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 -
Silicon Age Hinduism - A defence of Hinduism and an elaboration of what Bronze Age Pervert gets right
Recently, Bronze Age Pervert caused a stir by defending the single most fleshed out faith on the planet and the only living ancestral aryan faith, Hinduism. BAP or Bronze Age Pervert is an uber popular right-wing dissident on Twitter who is anti "desert cult" and is inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche
Naturally, I saw a lot of butthurt takes since no sane religious person will ever debate religions in a logical manner as religious experiences and religions in particular work on you believing something to be totally true. What I found interesting was the idea that modern hinduism is totally detached from the vedic faith, which in itself is a motte and bailey fallacy, the person stating this believes that modern day hindusim is a different religion, therefore we can simply have a new revival and this helps you avoid giving any props to Indians given the current political climate. Another thing to note is that most of India, 80 percent or more, is Shudra (4th varna) or below; the first two varnas make up close to 10 percent of the population and only a small number in them live up to the ideals of old, religiously and genetically.
Modern India, modern South Asia are completely dysgenic hellholes with terrible human capital. India of all places, stands out here because castes ensured clusters of higher IQ people in the elites which is also why you see many Indians doing well. This is not what my argument is. Hinduism itself is a broad umbrella term for all sects that vary greatly but are driven by the ideals and beliefs in the Vedas and offshoots of such branches. Unlike an Abrahamic religion, your canon is not your holy book but your guru.
The aryans from the steppe were not white, the Vedas were not written by whites as whites or euros came into existence around the time the aryans came and mixed here. Aryans, therefore, are the ancestors to my people and you, the reader. Modern Hinduism has way too much voodoo, it does deviate from vedic ideals but the texts and the practices from said texts still live on. The human capital here kept getting worse and poorer, which meant that things like Gaudiya Vaishnavism seemed more appealing as the strict purity spiralling there can elect Krishna as Jesus, and then religious offerings and a grain-based impoverished diet could be seen as virtuous. Modern-day India is not some place I can ever defend despite being a resident; the vast majority of the people are beyond fixing and always have been. Hinduism is the faith I was lucky to be born with and I may tolerate some anti-H1B takes since mass migration is always bad, but I just cannot fathom the bad faith takes posted by online dissident Christians. Shiva worship was tpresent in the Indus Valley, so were castes, whilst aryans had varnas, which is something that ancient euros also had.
BAP get Hinduism better than most pagan dissidents and every single non hindu, plus a lot of Hindus. The aryan text, Bhagavat Gita for instance, is the most modern Hindu text that goes against the Vedas and yet I have heard podcasts where Euro nationalists who decry Christ for being brown talk about the Gita being an example of aryan virtue, failing to realise that Lord Krishna was dark. So was Lord Ram who by all accounts was the physical manifestation of Dharmik values.
Their skin colors may have been different, darker or fairer, it is irrelevant to their divine status. The central argument is that these people, upon falling out with their Abrahamic faith, look to the past and cannot deny the appeal of the most fleshed-out aryan faith. Saying anything good about Hindusim without asterisks means saying good things about Indians who unfortunately, do not have the best stock today, so claiming that all good things in HInduism were pre-Puranas (a lot of puranas are fan fiction btw, not all though) or that the current population has negligible traces of the past ones is a way to avoid falling into that box. Since conservatism is in many cases a retvrn to values, you have a hard time going against Christianity, which, if you can manage it, always leads to ancestor worship.
Modern-day Hinduism is not totally Voodoo, despite all the mountains of trash, outdated superstitious beliefs, the shaktipithas and the chosen few temples are alive. Modern India bends towards the pajeet stereotype more and more, even for those of higher birth, it still is the only surviving aryan religion. India was poor and backwards during medieval times; a lot of seasoned euro intellectual giants had a lot of admiration for our texts and scholars. Goethe was inspired heavily by Kalidasa.
I was 19 when I came across Curwen Ares Rolinson, who was a far-right youth leader on trial for hate crimes. He experienced a divine intervention and dedicated his life to the study of aryan faiths and started writing for his blog Arya Akasham, much of it makes little sense to me, but he persuaded me to look into theology. As a token of his appreciation, he parted away with a large amount of his life savings to help India during COVID, a loving gesture that I will forever appreciate. I came across him via survivethejive, who, of all the white pagans I know, is the most respectful towards Hinduism, since, despite a sane anti migrant stance, he can see what a living faith like that of his people could look like today and respect it. Anti Indian sentiment is at an all time high for multiple reasons including bad faith behavior from Indians, I am not trying to touch on that topic since I cannot justify sentiments against fellow indian passport holders, but I can never defend things like chain migration and seeing the nation that accepts you as a special economic zone to be exploited. I just want to dispel the myths around Hinduism being a white religion, as it predates whites and many other ethnicities, and the other false belief stapled with it, which is that the link between modern and Vedic Hindus is non-existent, as there are large enough pockets of real beliefs that exist. I see some of those things in my own life, and they are just divine.
I am not here to defend Hinduism against logical arguments. If you ever want to know if it's true, meditate, and you will experience what truth feels like. We are a dying people, but I have faith in Shiva, and I pray for the benefit of all beings.
P.S. will add links in a bit
Whenever I read wholesale dehumanization of groups of people who live in squalor I think to myself: maybe it's the empathetic part of the human brain becoming overloaded and the response from the rest of the brain is to rationalize it as "Well, they're not humans like me.". Yes, words like "dysgenic" and "caste" and "elite" qualify as dehumanization for me, even if they don't for everybody.
The alternative is the empathetic part of the brain continuing along in pain from the knowledge that humans no different from itself are living in abject poverty and destitution. It could cry out, "Why do you do nothing for your fellow man?" - but it would be simply silenced by the retort "They are not my fellow men." This dovetails nicely with some of the alt-right "empathy is weakness" messaging that's been floating around.
