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 -
Lets talk about the amateur expose of the Somali day-care industry in Minnesota.
Here is the full 42 minutes of my crew and I exposing Minnesota fraud, this might be my most important work yet.
This video and associated clips have been taking the right-wing internet by storm. The format is new and interesting; a charismatic zoomer social media influencer teamed up with an angry obsessive boomer autist. Their idea was to show up in person to various government-subsidized "child care centers" to see if there was any meaningful economic activity going on. The results are certainly interesting if nothing else.
The most notable finding is the complete absense of evidence of child activity at all but one of the facilities. I'm not sure how definitive this is that fraud is occuring (especially since we don't know what time of day or week these visits were made), but it is certainly suggestive. I wouldn't be eager to display my entrusted children to a group of strange men who seem oddly interested in seeing them either.
One might get the impression that these facilities are completely unregulated and uninspected. This appears to be wrong. You can look up the licenses of Hennepin County child care centers and find annual inspection results, usually with violations! The laundry list of violations found with each annual inspection did not seem to prevent these facilities from recieving 7 figures annually in taxpayer funds.
I’d like to write a larger post on this but the fraud in American minority populations is fundamentally the result of a sociobiological assymetry between the immigrant population and the native population, because the native population has neutered their natural instincts through culture and biological adaptions. Culturally, White Americans are presented with trauma-inducing and phobia-inducing stories and lessons at an early age to reduce their natural in-group affiliation, much like a dog that has been punished not to naturally bark; biologically, Northern Europeans like the Swedes in Minnessota have the highest rate of OXTR rs53576 G/G expression which is a unique evolutionary adaption that allows them to see racial others as part of the same “tribe”; for those carrying A/A, no amount of in-group allegiance is sufficient to make them to see racial others as part of the same tribe. The Swedes in Minnessota have maximal cultural and genetic pressure to see the Somalians as simply an ailing faction of their own in-group, thus deserving special treatment, like a sick or mentally handicapped member of the tribe; the Somalis in Minnessota have maximal pressure toward the exact opposite: piracy, tribal supremacism, and the clearest friend-enemy distinction you could possibly develop on this planet, due to their culture + history + religion + biology.
The sociobiological asymmetry is the most important thing because it’s a motivational asymmetry. To use a quote from Conan the Barbarian, there is literally no pleasure greater to a young man than to crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women. This pleasure is so great that when a teenage boy in America has any free time, it is quite literally all they want to do and think about. They want to raid a stranger’s base in Rust that took them weeks to build; they want to track down a secret base in Minecraft that took years to build and light it on fire; they want to hop on Fortnite with their männerbund and ruin the fun of a rival gang of men; they want to raid Orgrimmar and kill an enemy race’s chief; if they play football, they want to exert dominance over a man they just tackled and flex at the other side’s cheerleaders; if they are some sociopathic looksmaxxer, they want to steal someone’s date or girlfriend while live-streaming; in chess, they want to lay a trap that see’s their enemy’s Queen captured; and so on. When I would play Call of Duty with the boys, the funniest moments were always a direct similitude of the Conan-Genghis principle, when the rival team had someone’s girlfriend playing: we kill the members of a group (usually through trickery, sometimes through gratuitous torture), steal their precious belongings, and then hear the lamentation of their woman (rather annoyed yells) as she is the last one alive. This always made us laugh hysterically, it’s just innate. Stealing things from the alien group in a game is even a popular YouTube topic and the basis of the popular game Sea of Thieves. Secretly backstabbing someone that you are pretending to be allied with is the whole basis of Among Us, maybe the most popular game of this decade, a game popular solely because of that mechanic.
The joy that men get from fulfilling these natural instincts is intended to be set against defectors and foreign invaders; that is why humans have this instinct. But American education has made them phobic about this truth at a young age, and modern Christian theology erroneously leads them believe that it is evil. But the Somali, with his rich history of piracy and tribalism, and his religion which celebrates war against the Kafir, is not confused by any of these illusions. The scamming is fun in itself. It is one of life’s greatest joys. They would do it even if they only make out with a single dollar, just as American men do it for free in virtual pretend worlds. They are laughing, dancing, and singing after stealing the Swede’s money, because it represents a victory over an alien race in their midst. They consider if a victory because it really is a victory, while the Swedish Minnesotan is looking at pixels rejoicing over something retarded like winning a match of Clash of Clans. The Somali male has the same motivation to commit a scam as an American male has to play a round of CounterStrike or Escape from Tarkov. This is the fundamental reason the scams are all over the place.
Looking at the allele frequencies of rs53576:
It's true that Europeans have a relatively high frequency of G, but it looks like Africans have them beat.
Maybe the aggregation here is obscuring subgroup heterogeneity, and Somalians don't share the well-known cosmopolitan universalism of Bantu cattle herders.
More options
Context Copy link
No. Young men are aggressive, belligerent, proud and honor-conscious, and seek glory. But not all men are natural despoilers who live for nothing more than to wreck what others have built, to ruin others' works.
This is the philosophy of the ant, mindless raider and reaver who is incapable of seeing anything other than an Other to be killed.
This is the philosophy of the thug, violent, of short-time preference and low impulse control, devoid of vision or higher purpose.
This is the philosophy of the petty and the small, who enjoys the misery of other people more than anyone's happiness or anything ennobling for himself.
This is the philosophy of the sociopath, who sees others as only prey, who cannot see other people as anything other than potential resources to be exploited or rivals to be eliminated.
This is the philosophy of the psychopath, who loves only violence for the sake of violence, and writes alt-historical pseudo-political screeds to justify a desire to pillage, rape, and kill, and reduce all of humanity to war to the knife.
As best, this is the philosophy of an insecure and callow youth who soothes himself with words like "männerbund" to tell himself he is embarking on glorious viking with his warband, and not simply seeking group security to go bully others in a game because he's not brave enough to gangbang.
This "joy" you speak of is a joy that everyone feels from time to time when our monkey-brains trigger, whether it's imagining hunting down a horrible criminal you saw on the news, beating the crap out of the guy who pushed your buttons on the Internet, or running down that motherfucker who cut you off on the highway. It's a joy you might temporarily feel when your fight-or-flight activates "fight" and you win... until the consequences arrive. But there is a reason we regulate and channel and try to restrain violent young men, especially those who seem to have no higher aspirations than to tear down what others have built, to kick sand in the faces of those weaker than them, to wax rhapsodical about the joy of hurting other people and laughing at their pain.
It is not a philosophy for men. At least, not men we want to share a society with. Not men capable of building a society. Certainly not men who speak of shared values and community and building a greater civilization than a mere tribe with spears all pointed outward from their very tight and insular circle.
It's fascinating how you breathe this "joy" of rapine in one post and extoll Christianity in the next. No amount of Biblical exegesis can rationalize a Jesus who says yes, it is right and good to crush your enemies and hear the lamentations of their women and take joy in it.
Though it is amusing to watch KulakRevolt go off on how Christians are cucked puss-pusses who sold out white Europe, and his outraged Christian followers, like you, try to describe a "Based Jesus" who totally says it's good to hate and kill and wallow in the infliction of your enemies' well-deserved suffering.
According to the revealed preference of their favorite leisure activity, men really love raiding enemies and aliens. Your counter-hypothesis needs evidence, and it will have a difficult time explaining why men pay for the opportunity to recreate what they did in the past. And why men loved to do it in the Napoleonic Era, or during the 1527 Sack of Rome, or the 1850 sacking of the Summer Palace. Or during any of the completely normal raiding activities during the Age of Sail. And why it comprises the subject of the most popular “guy movie”, Master & Commander, which is literally just about a hierarchical männerbund seizing a trophy ship through trickery. Is it okay because the authority says it is okay? This would not be a very masculine take, as the King himself was established through men simply willing it.
The Psalms which were inspired by God are filled with curses of destruction for enemies, so the eseigesis isn’t completely impossible. But you don’t have to do exegesis, you simply have to understand that very devout Christians have always engaged in the joy of taking from enemies. If this is a sin, okay, it is probably less of a sin than the one your critic is engaged in, so they can be quiet and criticize themselves + repent for seeing a speck in his brother’s eye, which is a much worse sin.
I already addressed that - yes, men like the idea of fighting and winning glory. You have provided no evidence that this means we all deep down enjoy causing pain and suffering and wrecking what other people have built. Like all your just-so stories, it's just something you spun out with deepity words.
I think if you actually read journals of people fighting in the Napoleonic era who were not Napoleon, you will find that as in most wars, most of the men fighting it did not actually enjoy it, even if they have fond memories of the camaraderie afterwards. They justified it with pride, with self-defense, with national interest, but not "'Cause it's fun to destroy what other people have." Master and Commander is not about guys enjoying destruction and pillage. The whole point of the movie is that they are trying to defend their homeland; Aubrey's rousing speech to his crew is all about preventing the French from taking over England.
Very devout Christians have always enjoyed fraud to get rich and consorting with whores, too. You are still just making up what you want the Bible to endorse.
It’s very normal in video game culture to say things like “you ruined his night”, “he will cry himself to sleep tonight”, “you made him uninstall” after vanquishing your foe. Why do you believe boys and men say this? Or are these just evil people in your mind? Usually when you make the enemy quit the game, this makes the male player happy. You would have to explain why this occurs, if not for causing misfortune and pain upon your enemy.
