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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   22537 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 29, 2026

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The United States is an exceptional country and no American should take for granted the lottery of life that they won merely by being born in that country.

I hate this. I want to find whoever coined this "lucky to be born a X" meme and torture them in the most luxurious way I can possibly imagine.

There is no lottery to being born in America, any more than there is a lottery for a TSMC foundry to produce silicon chips as opposed to burittos. Americans conquered this land, established it's institutions, and then fucked. They fucked a lot. And they made more Americans as surely as Indians make more Indians, or Africans make more Africans.

The mistake of America is believing anyone else could possibly achieve this. It's resulted in 100 years of global misadventures trying to spread "Americanism" and failing every single damned time when 3rd worldism just drags it back down to the lowest common denominator. And it's going to fail even harder when it tries to make Americans domestically out of another billion third worlders.

You are killing the America you love so much. We'd all be better off admiring it from afar. At least then there would still be something left to admire. I wept during the festivities today with the certainty that America won't exist in another 50 years. I recognize nothing of the country I was born into only 40 years ago already.

The born lucky thing is from Rawl's Veil of Ignorance. It is an incredibly retarded argument, imo.

Rawls is right up there near Rousseau on the list of Most Destructive Philosophers of History.

Of course, Rawls being downstream of Rousseau means the frog retains the top rank.

So what is you explanation for American exceptionalism, if it is not the ideals? HBD of its white population? Or something metaphysical, that during the independence war God let the Holy Spirit descend on the Americans and their descendants in a way which he did not bother with for the Latin American nations?

So what is you explanation for American exceptionalism, if it is not the ideals? HBD of its white population?

Probably both. It can't just be the ideals, we have Liberia as a counter-example.

It's probably something like "A heavily selected portion of Europeans with the right ideas at the right time".

Liberia literally isn't ruled by America-descended blacks; it was overthrown by a cannibal warlord named 'General Butt Naked' who left a power vacuum for the usual pack of savages.

The fact that they could be overthrown by a 'General Butt Naked' probably indicates there were some flaws with the society they'd established, though.

Estimates for the population of Liberia that is descended from African-Americans range from 2.5-5%, the indigenous Bassa and Gio ethnic groups resent that cohort and there have been severe tensions between blood-and-soil Liberians and those descended from returnees as the latter did not integrate well. By that time, they have lived in the United States for centuries which has formed a great chasm between the cultures and religious traditions.

Even if you are so vitriolic about black people, the fact of the matter is that they are more productive in the United States than in any other country. George Washington Carver would have never realized his innate talent in a country like Liberia. If you believe black people are so lazy and violent, you should still desire the damage to be minimized by allowing them to remain in America, where they can provide the greatest benefit out of any country in the world. It is the United States where professional African-Americans have thrived in communities such as Prince George County, Metro Atlanta, and Missouri City. African-Americans are an integral part of the American ideal; they have given us jazz sounds that play in every dance scene of a WWII movie, the banjo, iconic Southern soul food and Creole cooking, legendary stories like To Kill a Mockingbird, and honorable men and women such as Justice Clarence Thomas, Colin Powell, Thomas Sowell, and Condoleeza Rice.

To Kill A Mockingbird wasn't written by an African American unless I'm learning very new information about Harper Lee. Also the majority of contribution is either entertainment where there's a substantial thumb on the scales to both put them in the spotlight, and to overly lionize their contribution to the formation of the art forms.

Even if you are so vitriolic about black people

I'm not? I'm just saying Liberia basically forked the US constitution and it didn't produce results above what you'd expect from any another African nation.

I'm not accusing you of doing so definitively; I meant in case you are. I just don't consider Liberia to be a compelling example, as they haven't truly embraced the values that have yielded America's prosperity, even if their non-binding constitution may suggest otherwise prima facie. Freedom of the press, consent of the governed, and the rule of law are alien concepts to the vast majority of Liberians who have no connection to the US to speak of.

