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 -
Welp, turns out more Epstein files are finally getting released!
Apparently there will be a vote coming out to release even more, but the docs released so far have been negative for Trump's claims to be innocent of the whole matter.
This, combined with the ruckus over Trump arguing we need foreign talent, has caused a massive cratering amongst online confidence in MAGA. From my perspective, confidence in MAGA at least online is the lowest it has ever been. Many feel betrayed by Trump when it comes to his America First promises.
Add in the storm over Fuentes and Israel, and I feel I'm seeing the conservative coalition fall apart in real time, extremely quickly.
Is this inevitable, the narcissism of small differences? Or is it just Trump not being a very principled man?
I've slowly come over to the view that it's a good thing Trump was restricting immigration of the best and brightest so they instead went elsewhere. As they say: Democracy is the belief that voters know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard. We've seen the humiliating climbdowns against China and if this policy of being unwelcoming to high end immigrants continue I suspect we'll see plenty of self-flagellation from the US 10 years down the line when it's trying to rebuild up its attractiveness for such people.
Taking what you've said at face value, possibly. If the US actually pursues going closed-borders-for-everyone, maybe it will be overtaken by China, given the slight national IQ advantage (I hedge my bets with the qualifiers because Europeans were the ones to conquer the world a few centuries ago, despite being lower IQ, so shrug)
Of course, you elide the obvious, though politically incorrect, question: What race are the immigrants? As I concede, it may be true that the US will need the best and brightest of foreign Aryans, East Asians and Jews (i.e. high-IQ races) to stay on top - but what of the best and the brightest of the Third World?
I think it is true that, for a sufficiently selective (and then properly enforced) immigration policy, we can have eugenic immigration from the Third World. But, due to HBD, the amount of additional value from Venkateshes and Bhargavas is going to be much less significant (because there are just not as many of them, and just less total human capital altogether to siphon)
On the other hand, once we hop over this fence, there is the constant danger of somehow (fraud, relaxing the bar for "skilled", etc) then allowing a less filtered, and hence dysgenic, influx. This leads to pretty serious harm - either these people assimilate (and hence lower the quality of the nation's gene pool) or you get a permanent racial underclass. In practice, this might lead to, say, your capital city becoming minority White, and the replacements actually being worse on average.
If we are looking at this purely from the perspective of national self-interest, I think this is overall a net negative. There is obviously a moral argument about helping unfortunate people who could thrive in a 1st world civilisation but were born into a low-IQ race, so it is worth the necessary overhead to carefully filter these people out and let them in (and of course, the more extreme one, which is to just let everyone in so everyone in for equality-of-opportunity reasons, and just accept the nation becoming Third World)
With the substance of my reply out of the way: why do you do this? As in, I know you are a high-IQ Third World immigrant, so I'm guessing you are not super thrilled about the recent vibe shift on immigrants: you personally haven't ever done anything bad, how unfair is it that some people implicitly blame you for (or at least associate you with) stuff like Rotherham, etc.
But you've had many conversations in the past with White identarians on this forum, so I'm pretty sure you are aware of this line of thinking, and then decide to constantly post as if you are some bluepilled liberal normie. I think it's bad form to psychologise your interlocutor, so I won't speculate why any further.
I will just ask - is there anything in what I've said that you actually factually disagree with? And I stress the word factually (since your claim that the US would fall behind and later on regret its current immigration policy is a statement about descriptive reality)
Do you not believe in HBD applied to racial groups? Do you dispute the Lynn IQ numbers as being roughly accurate? Do you dispute that IQ is a decent measure of a person's ability to function well in a society? Do you think that it doesn't make logical sense to make probabalistic judgements about groups of people on the basis of race given HBD? Do you think that the issues with Third World immigration that have occured in the past (e.g. Indians in Canada) are actually very easy to prevent if we just do X? etc
You know brahmins are a high IQ group, right?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link