site banner
naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   33490 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 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.

23
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

if things like intelligence and personal discipline are primarily genetic why are the children of our elites so consistently idiots and drug addicts

First, citation needed (no, other than Hunter).

Second, it must also be shown that the process of becoming an «elite», i.e. a member of the political class, is substantially meritocratic. Perhaps political animals pass through some other pipeline than one requiring merit of the kind incompatible with drug addiction and stupidity. I do not observe high rates of idiocy and drug addiction among the progeny of liberal academic elite you love to sneer at so much; rather, children of tenured math profs tend to become math adjuncts or maybe quants at Jane Street, as the regression to the mean predicts. And they do more to build up a great nation than Bidens and Trumps.

Second, the axis would have won WWII. The Japanese and German militaries both entered the war with a substantial advantage in technology and training over their opponents.

Lmao no they didn't, and that's not starting to discuss industrial capacity and, more to the point, general human capital.

You are an undisciplined thinker, which I suppose is in your eyes a fair tradeoff for another kind of discipline. You seem to equate HBD with particular self-serving German National Socialist beliefs, which irrationally posited superiority of German stock over other peoples of the world (and Yamato subjects had their own sort of racial hubris, grounded more in their legitimate successes in recent major wars than in some theoretic HBD scholarship). By the end of the war Germans have «discovered» that not only are Anglos perfectly capable of matching their Teutonic spirit or whatever, but that even Slavs aren't inept Mongoloids like they came to believe.

Here's Himmler whining about it:

Then you hear the next prayer. This goes: "We were wrong about the Russians." This song is usually sung by men from some eastern province, who were over there in their youth, some of whom have written very good books and had a Russian mother, too, and now they tell stories. It is also sung by the little political vagabonds whom we first came to know in the eastern struggle against Poland, whom we rejected at home, and who have now been drafted as soldiers, officers and majors, and are still peddling their intellectual poison under cover of the uniform of our decent German army. Goaded on by this propaganda tendency -- I can't call it anything else -- they tell you so many stories, or write them home by military post (and the stories then trickle down from top to bottom): "Yes, we were wrong about the Russians. The Russians are not at all the robots" (this is the expression used most frequently) "that we thought they were in 1941. Now that we're over here in the East, our eyes have been opened. The Russians are a noble people”, and so on and so forth, “a collection of all virtues. We just have to educate them as National Socialists, the best thing would be to create a NSRAP or something similar. Then they would" -- this is the next bit -- "form the army of liberation under General Vlasov".

You're straight up wrong. Like the Nazis were.

If the HBD-Tards' and Woke-Cels' theories about race were accurate

Instead the racially diverse, hopelessly disorganized (IE decentralized), and utterly lacking in warrior spirit/tradition armies of the Aglosphere

Come on now, this is peak PoMo. Wokes predict that diversity breeds success, they have pseudo-mathematical papers on that.

P.S. How's that diversity and disorganization working out for Russian Federation right now?

P.P.S. A Borderer descendant talking about the lack of warrior tradition, that's rich.

I'm afraid Hlynka still doesn't understand regression to mean

First, citation needed (no, other than Hunter).

Jeb Bush, Matthew Yglasias, Liz Cheney, and yes Hunter Biden. When comparing the current scion of a political dynasty to that dynasty's founder there is rarely any comparison. And for what it's worth "elites" being selected on something other than intelligence as you suggest here would itself be a body blow to the HBD advocates' claims.

Lmao no they didn't

Yes they, they kind of did. On the German side in the Autumn of 1939 the BF-109 and FW-190s were qualitatively superior to any fighter available to the opposition ditto the Panzer IIIs and IVs on the ground. Further more Germany's professional NCO and JO Corps (inherited from the Prussians) meant that their crews generally had far more time and practice in their vehicles than their mostly conscripted opponents. They also enjoyed an approximate parity in numbers. Likewise on the Japanese side the A6M was easily the match of anything the Americans or Brits could field in the winter of '41 and the US Pacific Fleet had rather famously (infamously) allowed things like live fire training and regular testing/maintenance of equipment to slide in favor of "looking pretty on parade", leading to notable under-performance in the early phases of the war even if we discount the "sucker punch" effect of Pearl Harbor.

Here's Himmler whining about it.

What Himmler seems to be whinging about, is the Nazis' inability to keep up the façade.

In other words he's complaining whinging about guys like me being proven right. "Culture", "grit", and "General Motors" really do matter more than your old-world notions of racial purity/destiny.

Wokes predict that diversity breeds success, they have pseudo-mathematical papers on that.

The Woke conflate diversity of skin color with diversity of opinion, background, class, etc... because their whole ideology is built around their belief in the maximal importance of race. This is why when a hard-core progressive get's red-pilled they have a tendency turn into whacky ethno-nationalists like Steve Sailer, Richard Spencer, or our very own @SecureSignals, than anything resembling a republican. Being as deeply ensconced in the progressive bubble as they are, they simply lack the historical and cultural context to truly free their minds from the woke matrix.

How's that diversity and disorganization working out for Russian Federation right now?

Putin and his Vatniks are mid-20th-century fascists in all but name and they are loosing for the same reason. They put way too much stock in thier own perceived superiority and their opponents perceived weakness, and now they are paying for it in blood.

A Borderer descendant talking about the lack of warrior tradition, that's rich.

I am merely repeating what others have said about us. And on one hand they are correct, there is nothing in my ancestry that compare to the centuries long traditions of the Japanese Samurai or the Prussian Army, that said what we do have is a history of irrational defiance.

edit: fixed image link

What are you talking about? Pz 3&4 were worse than T-34 and they were unable to penetrate armor of KV-1 heavy tanks, Germany started to use heavy tanks noticeably later and in small quantities because they were overengineered. The only thing better was radios, and that every tank was equipped with it rather than select ones (in Soviets).

Americans didn't need to put much effort in tanks because tanks weren't useful in terrain where they fought Japanese.

Should be fixed now.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats