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