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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   12306 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 8, 2025

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(cross-posted from dsl)

I recently listened to the Tucker and Piers interview, and specifically want to talk about the part on population replacement. Pierced framed the idea of whites becoming a minority in the future with 'so what' and I felt tucker inadequatedly answered the question. (He is not a good debater). More broadly, much of the inadeqacy generally, is folks tripping over themselves to avoid claims of racialism. Everyone is trying so hard not to sound like a racial essentialist, while the other side, gotchas on anything not nailed down.

While thinking about it, I have come up with a propostional idea, I want to share here. I will call it thenetics, a portmaneu of genetics and Theseus (as in the ship). Thenetics is the empty bag that carries genetic and memetic transmission. Much of the disagreement with replacement population (aside from the conflict theory), is one side thinking thenes alone is enough (or better).

Genes tell the story of bodies. Memes tell the story of ideas. But thenes tell the story of arrangements. The social graph, the occupancy of roles, the alignment of persons in an institution across time. When people talk about “losing a country,” they often mean the fading of memes and gene. Thenes are the structural continuity during that transmission or loss.

My thesis is that thenetic continuity without memetic or genetic is empty, and hides actual noncontinuity. It simply preserves the shell of the institution while its substance may have changed entirely.

Consider four churches in one town.

  • Church One is the easy case: a multi-generational congregation with healthy memetic transmission. The families remain, but newcomers are welcomed into the liturgy, the stories, the shared habits. There is continuity of body, of belief, and of arrangement.
  • Church Two loses its founding families over time, but it holds fast to its doctrine, its rituals, its internal grammar. The pews are filled by new faces, but the culture is strong enough that the ideas replicate themselves. Here the genes depart, but the memes endure. Most people still say, yes, it is the same church.
  • Church Three begins like the first, but its memetics fail. The congregation dwindles. The shared language collapses. In desperation, the church reinvents itself attempting to attract a new audience new doctrine, new sensibility, a total cultural rewrite. It never closes its doors, but by the end it is a different creature entirely. Only the thene remains.
  • Church Four suffers the same decline, but its end is literal. The church dies. The building goes dark. Eventually another congregation purchases the property and plants something new with the memetics of church 3. A successor, not an heir.

In my pointof view, Church Four is clearly a successor organization in the same 'space'. But from a Ship of Thesian way, #3 is more like 4 than 1 or 2. In both 3 and 4, the memetic and genetic transmission are dead ended. But the difference is the thenetic continuity of 3, which is irrelevant and a distraction from the idea that it's the 'same' church.

Ship of Thesus To answer the question, it's the same ship at the end if the form and function are the same. Replacing a plank with a like plank is genetic (via the 'blueprints'), retaining purpose and aesthetics are memetic. But if the ship is a car at the other end, it's not the same ship, even if it had thenetic transition. Thenetic continuity alone cannot guarantee identity. Thenetic continuity does not determine identity. It can only disguise the loss of it.

The Family The platonic family is biological: parents raising their own children in a shared home. But adoption shows that concept is not confined to genes. A family can be created through transmission of life, but also through transmission of meaning in shared context (family). The bond is thenetic and memetic in place of genetic

But there are limits to this. If a child moves into the house after you have already moved out, that child is not your sibling. Even if you once slept in the same room, the relation is absent. And if two children overlap in the house for a brief season, the degree to which they become family is not measured by the length of the overlap but by the memetic exchange within it. Family is not the structure of occupancy alone. It is the lived transmission that occurs while the structure is shared.

Finally, consider my own experience as father sending his children to the same church and school of my youth. I have many feelings seeing brand new people and families who have in the intervening 30 years carried on, changed or added to the familiar traditions, ideas, identity, and physical space. There are also other families still there or returned (I have old classmates with kids here too) and/or people who are transitionary (a constant chain on relation). The latter is thenetic. But the thenetics only matter if they are transitioning the memes and social graph. If there was a wholesale rip and replace, it would be more obvious and jarring that it was a 'new' community. But so would it be if 'brick by brick' it had fundamentally changed.

TLDR; I appreciate the recent meme that a country is not just an economic zone, because it generally resonates with how I feel about both my side and the other. But I think it risks over-transactionalizing the people on the other side. My main beef is that a country is not a thenetic structure, to be filled with whatever people and ideas fit in.

Thenetics describes the continuity of an institution’s role-structure across time. An institution remains identifiable only when this structural continuity is joined by an appropriate degree of genetic or memetic transmission. Thenetic continuity alone is insufficient to preserve identity.

I think you left out a 5th option, enemy action. What happens when a sociopath infiltrates the church, makes all the right mouth sounds, and uses their superior verbal intelligence to hoodwink the congregation into beliefs and actions antithetical to their core beliefs or interest?

I picked Bari Weiss for my example, because this is a woman with a singular interest. What's best for Israel and Jews. She's not shy about it at all. I mean if you put it like that to her, she'd deny it. But then she'd go on to prove the accusation correct with no possible alternative with every word and deed. She's thrown enough red meat to the right that now the left hates her, but that's only so she can lead and pace an increasingly Israel skeptical right wing back in the direction of backstopping Israel's well being at the expense of their own.

Some people seem to get an almost sexual glee out of rewriting reality in front of people's eyes. I think often of that scene in Batman Begins where Falcone is bragging that he could shoot Bruce Wayne in front of a hundred witnesses, including law enforcement, and everyone would ignore their lying eyes and parrot whatever he says happened. Alternately, if you've ever dated a woman with BPD, letting them gaslight you turns them on like almost nothing else. Not that I recommend it.

The problem with the Church is the same problem with Western Civilization at the moment. Christian Charity. They are so willfully blind to enemy action, cannibals could be harvesting their flesh and they'd try to come up with a plausible alternate explanation.

That Nation article/hit piece you've linked as presumable evidence against Weiss isn't particularly compelling.

To my mind there's a conspicuous absence of a fifth church:

  • Church Five is a multi-generational congregation, with limited influence from newcomers. Perhaps it's in a remote place where the population doesn't change all that much. However over time the subsequent generations find themselves drawn to other beliefs and practices. So much so that after some number of generations there is little in it that would be recognizable to prior generations.

Is my hypothetical Church Five more like a Church Three or more like a Church Two? Is it identifiably the "same" church? It seems like a theory that permits continuity to be established by either genetics or memes would be constrained to say Church Five is the "same" church in the relevant sense.

right, I am not suggesting that the only true institution is one that resists change or evolution. And perhaps my OP misstated this. Genetic and memetic evolution will occur in most (every?) institution, and attempts to resist that are varying levels of tension in the system. I am trying to combine both an analytical frame and a point of view in the frame, which I think is muddying it.

I think there is a natural, healthy debate about what Church Five is, and this is the natural order of an institution or nation. The fact that the US has conservatives and liberals, and an internal debate about what do we progress and what do we conserve, and which parts are core to our identity is a reasonable debate. When a faith or organization says, which parts of our doctrine are non-negotiable, and which parts are developments, the same.

Whether memetic evolution, changes the nature of an institution or not, I think is an open question. What I am suggesting is that when memetic evolution occurs primarily through genetic replacement, something somewhat different is happening (this is akin to the concept of skinsuiting), and conflating the two or trivializing the difference is usually done by pointing to thenetic continuity.

My point of view is that thenetic continuity is less important than it is often made out to be when debating core identity.

I guess it's not clear to me why the memetic change being driven by genetic change is different from the general memetic change. To concretize a bit, I imagine a church founded by, say, Catholics. Consider two evolutions. In one case the descendants of the original founders (for whatever reason) convert to Mormonism and convert the theology of the church the same. In the second case the descendants of the original founders gradually move away or stop attending, but newcomers move in and gradually convert the church toward a Mormon theology. It seems to me that the church is no longer the same church in either case, whether the members are descended from the founders or not.

I also think the degree to which continuity is thenetic varies by institution. Consider, for example, an institution like "The Supreme Court of the United States." Or "The United States Congress." To the extent these institutions are continuous through time I think it is in primarily a thenetic way. In their form or structure.

I am highly suspicious that a certain portion of this post was output from an LLM. Similar to the previous top level post from earlier, it's not outright slop, but an uncertain amount of this is likely AI.

Portions, I ran through an AI for editing (at this point, this is just unfortunately any writing at all that isn't pure stream of consciousness), was mostly frustrated with the output not being in my voice, and pasted back in my own words. It is certainly stilted, and a combination of lack of time spent editing, skill, and my rusty impoverished attempts to be more essayic.

As my time spent posting on the internet has decreased, my writing style has increasingly become sloppier stream of consciousness, and this was the first attempt in quite a while to draft something before posting.

It is not AI, but poorly written, and unfortunately apes AI writing styles, in an attempt to be structured.

"I reworded the AI material back in my own words again" is still AI. Just because it's in your own words doesn't mean that there isn't something in the structure that still carries over from the AI version and can be noticed. (And obviously there was enough for people to notice.)