Do you really think the soldiers did not enjoy the prospect of taking things from their enemy? Then why did all of Napoleon’s soldiers loot? Why did the British loot the Chinese? Why did the Catholics loot the Byzantines? Why did Rome loot their enemies? It’s possible you have an atypical mind a la typical mind fallacy. Hell, I know a guy who proudly showed of Saddam’s execution sword, which of course he looted in Iraq while in the army. And again, male leisure activity involves looting mechanics for precisely this reason — video games are fun for a reason and the reason relates back to our innate psychology. We like to play the assassin who kills enemies and loots their bodies because deep down we have some kernel of an instinct which comes from prehistory, though of course moral compunction overrides this. What boy didn’t want to be a ninja in his adolescence? Why do people play GTA and not “give out compliments simulator”?
That’s just a speech to give them a just cause on top of their mannerbunding; Britain had declared war first and the ship was off the coast of Brazil. No one is watching the movie because they sympathize with the cause of the King, instead they see themselves in the männerbund who are singularly interested in destroying their enemy through trickery.
I think you're the one typical-minding. If your mindset is that it's fun to hurt people and take their stuff, I can see why you'd project that onto others and even construct justifications for it under your religious frame, but I do not think that is in fact the natural default psychology of most men. Most men want to be respected, to achieve things, and to defend the people and things they care about. War is a means to an end and we sing songs about it, but it's not the end. It's not our reason for being.
Your philosophy, like KulakRevolt's, is that everything else is all just a veneer over our desire to rape and kill. If that's true we'd never become a species capable of epic poetry, of grand architecture, of space travel. You and Kulak would have us never evolving beyond chimp behavior. Yes, we all have a bit of the chimp in us. That's why we teach boys that you shouldn't hit people because they hurt your feelings, and that fighting should be a last resort, not your first recourse. People like Kulak who say no, violence is the first and only answer, and people like you who say, but violence is fun and everyone wants to do it, cannot be trusted to build and maintain the very societies whose decline you bemoan.
You’re not coming up with any direct or circumstantial evidence to forward your theory, though. Your worldview lacks explanatory power.
This is a poor misreading. My theory is that men have an instinct to dominate alien or defecting groups and thus find it gratifying. American men waste this instinct on video games and have been wrongly taught that they can’t express it politically. Somalis express it politically, which is why they are stealing the Swedes’ resources and replacing them in Minnesota. The Somali allows himself to feel joy at his victories, just like the Puritans felt joy upon vanquishing their enemies, but the modern American male is only told to feel such joy in worthless video games.
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
coffee_enjoyer is constantly getting Christianity wrong. I'm not sure why that is, but I long ago learned to collapse any post he makes about Christianity because it'll be chock full of inaccuracies about what the faith says about things.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Scamming and stealing is definitely fun in and of itself for a lot of people. It’s why some bored housewives with money shoplift trivial value merchandise they can easily afford is a thing. Every few years here in England there is a story about some wealthy City banker using fake (or no) tickets on a commuter train and getting caught for years of fare evasion. Sure, even for the moderately wealthy that’s thousands of dollars, but it’s not about the money, it’s about the thrill. On Extreme Couponing many of the participants had money and treated it as a hobby.
However, the reason why the Somalis in Minnesota are stealing billions from the government instead of playing Fortnite isn’t just because they want to. It’s because they can, and the system isn’t really set up to catch them. They exist outside the complex web of North Western European social interaction which exists everywhere above the lowest dregs of that region’s indigenous underclass (Marius Hoiby types), and in which you would probably face some social shame or tut-tutting for ripping the government off for billions (interestingly I think this instinct is less developed in England, where the native working class have a reputation for cheating the state, both at the bottom on welfare (“benefits”) and at the top (see Michelle Mone’s PPE case)).
Northwestern Europe, especially the nordics, and so especially Minnesota, were just uniquely high trust. Singapore is also a very rich, safe and peaceful country with high quality of life, but because the state expects that whatever incentives they offer will be ruthlessly exploited by the very intelligent and cunning populace this is factored into planning. If someone is making tens of millions in China by exploiting a government program then someone in the government is corruptly in on it and local CCP management on a regional / sector level is either getting paid to look away or is being cut in. In Minnesota, I doubt there are any Jorgensens or Lunds who have made a billion off of this scam, they just let it happen.
I have no specific evidence for this, but my hunch would be that if we could trace a complete genealogy of the phenomenon, somewhere at the inception is a (blue haired?) social worker or NGO volunteer excitedly explaining to recently-arrived refugees that if they just fill out a couple of forms, everything will be okay. "You're babysitting your uncle's kids, and your sister's kids, and your cousin's friend's kids? You know, if you just fill out these forms, the government will pay you to do that!"
