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 -
Going to jump in with what I want to see discussed:
Police and political leaders in Northern Ireland call for calm after Belfast knife attack.
What we know is that a MENA immigrant has attacked a native in the street, gouged out his eyes, and was attempting to behead him when stopped by passers-by.
Details beyond that seem shaky. I've seen the attacker described as Somali, though Sudanese is more consistent. I've seen the victim described as a man in his 40s, though 15-year old boy is also popular. And I've seen that the victim's life was saved, but also that he's perished in the hospital.
What's certain is that the major concern of the people in charge is, of course, that this is liable to upset the native population.
Perhaps that's more understandable than usual because of where it happened. Belfast! A storied town. Across twitter I see various historically-enemy paramilitary sympathizers calling to set aside their differences and unite against the common enemy; that it doesn't matter who controls Northern Ireland unless there's any such place left to save.
Last I heard, all major transport routes into and out of the city have been shut down, businesses are forced to close at 17:30, and curfews have been established. The place seems to be gearing up for major rioting.
Is it just me or have the straws been landing more heavily, lately, on the camel's back?
And, provided that the historically-armed underground belligerent factions of the area haven't withered into insignificance; provided that they do get serious about uniting and using force; might they serve as a template, or at least an inspiration, for other places?
I believe Kulak once predicted that the flashpoint for organized European resistance would happen in Northern Ireland.
I responded to FtttG here before realizing why there was so little action in that thread.
Tl;dr
Seriously, social media is probably the worst way to learn about public opinion. Unfortunately, most of the public which is opining probably got the idea through social media.
This is still pretty silly. If the IRA is plotting a cooperative pogrom, they’re not doing it on Twitter.
Just you. Belfast has a smaller total population than LA’s black population. In the 90s. I’m not expecting to see anything remotely on the scale of the ‘92 riots.
Kulak predicts a lot of things. I don’t know that he’s been right yet. I’d take the other side of this bet.
With respect, I think you are falling into the centrist trap. Twitter isn't radicalising people. All the horrible murders are radicalising people. Twitter is merely declining to censor them afterwards.
Again, it's not about the discourse, it's about the horrible murders. I don't think you're a leftist shill but I think you are okay, fundamentally, with this kind of thing happening. That doesn't mean that you wouldn't fix it if you could snap your fingers and magically prevent all horrible murders, but ultimately you seem to prefer all the horrible murders to any of the things that would prevent the horrible murders.
If "calling for calm" means "calmly discussing how we are going to begin repatriating these people" then that's fair enough, but otherwise "it's good that politicians are calling for calm" does absolutely translate to "I want you to sit down and do nothing". That's not a discourse thing. That's a basic divergence of political preferences.
Well, horrible murders of whites are radicalizing other whites. I don't care about horrible cartel killings, and I presume you don't either (well, I suppose (royal)you and I might "care" in the way you accuse netstack of "caring" about the Belfast murder).
"These people" might mean criminal and illegal migrants, the recent crop of migrants in general, all Sudanese, or even all nons. I can absolutely understand why a non-white person, or anyone who cares about non-whites and is familiar with the dissident right's rhetoric, might prefer to weather the current storm rather than concede the field and risk the chance of the DR going the distance with the Overton Window. After all, what comes after reclaiming your lands if not seizing theirs in kind?
This does seem to be have been the reaction of the Africans and Arabs to colonisation, who as always are very clear-eyed about how they see other civilisations.
In general you seem to be going off on a weird tangent. My point is that it is the constant murders of white people by ethnic minorities that is radicalising whites against ethnic minorities, not the Twitter algorithm.
The safest countries have about one murder per year per 100,000 people. At least a quarter of those will be outrageous enough to make good social media copy. So a group of 5,000,000 people will commit one potentially viral murder per month, if they are as peaceful as the Swiss. And one a week if they are only as peaceful as white Americans or black Britons (both around 4 murders per 100k). Since there are more than 5,000,000 nonwhite people in the UK (and an order of magnitude more than that if you are looking at immigrant crime globally, as most of the Americans poasting about the situation in the UK are), your Twitter feed being full of murders of white people by ethnic minorities could just as easily be caused by the algorithm as by actual crime. If Elon Musk wanted your Twitter feed to be full of white-on-white murders, he could make it so. And if he wanted it to be full of cute cat pictures, he could make that so.
How much do you know or care about white-on-white crime in Belfast? It's a complex issue given the history of the Troubles and the number of ex-paramilitaries hanging around. And yet you feel the need to have an opinion about crime by asylum seekers in Belfast.
