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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 23, 2023

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tyre nichols, a 29 year old black man in memphis, was beaten up by several cops on jan 7th and died three days later. all five of the cops, who are black, were fired, arrested, and charged; the police chief denounced their actions as 'inhumane'. the bodycam video will be released about 3 hours after this post at 7pm EST. hopefully we won't see a recurrence of the floyd riots, although several cities, including atlanta which is dealing with its own controversial cop shooting incident, are preparing for an eventful evening. the police reform movement, which has stalled, may also be pushed back into the forefront of public consciousness.

4 videos have been released on the city of memphis vimeo account: https://vimeo.com/cityofmemphis

I'm kind of unsettled by the fresh new wave of Twitter excitementspew that it doesn't matter if you have black cops, black chiefs of police, black prosecutors, black judges, black city councils, black mayors, black members of Congress, black Presidents: systemic white supremacy makes them all racist too. Just going to chuckle nervously and assume that all of these online people aren't real.

Hard not to wonder if 100 years from now, white people could be only 5% of the population of the US but every bad thing that's done is considered latent white supremacy.

They have defined "whiteness" as a set of cultural norms. That Smithsonian museum infographic made the mistake of plainly stating the claims of academics in an easy to read format. Plenty of serious academics claim the same things, but that's not easily viewed by the general public so they aren't subjected to the same public derision.

That’s the motte. The Bailey is tons of unjustified racial hatred.

The Bailey is hatred of whites. Whether that's by blacks or by other whites.

Why not go one step further?

It's not race warfare here, since the term 'whites hating whites' isn't parsable by plain definition of the word (sure, you could unpack it, but that's the entire problem with saying it).

It's not class warfare, either, since doers and not-doers exist in the low, middle, and higher classes of society.

Gender warfare gets a bit closer to the mark; after all, the branches of academia that are generating these statements (as well as the bureaucracies, both public and private) are majority-female and there are a few very clearly man-resenting statements in there... but it still doesn't quite make it all the way.

And the Gervais Principle doesn't quite apply here.

Instead, these statements are an expression of what the Iron Law of Bureaucracy's ultimate conclusion implies: that the people in control of an organization (in this case, society at large) absolutely despise the people who carry out its goals.

I really have a hard time coming up with any other explanation because the dichotomy between "white culture" and "whatever else" is so stark- when an academic says "white", what they really mean is reality-based. And "white" is the only thing they can come up with, but because it's been a goal for such a long time that by and large has already been accomplished, it's also the perfect nag, because it inherently cannot be fixed, and it's something the doers still care about given it was the social cause celebre for so long (and can also be used to blind the newer ones).

I get that I'm kind of at an advantage here, since the class I'm calling out appears to have no plan, system, or method for how the marginalization of those who keep society running is supposed to improve things in any way, shape, or form (outside of benefitting that class by trying to tank the bargaining power and expectations for how much reality manipulation is worth alongside the enclosure through regulation to keep out any competitors to take up the market shortfall this generates), but is there a way to pass this ideological Turing Test for "hostile manager class" in a way that isn't just "project rational self interest, but in a maximally destructive way for everyone around me"?

It's not strictly class based but I do think there's a clear connection to the market, when you have the epicenter of this in public institutions, and jumping off your conclusion, sucess in the market is more or less rational self interest.

If you buy that pro/anti-market was never really about class, but more of a kind of its own philosophical battleground, I think "anti-racism" fits pretty well into "anti-market"

Alternatively, the academics that generate this stuff really are that insulated from the real world, need to come up with stuff they can call groundbreaking, and have extremely low standards of sanity checking, so they invent anti-white bullshit which gets eagerly parroted by bureaucrats who have never once exercised their critical thinking skills, all so that different people along the chain can call themselves experts in something. Even if that something is stupid, insane, and or hateful.