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.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
These sort of small separatist community attempts always seem (at least in the US) to draw in very unsavory personality types. The reason why these never really last starts to make sense when you factor in the psycho-social dynamics and the broader moral framework of this society when it comes to race. Is there a single popular separatist here in the US that doesn't have some noticeable level of disagreeableness or collection of anti-social traits? It just seems like maintaining such a society requires an overt level of resentment or even hostility toward other races, which of course doesn't pair well with pro-social behavior or stable community-building.
Some might argue that Jared Taylor walks this fine line pretty well, and he can seem quite cordial, but after reading some of his writings he comes off as having at least some distrust and disdain for those outside his racial group.
The idea isn't necessarily unworkable. It seems like they've pulled off some version of it in South Africa with that town called Orania, but in practice here in the US it continuously attracts people whose motivations tend to be more about who they don't want around coupled with personality types that have a high tendency toward social dominance and rigid in-group/out-group belief systems. I can somewhat sympathize with the concept, but I find communities whose entry requires a shared racial animosity somewhat repulsive.
I'm gonna tap the sign.
More options
Context Copy link
This is because all-white rural communities are a dime a dozen in the US. Seriously, if your goal is 'avoid blacks', it's just a lot easier to move to the towns which just... don't have them. 100% of people who moved there were making an intentional political statement.
More options
Context Copy link
I think you have to consider the type of person who would even consider doing something along these lines. If you’re willing to uproot your life, perhaps lose your career, abandon your community for any cause, you are absolutely not a casual person. Most savory people are rooted enough into their own community that they’d rather stay put, live quietly, and perhaps support the cause quietly, but not in a way that a hard core supporter would.
Ideological possession in any form tends to be a symptom of some sort of unresolved mental issues. It’s why even if I don’t agree with JBP politically (or at least not all the time), I absolutely agree that you should not be politically active until you’re in a mentally stable and healthy place. It becomes a person’s entire life because it’s not about the political issue, it’s about basing your identity on something that gives you the thrill of moral superiority, a cause to base your self worth on, and a virtuous reason to treat others badly. Such people will be unsavory, no matter how good the cause itself might be.
What if your entire society is ideologically possessed and you're trying to escape that to return to the norm?
If being disgusted with the moral order of things is automatically a mental illness, then even the most insane of moral orders must be conformed to and O'Brien was right to call Winston insane.
I find this a peculiar view to espouse in a country founded by dissidents and where there's a myriad of sucessful cults started as voluntary exile from the ways of the world.
Seems to me a natural and healthy part of the human psyche, actually.
I don’t mean just “disgusted by mainstream ideology”, I mean the kind of person who would uproot and move to an enclave specifically to forward an ideology. Escaping woke doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to move to a Nazi enclave. You could do equally as well moving to a rural town in a deep red state. Almost everyone in rural Mississippi is anti-woke, and a good number of them would be seen by city dwellers as racist. They are also fairly normal people who haven’t made being anti-woke a personality.
More options
Context Copy link
It might be healthy for the species at an evolutionary level, while still being bad news for your life prospects at the individual level (and for the prospects of a community if all its members are pre-selected for abnormally high scores on that trait).
Nah It's all good, normies don't have the wherewithal to make stuff or trade against consensus, I'm going with John Galt on this one.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Yeah.
Even if you assume there's a large contingent of white people who actively would prefer to live away from most minorities... the ones who are in a position to openly state and act on that preference are probably not the high-quality human capital that most would want to live around, either.
Or they've made their white identity the entire basis of their personality and those folks tend to be tedious.
"I drew myself as the cool smirking Chad and you as the chinless soyjack."
I have no reason to think these people are unusually shitty looking or generally dysgenic, as though their wicked thoughts degraded their bodies. They might have that dumb Richard Spencer haircut.
Its not so much that.
But as with rules 1 and 2, attractive people have a lot more options to pursue in life, so it is just inherently less likely they'll pursue white identitarianism.
And slightly MORE likely that a less attractive person, who wants to feel some sense of belonging and superiority, might pursue white identitarianism.
i.e., if they have nothing going for them in life other than being white, it is not too surprising they might lean into that factor. Not that their internal hatred warps their physical appearance.
Exceptions will abound, but I'll take a bet as to the aggregates.
That's a really good answer.
I suspect other factors would negate this effect. Such as selecting for self-motivated people who can afford to move and buy property. That filters out the listless and destitute. I predict a photo collage of these people vs equivalent income and age white Americans would not obviously show they are ugly losers, as comically shown in that link.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Why do we have to go by pithy fiction and not actually examine the content of, say, Orania?