Compare e.g. the Arizona "ESA" where homeschooling families are now getting money from the government to do what they were already doing... only now, with more Lego! (And books, and tech, and...) One might reasonably argue that this is ensuring educational tax dollars follow actual children rather than serving purely as a jobs program for low ambition and intellectually mediocre adults. But eventually little Billy and Susie (and your uncle's kids, and your sister's kids) grow up and move on, and actually attracting new, unrelated customers is hard, especially since it seems like now everyone on your block is running a government-subsidized "daycare." But since no one ever comes to actually check on your business, well, maybe you can just put down some plausible-looking numbers...
(And if you happen to have moved to Utah in the past year, but you still have relatives in Arizona who will let you use their mailing address, why would you bother to inform the state of Arizona that you no longer qualify for the money? Of course, you might get caught. But if you're a refugee with nothing to lose, what do you have to fear from a fraud charge?)
In other words, while it certainly appears that there is massive grift occurring in Minnesota, I think it is unlikely that it started in quite that way. One needn't have Jorgensens or Lunds who have made a billion off of this scam for Jordensens or Lunds to be involved, not just in letting it happen, but in making it happen--not for their own financial benefit, but for the benefit of their suicidally xenophilic political consciences. Hannah Dugan is not an outlier, Hannah Dugan is an archetype.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Was there "pre-modern Christian theology" that celebrated tribal predation, deception, and out-group domination as virtues?
Vikings/Romans? Though I'm sure they didn't have the memeplex to conceptualize it so crystally clear, it was about getting resources and providing for you and yours.
More options
Context Copy link
The Christians who founded America excluded those outside the fold, not just from obtaining something of a resource but even from stepping foot in their towns; they happily executed anyone who tried to step outside their social value ecosystem (eg witches); they were happy to kill the Indians who tried to kill them. But more to the point, the particular saying regarding enemies was never intended to be literal, because it exists squarely in the middle of sayings which we know for sure were never taken literally (“If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away” … “when you pray, go into your room and shut the door”). It was a mistake to ever interpret this rule as some invincible principle of all affairs, and indeed no Christian country ever did in civic matters. It’s simply a jolting reminder that we should make up with the brothers whom we think are our enemies, so that the collective is stronger and thus better able to solve in-group / out-group problems.
Loving your enemies does not mean prayers for the successes they desire, or assisting them in folly, often it's enough to pray they find Christ and repent.
You don't think
Could be taken literally? I'll happily agree that it also works with "inner room" as the heart itself. It's clearly about the 'why' not the 'where'.
Martin Luther describes a physical space, using the where to get to the correct why.
Plucking out your eye in the context of adultery of the 2 precededing verses is better understood that If you find yourself looking at a woman with lustful desire, then tear out that "eye" - but it's the eye of the heart he's talking about, not the physical organ. Lust originates in the heart, not the eyeball. So if you remove the evil desire from your heart, the physical eye won't sin or cause you to stumble anymore. You'll still see the same woman with the same two eyes you've always had, but now without the desire. It will be as if you hadn't even noticed her. The "eye" Christ is commanding you to tear out - the eye of lust - will be gone, even though your bodily eye remains perfectly intact.
More options
Context Copy link
Ahistorical nonsense. "Witches" existed far more often in popular retellings than any actual trials, and yes, they killed Indians with whom they were at war but contrary to the propaganda we're relentlessly bombarded with now, not every white European wanted to exterminate the Indians from the beginning. Many, from the first settlers, were perfectly willing to coexistence (and many of the Indians were too). There were just too many points of collision, too much cultural friction, and too many defectors on both sides.
The philosophy of the first colonists was certainly imperialistic by modern standards, but most of them weren't seeking to genocide the natives as an end in itself (you'd certainly hear people saying that, well into the 19th century, but even generals who breathed fire about pacifying the Indians would generally tone it down in practice if the Indians were pacified), and the early settlers' hostility towards outsiders was the typical hostility of people living in small precarious communities with little room for slack and few resources to spare. Note that they wanted trade and exchange (of news, technology, people) with the network of communities around them, not to gather in warbands and go out and conquer them.
None of this has much to do with Christianity, but your Kulak-like revisionism in which the founding fathers loved violence for its own sake annoys me more than your attempts to "base" Christianity in bloodlust, because I actually care about American history.
The question is what the Christian colonists would have done against a community of Muslims which were continually stealing from them. What do you think they would have done, and do you think they would do it joyfully? “Commit unorganized violence all the time” is a strawman of my position.
I did not say Christians don't endorse defending themselves against bad actors.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The Puritans also engaged in missionary efforts, e.g. the praying towns and Algonquian Bible translation of John Eliot. That seems more like trying to bring Native Americans into the fold than genociding them.
After lighting their wigwams on fire resulting in the death of hundreds, the Puritan preacher of the Christian army made the following sermon:
https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/news-wires-white-papers-and-books/pequot-war
Or elsewhere:
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
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link