Botswana, while far from perfect, is a case study of an African country that has managed to successfully lift itself by its bootstraps. It was once a landlocked country with no paved roads and only 100 educated people in a country of 1 million inhabitants, but through an export-based economy and democratic institutions inherited from the traditional kgotla system, has become the wealthiest country on the continent. Their recent presidents have unfortunately seemed to reverse much of what has facilitated this transformation, but nevertheless their living standards are about on par with those of Moldova or Bulgaria's. Botswanan poverty is not the same as that of its eastern neighbors in Zambia or Zimbabwe.

but nevertheless their living standards are about on par with those of Moldova or Bulgaria'

Bulgaria and Moldova are not basically the same in terms of economic development. In terms of PPP and nominal, Bulgaria's GDP per capita is about twice that of Moldova's. Bulgaria is 55th and 59th in ranking of countries by GDP per capita PP and nominal, respectively, while Moldova is 93rd and 89th.

Moldova is not in the EU, while Bulgaria is and this year even joined the Euro Area.

Freedom of the press, consent of the governed, and the rule of law are alien concepts to the vast majority of Liberians who have no connection to the US to speak of.

I think this is a fully general point regarding immigration, and applies to a thousand little things besides that season the secret sauce that makes America America.

Yes.

Less flippantly, do I need an explanation for gravity to prove it's effects? Are 250 years of history not enough?

If you're claiming only this specific idea of gravity could do x, probably yes. The US was a huge mostly empty resource heavy new frontier. It's why we called it the New World. I think a counter-factual nation of French Americans seems pretty likely to have been hugely successful as well.

If you want to say only this version of Americans could have done everything its not a claim thats well backed up by evidence if you don't know why.

I think a counter-factual nation of French Americans seems pretty likely to have been hugely successful as well.

Excuse me, counter-factual?

I think he's saying essentially rerun American history but have the Quebecois either end up in control of the greater USA or just replace the 12 Colonies with roughly-equivalent Francophones.

If you want to say only this version of Americans could have done everything its not a claim thats well backed up by evidence if you don't know why.

You know, this is the same argument I saw in a random youtube video ages ago, about why North America is an OP starting position for a civilization. They made all the usual arguments about natural resources, fertility of the soil, and a few I'd never heard before about how especially navigable America's waterways and coasts are.

Except there were people here before the land was conquered and turned in The United States, and they didn't do any of that shit. In fact, there were many, many unique peoples here, and none of them did any of that shit.

So excuse me if I don't entirely buy the argument that anybody living in America would have been as great as The United States. History shows there were, and they weren't.

Except there were people here before the land was conquered and turned in The United States, and they didn't do any of that shit. In fact, there were many, many unique peoples here, and none of them did any of that shit.

I think reality is actually more complicated than that. There's reason to believe that the North America that the European explorers saw was essentially a postapocalyptic wasteland. There's good archeological evidence there were very sophisticated societies in North America (as there were in South America when Cortez arrived) that had collapsed – Cahokia might have been larger than the London and Paris of the time at its peak around 1100, for instance.

Now, I tend to agree with you that these nations likely would not have been as great as the United States if they had not collapsed or been overrun, but this is for moral reasons as much as any other: the Cahokians, like the Aztecs, appear to have practiced human sacrifice. As simple as it is to say that being "too stupid to have invented guns," is slightly more important than whether or not you practice human sacrifice, I tend to think that European success (including in the sciences) was due in no small part to their religious outlook, which was upstream of their culture, which in turn produced the scientific method.

TLDR; American Lore is even cooler and more hardcore than you were taught in school (and if you ever get a chance to go to a North American mound, I highly recommend it).

Cahokia might have been larger than the London and Paris of the time at its peak around 1100, for instance.

Fascinating reading.

Political, economic, or cultural problems may also have contributed to the community's decline.[61] Thomas Emerson and Kristin Hedman argue that Cahokia's large immigrant population was a factor in the city's ultimate fragmentation, as differing languages, customs, and religions obstructed the creation of a cohesive Cahokian cultural identity. Analyses of Cahokian burial sites and the associated remains have also shown that many Cahokians were not native to the city or its immediate surrounding region. These immigrants were sometimes buried separately from native residents, a possible indicator of weak integration along ethnic lines.[32] It is likely that social and environmental factors combined to produce the conditions that led people to leave Cahokia.[62][56]

It would be really fascinating to know what actually happened. What's the largest or most recent city in Eurasia to be completely abandoned like that?

Cahokia seems to have been completely abandoned before contact with Europeans.

Eurasian diseases absolutely wrecked the Americas and the Australias. Making up a huge amount of the initial suffering/damage/deaths inflicted.

Like it's always struck me as kind of stupid when people try to whataboutism Australian history since unless they somehow had an impermeable bubble until the invention of vaccines there was no way that that exchange wasn't going to lead to 90% of Australian Indigenous dying horribly of smallpox et al.

I mean, asian diseases ravaged Europe for centuries, we dont hold China morally culpable for the black death.

Second, without the benefit of hindsight there was little way of knowing who's diseases would be worse for who on first contact.

That said, smallpox is gone, and syphilis is still going strong, so maybe notch one for new world diseases.

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It would be really fascinating to know what actually happened. What's the largest or most recent city in Eurasia to be completely abandoned like that?

Many good examples in Southeast Asia. One of the examples that comes to mind for me is the Khmer capital of Angkor, which at its height in the 13th century boasted a population of approximately 900,000 people (London at that time had a population of approx 80,000; Angkor's population was over 11 times larger). It's likely to have been the most populous city in the world during its heyday. There isn't consensus about the causes of the empire's decline and the city's eventual abandonment; some explanations I've seen relate to increasing competition by neighbouring kingdoms such as Sukhothai and Ayutthaya who would regularly conduct raids and incursions onto Khmer territory, others stress the effect of environmental shifts that resulted in poor harvests and clogging of the canals that irrigated the city, causing out-migration from the area. Certain other hypotheses suggest that elites freely moved elsewhere to take advantage of burgeoning trade networks accessible from the Mekong and Tonle Sap rivers. The coup de grace that spelled the end for Angkor was when the Thai sacked and burned the city in the 15th century, at which point the remnants of the Khmer court moved south to Phnom Penh.

Funnily enough this would later happen to the Thai as well in an act of historical karma - the city of Ayutthaya eventually ended up amassing a population totalling 1,000,000 around 1700 (one of the world's largest cities at the time) but they were then sieged by the Burmese Konbaung dynasty in 1767 and destroyed. It's a less compelling candidate than Angkor though, since the city was not fully abandoned and is still a provincial capital.

Sure, but there is a large gap between no-one else can do it and anybody else can do it.

Your claim was no-one else, my claim is likely someone else. I don't claim it is everybody else.

The French kind of did, though. There weren't as many of them as the English, but they were a sizeable minority population. Paul Revere was the son of a French settler. "It could also be done by some close cousin populations who were literally involved in the real life one that actually happened" is a pretty thin expansion.

Sure, but with an absolute position i only need a thin expansion to disprove it. And of the if the French could and so could the Spanish, then it seems like the Ottomans could have and so on and so forth.

France, Spain and Portugal had different objectives in establishing their colonies than England. They were establishing extractive colonies, with the goal of sending ressources back to Europe. England, sent people with the goal of expanding. While the early americans were building farming capacity, the french were going hunting for pelts deep into North America with the natives, and the spaniards and portugese only were interested in maintaining as many people as were necessary to keep the slaves under control. Of course when push came to shove (so to war) the english colonists had a large advantage by then.

Are we invisible? We're still here! Quebec is a large province with what, 8 millions of population? It's not just an historical eccentricity that some people and places have french names and a few people have learned french; the first language and the one everyone is expected and indeed in many cases forced to learn, is french. We've maintained as much control over our own affairs within the canadian confederation as we could short of independance. We fight and struggle as every western country to maintain our culture against globalism, with the extra difficulty of the political weigth of the canadian structure which finds us mightly inconvenient, and the juggernaut of American culture, but we are, so far, still here!