But maybe it's more along the lines of prosperity gospel, "I deserve this because I am special / chosen / of higher genetic quality": a defense mechanism against self-doubt that the only thing separating you from such a life are a coin tosses of fate. It would be crippling to spend every day contending with the possibility of living that way due to random chance, and so it's better to destimulate the brain and rationalize it away with a convenient belief system.
Not that it's been solicited, but my take is that the world changed too fast for India, and India grew too fast for how the world has changed. I see a similar story in the favelas in South America. Some peoples had the joy of riding the wave of modernization like surfers, and others were hit in the face by the break - like a Maxim gun nest firing on charging Ndebele warriors. To your main point, could the sociopolitical structures that Hinduism built play a role in India having not been prepared for modernization?
I mean, maybe. But my entire life has been living in a boomer project of trying to uplift these communities... to no impact what so ever. Build them critical infrastructure and they destroy it. Give them free resources and they just have as many kids as it takes to reduce them to their prior squalor. At the end of the day, they live like that because they choose to live like that. At least in so far as any of us choose to live any particular way while struggling with the human condition. It just seems that the human condition they struggle against seems to be on the extreme tail and at a horrifying scale.
A society that is 1-2% horrifying unreformable anti-civilization monsters might be able to get away with putting them up in nice abodes, letting them have a terrifying number of children, and generally dealing with the disproportionate drain on society this minority creates. When that rises to the level of a voting block of a country, it gets into "I don't fucking know man, it's literally impossible to accommodate them all, they're gonna drag us all down with them!"
How is this different from general misanthropy?
I could also define my own measure of utility for a person a declare anyone under a certain threshold as "dragging us down". My measure wouldn't be by skin color, of course, so it would be a lot harder to implement punitive measures for anyone below that threshold. E.g. I could say that all obese people have an extreme negative impact on the public welfare, but that doesn't trigger our tribal primate brains so no one is out there blackbagging obese citizens to alliteratively-named concentration camps.
Who said anything about concentration camps? All most people want is to be left alone. Stop taking my money to provide for them, leave them to their own devices, stop creating a dependent population with excessive charity, and the problem, if it doesn't go away on it's own, will at least develop some sort of homeostatic boundaries.
But if we insist on having a welfare state... well... then we need to pretty aggressively determine who deserves to be a part of it.
I was referring to Alligator Alcatraz, and how much of the most public support is brazenly transparent about how the current push against immigration is about race and genetics - and not just illegal immigration, but immigration of all types.
This seems to be a bedrock of how you feel about this topic. How did you first form this opinion, and what keeps you feeling this way?
I personally don't think that many people create much value for society. Big David Graeber fan over here. Furthermore, I think a lot of people who think they create value for society are in the best case simply leeches on the public welfare, and in the worst case actively harming society. I see eye-to-eye with many of the posts on Hacker News lamenting that an entire generation of our greatest engineers were gobbled up by big tech in order to serve hypertargeted advertisements - with a sprinkling of all the negative externalities that the attention economy creates.
It's funny, actually, as I think some of the work that (illegal) immigrants do create the most directly positive value for society, like harvesting fruits and vegetables and building and improving housing stock.
I don't really see much difference between Reagan's welfare queen and the Walton family, whose business is only viable because the government enables them to pay below-livable wages with their welfare programs. Both parties simply exploited a bureaucracy.
I don’t understand this common argument. Without welfare, wouldn’t the employees be more desperate, enabling walmart to pay them far less?
And to look at the problem from the other side: let's say Bernie decides that the state guarantees a minimum standard of living to everyone, regardless or work status, and raise that to equal or higher than whatever walmart pays : as a consequence, no one works at walmart anymore and the state pays everyone a walmart salary. It's a gigantic loss for the state. What I mean is, it's actually walmart who helps the state give money to people so they have an acceptable living standard (which is the responsibility of the state, according to leftists), not the other way around.
I think the argument is basically feudal. The employer is basically considered a liege lord to its employees, owing them some minimum standard in living. If the king (government) has to step in and provide additional largesse directly, that's a failure on the lord's part.
I don’t know, bit anachronistic, and they don’t bring up this ‘liege solidarity’ anywhere else.
My theory is that employees think they produce a lot of value, at least equivalent to their wages + welfare (+ a share of ‘unfair’ walmart profits, which they reluctantly grant those bloodsucking capitalists), and that this sum is stable and independent of other actors, and prices. They equate the value they provide with the effort they put in, which is usually a lot, because low-wage jobs really are tedious and unrewarding.
So they think that without the welfare, they’d just get more wages. The idea that someone's work might only be worth 5$/h just will not compute.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Taxes
Shit like this..
Yes.
I don't know what to say. I have a visceral disgust reaction towards people who can't even support themselves. Taking my money to give to them, no matter how round about it is, just adds insult to injury.
Sometimes I think of the wisdom of say, giving out free food on Thanksgiving versus all year round. If the food is a one day thing where you get to enjoy a nice meal with some dignity, awesome. If it's a stipend that lets you indulge in the dangerous delusion that you're actually taking care of yourself, or capable to producing dependents, well that's another thing entirely.
But then you started circling the idea of bullshit jobs too, and how much work is actually productive. One man's blue sky research is another man's wasteful spending. Sometimes you get Xerox PARC or Bell Lab's Idea Factory, and sometimes you get whatever the fuck this is, NSFW btw. I might have a bullshit job. I might not. Gun to my head I might just be a bit player on the outskirts of an industry that may or may not generate some ecosystem of products that makes the world marginally better to live in. If I'm lucky. What can I say?
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
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link