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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 16, 2024

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The argument people like Keith Woods makes is that these Arab immigrants will never be German, no matter how long they are there or if they learn the language, whether they commit crime or do not commit crime, whatever they Tweet or whatever political policy they support, whatever religion they will follow, the only certainty is that they will never be German. So your rebuttal is not responsive to the issue they fundamentally have with the mass migration of non-European people to European civilization.

It's not just about crime, it's not just about religion, it's not just about terrorism, although those things can be relevant symptoms, it's about jealously guarding a European genetic and civilizational inheritance from being Africanized, replaced by Arabs or Chinese, Indians or whatever.

Your argument is most responsive to the Conservatives who just say "hey, I'm not racist I just oppose mass Arab migration because I don't want terrorist attacks in my Christmas villages." For those people you can do your well ackhually it wasn't Islamic extremism that inspired the attack, but that just doesn't work on the DR perspective.

If Germany let in 100,000 Vietnamese immigrants tomorrow, my prediction is that those immigrants would flourish, as they have in America.

Why stop at 100,000? Why not 100 million? Even if mass migration of Asians, Vietnamese, Chinese to Germany caused a reduction in crime and created economic growth do you think the DR should accept these foreigners because they commit less crime or raise GDP? Why not replace all of Europe with Chinese if it lowered crime and raised IQ? It's only conservatives who say it's about those things.

This terrorist attack is pertinent to the DR perspective because it provides a symbolic counterexample to the lie that, no matter who you are, you can go to Germany, learn the language and obey the law and, congratulations you're German! No you are not. The American Midwest family with Germanic ancestry they don't even know about is more German than they will ever be. So this man ostensibly being the "model" Arab immigrant but still become inspired to commit this act is shattering the liberal illusion of assimilation, or that being German is just an idea.

He really did seem to resent Germany and to want to strike a blow against it on behalf of his in-group, but his in-group isn’t Arabs as a whole, it isn’t Muslims, and it isn’t even Saudis. It appears to just be “ex-Muslim apostates (especially women) fleeing the Middle East.”

His motivation was European immigration policy. You try to be ultra-specific about it to brush it as a one-off, but it introduces the likelihood of violence in response to Right-wing Immigration reform in Europe. We may see more of that type of violence than radical Islamic-inspired violence, although a lot of it will be blended together.

We have seen a similar pattern with Free Speech in Europe: terrorist attacks in response to offensive speech did not motivate backlash against mass migration it motivated crackdowns on "hate speech" out of fear of offending Muslims. So if we see more Arab terrorists attack Europe because of European immigration reform we will likely see pressure put against immigration reform. This is relevant especially at a time when parties are flirting with the idea of remigration.

You don't think that AfD and other European parties beginning to support remigration is likely to inspire any more of this violence? We already see race riots and organized street violence by African and Arab gangs. That already happens, and it's political, it's not driven by radical Islam. So your denial that we won't see more of this sort of political violence is absurd.

Yes, the likelihood is near 100% that this sort of violence is going to influence European policy on immigration, most likely it will cause authorities to crackdown harder on political support for remigration because authorities will plausibly be able to say that supporting this policy is likely to foment violence. Certainly if that policy were to be pursued, then violence from deportees would be a top concern of that policy. So there's simply no reality in which the prospect of violence from these African and Arab migrants is irrelevant, Muslim or otherwise.

This attack is more relevant because it was motivated by European immigration policy than if it were just radical Islam. It's proof that mass migration irrevocably influences politics and "assimilation" is fundamentally a lie.

Germany, Ireland, Finland, and the UK have very different cultures about assimilation. Famously France thinks it can assimilate Africans; German identity seems a bit more racially-exclusivist in comparison.

I think plenty of people from all over the world can assimilate and become culturally Southern

The word 'can' is doing alot of heavy lifting in your argument.

One of the elements that cemented my current opinion on such matters - among many - was talking with a friend of mine. Ethnically Italian, his family has been here for over a century.

And yet, despite this, there's parts of his family the rest know damn well to stay away from. Why? Because they're the ones connected to organized crime. The mafia.

A century of assimilation, and they're still culturally and ethnically distinct, with problems from the 'old world' still present. Hell, there's a sizable minority that have dual citizenship!

And this is with Italians. I grew up around alot of them. Hell, my father's godparents were damn near pure-blooded Italian!

And you're going to sit here, and suggest, straight to my face, that other ethnic groups are going to be better than them?

No. You import the people, you import the culture, for good and for ill. So stop importing them.

But I'm interested in hearing other European perspectives on this

From Europe, Poland to be more specific.

For me "American Midwest family with Germanic ancestry they don't even know about is more German than they will ever be" is absolutely laughable position.

No, just because you can trace some Polish ancestry does not make you Pole. You have no genetic memory etc. You are welcome in my country but if you start talking in English (not knowing any Polish and having meme-level understanding of Polish culture) how you are Polish then I am surely not going to agree with you.

