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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   15944 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 27, 2026

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My intuition (maybe yours differs) is that a progressive would actually choose a black doctor for their medical problem, or a black advisor for their child's college plan, these being signals of their true belief. There must be some costly signal we can check out to gauge the progressive’s sincerity. They actually do want their coworkers and managers to be black. I know the common refrain is that they have fewer black friends, but I think this is because they are very guiltprone (which lead to their recruitment into progressivism) which is at odds with the black temperament. (Cf “White people love Creep by Radiohead" discourse; the stereotypical black genre of music is on the polar end of guilt and self-abasement)

As a result the fundamental insecurity never goes away

This is not what the studies show. The studies show they have higher self-esteem than Whites. And just purviewing their culture, their culture is based in pride. Insecure White people listen to music filled with insecure melancholy and groaning &etc. Blacks have no such custom. They are like totally different birds with different birdsong traditions.

The pop music keeps getting more and more bombastic and allegedly confident, the memes of black women being everything from the most educated to the saviors of democracy are more present every day yet no one is happy and the language is as hysterical as ever. It's never enough.

Is this not their temperament, just like East Asians in America are more socially meek on average? East Asians have a certain social low-itiness to them; they are less aggressive in demands and are never expected to be Given That (whatever that is). If you mess up their Waffle House order they will very meekly ask if their order was correct. Blacks appear to have the opposite of what East Asians have.

And isn’t this actually great, in a way? If you were designing a race with a lower IQ, you would want them to have high pride to buffer against their low status, and you’d want them to be a little bit less sensitive to the higher social emotions. So it’s not even a bad thing, strictly speaking, it’s just that the never-ending compassion and guiltprone-ness of Whites has misinterpreted the whole situation.

There must be some costly signal we can check out to gauge the progressive’s sincerity.

Do the most progressive locales also have the most open zoning/housing to allow the most diverse group of people around them (and their kids)? The common accusation is that they don't but I can see it going either way, if you consider places like NY.

And just purviewing their culture, their culture is based in pride.

Is this contradictory? Narcissism - as you called it - is excessive self-pride cloaking a sense of insecurity. And you can probably think of jingoistic peoples who claim to be superior to everyone yet lash out with incredible fragility once they're made to feel small. Off the top of my head: Muslims have never reconciled themselves to being a third world religion and no longer ruling large parts of the known world. They're both supposedly super important and prone to whining like any colonial victim when they're made fun of.

And isn’t this actually great, in a way? If you were designing a race with a lower IQ, you would want them to have high pride to buffer against their low status, and you’d want them to be a little bit less sensitive to the higher social emotions. So it’s not even a bad thing, strictly speaking, it’s just that the never-ending compassion and guiltprone-ness of Whites has misinterpreted the whole situation.

This is at least partially a cultural thing.

I'm from Africa: I don't think we suffered from depression about our straits but the sorts of arguments that African-Americans make - that white people have a sort of fraught relationship with black people because black girl magic makes them feel insecure but they also like the music so they can't get rid of them, that wypipo don't know how to cook compared to blacks, or that everyone is secretly or not so secretly obsessed with black people - weren't really made. We were quite well aware of our lower place on the socioeconomic and geopolitical totem pole.

Older people especially would just bluntly say that white people were just better at a lot of things (sometimes in a negative way - there was a stereotype that wypipo were blunter/more honest), us younger generations just considered that sort of thing old-fashioned and slightly embarrassing.

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