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It will be undeniably used in the "Why we hate blacks." camp. I understand why, but some of my still-surviving liberal sensibilities can't help but examine another layer to this situation. This layer is touched on in nearly every single anti-Rampage/Raja rant out there, but nobody really delves into the father-son dynamic past Rampage being a shit father.
What Raja Jackson did to that guy cannot be denied. It was a shockingly violent attack that warrants a lengthy prison sentence. With that said, when I listened Raja's tough guy rant after he pummeled that defenseless man and was walking down the street, I just kept thinking his use of "everybody" in "I'm tired of everybody fuckin' playing with me 'n shit" was really just about his dad relentlessly jabbing at him throughout his entire life. I have serious doubts that any other people really fuckin' play with him 'n shit outside of his father, who he simply cannot fuck with on a physical level. I think there's a lot to this.
Rampage even told a story about Raja sucker punching him. Rampage's response was that he "sent him to the hospital." You read that right. He beat the shit out of his own son. What we don't really know for sure is what happened before that sucker punch, but seeing how Rampage constantly jabs at people on camera, I think it's a fairly safe assumption that Rampage was, to some extent, antagonizing Raja and probably has antagonized Raja for most of his life. I know Rampage isn't all bad. He can be funny, but he doesn't ever really seem like he's serious when he needs to be. On some level that has to be psychologically torturous to have a father who "won't stop playin'" when you need him to be a dad.
I'm not excusing Raja's actions. I think he needs to go to prison. What I'm trying to do is see if anyone on the internet who isn't a self-hating leftist that might be considering another reasonable explanation outside of it just being the warrior gene assumptions that a lot of people on the right like to grab onto.
I’m squarely in the Steve Sailer moderate racialist camp of “clearly there’s both nature and nurture elements working together here”. I’m confident that there’s some sort of genetic predispositions at play when considering aggregate black misbehavior, low average prefrontal cortex development, etc. But I’d be shocked if that’s the entire story, and I don’t know many serious racialists who believe genetics are the entire story.
Rampage Jackson, from what I knew about him previously and from what I gleaned from your comment, seems to have basically the modal black male personality. Gregarious, full of bravado, capable of very intense but sporadic bursts of aggression, and otherwise basically carefree and unserious. Sort of what you’d expect of a pre-pubescent child or rowdy teenager given a powerful adult man’s body.
I can imagine that this is an extremely poor model for a parental figure of either sex, but especially a father. A child growing up with such a father — even one that is regularly involved with the rearing of the child — will not have discipline or steadfastness or emotional regulation modeled to him. He will struggle to feel like his father is genuinely comprehending and responding to his needs, rather than putting on a performance of fatherhood for an imaginary audience. He will feel the need to compete with his father for attention and status, rather than feeling safe in the knowledge that his father is prepared to self-sacrifice for the good of the child. And unless the child can find a way to break the cycle and advance past this level of arrested development, this is a problem which is likely to compound across generations.
Whenever the rubber meets the road I feel like I see posts like these.
Yes, 'genetics' is the entire story. There is no moderate racialist camp. Bad parenting doesn't fall out of the sky by chance. And the bad parents don't keep their bad genes to themselves.
Technically we could take someone with Brunner syndrome and, through manipulating their environment, make sure they never have the need to violently express themselves. But that's if we are omnipotent. We're not. No ones life flows flawlessly. There are always moments that call on violent reactions. What separates the wheat from the chaff is how a person responds to these stimuli.
People have to be capable of living in the real world with other people. If they fail that it's not a matter of 'could would should' on behalf of everyone else to coddle these people into not being violent retards. Raja is 25 years old. He should be way past the point of pining for his fathers approval and attention like a dog. And way way past needing to hospitalize another person to do it.
Just think about what kind of an insurmountable failure you would have to be to express yourself like Raja did. At no point did his brain go 'nah, I'll just not do this because attempted murder is bad' or 'I'll probably get arrested' or 'that man apologized to me so it's ok' or 'he probably has friends and family'. None of that.