It can both be true that our immigration system is largely a tool of fraud and parasitism, used as a cudgel by elites against the American people, and that in many countries there some men and women with true American hearts, who could make themselves beloved and patriotic Americans today as easily as if they were born here. Just part of the tragedy of the whole situation.

I hate this.

...and for what it is worth I hate you right back. While I may not have coined the phrase I do share the sentiment. Rawhide Kobayashi Is more of an "American" than you will ever be so long as you continue to cling to your old-world bigotries. Change my view.

My country is not a costume, my nation is not playacting, my forefathers did not bleed and fight and die so that way everyone in the world is born American if they say aw shucks and light fireworks. They did it for their own progeny, their own sons, even the ones who married the ellis islanders. They staked their own fortunes on the outcome, and the winnings are rightfully theirs and no others.

That's the opinion of the founding fathers, too, that the nation was earned through shed blood and shared prospects, nothing else.

They staked their own fortunes on the outcome, and the winnings are rightfully theirs and no others.

So the USA is the property of the descendants of the 13 colonies by right of conquest, in the same way the Venezuelan oil is?

And if other ethnicities want to share in that wealth, you would prefer them to do so not by emigrating to your country and adopting the local beliefs and customs, but through violent conquest and displacement of the indigenous population, so their claim will be as valid as your claim?

As the saying goes, civilization is not a suicide pact.

War is bloody and awful, but it's honest. Letting your better principles be the knife used to bleed you dry is not.

Yeah, I would prefer the lie I was sold about people emigrating here and learning our language, our history, our morals and customs.

But that isn't happening. Not even remotely. We just have random third world colonies committing tax fraud, welfare fraud and immigration fraud on an industrial scale, and we just let it happen. I would enormously prefer an actual war instead of rolling over and letting the third world steal everything that isn't bolted down.

My country is not a costume,

No, it's an ideal. That is what it means to be a "Creedal Nation" I have far more respect people like @Opt-out who elected to self-deport, than I do the false friends who claim to love their country while simultaneously aligning themselves against everything it stands for.

As I said above, If you want to leave, I want you to leave. At the same time, if you are onboard with Baseball, Buc-ee's, and government by consent of the governed I welcome you with open arms.

That is what it means to be a "Creedal Nation"

You just elected a third world communist to be the mayor of New York. There is no creed that will get you booted out, so it's not a creedal nation.

You just elected a third world communist to be the mayor of New York.

I didn't elect him. You (the rootless affluent liberals who sneer at normie Americans) elected him. And whether or not someone can be "booted" out of the country for not being American is arguably one of the hottest fronts on the culture war right now.

Yes the current focus is on illegal immigrants, but we can discuss expanding the effort to include Communists and Salafists once the border is secure.

  1. I did not self-deport. Overstating as I’m still in US half the time. As some of us have come to believe my self deportation is to one of two of the US allies. It’s aligned with building America.

  2. America being a creedal nation is false. It’s only creedal in how it’s a new Europe but the America story has always been fundamentally a European tribe. 80% maybe even more of humans could never be America. They can’t build or maintain institutions.

It's not an ideal, either, it's a people, and every attempt to make it an ideal is an attempt to erase and if ore those people.

I'm not going anywhere, this is my home as it has been for ten generations, and it belongs to me in a way that it cannot and will never belong to foreigners regardless of their citizenship. You can crowd in all you like but goddamn you this is mine.

Bucees and baseball doesn't make an American any more than a stetson and boots, and it never will, and it never can.

And what if a majority of heritage Americans support civic nationalism, birthright citizenship, and all the rest (as seems to be the case)? Can they not overrule you? Or is the desire of, shall we say the Scotch-Irish, to close our borders more legitimate than that of the scions of New England Puritans and Pennsylvania Quakers to have them open?

I sorely wish we could have that conversation instead of being crowded out by teeming hordes of foreigners.

But realistically, White Men Vote Republican, so I think you'd find that you wouldn't get your way.

