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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 4, 2026

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For those with knowledge/believers of HBD, what does it have to say about Indians (East Asia), Arabs, & Hispanics (IQ wise)? I've been living in my city and I've noticed Indians tend to live in the nicer neighborhoods. Perhaps just selection effects from immigration? Hispanics have similar problems as black people, what does HBD say about them? Arabs?

Perhaps just selection effects from immigration?

That can be, and is an important part of why immigration, especially the highest skill immigration is so important to keeping the US rich and powerful.

Let's say that white people will have a polymath SuperGenius in one out of a million people. In the US, that leaves us with roughly 210 white polymath SuperGenius. (in this scenario, we are Bovino pilled and have no non whites left)

Meanwhile let's be really racist and say that the ethnic Chinese only have a SuperGenius with one in three million. China, even despite this handicap, has roughly 450 or so super geniuses.

China has more one in a million SuperGenius than the US despite a significant disadvantage we applied to them. Do the same with 1 in 500k or 1 in 100k or whatever and you get the same results. China has more.

If the US does not either grow numbers significantly or recruit more SuperGenius, subSuperGenius, Genius, etc from elsewhere in the world, we will lose the top of intelligence war. Maybe we can cope with that, maybe we have better healthier systems from our higher average intelligence or something. But we will lose it anyway, China will have more just by pure numbers. Now consider that China is probably not 3x dumber than us at making SuperGenius.

Now apply this to the whole world. The US is only about 4.3% of the world population. Way more geniuses and talent of all sorts is born outside the country than in it. The best thing you can do is be immigrant friendly, and bring in the geniuses who do things like make up almost a third of your country's nobel prizes and make you richer and stronger. The worst thing you can do is to expel your geniuses so they all work for the immigrant friendly country willing to accept them.

You need the elite human capital. And of course, the more willing you are to take in anyone who is above average, your chances of Geniuses grows.

Many will say it’s good to let in the world’s geniuses, but that we don’t need people who are simply slightly above average. Of course, there’s no reliable way for government to decide who the geniuses are beforehand. Under such a system, Elon Musk wouldn’t have gotten in, and neither would Jensen Huang’s parents. The point is that if you accept large amounts of people who are slightly above average, some percentage of them and their children will turn out to make absolutely massive contributions to society.

Personally I've always said that we should extend immediate citizenship invites to winners of the math Olympiad and other such contests.

If you only believe in short-term GDPmaxxing (which is a valid position I suppose), sure. View people as fungible, import the best according to some metrics.

The truth about the US immigration system is that most green cards are family-based and that cultures and people are not fungible. Even if Chinese people and Indians increase your GDP they also change your culture, make use of family reunification (which can often negate economic advantages), bring grievances from the old world with them and often promote ideologies that go against the host population (white people). Not to mention that things like IQ =/= social trust, "western" morality, etc.

People have pointed out that Asians are importing things like Childhood-destroying striverism (see the whole Vivek thing), Caste-like dynamics, etc.

I am not nearly as reactionary as a lot of posters here but I do not believe in the fungibility of people. I think the US was smart to consider demographics in immigration policy, not just due to economic reasons, but much more because of cultural cohesion. Just like places like Singapore or the UAE (to a lesser extent) do. That doesn’t mean "no Asians" but maybe being very discerning about to whom you grant permanent residency to is not a bad idea. And it's not like you could just move to India or China either.

you only believe in short-term GDPmaxxing (which is a valid position I suppose), sure. View people as fungible, import the best according to some metrics.

People are not fungible. Jensen Huang alone has created far more value than the extremely large majority of other Americans regardless of race. You can not replace what he has created (5.4 trillion dollar valuation of Nvidia!) with your average Joe, it is not possible. You take a random white guy off the street and compare their value, and you can't even see the stranger on the chart. That is how dwarfed he is by Huang.

The truth about the US immigration system is that most green cards are family-based and that cultures and people are not fungible.

Well yes, it would be hard to convince smart people to come if they can't bring their families.

Even if Chinese people and Indians increase your GDP they also change your culture,

Yes, and part of that cultural change is a culture that values being smarter and harder working than what we currently have. A culture of grinders and geniuses.

make use of family reunification (which can often negate economic advantages)

Again, Jensen Huang alone is so massively valuable that even hundreds of thousands (probably even millions) of net negative parasites would be cancelled out. Alone. And we are not even close to that number of immigrants who are purely net negative.

bring grievances from the old world with them and often promote ideologies that go against the host population (white people).

I think Hanania addressed this with an excellent point that realistically, the same people pushing nativism the hardest now have been sabotaging themselves with the things they claimed immigrants would do.

I’m old enough to remember when nativists complained that immigration would make the country more socialist, yet as the Republican Party has become more nativist and anti-market at the same time, they have shown themselves to be accommodating towards or even enthusiastic about economic statism as long as it’s the type preferred by Americans who share their distaste for foreigners.

Immigrants actually have a pretty pro western selection effect overall. Some of the proudest most patriotic free market loving freedom desiring American dream appreciating people I know are immigrants. Meanwhile go up in the Appalachians or something and you get a bunch of drug addict white trash statists who would rather bitch about how unfair things are.

Here's Ronald Reagan saying this same thing.

It is bold men and women, yearning for freedom and opportunity, who leave their homelands and come to a new country to start their lives over. They believe in the American dream. And over and over, they make it come true for themselves, for their children, and for others. They give more than they receive. They labor and succeed. And often they are entrepreneurs. But their greatest contribution is more than economic, because they understand in a special way how glorious it is to be an American. They renew our pride and gratitude in the United States of America, the greatest, freest nation in the world -- the last, best hope of man on Earth.