Orania and the USA are very different because there are approximately seven zillion conservative towns with an all white population in the USA because no blacks or asians bothered to move there.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Howabout the Amish? they definitely separate from mainstream society. They seem popular, but I don't think it's from attracting outside people into that lifestyle but by breeding more from within themselves. Amish aren't particularly disagreeable seeing as they regularly participate in farmer's market or make transactions with non-Amish people (I've only heard generally good vibes about Amish construction/furniture).
Yeah, the Amish are a pretty good example. I don't think they actually hold any racial animus toward anyone. They just have insular and hard working lives, which serves as a natural deterrent for most people outside of their community.
More options
Context Copy link
I think a better example would be Hasidic enclaves like Kiryas Joel.
Chasidic views on interracial marriage (and therefore conversion into Judaism, really) are less exclusive than you might expect. All ultra orthodox accept sincere religious conversion as an inherent part of Judaism and there are occasional ethnic minorities.
As with the Amish, though, an extremely high native birth rate means the majority of the population will probably always be of the original stock.
I'm not sure what your point is. Several of the posts in this chain are deleted so I'm going off vague memories here. Regardless, I don't see how interracial marriage or how exclusive is even a relevant factor. Even if it was, ultraracists are generally actually OK with minorities as long as they believe the right things. I don't see how this is any different from Hasidics trying to exclude anyone that does not share their views.
More options
Context Copy link
Obviously the very small % of interracial marriage in Kiryas Joel is totally irrelevant in comparison to that example of an intentional ethnic enclave, in which they organize along racial lines, flex very considerable political power to the detriment of others in the community outside their racial group, and engage in systematic and widespread Welfare fraud while receiving many more government handouts unjustly.
Aarvoll's community won't even be 1% as disruptive to their outgroup as Kiryas Joel has been to non-Jews living in the area. With that said, I don't really support Aarvoll's project. I don't want to live in an intentional ethnic enclave in Arkansas, I want to live in Manhattan. There's no logical avenue to political and cultural power with this project. At best, it goes nowhere, at worst it gains the smallest amount of traction and gets absolutely crushed, ruining the lives of good people and blackpilling many more.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I would say this has been broadly true, so far. However, with the last 10 years of naked anti-white racism on display at all levels of society, noticing is off the charts. It's going to be experiments like these that show if your thinking, which has been true my entire life at least, still holds true. Or if, just maybe, enough "good whites" have been burned enough to take a gamble on racial solidarity, and bring their prosocial traits with them.
Even if your claims of anti-white racism were true (the FAA hiring scandal is clearly an instance, and affirmative action can reasonably be described as both anti-Asian and anti-White, but that does not clear the "all levels of society" bar for me), I do not see how segregation would be the natural consequence.
The Black's response to facing racial discrimination was the civil rights movement, which was way more effective than any attempt to build a black-only community in the US or elsewhere would have been.
Even if you could convince the PMC that they were getting a Bad Deal wrt race in the coastal cities and that they should build their own White-only coastal cities in the middle of Arkansas
with blackjack and hookers, I am not holding my breath for these cities to decide national elections. I would rather embark on a campaign of meritocracy and how racial discrimination is not cool even if it targets Whites or Asians.At the moment, most people openly advocating for racial segregation are Neo-Nazis. I think I speak for the vast majority of Whites, HBD-pilled or otherwise, when I say I would much rather have a randomly selected Black person as a neighbor than a Neo-Nazi for purely selfish Bayesian reasons.
But this goes to the core of it. What if normal whites have noticed enough that they decide "You know what, I'm going to act like every other race treats me." What if they preferentially hire whites the same way Indians favor Indians, or Jews favor Jews? What if they aggressively subsidize and import white residents the same way the federal government bombs small Midwestern towns with Haitians or Somalians? What if they start giving out contracts to white owned businesses the same way the federal government gives contracts only to black or minority owned businesses? What if they forgive debt for white's the same way the federal government keeps finding way to forgive debts exclusively for blacks? What if they give preferential medical treatments to whites the same way preferential treatments were given to blacks?
None of this requires deep supremacist neo-nazi beliefs. Just noticing and then going tit-for-tat. Realizing if you don't, you have no future.
Take tariffs. Tit-for-tat is fine, because you can make it explicit that your tariffs are retaliatory.
Contrast with terrorism. If members from group A blow up random members from group B, then there are generally responses which are much more efficient to stop these incidents than members from group B starting to blow up random members from group A (unless you are in Somalia or something -- and even then targeting the murderers would likely be strictly preferable). In fact, retaliation would be likely to increase the rate of incidents.
