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 -
Nationalism can't stand up long-term against urban-globalist atomization, because it's the creation of urban-globalist atomization. That stars-and-stripes/ apple-pie Americanism is a thoroughly artificial construct: it was cobbled together in the mid-1800s to overwrite more authentic "heart-allegiance" to local and state communities, just as the new mega-states in Europe propagandized fake mythologies of "Germany" (b. 1815) and "Italy" (b 1861) to undermine people's more authentic allegiance to the assimilated Hanover, Prussia, Venice, Florence, etc.
3-4 generations ago, the nationalists were themselves the high-culture hipster urbanites with more love for sociologists' utopian fantasies than for their real-life neighbors. The nationalists were the ones erasing boundaries and mixing culturally disparate populations; the nationalists were the ones preventing people from celebrating their own customs and speaking their own languages in their own lands. The nationalists were the ones replacing all the rich particularity of local culture with bland nationwide, state-enforced pap. (You yourself point out the "clear cultural distinctions between the East Coast and West Coast, North and South.") As a result, I think there's an inherently fake and cringe quality about the "nation," and it seems neither sad nor surprising that the same people who used the nation to kill the city-state would turn around and use the globe to kill the nation. Same playbook, same goals.
...and Ukraine has been less than a week from collapse for over three (almost 4) years now. The great irony of claiming that nationalism can't stand up to "urban-globalist atomization" to an citizen of the US is that the founding of the United States was in many respects a rejection of globalism. A recognition in the wake of the Seven Years' War on the part of Anglo, Dutch, French, and Spanish colonists in North America that their interests as colonists were much more aligned with each other than they were with their respective global empires. That many years later the US would become of a global empire itself is neither here nor there. See the old line about how when fighting monsters, one must be careful not to become one.
But even if I take your claims at face value. A freight train is a thoroughly artificial construct cobbled together from a bunch of disparate and often unrelated pieces. Stopping to argue the point on a level-crossing is still an invitation to get smashed flat. You are free to assert that the idea of a national identity is fake and cringe, but that doesn't mean you're right and I'm wrong. It just means that you have chosen to stand in "the blue corner" with all the other liberals and post-modernists.
Ukraine is allowed to have nationalism because it’s a convenient meat shield against Russia, and can only maintain it in practice because it’s too inhospitable for anyone else to want to live there.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
That may be so, but this thoroughly artificial construct has some pretty significant impacts. Maybe you have no interest in nationalism, but nationalism has interest in you as Jews, Armenians, Kurds and many other formerly or even currently stateless peoples can attest - including primitive tribes like american Indians who genocided each other before they adopted the wheel, not to even talk about nationalism as industrial CIV tech. As far as I can see, the situation did not change even today with wars in Ukraine, Sudan and many other places flaring up again based on ethnic and national lines. If English and French and other peoples will act with such a nonchalance in face of mass immigration, they can easily end up like Arabs in Palestine earlier in 20th century - replaced and displaced nation with no state to call as their homeland protecting their interests.
Oh, there were people like that even before. Trockyists and other lunatics believed in class division and socialist international movement - and it failed even domestically in face of Stalin's national communism. There were secular globalists who took world spanning empires such as the British Empire as given, and they saw themselves as first citizens of Earth, who were equally at home in London or Bombay or Cape Town - always having access to excellent tea, The Times and all those luxuries. Of course until they were driven out by one revolution or another.
More options
Context Copy link
Here's the thing. You can't go with wide eyed Alex Jones on speed style rant to a normie explaining to him the importance of ethnic/racial cohesion even if that's exactly what you want to do, so you go with a "nation" themed proxy. This goes on long enough that people start unironically believing the nationalist edifice. Now that internationalists have run the dog and ponny show for decades the only allowable position in the overtonwindow is to vaguely gesture towards nation states and high trust societies. So even if Nationalism is fake and gay, it's the least bad option to oppose globalizing forces interested in humanity as a fungible work-unit currency.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link