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 -
Americas Bad Cities are costing you
This is where Cremieux goes through the loss of agglomeration effects due to American cities being awful low density places. The loss of the American City he largely blames on the Great Migration and the associated crime waves. He then goes thru how white flight has mostly only occurred with black populations especially ADOS and occurs less with immigrants from Africa.
One of the things with woke is it made people think about ways to refute their ideas. One of them is that white people just hate black people so they did white flight. Turns out the data and original source material people started to look rediscover showed a rise in crime before white flight. People accepted those narratives for decades because we had already mitigated the costs and it was just easy to go with the old narratives. We also accepted a narrative that Americans just liked to live in the suburbs. The actual answer for the preference is crime was too high in cities.
The costs of mitigation Cremieux lists is likely not the full costs. It’s likely everything about city design has been done to allow for unofficial segregation. Often this has been done thru zoning to keep prices high. High home prices means high prices for everything in safe cities as your working class either needs to be able to buy housing in the community or compensated for a long community.
Not being able to do official segregation has basically made the American urban lifestyle very expensive and even more expensive if you have kids. You can’t just buy a cheap house and send your kids to public schools because of the demographics. Which forces you to either live in an expensive suburb or use private schools. This also means you largely can’t be poor in your nice community because your community refuses to have low costs of living options because that would allow the more criminally inclined people to move in.
Today we talk about foreign migration and not domestic internal migration. Once you do mass migration you can’t unring tbe bell. You are now stuck with new demographics. In the case of the great migration I think it basically destroyed Americans urban environments. And now American cities suck. And we had to convince ourselves that we loved living in the suburbs instead of the suburbs being a mitigation for good schools/safety.
I am also open minded that the Great Migration led to increased American wealth because people opposed sharing economic resources and it had a macro effect of limiting socialism in the US and the political paths Canada/Europe went down.
I really wish people were more capable of noticing, let alone publicly agreeing, that the presence of substantial numbers of blacks is just generally a social catastrophe. How many prominent men in American history had great compassion for the negro and despised slavery, but were straightforward in their belief that sending them back to Africa was best for everyone because an integrated society could not possibly work out? Have they not been thoroughly vindicated? And yet the position is so far outside the overton window that afact it's literally unimaginable to most whites. I'm not even sure I'm allowed to propound it here without any amount of pussyfooting. But in this case I think consensus is appropriate.
At some point we need to be prepared to call a spade a spade.
And the social damage whites inflict upon ourselves as we struggle to reconcile our high-minded optimism with reality is likely even worse. I'm in mind of Dan Carlin's point about how 9/11 was as a flea biting a dog, compared to the unbelievable amount of damage the dog then did to itself tearing at the itch.
I'm not sure the West was long-term viable after the decision was made to keep millions of blacks in the US. We simply cannot be ourselves with them here, and they're not going anywhere. I don't think segregation was long-term viable either but golly it sure did help!
What now? I guess at this point every thought experiment gets derailed by the AI wildcard, and bracketing that out for the sake of conversation seems masturbatory. It's just so unbelievably tragic, how this has all played out.
IDK, if you think I should be more nuanced about this by all means let me know.
Fuck you! I'm an American. All my recorded ancestors were Americans. Black Americans fought in every goddamn war for this country. We fought too hard to have fucking rights in this country. It's our birthright! It's our country! It belongs to us just as much as it belongs to any white person.
...and there's the rub. I think you're right. Black Americans are just as much a part of the USA, of the American nation, as white Americans. Free black people, not just slaves, were active in American public life well before the USA was even founded. The idea of mass deportations of black Americans is to me as absurd as deporting all American Indians 'back to Siberia'.
I also think the other guy's right (about the analysis, he doesn't really present a solution). ADOS are prone to commit crimes and socially deleterious activity at higher rates than other American peoples (not just whites), and no social intervention really seems to change this. I don't think white Americans have or had a right to deport all black Americans 'back to Africa' but we really seem to have stumbled into the worst compromise possible of ever-growing totalitarian falsifications of data and witch-hunts for invisible systemic racists.
I think the least worst solution, if Anglo institutions are indeed only suited for an 'Anglo' people, would have been autonomy within the framework of the Union. Turning the black belt into a black-majority state, for example, but not requiring affirmative action or ever-expanding reverse racism in every sector of white-majority areas. But that also seems so far outside the overton window to be unimaginable. Especially since the unfalsifiable conspiracy theory of 'systemic racism' would say that invisible Texas oilmen were sabotaging the black majority state if it was behind white-majority states in any respect.
A two-state solution? Heh.
I'm all for it, by the way. But implementation seems impossible.
We tried that. It's called Liberia, and it went about as well as you'd expect.
Not really. I often see this (perhaps unintentional) oversimplification from HBD enjoyers where the strong hypothesis it affects outcomes is overdetermined and actual historical and environmental factors get minimized. Liberia was a colony of voluntary self-deports, as sleepyegg says, comprised both American freedmen and Caribbean freedmen (big cultural differences there already), and had to deal with a native population even less amenable to western statehood. Plus it was cut loose by the much more isolationist American second republic c. 1850 and was on its own eking out an existence on the Dark Continent, only getting the typical New Dealer foreign policy gibs beginning almost a century later.
Nevertheless, it was one of the more functional African countries because the Americo-Liberians set up a based Yarvinist sham democracy that never let the natives near anything important and even had the impishness to call the one ruling party the Whigs... until they fell for the democracy meme in the 80s and were consumed by brutal intra-black civil wars.
In any case, I think a black state or associated commonwealth would definitely have worse outcomes than, say, Oregon, but it would benefit from inclusion in the American economy, American military protection/military-industrial complex subsidies and so on and so forth. Still wouldn't work without killing the invisible Texas oilmen wreckers mind-virus.
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