If Whites start to (more) openly discriminate against non-Whites, then of course the wokes will whine how unfair and racist that is and how the government should put its hands on the scales even more.
Now, if a Republican state was saying "as long as the federal government is openly preferring minority-owned businesses, we will openly prefer any businesses which do not qualify for preferential treatment from the feds", that would be a limited tit-for-tat, like retaliatory tariffs. Sure, the wokes would also whine how incredibly racist that is, but a smarter member of the public would recognize that the goal was to have a level playing field, not to establish the fourth Reich.
Rumors of white genocide have been exaggerated, European-origin DNA will be common in the US population for the foreseeable future. For all the efforts to achieve equality of outcomes, the odds of a white person to make it big are still better than for a black person, which is possibly HBD-related. In the contemporary US, Whites might get a -2 racial malus to both sympathy and government handouts, but that does not make White characters unplayable.
Plenty of groups get treated unfairly, and in most cases, making their victimhood a core part of their identity is actively harmful. Women and men, straights and queers, all sorts of ethnicities, can legitimately claim that sometimes, they are treated unfairly. And that sucks and they should push for a better society, but in most cases they should play the game with the cards they have been dealt, rather than embracing their victimhood.
Telling the multi-ethnic society "your game is so rigged against us, we will not play" and going to raise chickens in some rural white-only community, or emigrating to Hungary does not seem an appropriate response to the present level of disadvantage.
I've never felt more seen. Also, wives fucking love chickens, and husbands who can build coops.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I mean they did right? Even more than that actually. This is something white Americans already did. It's how you ended up where you are now. Do you think trying it again is going to work better? You have affirmative action and white guilt, people trying to make things up to black farmers and the like because this is what happened before and white people decided, actually this makes us feel pretty bad when we look at in comparison to our theoretical national values.
Whites had the nation you are envisaging and even more than that. Then they decided they didn't like it. Black people didn't have the power to change it. White people themselves did.
The things you complain about are already the tat for white peoples tit! (so to speak!), to try and make up for slavery and Jim Crow and so on and so forth. Instigated by white people themselves!
They already did the "What if?" You know how it ended.
This assumes more continuity of people and culture than is advisable.
When appealing to those national values and the ideals of the Founders, modern folk do tend to forget John Adams' ominous line- "Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." And so we reap that failure mode.
If the rule brought you to this, of what use was the rule?
Or one of those other pithy lines, like "liberalism is not a suicide pact." A libertarian arguing for open borders is not a result of mental illness. For any other ideology, the root cause is at least mental illness adjacent. By extension, "white guilt" (and many other racial sicknesses) should be in the DSM.
There's a really nasty lesson here; that moral "improvement" has incredibly high costs for a culture. Either a culture has to be fully right and never commit even a single evil act, or go Full Evil and salt the earth behind you; anything in between tends to result in a blood curse.
Sounds like a subcategory of Onlyfans, or an Aella stunt. English is funny.
I mean America is pretty great in my opinion.
Moral improvement should have costs surely? If being moral was easy and cheap then everyone would do it. If you want to be moral you are explicitly making decisions that are worse practically, because if they were better practically you wouldn't have to be moral to choose them. Being moral mean soften looking at the most efficient choice and not making it. You risk your life to dive into the river to save the child and so on and so forth.
The ancestors of America brought the wolf in (as per Jefferson), they could later have chosen to be immoral and kill/deport all the wolves. Or moral and have to contend with what enslaving a race means for race relations and the future when you let them go. They chose the latter. That means their descendants have to deal with that choice, for better or for ill. Being immoral is often better practically. But it isn't what America was founded to aspire to. I don't think that's a nasty lesson in as much as a lesson about reality. Choices have consequences. Being better than you were does not immunize you against previous choices. It's easy to go back and think we should have just killed them all. It probably would be easier. But morality isn't about being easier it's about being better, however you measure that.
"Jefferson wrote that maintaining slavery was like holding “a wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go.”17 He thought that his cherished federal union, the world’s first democratic experiment, would be destroyed by slavery. To emancipate slaves on American soil, Jefferson thought, would result in a large-scale race war that would be as brutal and deadly as the slave revolt in Haiti in 1791. But he also believed that to keep slaves in bondage, with part of America in favor of abolition and part of America in favor of perpetuating slavery, could only result in a civil war that would destroy the union."
