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 -
Let's look into the recent police video that's been going viral on Twitter.
In the video, a lone man is being harassed by a group of foreigners, and they knock him to the ground and hit him. Even before he gets up, a nearby police officer, who has been doing nothing up until then, tackles him into the wall. Understandably he resists somewhat. As a result of these events, the victim in this incident has been arrested and charged, and is now having the book thrown at him. Meanwhile, no effort at all was put into catching the original attackers. The police have released a statement saying they "have no concerns over the officer's actions." They have also asked for people not to share the footage.
This event seems to echo the vibes of a recent incident in Germany where a police officer tackled a bystander, getting himself stabbed to death by a terrorist as a result. It also seems to vibe with the murder of Henry Nowak, where the mortally wounded victim was arrested by the police while his killer was right there gloating.
In the context of culture war it seems like the "right wing" has firmly swung against the police in Europe, which is a big difference from in the United States, where a large portion of the right still is on side "back the blue". Of course there is still an anti-law enforcement wing of the right in the United States, pointing at politically motivated prosecutions, as well as the kid gloves for left-affiliated rioters. I also haven't heard about any similar incidents in the US where where police intervened in a situation on the "wrong" side (though plenty of police brutality in confrontations between police and others). And often American departments are very willing to throw their officers under the rug when the do something that looks bad.
I think to the public, there's a huge difference in police arresting, beating, and killing right wingers, versus being seen as taking the side of a group. Because it's no longer state vs crime (with a sprinkle of biased treatment) but directly being seen as taking a side, though the left has always seen the authority as evil nazi thugs.
Not sure if anything will come of this trend or it's a nothingburger. Maybe increased riots and disorder among the native population, who have historically been quite docile in the last century.
Is there an element of convenience here?
It's much easier to arrest the one guy (who's, let's be real, more likely to respect police authority) than the three guys who'll go all tribal. It still has the effect of ending the altercation. The three guys will process cop and guy= white, two us = black, three, therefore, attack
I think that's behind a lot of two-tier policing; not hating white people, but enforcing the laws that are easy to enforce on the people who will capitulate.
That’s even worse. Sorry we imported a bunch of third world people who commit violence at higher rates. Besides having to live with that, we will arrest you when they attack you because it’s much easier to arrest you who won’t resist too much whereas they might heavily resist.
How is this not waging the culture war? Possibly I have misunderstood the ethos of this weekly thread.
Third world people do in fact commit crimes at higher rates compared to natives. Do you disagree?
Two tier policing in the UK has been noted for awhile. This is yet another example.
Do you disagree?
Your blanket generalization of "third world people" is the kind of vague wording that could mean not quite anything, but is loaded and not in the spirit of "speaking clearly, saying what you mean." The term "natives" as well, though perhaps this is a code word for white Britons. Your post to me seemed to be a throwaway bitter, we-all-know-what-we-mean response of the type I used to see on reddit, rather than the type of meaningful contribution you are capable of (even if you were to make the same points) and I would like to think is the distinctive quality of this site.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It seems a valid observation of the kind of dynamics this will inevitably introduce.
More options
Context Copy link
Don't forget to click the report button.
More options
Context Copy link
I agree this is waging the culture war.
You recently said something along the lines of “I like the west except its people”
Some are more equal than others, around here.
More options
Context Copy link
Yes, that's true. There's much I like about the west. For example the institutions are great in theory but the people around them lead to them rotting and withering from inside.
Singapore for instance basically copied British Insitutitons on Independence and has done really really well over the last 70 years while the UK has just declined. The institutions are the same in both places, the only difference is the people, and that's where the divergence in fortunes comes from.
I was just stating a fact, not trying to wage culture war.
Are they really tho? Do they have the same tax rate?
Would the Singaporean institutions allow the grooming gangs that developed in the UK in the last few decades? Or a Jimmy Saville celebrity character to blatantly abuse a bunch of kids? I see Singaporeans can get jail time for hate tweets as well.
Jail for man who posed as 'SharonLiew86' to send racially offensive tweets
Is it really just a people difference? Would singaporean institutions react in exactly the same way if they were faced with the same influx of immigrants that are prone to grooming vulnerable teenage girls? Or they wouldn't because Singaporean cops are more efficient enforcers of the institutions' spirit?
Isn't selecting people that can make the institutions work also part of an institution? The Catholic Church is not just the Bible and the rules for how things are organized, it's also selecting men that will take chastity vows to be priest. Without that rule, the institution would look different.
Now, if the Singaporean institutions are the same as the British ones, are they also selecting for cops that will turn a blind eye to grooming gangs or will cover them up in the name of racial harmony?
More options
Context Copy link
What is it you don't like about western people?
