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 -
I am reading the first book of 1632, the Isekai/historical novel by Eric Flint.
Basically, a West Virginia fictional town is teleported in the year 1632, during the Thirty Years War, and the usual scenario happen, technology triumph on the less advanced, the future breeds social and economical innovation, a cast of character is attracted to the colonists from the future etc
What is very odd is the sentiment that lives in the novel, published in 2000.
Resuming it in bullet points;
The protagonist is a WASP, no-nonsense ex-coal miner, who has the dream of rebuilding a new USA in Germany, with a Constitution, a Bill of Rights etc. He marries a Sephardic Jew girl.
His political enemy is another WASP, but this time from the East Coast, rich guy with a pretty wife, xenophobic and anti-immigration, but that is constantly criticised for being a de-facto "globalist". ("He is not from this town, he is a rich dude who lived in London and Canada and everywhere else without stopping!")
The heroes of the story are the local members of the UMWA union, a mix of WASP and Italian and Irish coal miners, who defend the town first and are the major supporters of the protagonist's agenda.
There is a character in the protagonist ruling council, who is a 50s WASP feminist woman famous for being an ex-radical Ivy-League student who tossed Molotovs around and turned high-school teacher. She is one of the main supporters of the protagonist, always bickering with him or the UMWA, but in the end she is always supported by them.
There are a bunch of female characters who during the story demonstrate intelligence, combat attitudes etc, and the protagonist, despite having some small moral problems at the beginning, supports them in their actions and dreams.
The oddness is reading a novel, written by a Liberal with in mind the liberalism of the late 90s. The white coal miners are all union supporters and pro-immigration, the feminists like them, and the very-white West Virginian town is lauded as an impoverished but proud and tight community hostile to the rich bastards from the big cities. Diversity is not nominated apart from two or three times. The greatest oddity, by the way, is the lingering anti-Catholic sentiment, where the majority of the Catholics are closed-minded, and anti-freedom of religion, while the Protestants are essentially the good guy.
What an odd time machine.
There was a lot of 'liberal/left/progressive' pro-Union rhetoric in the US that got upended when the anti-black anti-immigration history of the unions was popularized in the new era of anti-white academia and media. The thing is that, unlike a lot of the anti-white stuff, there is a pretty solid historical base to make those arguments.
You literally can't have implicitly white and oikophilic unions. As history shows they will be at odds with uncontrolled influx of labor since new labour is a direct threat to their ability to leverage the value of theirs at the negotiation table, as well as being a direct threat to the sanctity of their 'home'. That was the case with freed slaves from the South coming into the American labour markets and it has been the case with the huge amounts of skilled and unskilled labour flooding the western world from the third. The end result is that you don't get to have effective unions in an international economy. 'Big business' can and will always leverage the new labour to get what they want.
If you look at the decline of American unions it's not the case that we still have all the steel mills and auto plants only now they're worked by unionized immigrants. Plants being closed and moved to where there are large populations of low wage workers seems a much bigger factor. Automation also played a big role.
Germany of course still has a lot of unionized manufacturing but they have a sectoral bargaining system that's pretty different from America's.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link