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 -
Our struggle with China is racial
There are aspects of human civilization which would, with enough time be understood and adapted by any sexually reproducing species of sufficient intelligence, simply because they are instrumentally valuable with regards to the instincts that all biologically similar animals share. Animal likes food too. Animal likes sex too. Animal plays games too. Animal fights enemies and wages war for resources too. Many animals beat few animals, so animals have incentives to form alliance structures or be outcompeted and exterminated. Yet wouldn't it be surprising if they valued the same things, or felt the same ways, where instrumental necessities didn't require it? Shouldn't we then expect to see, dramatic differences in what are superficially institutions, even amongst intellectually comparable animals?
Consider the family. Every functional civilization has been patriarchal at least until recently; and the physical and cognitive differences explaining this are seen in the animal world as well. Woman needs man, and man must find his mate. It'd be great if she were loyal though. Yes you could punish disloyalty after the fact but that's not exactly foolproof. Hey what if she literally couldn't run away? If every couple breaks the feet of every daughter then she'll make a perfectly suitable mate! The logic here is of course unimpeachable; and yet is there any reason to believe Nero himself wouldn't react with a similar disgust to it as modern (non-anthropologist) man?
Where unimaginable cruelty naturally pervades even the closest family bonds between the strong and the weak; concern for outsiders may be expected to be similarly lacking. A toddler bleeding out in plain view to the complete indifference of most passers by is not at all surprising when you remember what their close genetic ancestors did, nor are the countless similar videos you can find on the Chinese interwebs: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ECeC4R-Gjtc.
I don't need to mention that where humans cannot expect compassion, the fate of man's best friend is not at all uncertain.
Other areas of human life like the ability to be moved by beauty seem similarly lacking in a civilization whose pre-1800s painting and sculpture never approximated that of Ancient Rome, much less Michael Angelo, when portraying human subjects (as opposed to landscapes were they admittedly excelled).
A people with innately different instincts in one field, might also be odd in other ways, like committing mass cannibalism against political enemies in the absence of famine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guangxi_Massacre .
Their literature might include bizzare scenes, like a inferior man demonstrating his pious hospitality to his superior by secretly killing and cooking his own wife to feed him. https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ghmx4v/what_can_romance_of_the_three_kingdoms_liu_an/
Different from birth
Someone covers your nose or lays you face first against the bed. What do you do? Seemingly every non-disabled European American newborn that isn't cognitively impaired has the same reaction; to move, struggle and fight against this horrifying imposition. Nearly every Chinese American baby has a different reaction; complete non-reactivity.
Isn't this precisely the kind of difference common stereotypes, a history of slavish behaviour, and the above section would suggest? Can you think of a more elemental test of innately different instincts than a newborn's reaction when you screw with his breathing? Have you noticed that basically everyone still wearing a mask is Asian?
https://sci-hub.ru/10.1038/2241227a0
** The necessity of racism **
What does it mean to allow members of a high IQ species of alien fundamental moral and aesthetic instincts to increase their power in our institutions?
What does it mean, for an entire nation of them to become the dominant power on the planet?
So, this is certainly a valid and understandable interpretation of the phenomena you’re referencing. However, I want to offer an alternative interpretation.
Perhaps rather than seeing the European and Asiatic peoples as headed for conflict due to their differences, perhaps what is needed instead is a sort of biological Hegelian synthesis: a recognition of the strengths and weaknesses of the two races, and the ways in which they are actually complementary. Perhaps the creation of a Hapa race, occupying a healthy middle point between the excessive individualism, sentimentality and recklessness of Europeans (the acute failure modes of which we are witnessing all around us) and the excessive communitarianism, coldness and safetyism of Asians, is the key to unlocking a superhuman race of people who alone will be worthy of the task of making humanity an interplanetary species. When I imagine a race whose women all look like Mina Kimes playing beautiful symphonic music in a Tokyo-like super-metropolis on Mars with Greco-Roman-Japanese fusion architecture, I admit I find very little to quibble with.
Wait what?
