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 -
I have just reread Powell's speech to make sure I don't put words in his mouth, and I'm sorry but I still think it's petty, get-off-my-lawn prejudice disguised as argument, and only looks prescient by accident.
Above all else, I remain baffled that of all the sob stories he could have quoted to make his point - and I do not doubt that legitimately sympathetic stories existed - he chooses one about an old lady who courts destitution by stubbornly refusing to rent rooms to non-white customers, and then has the nerve to complain that she is denounced as a "racialist" because of it. That he expected his audience to parse her as a sympathetic rather than pathetically self-destructive figure speaks volumes.
And in much the same way what sticks in my craw about the main, demographics-based thrust of the speech is that he isn't "voicing uncomfortable truths". In fact, he's leaving key parts of the argument unspoken, either because even he couldn't bring himself to say them out loud, or because he somehow considered them literally self-evident. To wit, he leaves the statistics about immigrant demographics to speak for themselves; he writes as if the mere prospect of there being more brown than white people in England is self-evidently repulsive. He is not making an argument that if this process is allowed to happen then nice Polish young men are going to be stabbed in the street by crazy Sikhs and the police will turn a blind eye. Either he is assuming that everyone already understands browns to be violent savages by definition but doesn't want to say it out loud, or else, as near as I can tell, the whole of his argument must come down to "there are soon going to be more brown than white people in England, and then the browns will be in a position to outlaw racial discrimination on the part of white business owners, which would be illiberal; it is the God-given right of racist old ladies to refuse service to Negroes if they want".
From a 21st century vantage point, this is just… such a deeply parochial argument. It's so quaint. It somehow manages to simultaneously be almost unthinkably bigoted in its basic assumptions, and comically optimistic about the kind of problems that runaway immigration would actually cause. Religious extremism is not a twinkle in this man's eye. Rape gangs do not follow from anything in this speech. Spurious, witch-hunty accusations of racism are not even what he's talking about, and God help us, he's not even discernibly talking about HBD. He literally just thinks that if there's too many brown people the brown people will "oppress" your basest, most vulgar, I-don't-like-looking-at-blacks garden-variety racist by outlawing that kind of racism, and that this would be a great blow against freedom in England.
It's honestly kind of embarrassing (though it's a testament to his sheer skill as a writer that the flow of his prose almost disguises the underlying vapid stupidity of the argument).
I'd think that the example of the old lady refusing to rent to non-whites would be particularly pertinent given the modern dynamic where hotel owners rent out every room to the government so it can house migrants in them. And then these migrants rape women and children. Just search 'uk migrant hotel rape'. It's practically a sport at this point.
I think you are not paying the respect prejudice deserves. And that this is a cognitive and moral failing on your part. You are looking at the words, not the emotion.
I saw this a lot in the aftermath of the big purge of the Alt-Right from YouTube. Where lefty youtubers could claim, after the fact, that they ultimately won and that the alt-righters had always been kind of stupid. And to an extent that's not an inaccurate observation. There were a lot of 'vapid' and 'stupid' creators in that space. They didn't really understand HBD to any relevant extent, they didn't do well in debates and they certainly could not predict how bad things could get. But they did get an audience. How? Principally because their attention was on the same gut wrenching worry others felt. That the current state of affairs was bad. They could not necessarily articulate why. But they had a gut feeling and others could emotionally resonate with that.
To that extent, it should be a source of embarrassment, continuously, for every person that was more intelligent, erudite, or otherwise better equipped to handle reality, that they are continuously shown up by random racists when it comes to identifying threats. The trajectory of the western world has been so comically bad the past three decades that it's hard to imagine how it could have gone worse.
Turns out, almost every economist is a retard, actually. Along with every educated person that can read, write and reason yet fail to recognize that no, importing the third world will not be an economic benefit, colonialism didn't make Africa poor and 'poverty' doesn't make black people rape. The racist could not necessarily articulate why he knows what he knows or believes what he believes. But they had a gut feeling that has outshone every alternative. Sure, they continuously fumble the moment, make bad arguments and otherwise embarrass themselves, but ultimately they've not been the ones who've been wrong when it counts.