That's fair. This is a tough issue though, because AI is at this point impossibly looped into basic editing processes, and there's a spectrum. It is AI now, because I ask AI for a spell check, or to fix commas? 1.Write a something for me on this topic is one thing. 2. Draft these bullet points into a post is another. 3. Take this draft, and help me edit for grammer/wording, is another still. It's closer to blue underline suggestions in Word. For me personally, I don't really do option 1 ever. I will occassionally use option 2 in work emails. But option 3, which should be useful,I find the AI to be overly zealous in rewording, then have to tweak back. It's a general problem I have at work with AI generation. AI is a very zealous editor, and instead of tightening a clause or fixing a word, it tries to aggressively redraft things into AI voice. Perhaps somethign like Grammerly is better, but ChatGPT sucks in this regard.

However, in this case, I don't think AI was noticed here. I think stilted prose was noticed, and everything that doesn't feel organic, registers as AI now. The biggest difference between my OP and, say this comment, is that I tried to write it out in a word processor and create a structure, rather than stream-of-consciousness into the comment field.

I have tried (and mostly failed) to get AI to write fiction for me since I have mostly tapped out the prog fantasy space for fiction that I enjoy. There are several ways to get the AI to do more or less of it's 'own' writing. You can simply prompt it with something like, 'Edit this for spelling and grammar while changing as little as possible and maintaining my words and voice, minor technical errors are fine only fix things that are obviously mistakes : Paste Text. Whenever I use the prompting above, the AI changes almost nothing.

I have tried (and mostly failed) to get AI to write fiction for me since I have mostly tapped out the prog fantasy space for fiction that I enjoy. There are several ways to get the AI to do more or less of its "own" writing. You can simply prompt it with something like, "Edit this for spelling and grammar while changing as little as possible and maintaining my words and voice; minor technical errors are fine, only fix things that are obviously mistakes: Paste Text." Whenever I use the prompting above, the AI changes almost nothing.

The quote was what Chatgpt spat out when prompted in that way to edit this comment. I doubt anyone would flag the AI output as AI (unless they were familiar with my writing and shocked my the lack of mistakes).

It is AI now, because I ask AI for a spell check, or to fix commas?

No if it only fixes commas and spelling. If it can't help slopping all over what nobody asked for, then yes it's AI slop.

Draft these bullet points into a post is another.

Completely AI slop. I am completely against this.

But option 3, which should be useful,I find the AI to be overly zealous in rewording, then have to tweak back. It's a general problem I have at work with AI generation. AI is a very zealous editor, and instead of tightening a clause or fixing a word, it tries to aggressively redraft things into AI voice.

This is exactly the reason why I think option 3 is still sloppified in current_year. Because it's quite tricky to just get AI to "help" fix the issues and organize your thoughts without slop leaking in somewhere or another.

However, in this case, I don't think AI was noticed here. I think stilted prose was noticed, and everything that doesn't feel organic, registers as AI now.

No, there are definite sentences and phrases in there that are totally chatgpt-isms. I don't want to reveal the more subtle tells in fear that people will simply edit them out. But there's parts of your post that you forgot to "tweak back" from the AI output.

All fair points. I'm not particularly proud of the structural product of op, so no point belaboring. Happy to engage further on the actual content

Don't listen to the haters, I thought this too. AI paranoia all the way.

Its best not to go down this route of AI paranoia. I'd suggest reporting things as AI rather than calling them out yourself.

This post didn't trigger my inner AI detecting sense. In an effort to be better calibrated, can you tell me what about this person's post strikes you as AI? I'd like to get better at AI detecting.

After re-reading, the very last paragraph does have a slight AI feeling but that's all I got

It's pure paranoia. The writing is a little clunky, but it's a distinctly human clunkiness of someone trying to write in a formal register because they believe what they're saying is important and should be stated in prose appropriate to important things. An AI would be polished but soulless, this is soulful but unpolished.

AI can do that too.

Making it clunky and unpolished is not that hard.

But what is a thene? (Being countable implies discrete things/examples, perhaps it shouldn't be countable.) Mild inspiration: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emic_and_etic_units

If I understand correctly, genes are an emic unit and alleles would be the corresponding etic units (since they are the concrete, reified variants of a gene).

Thus, Church One through Church Four would appear to be different surface representations of the thene that codes for “church as a social organization”. Not sure what to call such units though.

I do like the word. Thenetic disorders. Human Thenome Project. Epithenetics. Thenetic drift. Thenetic fallacy. The possibilities are endless.

In a community without widespread knowledge of genetics, or one like ours where most people learn genetics in school but compartmentalise it as dangerous knowledge only be used on biology exams, "family" or "blood" or "lineage" or equivalent is the emic unit and genes are an etic unit. To be emic, it has to be something that the community under discussion bellyfeels.