This reminds me of Russia fetishism among the Trad-right. Oh here look a 'traditional" society with a third our church attendance, higher abortion rates, higher divorce rates, lower fertility, extreme alcoholism and spousal abuse... But look at manly Army ad they have. Yes, and what does traditional comradery mean in a nation with Russia's history of de-facto slave armies? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dedovshchina
You can't just use words, and assume that the versions of them that exist in other societies have anything to do with what you are envisionining. What does communitarianism mean here?
Well, even in the most atomized White American neighbourhood, If I have an accident and am dying in public view, I can be 100% certain that someone, who i've never met will stop and try to help me within seconds. Can you say the same in China? Why not?
And how, in the wake of our covid response do you feel like describing Americans as reckless and asians as safetyist, with the ideal somewhere in between, is reasonable. I mean, I know there are some Whites who feel we didn't mask enough, but you might be the first White nationalist sympathetic person I've found expressing that view.
To be clear, I am not talking about Covid at all here; I’m as vociferously anti-mask as any right-wing poster here and was from pretty much the second I saw the early IFR estimates for Covid. I’ve never felt more in-sync with the Red Tribe than I did during Covid. However, all that is contingent on the fact that Covid was not remotely as dangerous as it was advertised to be. I do think there is a persuasive case that if it had been the kind of super-pandemic it was initially purported to be, there probably would have been untold millions of working-class white people who would have died like flies from not taking precautionary measures, due to apathy or generalized (justified) distrust of the government or pig-headed “if I want to get sick and die that’s my God-given right”. It happened in this case that those traits were adaptive to the reality of the actual disease, which was a nothingburger; there’s no guarantee that the next pandemic will be as fake and gay, and in that scenario it may very well make sense to talk about whites as reckless.
No, what I actually had in mind were things like the massive disparities in tragic fatalities, firearm accidents, concussions from bar fights, and all the other sorts of mayhem you can encounter in the ER at any major hospital in the U.S., versus what you’ll find at an equivalent hospital in Asia. Yes, I’m aware that the 13% are contributing far more than their fair share to these phenomena, but if all the ADOS got teleported to Jupiter tomorrow, U.S. numbers, and European numbers more generally, would still differ markedly from Asia’s.
I do agree with you that China seems qualitatively different from other East Asian countries in some really interesting and unflattering ways. It almost seems to be simultaneously very communitarian - in the sense of high conformity, willingness of the population to follow orders and to not make trouble, and a general low-agency environment - and also low-trust and low-altruism. The worst of both worlds, in a way; all the bad parts of communitarianism without any of the good parts.
However, your post wasn’t just about China; your argument is that this battle is racial; that there’s something about the Asian race generally that makes it fundamentally incompatible with the European race. And what I’m pointing out is that many of the failure modes you’re pointing to appear pretty much specific to China and not generalizable among East Asians as a whole, or even Han Chinese as a whole, given that I don’t think we see some of these problems in Taiwan or in Singapore or in the communities of overseas Chinese in places like Indonesia and the Philippines. So, while I agree that there are points of profound difference that present significant potential for conflict between European-derived civilization and Chinese civilization as currently constituted, I disagree that this conflict is properly a racial conflict.
And, perhaps as relevantly, US numbers would be much higher than most of Europe's, which would be higher than China's, which would be higher than Japan's.
I mean, yes, obviously there's overlap between the US murder rate and Europe's, but the white homicide rate, firearms death rate, etc is still noticeably higher than, say, France or England or Germany.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
What about in an Asian American neighborhood? Do you think they would let you die on the street? If yes, why? If not, what is different between Chinese-Americans and Chinese-Chinese?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Congrats, you invented Russia. Beautiful women, not sure about the Japanese-Roman metropolises though.
I thought Russia was where they achieve excessive individualism, sentimentality, recklessness, communitarianism (perhaps at gunpoint), and coldness all at the same time.
More options
Context Copy link
Haha, believe me, this has occurred to me before. Although sadly Russia seems to take more culturally, on the Asian side of its origins, from the rather more brutal Mongolic/Turkic substrate rather than from a more refined Japanese-Korean-Sinitic element.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link