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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 30, 2025

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The real lesson is actually 'if you oppress a group of low performers you must never stop. If you grow tired of oppression then leave no survivors, but only if they are low performers. It's fine to just liberate Chinamen or Ashkenazim because they'll catch up without really needing the help their more unhinged activists demand.'

No that is not the lesson, there is nothing to fear from a "low performer". What you need to fear is the person or group who you dismissed as low performing but have the potential to not be, because if you fuck em there is a good chance they'll fuck you back and you will deserve it.

They can TRY to fuck you back, but they usually lack competence organically, which is why they failed in the first place. They only succeed because their nominal allies of convenience prefer wielding them as cudgels against their proximate enemy. White liberals play the oppression meta to discredit enemies, not to materially advance the cause of their pet projects. Without external support these low performers default to the limit of their capability.

They mostly have not done this. The black and indigenous minorities who are poor performers have tried; the once-oppressed Chinese have been content with their rising standards of living.

the once-oppressed Chinese have been content with their rising standards of living.

isn't the US in a fentanyl epidemic?, last I heard it came to the US through Cartels that bought the necessary precursors from the Chinese.

Have not doesn't mean they will not.

Conceptually, I think the choice of "grifting" has a fairly limited cap on median outcomes. Limited cases might exist, but it's hard to sell indefinite affirmative action or reparations for a minority doing better than the median. I can't see democratic will supporting that for long, and it's unpopular even when isolated exceptions come up: Elizabeth Warren, or affirmative action for Obama's kids applying to college.

Chinese-Americans seem to have taken the "work hard and naturally do better than the median" option, which I think sounds better if it's available.

They tried with "Stop Asian Hate," but it turned out that Asians are doing better than whites by most measures and the people beating Chinese grandmas for bus money aren't white. So I think we've already seen how such a campaign would pan out (i.e. not at all).

I mean, I can envision an America where Asians run black-like racial advocacy. It's just not very plausible.

Its just the racial meta. If Asians could only play that game, they would, but they can play the competence game and achieve greater outcomes. The sympathy game is a means of last resort, played only because there are no other cards to play. Nigerian immigrants in Virginia can play both sides of the fence till BLM figures out a way to kick them out fully and get ADOS as a special protected class without the inconvenient racialization allowing actual high performers to cosplay as oppressed.

In my experience it's Indians who do far the most racial aggrandizing of the Asians about 'India would be hovercars and perfect development without the Raj' topics and the everpopular riffs on 'descendant of top caste complains about anglo oppression whilst having to leave India for better opportunities due to intense affirmative action for the people they've historically oppressed' though I've generally found Indian Idpol actively contradictory and absolutely insane.

Low performers are irrelevant, it's high performers that are dangerous. Who is more dangerous as a grudgebearer - Joshua VerbalIQbaum or Mgubu the Witless? Likewise it's not unreasonable for Chang, Zheng and much of the Maths Olympiad phenotype to hold a grudge for their treatment in the 19th and early 20th century. You can always ignore Mgubu, he has no armoured brigades or advanced rhetoric.

Mgubu isn't smart enough to recognize when he's gotten the better deal. People of small hats mostly are, and for all of chairman Xi's attempts at becoming grand Chinaman of the race, people of slanted eyes are too.

Contrary to what @George_E_Hale said, this isn't an odd moment of bluntness for you, it's something you've been warned about before.

Drop this "this is just the way I talk" gimmick. You can say "Blacks aren't smart, but Jews and Chinese are," but phrasing it the way you did just reeks of "I'm an edgy ironic racist, hee hee hee." We've told you this already: being racist isn't prohibited, but you have to figure out how to spray your spittle in a polite manner, and if you find that difficult, that's intentional.

As opposed to 'Mgubu the witless'?

Aside from the parallelism in 'people of small hats/people of slanted eyes' it doesn't seem offensive in isolation either.

people of slanted eyes are too.

Are smart enough? I'm parsing your sentence but the general tone seems dismissive, whereas this seems complimentary. The slant eyes bit is an odd moment of bluntness for you.