What Raja did is not the reaction of a fully grown man, if we use the average white person as a comparison. This is the brain of a child in a grown mans body. Which is, as you've mentioned, very similar to his father.
You seem to have somehow gotten the impression that I’m arguing for leniency or grace toward this man. I’m very obviously not. He should be punished extremely strictly and probably never see the outside of prison walls. I am merely observing the patterns that seem to have landed him (and a very disturbingly large number of other black men) in this position. There’s nothing exculpatory about it.
I have made this point many time myself, right here on this very website. Cultures didn’t fall from the sky, assigned at random to different population groups. To an extent, the culture of American blacks is an expression of their innate capabilities and predispositions. However, it’s clearly not entirely so, because it’s also a very different culture from West Africa. It clearly has very strong elements of the Southern American culture into which American slaves were acculturated. (Honor culture elements, boastfulness, etc.)
There were changes in aggregate black culture between 1940 and 1990, and those changes did materially lead to a decline in life outcomes, in terms of things like criminality and out-of-wedlock births. The genetic substrate didn’t change. (One could make an argument about genetic selection effects leading only the most profligate black men to father children during this time, therefore subtly altering the proportions of various genetic traits within the population, but the time period is too short for this to matter, and also the evidence doesn’t seem to support this.)
If those cultural processes could be reversed — either from within black culture, or imposed from without — there would be measurable difference in life outcomes, even though the genetically-influenced things like average IQ and other cognitive limitations would remain. I don’t disagree with you that the higher average propensity for violent outbursts would still be there! That has been a feature of American black men (on average, in the aggregate, with a great many exceptions) for a long time. But it can be mediated by cultural pressures (and an awareness of the need for those pressures) if a concerted effort could be introduced. (Think of something like the strong legal structures that were once put into place to protect indigenous Amerinidians from alcohol, given their lack of genetic protections against alcoholism.)
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Pretty much all of your post can be true except the second paragraph which is an orthogonal claim. The culturalist claim that I mostly believe (my ballpark estimate is that this sort of thing is 80-20 culture vs genes) is not that Raja is a normal unbroken person and if you put him in a good environment he would suddenly start acting like you or me. The claim is that he was not born this way. It was not inevitable, it was instilled into him slowly over the course of decades.
It should be obvious that there is a non-neglible influence of culture by considering the limiting case. If a toddler were left in an empty room with literally no parenting other than support robots that kept it physically alive but provided no socialization, they would end up completely feral and with all sorts of psychological issues. The child raised by wolves. Even if you later introduced them to society, they would almost certainly never reach the same level of development or civilized behavior.
And this is a continuous function. If you take an uncivilized half-animal man and he has a child and raises them that way you'll likely end up with an uncivilized half-animal person. If you have a mostly civilized but not quite man who has a 1% chance of aping out and trying to murder someone every time they are provoked, they're likely to raise children who are mostly civilized but not quite men who have a 1% chance of aping out and trying to murder someone every time they are provoked. Heritability is not synonymous with genetics. It can simultaneously be true that Raja is, in his current state as a 25 year old, an insurmountable and unfixable failure. But it was not inevitable. He was not born broken, he was slowly twisted and mentally disfigured into this state over the past 25 years. All you have to do is look at minorities who get adopted by functioning civilized people and oh hey, 80% of the problems magically go away. Some of them don't, and it's a little tricky to disentangle the genetics from the trauma of whatever caused them to be adopted and being temporarily parent-less as an infant. But the reason I think it's 80-20 as opposed to 50-50 or 20-80 is because the majority of adopted minorities I've seen emulate the culture, behavior, and civilized behavior of their adoptive parents, not their genetic ones. Maybe slightly less intelligent, which does correlate with criminality, but only weakly. And if you look at middle or upper class minorities who live in mostly white areas and act like them, their children usually end up middle or upper class and act like their parents too, because that's how they were raised.