Smartdick sophistry is for fags dickwaving intellectualism in geneva tea halls, not real fucking life. If listening to whites complaining about brown's is untoward then how about asking browns themselves whether they would be happy living next to other shades of brown. White racism has nothing on brown or yellow racism, pakistanis lacked the institutional capacity of nazi germany and still successfully purged their hindus, the Japanese annihilated the Christians and tried their best to genocide the chinese, the Sinhalese reduced the tamils to a rump, every arab state expelled the jews (dont fucking morocco me pedants). Foucault could write wistfully about the nobility of the african experience because he had a coterie of boytoys eager to metaphorically and literally fellate him in exchange for his crumbs of comfort. Now the europeans let themselves be raped by these same browns, and the other browns are baffled and increasingly jealous that they didn't take the gora for what they had when the opportunity presented itself at first.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
That's the racism that prevents cops from taking the brown people's side when they attack you.
'First they came for the I-don't-like-looking-at-blacks garden-variety racists, and I did not speak out, because I was not a I-don't-like-looking-at-blacks garden-variety racist...'
The funeral pyre is burning for Nowak, 'you' and you's family are next.
Okay, but the thing is, I dislike the I-don't-like-looking-at-blacks garden-variety racists. I dislike them intensely. They disgust and appall me in much the same way that blacks disgust and appall them. I and people of similar political and moral principles to mine would be liable to "come for them", in the sense of wanting to outlaw racially discriminatory refusal-of-service on their part, even if the racial minority they discriminated against made up an irrelevant 0.01% of the population and had no electoral weight of their own. The "first they came for the XYZ, but I did not speak out" rhyme breaks down when the XYZ are not merely a group to which I don't belong, but a group that I already considered enemies regardless.
Of course, you can have a maximally libertarian setup, where the old lady is allowed to refuse to rent to Negroes because she thinks they're icky, and I'm allowed to call her names for being a bigot because I think bigots are icky. But Powell seems to think we should be shedding tears for the old lady because children follow her around calling her a "racialist" (which I stress again, she objectively proudly is), so permit to doubt his principled commitment to freedom.
Again, I do not think there is any sensible reading of the speech which suggests that Powell is concerned about browns enacting genocidal violence on whites. His "funeral pyre" is a purely demographic/cultural one, his doomsaying prophecy is that one day there'll be so many brown people about that white racists will be ostracized. He puts forth no evidence - no argument - that the new brown majority will treat the white minority unkindly, except specifically in the form of cracking down on white bigots.
Mark: I am not saying that no such argument can be made - Nowak's murder alone is an argument written in blood - I am saying Powell does not make any such argument. He is not talking about the same thing you are. The thing he's talking about is rather more stupid, and infinitely less serious.
Uhh... no it doesn't? This is the entire principle behind defending scoundrels. Just because X is currently oppressing group Y (a group you consider your enemies), doesn't mean they won't eventually turn on your in-group too.
The author of the "first they came" poem was an anti-communist priest who hated Jews, and yet two groups listed in the poem are communists and Jews. Your claim that the logic breaks down when the group is a group you consider your enemy is literally the exact reverse of the intended meaning of the poem.
Thank you, however, for giving me a presumably unintended insight into your worldview. The message you took from that poem was not "you must defend the civil rights even of people you consider your outgroup, because if you don't, there'll be no one left to defend your civil rights". The message you took from it was "you must defend the civil rights of groups you feel no animosity towards, because if you don't, there'll be no one left to defend your civil rights. However, if someone wants to trample on your outgroup's civil rights, that's 100% A-OK and not at all a cause for concern." By your logic, the priest who wrote this poem was right to look the other way when the SS were rounding up Jews and communists.
Thank you for saying the quiet part out loud.
sigh Again, it depends on what you mean by "came for". I do not think that my outgroup should be oppressed or have their civil rights ignored. But this does not mean "you can't anything at all against your outgroup, ever". The poem was not intended as anarchist apologia that says you can never outlaw, or even oppose, any evil behavior whatsoever because "coming for" anybody in any way, ever, is too much of a slippery slope.