Might be.

But you'd expect low performers to end up on the receiving end of the oppression more often than not.

It's fine to just liberate Chinamen or Ashkenazim

Looking at the current geopolitical situation, there may have been other downsides.

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As a non-American, I find the notion that America should permanently kneecap anyone who might contest their dominance very off-putting. If America isn't clever enough, organised enough or stable enough to compete with China on an even footing, why should it be in charge of the globe?

I would also argue that even America benefits from having an actual rival that can go toe-to-toe with it. When America was competing with the USSR, it had to be focused and cohesive and attractive to its citizens. When the USSR died and the USA was left without rivals, it seems to me that it sickened and started to alternate between flailing around and infighting. (The same of course applies to China in reverse).

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Other people’s sincere patriotism is always a little annoying because it’s generally a claim that they consider their country’s ways strictly superior to mine. Nevertheless, I believe that love of country is (usually) a healthy love to have. What I object to is those people deciding to kneecap everyone else.

I don’t necessarily disapprove of tariffs on the other hand. People don’t have to cooperate with their rivals, just ideally refrain from stomping them to the ground. Of course tactics like market flooding make this philosophy more complex to hold to.

If America isn't clever enough, organised enough or stable enough to compete with China on an even footing, why should it be in charge of the globe?

Because the comparison isn't America to some hypothetical perfect country. It's a comparison to China, and China's government is pretty shitty. If you have to choose between China and America and you're not in the Politburo, America is loads better even if you don't like some of the things America does.

If you have to choose between China and America and you're not in the Politburo, America is loads better even if you don't like some of the things America does.

At the very least, this is not an indisputable fact. I've known various Chinese in and out of the country and I've visited briefly; China had much tighter security and much more overt control of information than America, but it was, basically, just another country. The people clearly didn't consider themselves to be living in a dystopia. Nor were they smiling and desperately terrified like somebody in North Korea.

Meanwhile @No_one is literally arguing that America should keep any potential competitors 'in eternal poverty and civil war'. That strikes me as pretty shitty! Like, probably America is still the country that most of us would prefer to win a battle of superpowers if it absolutely must come to that, but that calculus changes very quickly if America starts throwing its weight around even more than it already does.

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Then I apologise for misreading you. I come across the real article every so often and it irks me.

I’m not sure. I like America as a country, and it wouldn’t be bad if they win the war of civilization if it happens, but im also very impressed with what the Chinese have built in their own country and the competence of their leaders. They’re pragmatic to say the least, value stability both at home and abroad, they make decisions based on fact rather than feelings, and the society itself is pretty balanced and sane. A Chinese century would be boring but probably fairly stable and prosperous.

This is very weird to me because this is heavily colored by recency bias. China looks like this because this is intentional. Their realpolitik and pragmatism is born out of fire, revolution, infighting over the levers of power and millions dead.

The reasons people like to hold up for China's success - their uniparty, the absolute dominance of the governing power, their zero-tolerance model of governance, their model of state and local governments, their high-IQ population - are also reasons to doubt them.

China has unique strengths, but also unique weaknesses. The Party is bloated, corrupt, inefficient, and bloodless transitions of power are not guaranteed. Local governance lies, schmoozes, and fakes numbers to look good to state governance. Measures are targets. Their state capacity leaves other states green with envy. But for all the bemoaning that You Can Just Do Things, or that the Chinese Government Can Just Do Things, the corollary is that the Government Can Just Do Things to You.

They're facing some genuinely difficult problems now; real estate collapse, the income trap, historical weakness in domestic consumption, demographic issues with tax base + aging population. It's too early to call the Chinese century. But broad policy strokes can affect billions.

The best way to understand this is that in China, the trains will not stop for you, even if you get caught in the doors. It'll drag you for miles, uncaring of if you become a corpse or not. And you have little control over where the train is going. It may lead to a prosperous, stable future, but if it doesn't and the train is headed for a cliff, what control could you possibly have over it, short of killing your way to the front?

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