To wit, this is another video by the same channel that recorded the arrest OP is talking about; pick a random start point and watch this for a collage of how these sorts of people behave: https://youtube.com/watch?v=XOWLnLNWKAw
And now realize that I, a well adjusted, highly productive member of society gets taxed close to 50% to subsidize these people so they can continue to behave in the way they do right now. Any reasonable person would develop a dislike.
This is just about the lower classes, but other justifiable reasons also exist for those above these people on the social stratum.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Explain how “I hate western people” isn’t waging the cultural war if my claim that third worlders commit crime at higher rates / police fear to arrest them is waging the culture war?
He 'hates western people' does not imply 'he loves Africans'- my read of him is that he prefers brahmins, han, other orientals to whites.
More options
Context Copy link
I didn't out and about start harping on about that from nowhere. Someone accused me of hating the west first and I just corrected the record. I like many many aspects of the west, lets be clear here.
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
I didn't say it was good. I was citing an example of anarcho-tyranny.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This may offer a less malicious explanation for the behavior, but it doesn't really deny the problem. In fact, it makes the problem more intractable, since they will never admit to this explanation. It also incentivizes even more tribalistic behavior to dissuade law enforcement actions. If the purpose of the police is to manage relations between ethnic groups to prevent large scale public disorder and inter-ethnic conflict, then they cannot also treat people as individuals before the law. Every law enforcement action must be first evaluated by the likelihood of it undermining "community relations", and so the ethnicities of the people involved should be at the forefront when deciding when and how to enforce the law. Because whites have lower levels of ethnic solidarity, the trade-off will almost always be to target the whites. This makes a lot of good sense given the new priority to manage ethnic conflicts. The question is how stable this strategy is longer term.
Presumably, these concerns are also driving the abolishment of juries. It allows judges to concern themselves not with individual actions but rather balancing competing ethnic resentments to maintain public order.
Quietly, the entire tradition of British law is being repealed and replaced by merely changing "guidance" documents.
Very stable, because us WEIRD types are hardwired to keep taking it — we are genetic defectives in whom the basic human capacity for tribalism has been utterly crippled. This is yet another example of how you need a certain level of collective identity to stand against other groups and not end up preyed upon. We lack it, and since it's in our DNA to lack it, it can't be fixed.
Thus, we're doomed. We'll be preyed upon by more tribal peoples worse and worse, have more resources taken, beaten down more and more, until we're finally hunted to extinction.
There is no escaping this. It is 100% certain, set in stone — the WEIRD populations of the world are going to go extinct. The only way any of us have even the slightest genetic legacy in future humanity is if they marry into a non-WEIRD culture. There's absolutely nothing else to be done.
Setting aside the questions of whether WIERD characteristics are genetically heritable, either WEIRD types have lacked it in the past, in which case it is quite adaptive in an extremely tribalistic environment, or WEIRD types (at least, in the United States) still have it today. There's no plausible mechanism by which it would have been bred out of the population in just a few generations without an extraordinarily efficient suppression of breeding (such as genocide) and no such mechanism has been observed.
What "extremely tribalistic environment" are you thinking of WEIRD European populations having lived in, prior to our current condition?
All of them, pretty much. European populations were literally living in tribes until they were Romanized, Christianized, or feudalized. For some of them that happened pretty late (and of course Romanization, Christianization, and feudalization did not end tribal-based thinking) and a good number of them left those environments to go live in tribalistic environments again – where they did extremely well for themselves, conquering entire continents.
Yes, and that's before they became WEIRD. Before manorialism, cousin marriage bans, and all the other elements associated with the Hajnal line bred WEIRD traits into them.
Because, in the case of the Americas, diseases did most of the work, killing 90% before they ever saw a European. For the rest, it was the raw technological advantage we had, which allowed us to succeed despite our crippling genetic defects. Now that the gap has closed and the rest of the world caught up? We're doomed.
As an example, back when Tyler Oliveira put out "Inside India's Poop-Throwing Festival," Dave "the Distributist" Greene made a comment in one of his video's about Dinesh D'Souza's reaction to the documentary. Greene asked why D'Souza took the documentary personally, acting like it was an attack on him, when he's a Christian who lives on the opposite side of the planet from these 'pagan' Hindus. Greene then mentioned that his ancestors were mostly German, then outlined a scenario where, instead, it was a documentary about a bunch of Pagan Germans throwing cow dung at one another in the Black Forest; and how he wouldn't care, because what's that to do with him? And he'd be promoting it, saying "look at how disgusting these Pagans are" and using it as an example of why Christianity is better. And that he just doesn't understand D'Souza's behavior here…
Which is exactly my point. D'Souza showed the natural human reaction. He saw this as an attack on his tribe. And he feels an attack on his tribe as an attack on himself, not as a matter of abstract reason, not as a cultural norm, but at a deep instinctual level, the kind of deep reaction that is inborn, that cannot be taught. And that Greene doesn't feel such a natural instinct, cannot even understand that instinct, that he finds it laughable, demonstrates exactly the WEIRD genetic defect I'm talking about.