Bad parenting doesn't fall out of the sky by chance. It's cultivated in a chain reaction over generations, as bad parents beget bad parents beget bad parents. But that doesn't force it to be genetic, and doesn't force it to be immutable. The majority of mutability happens while they're children, but that's not some magical things about race: all children need to be raised properly or it will cripple them psychologically and leave them horrible mangled monsters. Even if it's too late to fix Raja now, he could have become a better person if he had been raised better.
I appreciate the reply, though it is tiresome to have the position I just argued against explained to me as if I just didn't know, understand or wasn't addressing it before. Then seeing all the arguments I just argued against... Eh.. Let me give you some examples to judge for yourself.
To begin with, the possibility of a better outcome does not change the fact that environments are heritable and there is no omnipotent hand ready to steer children away from criminal parents to minimize their chances of criminality. This is why I said that people have to be able to live with other people. Asserting that there was technically a chance to environmentally pacify someone with Brunner syndrome does not change the fact that they have Brunner syndrome whilst others do not. And whilst Raja doesn't have Brunner syndrome, he does seem to have a higher propensity towards violence than average. To that extent you are not arguing anything about genetics or environment, just asserting that with omnipotence we could change some outcomes. Well, I don't disagree, but we don't have omnipotence. So with what does that leave us?
As a second example, when I say bad parenting doesn't fall from the sky, and you reply with the assertion that it is cultivated over generations, I am left perplexed. How does that answer where it comes from? And if it persists over generations, what exactly are the conditions that produce and maintain it? Like, you are asserting a theory of psychology and sociology that, if true, should be extremely well studied and have very clear and visibly interactable effects. Are the results of adoption studies really so definitive in that direction? As far as I remember, children of criminal parents adopted into non criminal families still have higher rates of criminality. So we are at making the best of a sub-average situation in the hopes that it won't metastasize into something worse again?
When I see these arguments all I can think of is: How? How will anyone do this or enforce what you are proposing? You are taking a hypothesized maximum potential of people and asserting that the genetic component is negligible because in a hypothesized scenario most everyone could be raised to be a good person if removed from their inherited environment and have all negative impulses stifled somehow. My point would be that we don't live in such a world. Instead we live in a world were the Rampage Jacksons of the world can raise their own children and freely express whatever impulses they have. And my argument relies on that world being our point of comparison. Because despite all the excuses made for violent blacks, there are so many people who have lived hard lives, had few opportunities, been used and abused, and never once been close to expressing the type of sub-humanism displayed by Raja.
I think we're 90% in agreement on the broader framework. My primary objection, first and foremost is your leap from "this is strongly hereditary and these people are scum" to "this is 100% genetic". Aside from this being a scientific and biological claim about reality which is demonstrably false, it suggests that the problem is fundamentally unsolvable. If this level of criminality were actually 100% genetic then the only options would be to either tolerate it, or exile/genocide people who have it so they can't make more.
I'm not claiming that I have a grand plan for how to cleanly and reliably solve all of these issues on a society-wide scale, just that such interventions could have an effect, and on a case-by-case bases clearly do. While I don't think it's either physically or politically realistic to identify degenerate scum and confiscate their children to raise in better homes, many instances in which we can legally confiscate children from degenerate scum via CPS do result in better outcomes for the children and a partial improvement of their overall life outcomes compared to children who get stuck in an equivalently bad environment without being noticed. This is actionable. It's not going to solve the entirety of the problem, but in marginal cases confiscating degenerate scum kids who are being abused helps not just them but our entire society by making things just a little bit less toxic. If it were 100% genetic then this would not be the case.
To put it in a metaphor: you're out here claiming that heart disease is 100% genetic and any treatments or scientific research into it is pointless. And then using the fact that we don't have a reliable general purpose cure for it and even people who go to the hospital for it just die anyway as evidence for this basis, and extrapolating this to suggest that a cure or even interventions to reduce risk are completely impossible. And while obviously there is a strong genetic component to heart disease and we can't just snap our fingers and magically fix it, there are surgeries and medications that help reduce its probability and its impact. It's a combination of genes and environment both, and an understanding of it is incomplete without considering both.