A society that looks like church #1 sounds like a dystopian nightmare to me. Something like the society in Ayn Rand's book Anthem.

Stagnant in every aspect. No social mobility, no new technology, no new ideas. I suppose the Amish live this way, but even they have a sort of safety valve that allows their young men to leave.

But the Amish can only exist because a much stronger more competitive society shelters them from the rest of the world.

Or it could sound like China.

It's interesting that you equate a stable population with stagnation and lack of social mobility. Care to say more about why you think that is?

Stagnant memetics were more of the problem.

Memetics impacts technology and vice versa.

Ideas of who is in charge and who is the shitty underclass will also remain stagnant.

A society that looks like church #1 sounds like a dystopian nightmare to me. Something like the society in Ayn Rand's book Anthem.

It is funny, on one hand church #1 sounds really nice to me, on the other I also kind of hate both the Randian Dystopia and the Randian Protagonist. I'm curious to hear why it triggers that reactions because I feel like it might tell us both something meaningful about ourselves.

I think the Amish are a nice outcome. If the world went this route it would look like Anthem.

The Amish are commensals living on the fringe of a technological society. If the whole world regressed to late medieval technology, we would get late medieval outcomes.

The Amish do not have late medieval tech, their tech level depends on community size but something like ‘victorian’ is probably fair as a rule of thumb, with quite a few exceptions. The Amish are not luddites, they have limitations on relying on non-community members that force them to live off grid. Some communities have electricity and tractors.

They're pacifists. They'd not last.

They do fine in ultraviolent northern Mexico right now.

Do they have some theological carve-out allowing them to form militias, or is the Amish refusal of military service purely about refusing to serve someone else's military?

The point I am making is that the Amish communities that have tractors don't have tractor factories. If every community tried to regress to an Amish tech level, society as a whole would end up regressing further than that.

Also the Amish only exist at the pleasure of their hosts. It's the affluence of their surrounding nation that allows them to live in their own way, and if that were to change, it would be their final generation-

The church example was only illustrative. The idea with both genetics and memetics is not that they are stagnant. Children aren’t clones, genetically or ideologically. But that the successive generations are descendants not displacements. To go back to the real example of my child’s school, which is attached to our Church, a tremendous amount has developed, from the technology in the classroom to the buildings to the curriculum. The idea is not stasis. But I also accept that the general positionality of the conservative is undesirable for a libertarian, but preference aside, my post is about taxonomy

I see descendants as very disruptive. I have one daughter that is very like my wife. One daughter that is like neither of us, but maybe like my mother in law or brother in law, and one daughter that is too young to guess. Neither I or my two siblings are anything like my parents in terms of occupation. Neither of my parents were like their parents in terms of occupation. Neither of my mothers parents were like their parents in terms of occupation. (i dont know much about my father's grandparents, but what little I've heard suggests the same pattern). I didn't marry some foreigner, I married someone that is at least three generation American, probably 5 or 6 generation, but they didn't fully keep track. My ancestors were once upper class Americans. They owned slaves, attended the revolutionary war state conventions as representatives, served as officers in that war, and then subsequently the civil war. We then became upper middle class Americans. Doctors, engineers, etc.

I've shared this sentiment on here before. I am American via ancestors that have been here approximately 400 years from England. I find the gatekeeping of people that arrived after my ancestors to be silly and pointless. This has always been a country of immigrants and memetics, and never a country of blood and genetics. I feel like WWII was the definitive answer to countries of genetics like Germany and Japan. We kicked both of their asses at the same time.

China is a country of genetics but not of memetics. They have bounced around to radically different philosophies as the ruling class has changed over the last century.

Piers' and the general Conservative, boomer, narrow loyalty to certain propositions, legal documents, and historical institutions is a thinly veiled expression of loyalty to socially dominant Memes- in particular Hitler and the Holocaust. "I don't care about race I care about the Constitution" is not misguided loyalty to Thenetics it's compliance with socially dominant memetics which demand that this ambivalence towards genetic replacement compose the right-wing side of the cultural dialectic. It makes racially-oriented thinking taboo.

Amazingly, Piers Morgan strongly and emotionally denied that his proud ambivalence towards the erasure of his own people is the product of this Hitler/Holocaust-centric memetic structure... and then a few minutes later Morgan literally calls an old Jew into the show to lecture Nick with a sob story about family killed by Stalin and Hitler! This is similar to my dispute with @2rafa, who constantly cites other factors as formulating the center of this memetic structure while the Priestly caste of that memetic structure incessantly and without fail invoke Hitler and the Holocaust to justify their moral advocacy for ambivalence towards genetic replacement and racial thinking. At what point do you just believe them when they cite these symbols as inspiration for the center of their moral perspective toward these extremely import issues facing the United States and Europe?

