eastern European barbarian badwhites.

And we can rightly assume such attempts were dishonest, because it's rather obvious to anyone that if, say, Poland or Latvia accepted a large group of African migrants, most of them would just want to move on and cross the border into Germany. And who'd try stopping them? Certainly not the local authorities, and very probably not the German border guards either.

It seems to be the paradox of EU 'democracy'. While no individual EU state is individually strongly pro-African immigration, the collective response of the EU is to take them in. With some caveats, as they have developed some measures of containment with North-Africa.

This emergent property of the EU was not hard to predict, but of course the bureaucrats in charge are strangely sympathetic to the corporations that benefit from economic integration and industry relocation.

If this continues on this trajectory, Europeans as a people will not survive the EU, having survived the USSR and all kind of monarchies and fascist dictatorships previously.