They are the people who embrace being American far more than some white chick reposting marx memes on her phone between college classes, or some white trash honey boo boo family, or the endless other complainers and whiners who when given the greatest and most opportunities filled country in the world, in history, for free with native citizenship, flounder like the losers they are and complain instead.

Well yes, it would be hard to convince smart people to come if they can't bring their families.

Plenty of places manage this without meaningful abilities to tap into the social security net. Dubai, Singapore etcetera are welcoming but you're going to struggle immensely to ever get a passport for a lot of immigrants. I do also broadly agree that the 'O1'/'genius' level of immigration should be encouraged (albeit one must acknowledge you're absolutely fucking the developing world by taking their best and brightest), but the current playing field has gone far far far far beyond that where now the H1B layer is taking fairly interchangeable mid-level career jobs and being used as a bludgeon on the native stock to keep wages down.

Without even going down to the Deliveroo layer that's now plowing into Europe where '30 years ago when we were ultra-selective people from these countries used to excel now let's take anybody who can get on a plane' is absolutely botched policy.

First of all, having no or very controlled family reunification and discerning permanent residency and citizenship does not preclude getting geniuses. Singapore, which, if it weren't well run, would be a much worse place to migrate to than the US, manages to attract very good people just fine.

Secondly, while I admire what Jensen Huang built to an extent, it's not trivially true that in his absence there wouldn't be an equal or marginally worse Nvidia equivalent. Indeed, many GPU manufacturers exist and it does not follow that a more restrictionist US would not be at the technological frontier.

Thirdly, this is ultimately a values question. You seem to find having "Asian Grinders" as a good thing. Many White Americans pre mass-migration, if told that their kids would have to compete in school and participate in the habits and mores of "Asian grinders", would have recoiled in horror. Not that they got a say anyway, no western country in history ever voted for mass migration.

Also, take Australia. Australia gets far more Asian grinders than the US ever did, indeed, it has some of the most elite immigration in the world measured by your system. And yet, it has stagnated against the US in the last decade in GDP terms and is facing heavy anti-immigrant backlash.

Immigrants actually have a pretty pro western selection effect overall. Some of the proudest most patriotic free market loving freedom desiring American dream appreciating people I know are immigrants.

If you look at actual polling you'll see that Asians are extremely happy to jump on the whole anti-white anti-western culture bus and that they often bring things like speech norms from their places of origin.

Here's Ronald Reagan saying this same thing.

Immigration in his time was from very different places than it is now.

Ultimately it gets down to whether nations should be economic zones or actual coherent nations.

Also, take Australia. Australia gets far more Asian grinders than the US ever did, indeed, it has some of the most elite immigration in the world measured by your system. And yet, it has stagnated against the US in the last decade in GDP terms and is facing heavy anti-immigrant backlash.

I feel like there might be a breadcrumbs effect that is under-explored. Basically, every ultra-competent (in the sense of being simultaneously highly intelligent and highly conscientious and highly agentic, and so on) person in the world, if they are interested in leaving their country and going to the west, will try to get into the US first and foremost, since it's the powerhouse #1. And since they are ultra-competent, they will find a way in. Every single other western country - no matter how hard they're working to have selective immigration - will only get the breadcrumbs from this, only people who either aren't quite competent enough to get into the US or who want to go to another country for idiosyncratic reasons, like already having family present there. And worse, this effect is cascading down: If not the US, then it's north-western europe, which also isn't even terribly hard to get into for a reasonably motivated individual.

To be sure as long as you're not screwing up the selection you're still getting reasonably competent, unproblematic individuals. But I wouldn't be surprised if Australia in particular gets the chaff of the grinders: Those that needed to grind extra-hard just to barely make it.

Yeah I'm not a particular Elon Musk fan and I think he's probably better example of somebody who's harder to replace in that he has the right combination of luck, willingness to keep diversifying into new speculative fields and raw tenacity to actually engender meaningful change as an individual. IMO somebody like Huang would have likely emerged regardless since it's not like he invented Unobtanium that completely unlocked the path of GPU development.

You can not replace what he has created (5.4 trillion dollar valuation of Nvidia!) with your average Joe, it is not possible.

Again, Jensen Huang alone is so massively valuable that even hundreds of thousands (probably even millions) of net negative parasites would be cancelled out.

Not really. It's true no amount of average Joe's can replace a Jensen Huang, but the truth is he depends on them as much as they depend on him. This is trivially observable by the fact that none of these people are able to "cancel out" impoverished populations of other countries, and have to go to the US for their success.

It's also telling you measure his contribution by the valuation of his company, which is an absurd thing to do. In the mind of a valuation appreciator, all you have to do is subtract government expenditures going to the net negative parasites from the company valuation, and as long as the bottom line is in the black,you're good! The reality is that just like no amount of average Joes can compensate for Jensen Huang, even if you get enough of them that their total contributions exceed $5.4 trillion, no amount of Jensen Huangs, and no amount of money transferred by the government, can compensate for the social erosion caused by mass immigration from incompatible cultures.

Yes, and part of that cultural change is a culture that values being smarter and harder working than what we currently have. A culture of grinders and geniuses.

That's not the cultural change that's happening anywhere in the west. We are constantly being pushed to erode our standards, and a significant justification for that is the push for greater "diversity" necessitated by mass migration.