Hitler and the Holocaust is the secular religion that Nick challenges with his shock and humor (and he is a Denier too, although he wisely avoids engaging in Revisionism directly). The way you contest a religion is by subverting and destroying its idols.

Genes tell the story of bodies. Memes tell the story of ideas.

Genes are downstream from memes. Think about how the tokens constituting an oral tradition and written to paper literally direct the ethnogenesis of the Jewish people. The myths created the people, so it is in Europe and the United States today. The dominant mythos is required to understand the direction of the people.

This crucial insight of the interaction between the two is embedded even in the Book of Genesis, in which Jacob is promised speckled sheep (mixed black/white sheep) as wages for guarding Laban's flock. Jacob then does something odd. He takes fresh branches (from poplar, almond, and plane trees), peels stripes into them so the wood looks streaked and speckled, and sets these peeled sticks in front of the animals at the watering troughs when they’re mating.

He only does this with the stronger animals, not the weak ones.

Genesis says that as a result, the animals that mated in front of the striped bark bore sheep that were streaked or speckled. Jacob claimed those as his wages. The weaker animals (who weren’t given the rods) mostly stayed Laban’s. Jacob uses visual media, a symbolic technique (the rods at the troughs) to direct the breeding of the sheep and he wins the flock. In the bible, flocks of sheep are a motif representing people.

Of course all cultures share the feature of using memes to direct the genetic evolution of the flock, while Genesis is unique in demonstrating consciousness of the functional relationship between symbols and ethnogenesis. Piers is a sheep. His hangups over Hitler, the Holocaust, prosecuting Nick for all the -ists and the -isms is directed by the symbols and memes of his generation.

That's the impetus for blaspheming this secular religion. It's not just about being edgy, it's about tearing down the symbols that are directing the behavior of the flock in a suicidal direction. Piers is a product of that memetic structure, and so is his apparent, shallow loyalty to what you cell Thenetics.

Piers' and the general Conservative, boomer, narrow loyalty to certain propositions, legal documents, and historical institutions is a thinly veiled expression of loyalty to socially dominant Memes...

First; Peirs Morgan has never been a "conservative", in fact much of his career has been defined by his opposition to both Conservate and American hegemony. He's one of the central examples of an advocate for enlightened neo-liberal technocracy.

Second; As I said in a earlier post Something I don't think you or a lot have users here have really grasped is that Trump and a core contingent the MAGA crowd are playing Teddy Roosevelt's bit about "Hyphenated Americans" absolutely straight,. Racially-oriented thinking is not "taboo", so much as it is viewed as weak, degenerate, and anti-American. To quote Teddy...

The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities, an intricate knot of German-Americans, Irish-Americans, English-Americans, French-Americans, Scandinavian-Americans, or Italian-Americans, each preserving its separate nationality, each at heart feeling more sympathy with Europeans of that nationality than with the other citizens of the American Republic...

...The man who calls himself an American citizen and who yet shows by his actions that he is primarily the citizen of a foreign land, plays a thoroughly mischievous part in the life of our body politic. He has no place here; and the sooner he returns to the land to which he feels his real heart-allegiance, the better it will be for every good American

When Piers asked Fuentes what he liked about America, one of Nick's answers was that he liked that America was a pan-European experiment in which a European empire was built that overcame the petty nationalisms from the European continent. It's one thing I like about it too. What do you think Teddy Roosevelt would say about demographic change in the United States?

One of Roosevelt's closest allies in the conservationist movement was Madison Grant, one of the key political leaders behind the extremely restrictionist Immigration Act of 1942. Roosevelt gave a positive view of Grant's The Passing of the Great Race and implored women to have white babies to avert "race suicide" in a speech to the National Congress of Mothers in 1905. Today Roosevelt is regarded as a racist and white supremacist.

The racialist right has a far greater claim as successors to Roosevelt's view on race and including the quote you put there, from the perspective of America as a pan-European experiment and imperial project. That was Roosevelt's view, and he certainly viewed the world in terms of race.

The man who calls himself an American citizen and who yet shows by his actions that he is primarily the citizen of a foreign land, plays a thoroughly mischievous part in the life of our body politic. He has no place here; and the sooner he returns to the land to which he feels his real heart-allegiance, the better it will be for every good American

I feel like this is bait, because there are quite a few Americans who this denunciation would apply to today. And it's not Nick Fuentes, who is the one causing scandal by essentially restating these words today.

I feel like this is bait, because there are quite a few Americans who this denunciation would apply to today.

Yes, that is a large component of what makes Trump and the MAGA movement so divisive.

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