Then there is nothing to discuss, is there? The founding fathers did not secure a future (some future) for their descendants by posturing about it on the internet.

There are now those who do not respect blood claims on principle, and not dried blood in any other case.

Americans conquered this land, established it's institutions, and then fucked. They fucked a lot. And they made more Americans as surely as Indians make more Indians, or Africans make more Africans.

A significant chunk of Americans, including just of the white population don't have any strong genetic ties to the colonists. I have German and Irish and Italian heritage myself in my grandparents/greed grandparents and while I don't know the full lineage of my ancestors the idea that I, and many others like me, exist because the colonists fucked a lot is just incorrect. I may or may not have genetic ties to the colonists somewhere, but it's not some overwhelming key piece. And in fact about 40% of the country can trace themselves back to Ellis Island alone which only operated for 62 years out of the 250 we've been around (and was for the east coast, the west coast had Angel Island which processed a lot of the Asians). Now some of those people may have higher percentages of colonial heritage than someone like me does, but the idea of it just being beause the original colonies reproduced is incorrect.

The mistake of America is believing anyone else could possibly achieve this. It's resulted in 100 years of global misadventures trying to spread "Americanism" and failing every single damned time when 3rd worldism just drags it back down to the lowest common denominator.

Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Germany, Italy, and a significant portion of post soviet nations, among quite a few others here and there are success stories of Americanism spreading. So successful that you didn't even consider them, we literally did an anime style defeat means friendship with quite a few. Those dirty inferior Japs are now our friends and one of our closest allies. There's also of course Israel (which is a democracy and generally an ally even if they're a shit one), and the other nations that Olive mentioned.

And in fact about 40% of the country can trace themselves back to Ellis Island alone which only operated for 62 years out of the 250

And 30 million of us can trace ancestry back to the 53 survivors of the Mayflower.

The mistake of America is believing anyone else could possibly achieve this.

Surely Canada, Australia, New Zealand, etc., are evidence that other people can and have built comparable countries?

The whole process of "English people sail across the ocean, establish a colony, and build a free and independent nation that provides for the material prosperity of themselves and their descendants" has happened multiple times.

It kind of worked in Argentina too, until it became clear that you can't remain rich forever if your economy is 100% based on cattle.

I feel like a country should be able to be fairly rich just doing things that seem basic well. A country that adopts modern tech but doesn’t invent it. Has a good bureaucracy that doesn’t mess things up too much. Basically running a lot of constant costs businesses with limited moats. This feels like Australia to me. Which has mining instead of cattle. Especially if you do not have large amounts of minorities that are purely on welfare/cause crime. This is likely where Argentina should try to get to and become Australia of S America in terms of wealth.

Mexico is the opposite of this kind of economy as they have two better international cash crops (US trade/Drugs) which make the wealthier but always feels like a poor country because they have a lot of dysfunction.

Didn't Argentina retain wealthy after they had plenty of industrialization, and a succession of economically illiterate buffoons in the rose house destroyed any semblance of fiscal or macroeconomic sanity until that was no longer true, and then they had a national reorganization process which lost a war, and then they had hyperinflation?

You’re going to receive a pretty large barrage of responses filled with hair-splitting that supposedly illustrates the notion of American exceptionalism. Highly patriotic Americans view themselves as distinct from and superior to pretty much every other country on Earth, they view themselves as uniquely meritocratic, uniquely free, uniquely honest and uniquely stable as a society.

However, as someone who has lived in and travelled to a dizzying number of places you can put me in as one of those people who has no desire ever to live in America, and you would have to pay me to go. As far as I am concerned if they want their country to themselves, they can have it (nor is it their obligation to take in any immigrants). But the idea that America isn’t already subject to “endless subsidies, bureaucratic bloating and clientelism” is a fantasy, and has been for a long time.

Yes, for what it's worth, I've visited America a few times, and my experience has generally been that it's a nice place to visit but I am very glad I don't live there.

I don't want to judge all of America based on the big cities I've been to, because it is very large and diverse, and people have told me that I would find the Midwest or some of the smaller states and towns much more congenial, but you would have to pay me to make me consider living in New York. I find it quietly terrifying that people who live in that bubble have so much global influence.