To put it another way, if you think "first they came" applies to "first they came for the people who refuse to rent rooms to Negroes, but I did not speak out, because I was against refusing to rent rooms to Negroes" then I do not see how you cannot extend it all the way to "first they came for the people who lynched Negroes in the streets, but I did not speak out, because I was against lynching Negroes in the streets", or "first they came for murderous paedophiles, but I did not speak out, because I was not a murderous paedophile", at which point it loses all meaning. I think clearly the poem only works if by "came for" you mean "sent to a gas chamber en masse"; if you mean enabling the government to do unconscionably awful things to your outgroup, things it should never be allowed to do to anybody for any reason. But no one was suggesting sending the racist old lady to a gas chamber in a cattle wagon.
Well, the reason I think Powell's speech was so prophetic was that he understood perfectly the kind of slippery slope the UK had begun toboganning down. You are entirely correct that, at the time of writing, no one was calling for the execution (or even imprisonment) of white Britons who don't want to rent out rooms to black people. But in modern Britain, plenty of people have been arrested, convicted and even imprisoned for vastly less severe "infractions" than this, "infractions" which amount to thoughtcrime against the prevailing regime.
Maybe you think that a woman who doesn't want to rent out rooms in her boarding house to black men is just a racist and if she doesn't like it, tough. But you don't have to sympathise with her in particular to recognise Powell's broader point: if you think it's going to stop there, you are staggeringly naïve. And he was absolutely right – it did not stop there.
As I mentioned in the above links, a man was jailed for eight weeks for the "crime" of sharing a meme depicting Pakistani men armed with knives arriving to the UK in boats, with the caption "coming to a town near you". In my view, he should have not been sent to prison, and the fact that he was is a grotesque, unconscionable violation of his civil rights. Maybe you think forcing women to rent out rooms to black people doesn't inevitably lead to white Britons being arrested and imprisoned for any and all criticisms of diversity, immigration etc. Maybe it doesn't lead "inevitably" to police officers handcuffing a white stabbing victim while his Indian murderer gloats about how he done a racism. But at this point, whether the one "inevitably" leads to the other is sort of academic. Powell predicted that, at least in this case, one would lead to the other. He was right and it did. That's why it's called the "rivers of blood" speech, because Powell felt a great foreboding: not that the anecdotes he described are bad in and of themselves (they are, as you put it, almost quaint), but that they bode extremely ill for the direction the UK would take in the coming decades.
Right, it's not the slippery slope fallacy if you're pointing out that the slope is in fact a waterslide.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
That does seem pretty analogous to the communists. "First they came for the omnicidal would-be-tyrants".
This is why I think "came for… and I did not speak out" has to mean something like "they got sent to Auschwitz, which no one ever should be for any reason, and I let it happen", rather than "I myself did something, anything, to oppose them". With the benefit of hindsight, the writer does not think he should have allowed the Nazis to do whatever they wanted to the communists; but I don't think it follows that he regrets ever criticizing communists in any way, and I don't think it even follows that he thinks no amount of police action against communist terrorists was ever justified.
Therefore I do not think "first they made laws preventing bigoted old ladies from renting rooms to Negroes…" is a valid application of the poem, because I am not a hyper-libertarian and I do not think that 'the power to forbid people to rent rooms to minorities based on personal prejudice' is an inherently immoral weapon for the government to wield. I am not turning a blind eye to unconscionable evil being done to my enemies. I can conscion outlawing discriminatory business practices, I can conscion it just fine. It's what I would have been campaigning for already, no ominous "they" required.
Real fucking talk if Hitler had shoved fags gypsies and commies into Auswitch first with Jews as a coincidental afterthought of being commie he'd have some eager consolidation willing to fight for him on the cheap and who would die for his project. The whole "I did not speak out" fantasizing heroism puts oneself in the place of the victim but the reason people did not speak was because they were happy to be the oppressor too. And thats the reality of all the browns Enoch was assessing, they themselves all were ready victimizers of their own kin when barely in power so when in power they would wield the whip happily and freely.
