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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 13, 2023

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First, I reject the symmetry. Whites have built that country; whites and non-blacks overwhelmingly maintain it. Whites as living heirs to this culture do have a priority in deciding its rules, and are entitled to demand assimilation from those who want equal treatment; you do not get to demand equal liberty if you want to belong to an assabiyah which does not value that liberty and does not contribute to its preservation. Oranians have found that few are interested to join on those terms

Prospective residents are vetted and must have no criminal record.

"It's like going into a marriage," said Strydom, a 28-year-old born in the southeastern province of KwaZulu-Natal.

Would-be residents must "share the values and subscribe" to the town's goals, he said, insisting Orania was not "racist" or a "desperate grasp back to apartheid".

Boshoff said there was nothing stopping any non-white Afrikaners from applying -- only no-one ever did.

"We haven't found anybody," he said.

(This reminds me: in Stephenson's Diamond Age, a white thug contemplated joining a Boer neo-tribe but decided against it).

Second, they are indeed the same picture, in that something always restricts our liberties and modifies our behavior. Questions are: who, whom, how much and to what end. Right now, the behavior of both whites and blacks is being modified by disparately acting stimuli like this one, which encourage guilt, self-hatred and undue tolerance in whites and unmerited indignation and racial pride in blacks. The broader structure does little to buck those trends. This begets problems, which call for solutions of the type that I would like to have abandoned.

If instead blacks were vigorously (I cannot know the optimal degree of that) pressed into church-going and other easy forms of prosocial networking, provided with schools that focus on rote learning and unambiguous discipline, systemically shamed for dysfunctional family structures and criminality, dissuaded from what our friend calls «honor culture», denied opportunities to build antisocial status hierarchies and endow them with externally validated prestige and capital, etc., or even just not encouraged to be delusional, there would be less of a problem. I believe that a separate Black America would have had a decent chance to independently arrive at this strategy and eventually become more successful (assuming continued economic interaction with the US) than the current black population of the US. This would entail some sacrifice on part of those prosocial blacks who want to have it all, white standards of living and black culture and no police state. Such is life: something has to give, in this case the «black culture» has to develop adaptations to co-existence with non-blacks, at the very least being willing to meet them halfway.

It is hard or utterly impossible to implement within the same non-segregated society, especially a society that does not recognize the root of the problem.