So, maybe there are parts of America I would love, but for now, I still call Australia home.

I know this is a predictable response, but I nevertheless want to point out that I am American, and there is literally no sum on earth you could pay me to live permanently in New York. The smaller cities and towns are indeed far different, as other people already told you.

I wish that every non American had that view of the US.

For what it's worth this observation is actually consistent with my experiences in other countries as well. I love visiting Britain, but you would have to pay me to make me live in London. The smaller and mid-size cities, on the other hand, are lovely.

In general I think I prefer the smaller towns.

Have you been to any of the sunbelt megasprawls?

I love visiting Britain, but you would have to pay me to make me live in London.

That is generally how salaries work, yes.

I love visiting Britain, but you would have to pay me to make me live in London.

Oh boy yes absolutely. I'm British and if it were not for my highly paid job that requires me to be in London I'd be off to some mid size place like Letchworth Garden City (or, shock horror, Milton Keynes) which is basically like American suburbs but done right (never been a fan of the anti-suburb crowd, the US messes up in certain respects with how they do them but the basic idea is very sound).

There are plenty of nice suburbs like Beaconsfield, Gerrard’s Cross etc where you can live in a big suburban house and take the train in direct or nearly direct to the City for work.

It depends on the region, I think. In East and (most of) Southeast Asia I'm generally comfortable with the idea of living in the bigger cities; as overwhelming as they can sometimes be there's a lower baseline level of dysfunction, lower crime rates, less urban decay and a much lower chance of having run-ins with junkies, fent zombies and other such unsavoury characters. To be quite honest if I was fully capable of freely moving elsewhere without having to incur extra costs, I would go somewhere in Asia (I currently live in Australia as well, and while I like Sydney enough there are a couple reasons why I would not stay here long term).

In most Western countries I would definitely prefer not to live in most of the cities; granted it depends on the country but the level of dysfunction in many of the urban cores is hard to stomach. The smaller cities and towns are consistently much nicer.

I wouldn't mind living in Boston (most liveable IMO of the 10 or so USA cities I've been to) and would like to spend a month or two in certain parts of the USA for the novelty but I similarly think that day to day quality of living in the USA can be fairly easily mimicked in a bunch of places.

Wait what?

checks my pockets You had me excited for a moment, but no, there's still a king on my loonies.

WhiningCoil didn't mention anything about the monarchy, and certainly I feel no shame in the fact that we have a king.

Where did those mythical Americans come from before there was an America? Not outer space, surely?

Free Englishmen.

With a smattering of Dutch, French, Spanish and Native tossed in for flavor.

French, Spanish and Native tossed in for flavor.

No. Celts and Germans were tossed in for flavor, not these people.

You are wrong.

New York and Pennsylvania started as Dutch colonies before being occupied by the English in the 3rd Anglo-Dutch War. Meanwhile the Spanish presence in what would become Florida the Carolinas and Texas predates the Mayflower by a century, and much of the Mississippi watershed had been colonized by the French which set the stage for both the French and Indian War and the Louisiana Purchase.

Germans didn't start showing up in meaningful numbers until the mid 19th century, three generations after the United States had already been established.

The Dutch stayed in New York which is why I didn't say no to that. The Spanish left Florida and the French mostly left Louisiana and did not really contribute to the US like the Germans did.

No they did not. Again, Germans didn't start to show up in meaningful numbers until the mid 19th century when the US was already established, and even then they were themselves immigrants.

The US was barely established in the 19th century.

And Scots. My direct patrilineal line are Scots that settled Northern Ireland as part of the plantation of Ulster, and then came from Belfast to the colonies a few decades before the revolutionary war.

Fair point, I'll admit that I had mentally lumped the Scots in with "Free Englishmen" which I recognize is a faux pas when speaking to someone of Scottish descent.

Eh, no offense taken. I'm a mutt anyways, plenty of actual Irish, English, German, and French Canadian in my veins too.

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