Just because your grandfather could say 10 words in Polish, 5 of them being curses does not make you Polish. If all your grandfathers and grandmothers were Polish but you lost language, lost culture that makes you white, not Polish. (though if someone wants to recover that, it is entirely welcome to do so and I would be happy to help if I would encounter such person)

I have quite high bar what I would expect before I would consider someone to be Polish. But at least in theory it seems possible to me for someone green/yellow/black/purple/German to become Polish. And there were cases of this happening.

And yes, specially for our resident SSman: many people with Jewish ancestry were Poles, some of them were Poles practising Jewish religion, for some of them they were distinguishable only by genealogy and surnamed. (some failed to do so or had completely distinctive cultural identify). Though nowadays it is extremely rare as German murdered millions of Poles and Jews after invading. And while under communist occupation many were kicked out. Or preferred to escape from communist paradise.

And we had and have Poles with German, Belarusians, Russian, Ukrainian ancestry. Maybe if you would look really hard you would find some Poles with other skin colours (note: I can easily find some prominent people with Polish citizenship which are yellow/black, this does not make them Poles).

I'm just curious, if you a Pole went to China and learned the language and such would you say you are Chinese if you had 0% Chinese admixture? Would you say you were Bantu if you took residence in West Africa?

Would you agree the thoroughly Americanized Chinese family, with n-th generation children that can't speak a lick of Mandarin, are more Chinese still than some White person who immigrates there and learns the language?

I've seen a lot of Indians in the South. I've never seen a culturally Southern Indian. It would probably just make me laugh. It's not them, and they are not us.

But I'll admit that my motivation is not "We must preserve Southern Culture!" My motivation is directing ethnogenesis in a eugenic direction, and I am far more terrified of my descendants being half-Indian (or at least the macro-effect of such an ethnogenesis in aggregate) than I am of Southern Culture going away. I am more concerned with Europe becoming Arab than I am with German culture per se.

I've seen a lot of Indians in the South. I've never seen a culturally Southern Indian

What kind of Indian? Culturally southern Kashadas and Cherokees are a dime a dozen.

Dot Indians seem to be straightforwardsly here as a minority that doesn't want to assimilate in any way, and that is how most legacy southerners- both white and black- seem to view them as well.

Now unlike you I do care about preserving southern culture. I probably wouldn't let my daughter marry an Indian who hadn't been disowned, but that's because of their culture. Marrying a dot Indian woman is a different matter; she can learn to make gravy.

There are a lot of things about Southern Culture I admire, a lot of things I don't. But it's not feasible or desirable to be hung-up on freezing cultures in time. I'm more interested in the generation of future Culture than I am the preservation of 19th century Culture. This is what differentiates Conservatism from the DR, at least when the DR is at its best.

Southern Culture in particular is tied up with the Lost Cause, I'm not interested in Southern men retaining any sort of identity with a Lost Cause.

I am interested in Holocaust Revisionism because I think deconstructing those myths is important for the generation of future Culture. I'm not interested in the Lost Cause because it leads Southern Men, who have a lot of admirable attributes, to a cul-de-sac.

My motivation is directing ethnogenesis in a eugenic direction

That's what we've been arguing about‽

The way things are going (assuming humanity survives at all), a century from now we will be able to take the best genes from every branch and twig of the human family tree, and splice them into anyone who wants them!

Do you actually believe this will happen?

I don't find it ridiculously implausible that there will be a stratum of society with a TFR of <1 which embraces gene editing technology. But high human capital embracing natural reproduction at high rates seems a necessity for maintaining industrial society over the long run, because of that TFR issue.

It is difficult to imagine gene editing not driving down fertility rates among whoever embraces it. I'm a techno-optimist; I think cheap fusion and orbital solar power and space colonization are solveable problems. But I also think we need the people to do it. And the people who can do it don't have any room for their TFR to drop any further. South Korea is the most innovative country in the world(literally). There is a human element to our science fiction future and that human element needs to be taken into account. Gattaca was a dystopia because it comes off as one, no one gives a damn whether you think it sounds nice in theory, not in their heart of hearts.

I think what I'm trying to say is- your idea of making superbabies by gene editing won't produce enough of these superbabies to even maintain itself. Because it just doesn't fit what people actually want.

That is science fiction; if, when, or how any of that happens does not dismiss the immediate concern of demographic replacement by non-Europeans. There would obviously be huge political pressure regulating how that technology is used. Mate selection is not a deprecated concern, and it's foolish to put all the eggs literally in the basket of "mate selection doesn't matter because gene editing is going to save us."

That is science fiction

And what would you call the idea of people on multiple continents conversing with one another without leaving their homes, by means of a network of computing machines spanning the entire globe and beyond?

If I have to be maximally charitable to the ethnomaxxing view, we're going to need stable high-trust high-IQ societies in order to get to gene editing within the century.

In my effortpost from last week, I talked about the "respectable" media's reluctance to mention anything about the identity of the perpetrator who committed the shocking knife attack which precipitated the November riots in 2023. Some outlets, in an effort to disguise the fact that he was Algerian, described him as "born outside of Ireland but an Irish citizen" or similar.