Show me a WEIRD white who has the inborn, instinctive tribalism Dinesh D'Souza displayed. The inborn, instinctive tribalism of the black people protesting the Karmelo Anthony verdict. (In fact, I see plenty of WEIRDs online siding with them.) Tell me how we undo over a thousand years of selection pressure removing the genes for this instinct from us, in just this century (if we even have that long)?
We're not getting that form of instinctive, inborn tribalism back. And without it, extinction is certain. We're doomed.
Straight-up racism - which as far as I can tell is fairly similar to your idea of tribalism (although I would dispute this is a correct idea) - was (to varying degrees) acceptable in the West until the 1950s, which postdates those things by a bit.
Anyway, you're not presenting any evidence for this claim. Even for cousin marriage, is there any evidence that it makes people genetically predisposed to tribalism? It certainly makes people less smart, which could be associated with a lack of openness to experience...but on balance I'd take the trade-off. My understanding is that the mechanism of cousin marriage making Western Europeans more open we believed to be at least partially cultural, as exogamous marriages (which are not uniquely Western, AIUI) force greater extra-tribal participation.
I am familiar with this, but from what I understand, this had a much larger impact on North America. I recommend that you read up on Cortez.
Who's "we"? I doubt that you and I are closely related, and I would certainly be surprised if we are from the same tribe. I certainly do not believe that my line had crippling genetic defects. But perhaps we fixed them via admixture.
In my experience whites have this sort of reaction. I strongly suspect that either not all WEIRD types have whatever genetic makeup you are asserting causes this, or (probably more likely) this is somewhat culturally mediated.
In the United States, plenty of whites, especially in the South and the West, are extremely tribalistic - they would characterize it as patriotism. In other places, even where patriotism is less en vogue, tribalism may be channeled through consumer attachment ("fandom," football). I suspect you merely don't recognize it because you equate tribalism with genetic ethnic characteristics (which is not how tribes themselves viewed tribalism, or at least not exclusively).
To be direct (but hopefully not unkind), I think you are projecting. White/WEIRD types are still plenty tribalistic. I just think you don't see it, because your perspective on what tribalism and ethnicity is and should be is based on, well, the internet, instead of lived experience. That's why you are focused on race, much more than historical tribes were likely to be (as far as I can tell). Because a tribe is based on common behavior, with race being an imperfect proxy for that - you can read up on the research on children, for instance, which (if I am recalling correctly) shows that they prefer people of their own (parent's) race, but more strongly prefer people of their own cultural dress and behavior. Or you can look to the cultural practices of non-WEIRD types, where adopting people of different racial/ethnic backgrounds into the tribe, was a fairly common practice (at least in North America, where I have the most expertise).
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
It hasn't been bred out; it's been memed out. Earlier waves of immigration to the US were ultimately fairly well integrated. Problem was there were some lessons learned -- that one should never be suspicious of and 'racist' against immigrants -- that weren't so. I suspect such 'racism' (both real racism and objections to parts of the immigrants' cultures) was load-bearing in integrating them. And in protecting the country from them -- it wasn't breeding that resulted in an America-hating Ethiopian anchor baby winning in Colorado. There haven't been enough generations to breed that out (especially since the last group of integrated immigrants themselves wouldn't have had it bred out at all).
I also suspect that the steady decline in the hazards both of the journey and the destination have resulted in each wave of immigrants being successively less "pre-filtered" for what you might call "American temperament" than prior waves.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The British Empire having imposed the iniquity of its privilege upon the native population of this territory, I'm afraid the natives must follow the natural conclusion the rest of the world has already come to regarding this problem and demand independence.
England must free itself from the British yoke and become again a nation instead of an imperial protectorate. Only then can the self determination of English natives be assured. And other nations borne out of such circumstances such as Ireland, India and the United States should aid in this endeavour in the spirit of brotherhood that unites free self determined peoples against the evil of colonization.
More options
Context Copy link
Sounds like a few young, white British boys might ought to take one for the team and do their peers the favor of just absolutely beating the living shit out of some of these lady cops. Not like the fem-wankers have guns.
:(
More effort/commentary, please.
More options
Context Copy link
There are perils to committing yourself to nakedly tribalist, oppressive policing, especially when you disarm your officers and keep hiring frail women.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Well, once you've hit a cop ONCE (and you're white) they're already going to put you away forever. In for a penny, in for a pound.
Might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This kind of hair splitting could apply to any instance of alleged 'hatred' in history. It's only being applied to whites by whites since the alternative makes them more uncomfortable.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link