I don't have an infallible and reliable cure for curing all degenerate scum behavior. I'm just refuting the idea that one cannot in principle exist because the problem is literally unsolvable. And, more practically in the short term, assert that marginal changes have marginal effects. Even if we lack the omnipotence to solve 100% of incidences, a weak 1% intervention which reduces degenerate scum behavior by 1% is actually thousands of people. It would improve thousands of lives and prevent murder and suffering. Or even on an individual level. If you or someone you know saves one person from a childhood of degenerate scum parents and that has a 50% reduction in the chance of them becoming a degenerate scumbag then, in expectation, that's a meaningful improvement in not only their own life but the lives of everyone they ever interact with. If it was 100% genetic then this would not be the case and the intervention would be pointless.
That seems like an important distinction to me.
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Look, I think almost everybody here is in agreement with you about the extreme political/ideological difficulties in addressing this problem. To the extent that Americans are even willing to openly acknowledge the existence of the problem at all, we are viciously polarized about the root causes of it, and about what an attempt to fix it would even look like. One side (presented somewhat uncharitably) thinks we just need to expropriate more resources and guilt from the dominant white culture and the problem will somehow fix itself; the other side is hotly divided over whether genetics play any role at all, and the anti-genetics side has spent years screeching about the evils of eugenics, so they’re certainly not going to assent to any attempt to address the problem on a genetic/heritability level.
The practical difficulties of disentangling the genetic and cultural factors is a real one, but not a priori insurmountable. The existence of genetically-identical (or at least nearly identical) populations split along cultural lines, with large downstream effects in terms of life outcomes, is trivially observable. (North Korea vs. South Korea being the most obvious one.) We can infer from this that the reverse is achievable; undoing the cultural divide would ameliorate the differences in outcomes.
Now, with American blacks, we don’t have such a starkly-clear control group. We do have American descendants of Igbo immigrants, whose life outcomes are very markedly better than ADOS blacks; however, since Igbos are a fairly endogenous genetic ingroup and are not genetically identical to the ADOS founding population, it’s difficult to disambiguate to what extent genetics explain the difference. (Although at the very least it deals a powerful blow to the thesis that white racism against people with dark skin is the entire root cause of blacks’ worse life outcomes.)
Ultimately I think you and I are in agreement that the idea of bringing black life outcomes into complete parity with white life outcomes is a pipe dream, short of a decades-long coordinated eugenics program. (And maybe even that wouldn’t be enough.) Since that’s not going to happen, we can at least try to fiddle with the cultural dials in whatever way we can; perhaps we can draw some useful conclusions from that regarding the extent to which culture contributes to the life outcomes we’re observing.
The other side, as you put it, mostly does not divide itself over whether genetics play any role. There is a wide variety of red tribe opinions on the matter, yes, but broad agreement on the solution to the problem of poor african-american behavior- they should assimilate into the red tribe. There is broad agreement on the causes of dysfunction in contemporary black culture- the government was promoting social programs to undermine the family and blacks were in the wrong place and time to get hit with the brunt of it.
Genetically, the closest analogues of AADOS blacks would be Jamaicans; they're likewise mostly west african with some british isles admixture. Jamaican immigrants do much better than AADOS, but selection effects. Has anyone run a comparison of AADOS middle class vs Jamaican immigrants?
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Very well put. This tracks pretty well with what I believe, and also what I think is pretty observable. I don't know about 80-20 or 50-50. I'd say it's probably more case by case, but I've known enough nonwhites who were raised by good parents to understand that environment plays a critical role in how they act as adults. I understand and agree with the genetic implications behind the broader statistics about group differences, but they are still generalities that don't guarantee unfavorable outcomes for all people.
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And current-day black culture mostly encourages these tendencies rather than seeking to move past them. Rap music, rarity of long-term partnerships, etc.
Blacks were much more socially functional and much poorer within living memory. Nurture elements are 100% real.
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