The clear intention was to give the impression that the perpetrator was "one of our own", so racism was misplaced. But of course, an anti-immigration activist would counter - the fact that he was an Irish citizen makes it even worse! It'd be one thing if he snuck into the UK, took a ship to Belfast then crossed the border into the south and applied for "asylum" as a "refugee", and committed this attack while he was in the legal limbo of waiting for his asylum application to be processed. The Irish government could perhaps be forgiven for extending clemency to a man about whom they know nothing by allowing him to stay in the country pending his asylum application, and then he goes on to commit a terrible crime. That's the kind of unfortunate but inevitable outcome that could theoretically happen even in a country with an extremely strict immigration policy.

But no - this is a man who has already jumped through all the hoops of applying for Irish citizenship, was thoroughly vetted, and still went on to commit a shocking and completely unprovoked crime like this. If a nutcase like this can pass the vetting process, clearly it's not stringent enough.

I don't know. I certainly believe that second-generation immigrants to Ireland can be fully assimilated (I've met plenty of women of Chinese descent who sound more Irish than I do; I work with a woman who has at least one Algerian parent and didn't clock her as anything other than Irish until she told me, although her name was a dead giveaway in retrospect; I once dated a Polish girl who sounded Irish from top to bottom), but I have no firsthand experience of a first-generation immigrant fully assimilating.

Some outlets, in an effort to disguise the fact that he was Algerian, described him as "born outside of Ireland but an Irish citizen" or similar.

I should switch news providers, because that's still much better than what I saw (at 1:05): "Police say false information quickly spread through social media, that the attacker might have been a foreigner, and that appeared to fuel the frenzy of destruction that followed". Their earlier article isn't much better: "The violence began after rumours circulated that a foreign national was responsible for an attack outside a Dublin school on Thursday afternoon. Authorities haven't disclosed the suspect's nationality."

I couldn't find any followup articles offering more information.

Obviously there are different tiers of the anti-immigration position that include various forms of nativism and not-nativism.

What is likely, though, is that most Western Europeans would probably have quietly acquiesced to mass immigration and demographic change without any major drama if the migrants had been, say, all Vietnamese or Filipino. Not because the nativist position would have been ‘disproven’, but because there would be none of these extreme staccato incidents of terrorist violence, things like Rotherham, Charlie Hebdo etc that draw a great deal of public attention.

In the US the majority of the public are still relatively torn on mass immigration, and the large scale deportation of most legal immigrants, let alone actually stripping naturalised migrants of citizenship, is an extreme fringe position. In Canada the public only really turned after they started importing pretty much the entirety of the Punjab at like 2% of the whole population per year.

There isn’t a huge (foreign) religion/race-neutral nativist constituency in most Western countries, meaning the population that wants everyone gone regardless of who they are, how they act and what they believe. Even in Iberia where there’s been huge legal immigration (often of people who are rather far from being of pure euro descent) from Latin America almost all anti-immigrant hostility is directed towards migrants from the Islamic world.

Counterpoint: there seems to be a massive backlash to migration in Canada from Indian immigrants, and that is not caused by crime or terrorism by Indian migrants.

What's happening is the European groups, too, take the political playbook from US Conservatives. "We're not racist (that would be evil!) we just think radical Islam is bad mmkaay." But that is downstream of the political pressures of liberal hegemony, there's a practical reason it centers on a religious critique of migration rather than a racial critique of migration.

Remigration strikes a more nativist cord than it does a purely anti-Islamic cord.

I think in the counterfactual where the majority of recent non-European migrants to Europe aren’t from the Islamic world is one in which anti immigration sentiment is far lower. As far as Canada goes, they did the equivalent of the US importing like 7m Indians a year several years in a row, which is very unusual even by Western mass immigration standards.

Before 2020, Canadians didn’t seem to care much about immigration, Trudeau won a landslide, and there had been mass immigration of Chinese and Indians for at least 25 years.

Depending on whether you think they are Europeans or not, you have a non-counterfactual point of comparison: Spain has had tons of immigration from Latin America, and while there has obviously been some backlash, it doesn't seem to be as strong as in the rest of Europe.

Latin Americans are already Spanish-speaking Catholics, so you'd expect them to be more culturally similar and willing to integrate when they're not.

They are also themselves largely Spanish, so immigrants with actual Spanish ancestry causing less trouble than purely non-European immigrants is proof of the DR perspective, not the other way around.

Just to add on to this- the Latin American immigrants who immigrated to Spain are mostly from elite or at least upper-middle class strata who may not be 100% pure European but are at least majority European.

Counterpoint: there seems to be a massive backlash to migration in Canada from Indian immigrants, and that is not caused by crime or terrorism by Indian migrants.

Counter counterpoint- they're Indian. Mexican and Ukrainian and Vietnamese immigrants would have gotten away with it.

Minor counter counter counterpoint

There is some minor hostility to Ukrainians in Poland. But it is far from widespread and that is after massive shock migration due to war.

Though if 4% of country would be imported from Syria/Libya/Turkey/Nigeria/Russia/China/etc within months then reaction would be much poorer then welcoming then minor hostility months/years later.

Canada is much more welcoming of outsiders than Poland, though.