You’ve done a lot of venting in the past couple days. More in the past couple years. You keep showing up to bitch about the minority du jour and you demonstrate zero interest in the intended purpose of this community. We should have banned you the last few times.
Goodbye and good riddance.
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
What exactly is the problem with these people?
Is it the 'black' part? What do you think of racists who call the police to get their dying victim arrested? Ironically, present-day Britain likely has more brown 'I-don't-like-looking-at-them-garden-variety racists' than white ones at this point.
'already'? When we are at iteration 1000th of the rhyme? We're all way down the list, not at the start. The anti-racist rhyme is the water and you are the fish.
Oh the 'rivers of blood' are purely metaphorical then? Same as this part, I suppose?
What is a whip used for again?
Either that, or he has smuggled in the implication that browns are inherently liable to be physically violent to whites without actually justifying it in any way whatsoever, which again makes his entire rhetoric founded on silently assuming the most crucial conclusion. Pick your poison, but he doesn't come out looking good in either case, intellectually speaking.
I think the argument is that you're bringing in invaders who are going to radically alter your society. Anybody that stands in the way of that is going to get cut down. I suppose that this is something that needs to be explicitly spelled out to people like you explains why the globalists have been so successful in their reshaping of the West.
You are, again, skipping crucial steps. It's not inevitable that a demographic change will lead to physical violence against the old majority. If, say, Belgians or Koreans moved to my town en masse I would not expect them to start stabbing the locals, whatever the scale of the migration. To believe otherwise would be sheer, paranoid xenophobia. It may very well be the case that if you replace my Belgians and Koreans with Pakistanis or Sikhs, the murder rate will in fact go up, but this is a specific claim about the cultural (or, if you must, genetic) dispositions of Pakistanis and Sikhs, which requires evidence to back it up; it's not the null hypothesis about any generic group of foreigners.
Why would you need to make the argument that an influx of brown people would not correspond to some kind of downfall in civilization and descent into savagery?
At the time the UK was coming off the high of a 100-years run of civilizing the entire planet, from vast continents to tiny islands, leaving behind cargo cults.
Two world wars in recent memory demonstrate that even properly educated European neighbors could behave in quite savage ways, and that perhaps the well-mannered British people were even more of an exception than expected.
There was no evidence that the brown people would be able to behave, except for the few British people that had travelled and were lucky to stumble into some positive experiences, and avoid bad ones.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Since experience seems to be solidly backing him up - as I never tire of reminding people, blacks in London are 8x as likely to commit murder as whites according to statistics quoted by the former chief of London police - this is less an assumption and more of an observation.
But again, FttG originally praised him as "a conservative voicing uncomfortable truths about immigration". Even if I we grant that he had those kinds of statistics in mind, he just comes across as a mealy-mouthed coward for not having the guts to explicitly discuss his most important claim or the evidence for that claim. He would be leaving the most important "uncomfortable truth" unspoken.
I find it profoundly petty that, when someone makes a prediction which, decades hence, is soundly vindicated, you rap them on the knuckles for not showing their workings.
Well again I'm not actually convinced that he made that prediction. I still find it a more natural and coherent reading of the text that the strife he perceives in Britain's future is the political oppression of white racists by an electoral majority of brown anti-racists. I don't actually think there's any textual evidence that he was envisioning a plague of acts of personal brown-on-white violence like Digwa's. If that had been his point, I contend that his rhetoric would have been burying the lede to such outrageous degrees as to make the overall speech laughable, but I don't think it was his point.
(I think you actually have a much better case in the other sub-thread when linking his doomsaying, not to modern crime statistics, but to the rise of anti-free-speech legislation, which can legitimately be seen as a slippery slope from the concerns he voices. This doesn't wholly rehabilitate the speech in my eyes, because I still think that in fact a just society should not allow racial discrimination, and allowing it in the name of preventing a free-speech-destroying slippery slope is throwing the baby out with the bathwater; and also because he's still complaining about private responses to racist behavior i.e. the children chanting "racialist", not just institutional overreach, so his principled-libertarian cred is less than stellar; but it's a fair defense.)
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
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link