There is enough crime in Zurich to fill a tabloid or a social media feed with crime stories. To know whether the constant stream of crime being shoved in your face by people who don't have your own interests at heart (at best they want you to keep staring at the ads between the criminal fnords, and in the case of Twitter coverage of migrant crime in the UK, we know that these posts are being amplified by a foreign billionaire who has made no secret of his desire to foment political violence in the UK and drive the British government out of office) is caused by the people doing the crime or the people doing the shoving, you need to look at statistics. So let's do that.
Murder has dropped since mass immigration started in the UK and continues to fall slowly. Ditto stabbings*. Ditto violent crime where the victim ends up in A&E. Ditto violent crime measured by victim surveys. Ditto property crime measured by victim surveys. There is some evidence that property crimes which mostly target tourists and therefore wouldn't appear in a victim survey have increased, including phone snatching and pickpocketing. Shoplifting (which also doesn't appear in victim surveys because the victims are businesses and not individuals) has definitely increased. Sexual offences by ethnic Pakistanis in the UK were out of control 20 years ago, and these cold cases are being regularly relitigated on social media in a way which suggests to people not paying attention that the crimes are still going on. (I genuinely don't know if they are or not, and the people outrage-poasting about them aren't bothering to check either). Cyber fraud is also rising, but it isn't what right populist agitators or tabloid journalists are talking about when they say that "crime is out of control".
Right now the UK right-populist discourse is dominated by two murders that went viral on social media. One was a case of "two hotheads get into a fight at pub closing time, unfortunately someone is dead because someone else brought a knife to a fistfight". The murder of Henry Nowak is only newsworthy because of the shockingly poor (and probably racially motivated) police response - and yet the social media peanut gallery are calling for penal laws against a demographic who commit less crime than the white British. Nobody has run the numbers, but given the reputation of Sikhs in the UK** it is likely that kirpans prevent more crime than they cause (much like guns carried by CCW permit holders in the US). The other case is a real failure of the UK immigration system - the Belfast attacker was a Sudanese falsely claiming to be a Somali who crossed the open ROI-NI border in order to claim asylum in the UK instead of the EU. But you wouldn't have learned about the difference from social media posts by right-populists.
* Police recorded knife crime is up (but peaked in 2024 and is now falling again), but actual stabbings are down, as measured by NHS administrative data. The most likely reason is that the police have been told to be more careful about checking whether a knife was used in muggings and suchlike where violence is threatened but nobody gets stabbed.
** Singh is the second-most common surname of VC winners, after Smith.
What a despicably misleading gloss of the Nowak murder. There is zero evidence that Nowak assaulted Digwa, or that he was a "hothead".
The video shows Nowak calling Digwa a "bad man" repeatedly while filming him shortly before the murder, and continuing to do so when Digwa is walking away from him. That isn't legal provocation, and nobody suggested it was, but it pattern-matches to "two hotheads get into a fight at pub closing time" much more closely than "unprovoked attack by crazed thug from violent foreign culture".
We don't know what happens in between "Digwa is walking away from Nowak, who continues to abuse him verbally" and "Digwa attacks Nowak with a big-ass knife", but "Digwa turns round and demands satisfaction, and a series of mutually escalatory threat displays lead to a fight" is quite plausible, as is "Digwa turns around and chops up the guy who he incorrectly thought was stalking him with no further warning", or anything in between. If we were trying to adjudicate Nowak's Darwin award nomination, the crucial point would be whether Nowak follows Digwa. Following someone while filming them and verbally abusing them is genuinely provocative (though not a provocation in the technical legal sense), and culpably stupid if the guy is visibly armed in a way which means they will win a fight. But the police didn't find any evidence either way on this point, and in any case it is legally irrelevant to Digwa's guilt.
If that exact scene were put into a Sopranos style prestige drama, the point of the scene would be to show that the murderer was an unhinged psycho with a pathetic, brittle ego and "random encounter" levels of impulse control.
More options
Context Copy link
The term "fight", to my mind, implies that the two men were attacking each other. Likewise "fistfight" implies that both men were punching each other. I don't think "one man insults another man, to which the second man responds by physically assaulting the first man" can reasonably be characterised as a "fight". Despite Digwa's insistence that Nowak attacked him first and he was defending himself, he was unable to present any evidence that this was the case, and there were no cuts or bruises on his person at the time of his arrest.
So: I think the claim that "Nowak and Digwa got into a fistfight" is simply untrue. No one has presented any evidence that Nowak punched (or even tried to punch) Digwa. If you said "Nowak insulted Digwa, and Digwa responded by stabbing him", I'd have no objection.
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