America you will note, managed to not have the union destroyed, not have a full scale race war and has not as yet been destroyed. And part of the reason for that is because efforts were made to make up for slavery. The Civil Rights Act, Affirmative Action and the like were promises to ADOS that they didn't need to resort to a race war to get their place in America. The white guilt you speak of as a mental illness was vital in charting a course that has made great strides.
Is it perfect? Not at all. Racial resentment did not vanish. Black people are still poor compared to whites. But assuming you think genocide is bad, the outcome has to be measured against that. Not against perfection.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Sometimes people with severe mental illnesses go off their medication because they feel better and think they no longer need it. They don't like the side effects, etc. Just because the medicine doesn't feel good doesn't mean you don't need it.
Even assuming I agree, that only goes for Blacks. How does it go for Indians, Jews, Asians, Arabs, Mexicans and every other nationality colonizing America and carving it's founding stock out of it?
Yup, but this isn't medication, or mental illness. This is a choice. You may not like the choice, but that doesn't make it mental illness.
If anyone is carving out the founding stock, it is the founding stock themselves. Indians, Mexicans and whatever else can't do anything they are not allowed to do. The vast majority of your political apparatus is white. This isn't colonization or invasion. It's invitation. And it is invitation largely because of the white guilt felt by large numbers of your fellow white Americans. You can't fix that by making them do the same thing they felt the guilt about in the first place. If you think it is a problem (and it legitimately might be!) then you have to resolve it, not repeat the actions that led to it. Unfortunately this is one of the dividing issues your nation has faced since its founding. It was called out at its founding this was going to be a huge problem in fact. The Civil War, Civil Rights movement, wokism is all downstream of the choices your ancestors made.
I don't see a good answer, with the possible exception (and even this is shaky) as you point out as going all in for blacks. Affirmative action for blacks only, reparations for blacks only, attempt to help your fellow white Americans extirpate their guilt by focusing on the main group that was harmed so others don't get pattern matched in. But that guilt is the foundational issue you are going to have to deal with. Letting immigrants in is asymmetric. It takes much less effort to do so, than try and get rid of them afterwards. So you have to find a way to make them stop wanting to. To make them stop feeling guilty about being so privileged and about how that privilege was used against yes primarily black people through American history.
I don't think you can do that, by going back to the same behaviors that got you here in the first place.
Overwhelmingly, every time it's put to a vote, people vote for less immigration. People vote against affirmative action policies. People vote against racial carve outs. Don't pretend the call is coming from inside the house, and whites are inflicting this on themselves. The government is running amok, either because racial spoils are easy to lie about but still deliver votes, or because some unaccountable aspect of it has been captured by racial interest groups. Might be worth looking into that "Critical Race Theory" thing. Whenever it comes up, I always hear it's defenders claim "They aren't teaching that in schools, it's only a legal theory".
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
What examples would it take to clear the bar? Like what categories of behavior or cultural positioning or what have you? Cultural measures?
I'm not saying Coil is correct, I think it's useful to prod at what people would take as evidence.
Good luck! The dream of the 90s is alive
in Portlandat the Motte?More options
Context Copy link
The Civil Rights Movement allowed them to build or expand black-only communities in many major northern metropolitan areas (the South, of course, already had them).
More options
Context Copy link
Indeed, this experiment has been run. Black supremacists are just schizophrenic antisemites and black separatist experiments are gigantic failures that always seem to have justifiable- and usually banal- reasons for getting shut down when the authorities intervene.
If you'd like a separatist enclave in the US, start an insular religious community and make sure the girls wait until 18 before they get married. Society is fine with it that way.
More options
Context Copy link
Just out of curiosity, how many have you met?
Open Neo-nazis is likely going to filter for people with criminal pasts and the like. I'm sure there's plenty of productive people with essentially white supremacist beliefs, but I'd personally prefer not to live next to somebody with a Swastika face tattoo
Well, I guess I also would prefer to not live next to a cartoon caricature of a neo-nazi.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Maybe? There are also "affinity housing" programs at a number of universities that haven't gotten the Bob Jones treatment that I would personally consider "racial segregation," but seem to be supported by leftists.
But I otherwise mostly agree with your conclusions.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think what will really swing things is if white people can find plausible alternative justifications for it. If they can convince themselves they aren't being racist they'll go for it. So I anticipate a lot more think pieces about dog whistles in the future.
IMO we've seen a big shift on Holocaust narratives in the last decade partially because the set of vocal Holocaust survivors willing and able to speak out from a position of moral authority has shrunk substantially. I wouldn't be surprised if the narrative of the Civil Rights Era changes in the next decade or two for similar reasons: the youngest people to march with MLK are in what, their late 70s?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link